52 SEO Tips - Jan-Dec 2007
presented by: Big Oak SEO
http://www.bigoakinc.com
contact@bigoakinc.com
A word from the author
This all started during Christmas of 2006 while I was home on vacation. My brain, being bored
from all the downtime a vacation provides, began thinking of ways to get other sites to link to
my SEO company website BigOakInc.com. Instead of coming up with a EUREKA solution, I
started writing some on the Big Oak SEO blog. Then it hit me that I should write one SEO tip
per week for an entire year. I mean, how hard could that possibly be? Famous last words.
So, over the year spanning January 1, 2007 through December 31, 2007, I endeavored to create
tips that were based on Big Oak’s experiences in SEO. I also provided references when I could to
support the tips offered and presented the information in a way that would be easy for the SEO
do-it-yourselfer to follow.
This document contains all SEO tips written as blog posts for the year 2007. Rather than make
this an incomplete volume and delete some of the out-of-date tips, I felt that all the tips should be
included. I do want to share the tips that are somewhat obsolete:
• How to Build Links with Flickr - SEO Tip Week 33 (Flickr links aren't as helpful for
SEO anymore, try Zooomr.com or read another post we wrote on how to use Flickr.)
• Google’s Supplemental Results - SEO Tip Week 29 (Google no longer labels
supplemental results.)
• Find Competitor Backlinks with MSN Live - SEO Tip Week 46 (MSN has stopped
showing backlink information, but this may return.)
In the end, the most important nuggets I take from this experience aside from a sense of
accomplishment are that:
1. Coming up 52 unique, robust, non-fluffed pieces of SEO advice is a difficult task.
2. Technology has changed, but the core best SEO practices remain the same.
3. Even those like myself that know a great deal when it comes to SEO can still learn a great
deal when it comes to SEO.
Thanks
Due to the constraints for publishing blog posts into a pdf, I add to erase the author credit for two
very intelligent people who assisted me writing these SEO tips: Chris Alexander and Will
Paoletto. Chris wrote the following tips:
• When to Use a 301 vs. 302 Redirect - SEO Tip Week 35
• Google’s Supplemental Results - SEO Tip Week 29
• Underscores vs. Dashes - SEO Tip Week 24
• Control What Gets Indexed - SEO Tip Week 19
As you can see, Chris wrote the more technical posts and left the easy tactics to me.
Will helped me at week 47, as I was officially burning out at that time, and wrote the following
posted tip.
• The Dangers of Buying Links Through a Service - SEO Tip Week 47
If you find any of the tips helpful, please send us an email at contact@bigoakinc.com or better
yet, come by and visit our blog: http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/.
If you need help with your own SEO efforts, we are a full-service SEO company specializing in
organic or natural search results. You can learn more about Big Oak SEO at
http://www.bigoakinc.com or call us at 1-804-741-6776. Feel free to ask to speak with me.
Thanks,
Shell Harris
President, Big Oak SEO
http://www.bigoakinc.com
Contents
1 2007 7
1.1 January . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.1.1 52 SEO Tips for One Year (2007-01-01 15:27) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.1.2 Create A Blog - SEO Tip Week 1 (2007-01-05 12:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.1.3 Keyword Research Tools - SEO Tip Week 2 (2007-01-12 02:00) . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.1.4 Use the META Description Tag - SEO Tip Week 3 (2007-01-19 02:32) . . . . . . . 9
1.1.5 Deep Linking - SEO Tip Week 4 (2007-01-26 02:37) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2 February . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.2.1 Internal Linking - SEO Tip Week 5 (2007-02-02 02:38) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.2.2 Create a Website Sitemap - SEO Tip Week 6 (2007-02-09 02:45) . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.3 Duplicate Content & URL Canonicalization - SEO Tip Week 7 (2007-02-16 08:35) 13
1.2.4 Social Bookmarking - SEO Tip Week 8 (2007-02-23 01:00) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.3 March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.3.1 Link to Your Home Page Correctly - SEO Tip Week 9 (2007-03-02 06:29) . . . . . 18
1.3.2 Seven “Secrets― to SEO Success - SEO Tip Week 10 (2007-03-07 18:08) . . . 19
1.3.3 Get to Know Google Services - SEO Tip Week 11 (2007-03-16 09:07) . . . . . . . 20
1.3.4 Internet Marketing with Articles - SEO Tip Week 12 (2007-03-22 06:50) . . . . . 23
1.3.5 Graphic Headlines Can Work for SEO - SEO Tip Week 13 (2007-03-30 07:30) . . 26
1.4 April . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.4.1 Every Web Page Should Be Unique - SEO Tip Week 14 (2007-04-06 06:23) . . . . 28
1.4.2 Register Your Domain for More Than One Year - SEO Tip Week 15
(2007-04-13 07:27) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.4.3 Submit Press Releases - SEO Tip Week 16 (2007-04-20 06:41) . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.4.4 SEO and Flash - SEO Tip Week 17 (2007-04-27 07:08) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.5 May . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.5.1 Search Engine & Directory Submissions - SEO Tip Week 18 (2007-05-04 14:37) . 33
1.5.2 Control What Gets Indexed - SEO Tip Week 19 (2007-05-11 13:47) . . . . . . . . 35
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1.5.3 SEO for Interior Webpages - SEO Tip Week 20 (2007-05-18 13:45) . . . . . . . . . 37
1.5.4 Finding the Perfect Link - SEO Tip Week 21 (2007-05-25 07:04) . . . . . . . . . . 39
1.6 June . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.6.1 Keep Fresh Content on Your Homepage - SEO Tip Week 22 (2007-06-01 20:15) . 40
1.6.2 Keep Current on SEO Techniques - SEO Tip Week 23 (2007-06-09 22:09) . . . . . 41
1.6.3 Underscores vs. Dashes - SEO Tip Week 24 (2007-06-15 15:58) . . . . . . . . . . . 43
1.6.4 SEO Titles, Using the Title Tag - SEO Tip Week 25 (2007-06-22 05:35) . . . . . . 45
1.6.5 Click Here For More Information - Bad Text Links - SEO Tip Week 26
(2007-06-29 19:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
1.7 July . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
1.7.1 Flat Site Architecture is SEO-Friendly - SEO Tip 27 (2007-07-06 11:56) . . . . . . 49
1.7.2 Research Your Competition with Yahoo Site Explorer - SEO Tip Week 28
(2007-07-13 09:55) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
1.7.3 Google’s Supplemental Results - SEO Tip Week 29 (2007-07-20 18:19) . . . . . 52
1.7.4 How to Find Relevant Links - SEO Tip Week 30 (2007-07-27 08:02) . . . . . . . . 53
1.8 August . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
1.8.1 How to Improve Local Search Results - SEO Tip Week 31 (2007-08-03 11:42) . . . 55
1.8.2 Google Supplemental Index Label Disappears (2007-08-09 15:40) . . . . . . . . . . 57
1.8.3 Squidoo for Traffic & Link Building - SEO Tip Week 32 (2007-08-12 17:19) . . . . 58
1.8.4 How to Build Links with Flickr - SEO Tip Week 33 (2007-08-19 21:45) . . . . . . 63
1.8.5 Reviews Can Improve Your Local Search Rankings - SEO Tip Week 34
(2007-08-25 20:12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
1.9 September . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
1.9.1 When to Use a 301 vs. 302 Redirect - SEO Tip Week 35 (2007-09-02 09:51) . . . 66
1.9.2 SEO Toolkit: Everyday SEO Tools - SEO Tip Week 36 (2007-09-09 17:13) . . . . 68
1.9.3 How to Use Keywords - SEO Tip Week 37 (2007-09-17 07:25) . . . . . . . . . . . 69
1.9.4 PRWEb vs. PRNewswire Press Release Service for SEO - SEO Tip Week 38
(2007-09-25 18:31) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
1.10 October . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
1.10.1 Google Alerts for Link Building - SEO Tip Week 39 (2007-10-02 22:29) . . . . . . 72
1.10.2 Unique Product Descriptions - SEO Tip Week 40 (2007-10-08 12:11) . . . . . . . 74
1.10.3 Build Links with Blogging - SEO Tip Week 41 (2007-10-18 12:33) . . . . . . . . . 75
1.10.4 Avoid Blinding the Search Engine Spiders - SEO Tip Week 42 (2007-10-22 13:11) 76
1.10.5 YouTube or Self Hosting Videos - SEO Tips Week 43 (2007-10-29 14:32) . . . . . 76
1.11 November . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
1.11.1 Finding Links with High PageRank - SEO Tip Week 44 (2007-11-02 16:00) . . . . 77
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1.11.2 Images Provide SEO Traffic - SEO Tip Week 45 (2007-11-11 23:33) . . . . . . . . 78
1.11.3 Find Competitor Backlinks with MSN Live - SEO Tip Week 46 (2007-11-20 11:30) 79
1.11.4 The Dangers of Buying Links Through a Service - SEO Tip Week 47
(2007-11-28 16:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
1.12 December . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
1.12.1 Wordpress Plugins Help Google Index Your Blog - SEO Tip 48 (2007-12-05 00:14) 81
1.12.2 Digg-ing Links by Commenting Socially Responsibly - SEO Tip Week 49
(2007-12-11 15:37) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
1.12.3 Go Green, Recyle Old Links - SEO Tip 50 (2007-12-14 20:50) . . . . . . . . . . . 84
1.12.4 Nofollow Helps Internal Linking and Conversions - SEO Tip 51 (2007-12-20 15:45) 85
1.12.5 Create an Wonderful Super Awesome Resource Directory - SEO Tip 52
(2007-12-28 15:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
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Chapter 1
2007
1.1 January
1.1.1 52 SEO Tips for One Year (2007-01-01 15:27)
We’ve made a commitment in January, 2007 that we would post one tip every week. We’ve read many tips
myself and I’ve often been surprised at the number of low quality search engine optimization tips that are
floating around. So rather than list tips that are uninspired have have no examples to back them up, we
have decided to create SEO tips that are meaningful and we have actually used. You will see SEO strategies
that we employ successfully with many of our clients and we’ll even let you in on the behind the scenes work
from time to time. And we will try to do it once a week. So please forgive us if we are late occassionaly,
remember we are running a SEO company in our spare time. ;-)
Feel free to send in any suggestions, questions or encouragement as we do this for one year!
Update: So far so good, although we have been late a few times, the SEO tip has always been up by
Monday. We try to post on Fridays.
nsilva (2007-08-30 16:20:25)
I’ve just found this blog and I have to say that I’m really impressed, I really like the compilation of tips you have
collected, I guess you have a new returning visitor to your blog. Thanks for the outstanding information
Shell Harris (2007-08-30 16:44:37)
Thanks for the compliment and welcome aboard. We try to keep the blog full of good advice and not a rehash of old
tips. ..at least for one year. ;-)
Alex Vitti (2008-01-20 22:59:53)
Just love your blog,every time im getting something new Thanks a lot
1.1.2 Create A Blog - SEO Tip Week 1 (2007-01-05 12:01)
[1] Blogs can be helpful if correctly used. But, blogs will not guarantee high rankings.Blogs provide an
easy way to add new and hopefully unique content. Search engines love new content and they love original
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BlogBook 1.1. January
content even more. Blogs are a great way of adding new information to your site because if search engines
know a site is adding new articles or posts on a continual and frequent basis, they will come around more
often to index the site. You can add a blog internally to your site directly (http://www.sitename.com/blog)
or as an external site (http://sitename.blogspot.com).
Think of your blog as a way to reach potential clients on a more informal basis. Your blog will also al-
low you to tap into ”lower hanging fruit” keyphrases that you use in your posts. You will be surprised at the
keyphrases typed in the search engines that will bring users to your blog. It may even inspire a new Internet
marketing initiative.
I recommend [2]Wordpress as the blogging tool of choice. Easy to set up, very powerful with the ability
to add plungins and it has a great support network.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.wordpress.com/
Peter Carr (2007-01-31 20:06:51)
Please keep up the tips.. it’s on ly the 31st of january but i’m already hooked. is there any way to get these tips
emailed each week?
Shell Harris (2007-02-01 18:05:50)
Sorry, but at this time (2/1/07) we are hosting on Windows servers and the Wordpress feeds are working correctly
with the server as well as some other functionality. We are working on it, but not sure when or if it will get corrected
so we can add a subscription to the site. You can subscribe to our [1]SEO newsletter which has additional information.
Otherwise you’ll have to visit us now and again for the next seo tip. If there are any requests I’ll take them.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/seo-newsletter.php
Shell Harris (2007-02-06 12:41:49)
You can now subscribe to our feed through feedburner at [1]http://feeds.feedburner.com/BigOakSeoBlog or click the
link in the top right of this page. You can also register for the blog and become a direct subscriber by clicking
[2]Register or click the link in the top right.
1. http://feeds.feedburner.com/BigOakSeoBlog
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/wp-login.php?action=register
Peter Carr (2007-04-02 16:23:57)
Thanks... I’ve signed on! keep up the good work!
Seo Tips (2008-01-24 04:17:41)
Peter Carr, Nice rankings for your chiro practice. Keep it up
1.1.3 Keyword Research Tools - SEO Tip Week 2 (2007-01-12 02:00)
[1] In hind sight, I should have put this [2]SEO Tip first but better late than never. You must do
keyword research before you start optimizing your site, that much is obvious, but what tools should you use?
There are two excellent keyword research tools that I can recommend as professional tools. They are
[3]Wordtracker and [4]Keyword Discovery. Both are great and both are different. At Big Oak we started
with Wordtracker and move over to Keyword Discovery after a year or so. We felt KD had an easier interface
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1.1. January BlogBook
and liked they way it worked us. This is not to say Wordtracker didn’t do a fine job for us, because it did.
It was really just a matter of preference. You may find Wordtracker better for your method of research.
If you are just getting into the game you may want to try something else that is free to do your initial
research. You can use [5]Overture’s keyword search tool, but it is limited to one month of keyword searches
and often isn’t working because too many people are trying to use it. You’ll want to move to the pay-for-use
programs quickly if you are truly serious.
In any case, do not overlook this important step and don’t assume you know how people are searching
for your product or service. If you optimize a site with the wrong keywords you may end up with a high
ranking site but won’t convert your traffic! Correctly identifying the best keywords and search terms using
a keyword search tool will help your odds of success and give you a fighting chance to target prospects who
are more likely to turn into clients.
My colleague, Holly Rodriguez has written about [6]choosing keyword research tools on her [7]SEO copy-
writing blog, [8]SEOScribe.com. Check it out if you would like more information.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
3. http://www.wordtracker.com/
4. http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
5. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
6. http://www.seoscribe.com/?p=18
7. http://www.seoscribe.com/
8. http://www.seoscribe.com/
1.1.4 Use the META Description Tag - SEO Tip Week 3 (2007-01-19 02:32)
[1] All web sites should use the META description tag. If you have too many pages to add it to, at least
put it on your home page and any core pages that bring in search result traffic. Google will use the META
description you place on your site if the user searched for a keyword that exists in the META description.
Google is giving us some measure of control.
How best to use this you may ask? You need to think like a radio advertising writer. What can you
say in one brief sentence that will entice a user to click your link rather than the one above or below. A little
sensationalism never hurt.
A brand message can help or you can put your phone number in the META description. Think out of
the box; how about a offer a discount or advertise a sale. Be careful though, if you put a sale message and
when the sale ends your message might still display until Google updates your site listing. You don’t want
your text in the search results still announcing a sale that is over. Ultimately you should tell searchers your
unique selling proposition.
Remember that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description.
While this can be tricky, it can be done with some forethought. You can do this for all of your targeted
pages and have dozens of marketing messages.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
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1.1.5 Deep Linking - SEO Tip Week 4 (2007-01-26 02:37)
[1] While linking is key to success in the SEO game, deep linking is what will set you apart from your
competitors.
Be sure to acquire links to all your important pages, not just your home page. It looks odd to the search
engines when they notice so many links all pointing to your home page - it isn’t natural. Besides you want
visitors coming to the page that will most likely convert them from a visitor to a customer and usually the
home page isn’t the best page to accomplish this.
You will have the added benefit of having two pages show in the rankings which always attracts more atten-
tion and aids your click through rates. Here is an [2]example. Notice how Big Oak is the shown in the first
two listings and the indented listing is more targeted on the search term ”seo richmond”. Here is a [3]screen
shot in case the link no longer shows the same results.
Deep linking also alerts the search engines to the fact that you probably have good, targeted content if
people are linking to your interior or sub-pages. It gives your site a vote of confidence to the search engines
to have links pointing throughout your site. If all your links come to your home page it might give the
impression your site has little value or its rankings are being inflated unnaturally.
While it is tempting to concentrate links to your home page, you will have many more visitors if you spread
the links around. Linking to sub-pages will help those pages rank well, giving your visitors a better chance
on finding what they were looking for with one click.
Find a new [4]SEO Tip Every Friday.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=
Ab4&q=seo+richmond&btnG=Search
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/images/deep-link-results.gif
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
David Taboada (2007-01-26 16:12:54)
I understand that Digg and the other social bookmarking services people use help with deep linking, so I assume
this is becoming an important SEO issue. So I would like to ask if you think these services will follow Wikipedia’s
NOFOLLOW policy? And also, if you know of research on the behaviour of social bookmarking?
Shell (2007-01-26 18:20:48)
David, It would seem this is the next step. After all, the only people who would care about such a move are SEO
companies. On the other hand ”real” links are used to establish true popularity and Digg (and other social bookmark-
ing) are a perfect indicator. It would be a shame if this happens. Of course, most people won’t realize the nofollow
was put into effect and still spam the Diggs of the world, just as I am sure wikopedia will continue to receive spam
even though the nofollow is in effect. If I were a betting man I would say this will happen this year and all social
bookmarking sites will follow suit. Too bad, but it seems unethical SEO companies have coruppted another useful
tool on the web.
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1.2. February BlogBook
1.2 February
1.2.1 Internal Linking - SEO Tip Week 5 (2007-02-02 02:38)
[1] As with most [2]SEO tips, this one is simple, overlooked and easy to do. Your site’s navigation is
an important part when providing a pleasant user experience and it can be beneficial in aiding your SEO
efforts. Even important is how you handle your internal linking strategy, or your body text links.
Repeat after me: ”I must include internal links within my content.” This is the very foundation for Internet:
hyperlinking text to provide more information about the linked text. Not only is it crucial for SEO it just
makes good sense.
For example, let’s take a look at this page on our client’s site, [3]Agee Woodworks. Within the copy of
this web page are a number of keyword phrases that link to other pages within their site. Some of these
internal linking phrases include ”custom fireplace mantel” and ”fireplace shelf”. This is simple and clever way
to increase the link popularity of other pages within the site. A text link from the home page is delivering
PageRank to internal pages with a targeted keyword phrase. This helps both pages. The only links you can
control are the links on your own site, so use them to your best advantage.
Another example, [4]Grote Consulting Services Page, shows how internal linking can guide you through
the site and provide a lift for the link destination pages. One of the terms linking on this page is ”per-
formance appraisal systems” and when I [5]search in Google for that term it shows a first page listing for
the link destination page ([6]http://www.groteconsulting.com/services/performance-apprai sal/index.asp).
While other factors clearly play a role, don’t discount the helpfulness of an internal link especially when it
is one of the few things you have total control over.
Fortunately, for you, very few sites are aware of the importance of internal linking. By using this [7]SEO
strategy you help the search engines index more of your site and more importantly those internal links will
contribute to higher rankings because of the keyword-rich anchor text that is being used.
Don’t ignore internal linking; use it and watch your own rankings increase.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
3. http://www.ageewoodworks.com/
4. http://www.groteconsulting.com/services/index.asp
5. http://www.google.com/search?q=performance++appraisal+systems
6. http://www.groteconsulting.com/services/performance-appraisal/index.asp
7. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/seo-strategies/
Shell Harris (2007-02-25 13:32:56)
I took a look at your Booster Page article and I totally agree with your hypothesis and I can guarantee you are going
to find successful results. In fact, I think any quality SEO company does this as part of the optimization process or
as part of the monthly service they provide. Since this is a strategy you are using in your seo work I would say you
are ahead of the game and understand the right way to do things. Good SEO is usually a large dose of common sense
with the research to back it up. Well done!
Industrial Search Engine Marketing (2007-02-23 16:04:56)
Great post. We’ve recently found another element of strategy to inject into the creation of an internal linking structure,
having to do with keyword weight and visibiltiy variance between [1]Booster Pages and destination pages. Thoughts?
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1. http://www.industrialsearchenginemarketing.com/blog/2007/02/22/
building-an-internal-linking-structure-with-booster-pages/
1.2.2 Create a Website Sitemap - SEO Tip Week 6 (2007-02-09 02:45)
[1] Some SEO tips can be hard to explain, but this is one of the few that is relatively easy to do and
can be done manually with small or large sites. Create a sitemap of your website. There are a few good
reasons to do this.
It allows easier indexing of your site by the search engines.
In other words, it helps the search engines find all the pages on your site. Some websites only have a few of
their pages in the search engines and this can be due to poor linking, sparse navigation or a host of other
reasons. A sure-fire cure is to have a sitemap links to all of the major sections of your website. If you have
a small website, linking to all the pages is a good idea. Web-crawlers will thank you for making their busy
lives easier.
It provides PageRank or link popularity to all pages it links to.
If you read about SEO then you have read how important it is to have high-quality links pointing to your
site from other sites. While this is true, don’t underestimate your own [2]internal links (as seen in [3]last
week’s SEO tip) pointing to your own pages. A sitemap can become another source of quality links with
descriptive text for your own pages.
Sitemaps help with usability and site navigation.
You website users can now access any important page on the site with only two clicks. This allows for deeply
nested pages to be found easier and not just by the search engine spiders but by people visiting your site.
Making navigation easier by including a sitemap is just good business sense as well as SEO sense.
Examples of good sitemaps
• Even if you have a large site, using a sitemap to provide quick access to major areas and important
pages is very helpful. The [4]Apple sitemap is a good example of this.
• A more detailed 4-column [5]sitemap by A.M.Best
• Small sites, like Grote Consulting, only need [6]small sitemaps
• Organization and categorization is crucial for an [7]ecommerce sitemap as created by Danforth Diamond
• Sometimes sitemaps can be a more integral part of the site. Look at this ”[8]footer sitemap” by Agee
Woodworks
Do I really need a sitemap?
Sitemaps can be viewed as a luxury, but for new sites they are critical. It can take the search engines months
to crawl your new site and they may never crawl the entire site. Adding a sitemap can speed this process
up. It also helps when adding new pages or sections, the search engines have easy access to all pages through
you sitemap
Don’t overlook this simple step in your search engine optimization success.
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1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/internal-linking-seo-tip-week-5/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/internal-linking-seo-tip-week-5/
4. http://www.apple.com/find/sitemap.html
5. http://www.ambest.com/about/sitemap.html
6. http://www.groteconsulting.com/site-map.asp
7. http://www.danforthdiamond.com/company_information/site_map.htm
8. http://www.ageewoodworks.com/
David (2007-07-06 15:43:19)
Does anyone know if sitemaps help Blogs? Do all posting pages get indexed?
Arthur (2007-05-01 08:10:49)
If you have any problems to create XML sitemap files for your sites or to notify search engines about updated sitemap
files, try [1]Sitemap Writer Pro. It is a powerful tool that helps you to create and keep up-to-date sitemaps for your
websites. Sitemap Writer Pro has [2]new tools - FTP manager for uploading sitemaps, search engine [3]notification
tool (now supports Ask.com and MSN.com), site [4]crawler for adding an URLs into the sitemap and Yahoo
Index viewer.
1. http://www.sitemapwriter.com/
2. http://www.sitemapwriter.com/onlinedocumentation.php#tools
3. http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php
4. http://www.sitemapwriter.com/onlinedocumentation.php#crawler
1.2.3 Duplicate Content & URL Canonicalization - SEO Tip Week 7 (2007-02-16 08:35)
Before we get into this week’s tip, let me provide a definition for the term [1]Canonicalization.
”It is the process of converting data that has more than one possible representation into a
”standard” canonical representation.”
For SEO purposes this means it creates a definitive and unique page to represent more than one possible
page on your site. You want to avoid duplicate pages on your site.
Sometimes duplicate content is a result of two pages sharing the same information in two different files.
Sometimes you have duplicate content because of the technology causing two different urls point to the same
page. Both of these problems have simple solutions. It is important to correct this because search engines
want to show only unique web pages and text.
If your site has multiple pages with the same content possibly through a Content Management System
(CMS) or through duplicate navigation, or because it actually exists in multiple versions, you are could be
hurting your search engine ranking results. We all know how important linking is to any SEO campaign and
if links pointing to different urls of the same information your link value will be diluted because 2 incoming
links may point to one version and 3 links to another. It would be much better for all 5 links to point to one
url.
301 Re-Direct to the Rescue
The solution is to take any current duplicate pages and use a [2]301 re-direct to point all versions to a single,
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”canonical” version of the content or web page.
Most often this problem can be found on a site’s homepage. For example: Search engines view your
home page as having more than one version. How? Take a look at the following urls. All point to the
same page, but to the search engines they are different: http://www.yoursite.com, http://yoursite.com,
http://yoursite.com/index.html and http://www.yoursite.com/index.html. The search engines may find up
to four home pages that have the same content.
While this may not cause your site to be unranked it is certainly not helping and can easily cause poor
rankings. That is a shame for something that is so easily corrected. Most often this is caused by links point-
ing to different versions of your site. You can’t change all the links coming into your site, but you can use the
301 re-direct to solve this by pointing all versions of your home page to the full url (http://www.url.com).
You can read more on how this is accomplished on our [3]301 re-direct blog post.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonicalization
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/how-to-do-a-301-redirect/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/how-to-do-a-301-redirect/
Shell Harris (2007-02-22 13:34:14)
Sam, You should contact your host to see if they can make the changes for you, but you can control it by accessing
files such as .htaccess on your server, if you are hosting on a Unix system. Your host is a good place to start if you
are unfamiliar with the inner workings of your server set up. The different urls should show the same information,
after all it is showing the ”default page” that is identified by the server. Usually this is an index.html or default.html
page. The extensions can be different, but you get the picture. So there shouldn’t be any worry of different pages
showing up. Finally you can tell Google which version you want to show up. You have to sign up for webmaster
account and verify that you are the owner of the site, but ther are other nice features provided by Google’s webmaster
tools to make it worth your while, besides telling them what your preferred domain should be. You can sign up
here [1]http://www.google.com/webmasters/ I agree they should be directed by default, but alas that isn’t the way
it works.
1. http://www.google.com/webmasters/
sam (2007-02-22 13:07:35)
awesome tip! I think this has caused me some problems which I will now fix. It seems like this is something
that should happen automatically somehow. Are there hosts that do this by default? Are there ways that
http://www.samwilson3d.com and http://samwilson3d.com could even show 2 different pages? If why would you
want this and if not why are they not redirected by default?
Seo (2008-01-17 13:48:38)
I haven’t experienced any problem or rankings drop when using www and non-www version of a site at the same time.
Or some link pointing to index.html instead of root. But is always better to add those lines of code in .htaccess file if
you can do it. And I saw once 2 different sites on www.domain.com and domain.com. I think they were hosted on 2
servers and 2 different DNS used for each one. Kinda funny for me..:D
1.2.4 Social Bookmarking - SEO Tip Week 8 (2007-02-23 01:00)
[1] What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks (web addresses) to a public Web site such as Digg or
Del.icio.us so you can access these bookmarks from any computer connected to the web. Your favorite
bookmarks are also available for others to view and follow as well, hence the social aspect. If you wish to
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create your own social bookmarks, you must register with a social bookmarking site (we have many listed
below). No you are able to store bookmarks, tag your bookmarks, and share with anyone interested in your
bookmarks.
Hopefully you can see the value and power of social bookmarks. You can think of it as viral or guer-
rilla marketing in a way. It can be a powerful grassroots method of marketing your site. Be careful though,
like everything else on the web you can spam these sites and make your list of bookmarks appear unappealing
or an obvious marketing ploy which will net you very little.
Keep it honest
Bookmark sites you generally would like to share or feel are valuable, which of course can contain bookmarked
web addresses of your own site. If enough people agree with the value of a bookmark you have placed they
will bookmark it to and as the popularity grows your site traffic will grow.
Don’t abuse this by submitting every page of your site, try to be judicious and think about what pages
of your site may be helpful and of interest to other web surfers.
All things must end
At some point you will reach a place where you are no longer drawing significant traffic from your older
bookmarks, but that’s okay. Your social bookmark page should be included in the search engine’s cached
sites and they are following your links like any normal web user. In fact, you have created an external link
to your site that should be using useful keyword text in the link. The real beauty of this is the fact that
others are also providing free one-way links from their own social bookmark pages. So even after the traffic
from the bookmarks slow you have the added benefit of a grass roots linking campaign providing solid links
to your site, increasing your site’s ranking in the search engines.
While you don’t want to base your SEO campaign on this one technique it should be in your SEO tool-
box of tasks.
A Good Start for Social Bookmarking Websites
Here are some of the better social bookmarking websites. It wouldn’t be feasible to become a member of all
of these but choosing a few couldn’t hurt. I have listed them in order of their Alexa ranking, which supplies
some measure of popularity that should be taken with a grain of salt the size of Rhode Island. In any case
here are some of the more popular social bookmarking sites:
1. [2]Digg
2. [3]Del.icio.us
3. [4]StumbleUpon
4. [5]Reddit
5. [6]Squidoo
6. [7]Furl
7. [8]BlinkList
8. [9]Blogmarks.net
9. [10]Ma.gnolia
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10. [11]Simpy
11. [12]Spurl
12. [13]BlinkBits
13. [14][15]Shadows
14. [16]Raw Sugar
15. [17]Yahoo MyWeb
Would you add any others? Do you have a social bookmarking favorite, please send us a comment and share
it.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.digg.com/
3. http://del.icio.us/
4. http://www.stumbleupon.com/
5. http://www.reddit.com/
6. http://www.squidoo.com/
7. http://www.furl.net/
8. http://www.blinklist.com/
9. http://www.blogmarks.net/
10. http://ma.gnolia.com/
11. http://www.simpy.com/
12. http://www.spurl.net/
13. http://www.blinkbits.com/
14. http://www.blinklist.com/
15. http://www.shadows.com/
16. http://www.rawsugar.com/
17. http://myweb.yahoo.com/
Michael (2007-02-25 02:11:59)
Thanks for providing such a useful list.
Justyna (2007-02-23 12:47:35)
Yep there is another one not listed yet: www.playtxt.net Itâ⠬⠢s a location based social network- really fun,
doesnâ⠬⠢t sent you any rubbish and user friendly. Justyna
Jennifer (2007-03-21 18:47:47)
Thanks for the list! This is exactly what I was looking for.
Steve Waganer (2007-02-28 06:43:53)
i read it and i find it good. Thanks for that
Shell Harris (2007-02-23 12:56:08)
Justyna, I wasn’t sure if this was a spam comment but I checked it out and it is a social bookmark site. While it
may not be one of the best out there, it does have the distinction of being a bookmarking site created for your mobile
device. Not sure how well it will work, but it is an interesting concept. Thanks for the comment.
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Criminal Lawyer Phoenix (2007-10-18 14:30:41)
Good article. It used to be extremely difficult to get links. Before Google started tracking how one got links it was
just a matter of buying links... The good old days. Now with social bookmarking sites one can get not only links but
traffic. This stuff is so cool!
Chicago cleaning service (2007-11-05 16:13:50)
Agree - good article , Is there any software you can recommend or bookmarking script?
Shell Harris (2007-11-05 19:00:18)
We have used bookmarking application called [1]Bookmarking Demon. It has been a solid program, but use it with
restraint.
1. http://www.bookmarkingdemon.com/
Phil (2008-01-31 14:38:38)
Excellent Google ranking for this information. Social Bookmarking plus Blogging equals good search engine optimiza-
tion techniques. Your position in Google proves one of them works... Thanks for the help.
Gel Nails St George (2008-02-23 00:40:50)
I would love someone to point me in the right direction on social bookmarking and how it helps SEO. I appreciate
this overview you have created, but would love to learn more. Thanks all!
Maggie (2008-02-24 16:27:23)
Thanks for the info - very helpful. Has any one used Submit Edge to set up Social Bookmarks? I am considering
using them but what they offer seems too good to be true.... 250 Social Bookmarking for US $65. thanks.
Levi Page (2008-02-25 15:56:52)
Do you feel having outbound links to every one of these bookmarking sites hurts you seo? All of them seem to work
based off of URLs going directly to ”their” site. Should people hide these with JavaScript?, because it would appear
that this would make the links reciprical in nature and not one way links. Is there an effective way to hide links with
JavaScript? Although... I guess you could technically use nofollow.
Online marketing agency (2008-02-27 12:37:27)
I have been using some of those sites for SEO purpose and it has brought us some good traffic!
Shell Harris (2008-02-27 17:18:41)
Social bookmarking has limited appeal for the the SEO consultant. We don’t count on it to increase site rankings
directly, but indirectly it can increase awareness which may eventually provide additional natural linking.
International Trade (2008-01-07 07:29:23)
Shell, Thanx for the list of sites and making me aware of the importance of Social Bookmarking and SEO
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 17
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1.3 March
1.3.1 Link to Your Home Page Correctly - SEO Tip Week 9 (2007-03-02 06:29)
[1] The last few tips have been a little longer than I planned when I originally came up with the idea
to post [2]one SEO tip per week. On the other hand I wanted the SEO tips to have some meat to them so
I’m okay with making the posts more than a few sentences. But I thought I’d give everyone a break and do
a tip that was short and sweet, but very important, of course.
Be sure to provide a link to your home page.
Pure genius, right? Of course we all know we should do this, but how you do it is just as impor-
tant. I think examples work best so here are some ways not to link to your home page. Let’s assume your
page filename is index.html.
Home
Home
What is wrong with this you say? The problem is linking to the filename. Always link to the root
address. Your links on your site and any external links pointing to your site’s home page should look
something like this.
Home
Home
The reason we do this is so the search engines don’t split our PageRank to multiple web addresses
of our home page. If all the links are pointing to the root address (http://www.mysite.com) then all the
PageRank will be gathered in the root address and not split between the root address and the filename
(http://www.mysite.com/index.html).
Get on the Same Page
Be sure all the links on your site point to the root and check them to be sure; even images on your site
should follow this advice. It doesn’t matter if you are pointing to the root with just a ”/” or using the full
url (http://www.mysite.com/), both work the same way. You want any external links to point to the full
url as well and ask anyone linking to your website to use the ”www” in the link. The key is uniformity. We
want all links pointing to the same web address for maximum PageRank and search engine rankings.
Bonus Tip
As a bonus tip, try to use a keyword in the internal links to your home page when possible. Using the
link text ”Home” provides little ranking support unless you sell homes. Don’t let this cloud your judgment
though, having a link to your home page with a three word keyword phrase might look ridiculous and
unprofessional.
Next time you are surfing around, click a link to a home page and see how many are linking correctly and
how many [3]aren’t.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
18 c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’
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3. http://www.arborday.org/
1.3.2 Seven “Secrets― to SEO Success - SEO Tip Week 10 (2007-03-07 18:08)
[1] This week’s [2]SEO Tip is more than a tip, it is strategic overview on SEO. I recently spoke with
a potential client interested acquiring our [3]SEO services and when I said that SEO really isn’t that com-
plicated he raised an eyebrow. I followed by saying that search engine optimization doesn’t have any big
secrets or tricks that only we SEO consultants know. It common sense applied with industry knowledge -
knowledge that can be with due diligence and research. So with that in mind, I am revealing the ”Seven
Secrets of SEO Success” and I’m doing it all for free.
1. Research Your Keyword Phrases. Invest the time and do your research. What do users type in
the search engines when looking for services or products on your site. We use a few tools such as
[4]WordTracker, [5]Keyword Discovery and [6]Overture’s Keyword Selector tool among others to find
out what keyword phrases are best to target. Never assume you know which keywords to target
until you do the research. I guarantee you will learn something about your business and your target
audience when you do. Finding a keyword you didn’t realize was being searched on can add visitors
and [7]increase [8]conversions.
2. Design an SEO-Friendly Website. I cringe every time I see an all Flash site and I’m asked to achieve
high rankings for said site. As much as Flash can hurt a site for rankings there are other things to
be aware of, such as: sparse text, poorly written code, javascript on your pages, 404 errors, using
graphics instead of text, javascript navigation, deeply nested pages and pages that can’t be found by
clicking a link are just a few. Make sure a someone with SEO knowledge with the site design and build.
While later is better than never, ideally you want the SEO consultant to work with the designers and
programmers.
3. Write Unique Page Titles. I wrote about this earlier so take a look at my post on [9]How Important
Are Website Titles. It is critical that every web page on your site have a different and unique title.
It is the most important part of your web page when search engines are determining your web page
message and ranking. This is easy, so be sure to do it.
4. Write Focused Content. This may appear to be simple common sense, but too often a web page will
try to be too many things and dilute its true message. Each thought, theme or topic should have its
own web page. If you sell dog products, then a page for each category would be needed. Dog toys
would be a major category with its own page, but chew toys would be a new page and so on. You
wouldn’t mix chew toys and dog bedding. The search engines want to see a focus so they know what
to rank your web page for as well as where to rank your web page.
5. Insert Keywords. If you have written a descriptive and keyword-rich title it follows suit that your page
content is also going to have keywords throughout. Write for humans, but keep in mind the search
engines. You don’t want to overdue it, but you do want your page theme to be evident. List your
keyword phrase in your titles, headers and content and the search engines will know reward you with
higher visibility.
6. Build Keyword-Rich Links. There is nothing more important for the high ranking success of your site
than strategic link building. And with that said, there is nothing more important than choosing the
right text to link to your site. If your company name is ”[10]Big Oak Studios” and you are an [11]SEO
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 19
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company then you better be sure to request any links pointing to your site have similar terms such as
SEO, company, firm, search engine optimization, marketing, Internet somewhere in the links. Let the
link state your business, not your web address or company name.
7. Find Quality Links. Since acquiring links is the most important off-site task you can do, then it
would reason you should do it right. While having a large number of links is important, making sure
they are quality is tantamount to your site’s success. This is especially true in high competition areas.
Quality links from sites with authority (popular and trusted sites) carry more weight. One link from
an authority site can be worth a hundred or more low-quality sites.
As an SEO company, we do these things and many more to achieve high rankings. Some of the ”secrets”
listed above require many hours and creative ingenuity to accomplish the task at hand. But the bottom line
is this: there is no secret and if you have the time and initiative and do the research you will have success.
Sometimes you don’t have the time and that is when you should consider talking to an SEO Company to help.
If you are at such a point, please give us call at 1-804-741-6776 or email us at [12]contact@bigoakinc.com.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
4. http://www.wordtracker.com/
5. http://www.keywordiscovery.com/
6. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
7. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/increase-conversions-on-your-website/
8. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/increase-conversions-on-your-website/
9. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/how-important-are-page-titles/
10. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
11. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
12. mailto:contact@bigoakinc.com
Shell Harris (2007-03-11 23:46:15)
A few methods we use involve checking the backlinks or your competitors. Yahoo has the most accurate list-
ings of backlinks so use them. Go to Yahoo.com and then type this in the search box, inserting your domain
name of choice: linksite:www.sitename.com The sites with links pointing to the domain name you entered will now
be seen. Usually the high profile linking sites are displayed first. Target these site for your linking campaign.
There are other tools to find quality links. Here are a few that I have used. http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-
builder.php http://tools.seobook.com/general/link-suggest/ http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php
You should also be submitting to paid directories. Here is a list of some the best paid directories:
http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/
Lists (2007-03-10 13:12:12)
Any tips on how to actually implement item #7? Thanks. :)
Eric E. Smith (2007-03-19 12:10:47)
#4 is a big one and one I see violated more often than any of the others. If a site visitor can’t tell what your web
page is about, how will a search engine?
1.3.3 Get to Know Google Services - SEO Tip Week 11 (2007-03-16 09:07)
[1] Get to know Google. What would an SEO Consultant’s life be like without Google? An interesting
20 c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’
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question but one we are likely never to have to answer. Google is the new Microsoft and will affect our
lives forever more in ways we don’t even realize yet. Don’t believe me? Do you think Google just does web
search? Think again.
I’ve listed many services that Google offers and I’m sure you may be a bit surprised at how many dif-
ferent pies the search giant’s thumb is actuall in. The list is growing so please contribute if you know of any
I may have missed. I have bolded the Google services I view important for SEO purposes.
Google Services Web Address
Google AdSense [2]https://www.google.com/adsense/
Google AdWords [3]https://adwords.google.com/
Google Analytics [4]http://google.com/analytics/
Google Answers [5]http://answers.google.com/
Google Base [6]http://base.google.com/
Google Blog [7]http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Google Blog Search [8]http://blogsearch.google.com/
Google Bookmarks [9]http://www.google.com/bookmarks/
Google Books Search [10]http://books.google.com/
Google Calendar [11]http://google.com/calendar/
Google Catalogs [12]http://catalogs.google.com/
Google Code [13]http://code.google.com/
Google Code Search [14]http://www.google.com/codesearch/
Google Deskbar [15]http://deskbar.google.com/
Google Desktop [16]http://desktop.google.com/
Google Directory [17]http://www.google.com/dirhp
Google Earth [18]http://earth.google.com/
Google Finance [19]http://finance.google.com/
Google Groups [20]http://groups.google.com/
Google Holiday Logos
[21]http://www.google.com/intl/en/holidaylogos.html
Google Images [22]http://images.google.com/
Google Jobs [23]http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/
Google Labs [24]http://labs.google.com/
Google Local [25]http://local.google.com/
Google Mail [26]http://mail.google.com/
Google Maps [27]http://maps.google.com/
Google Mars [28]http://www.google.com/mars/
Google Mobile [29]http://mobile.google.com/
Google Moon [30]http://moon.google.com/
Google Movies [31]http://www.google.com/movies?q
Google Music [32]http://www.google.com/musicsearch?q
Google News [33]http://news.google.com/
Google Page Creator [34]http://pages.google.com/
Google Personalized Home"¦ [35]http://www.google.com/ig
Google Reader [36]http://www.google.com/reader/
Google Remove URL
[37]http://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller
Google Research Blog [38]http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/
Google Romance [39]http://www.google.com/romance/
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 21
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Google Scholar [40]http://scholar.google.com/
Google Sitemaps [41]https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
Google Search History [42]http://www.google.com/searchhistory/
Google SMS [43]http://www.google.com/sms/
Google Suggest [44]http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1
Google Talk [45]http://talk.google.com/
Google Toolbar [46]http://toolbar.google.com/
Google Transit Trip Planner [47]http://www.google.com/transit
Google Translate [48]http://www.google.com/translate_t
Google Trends [49]http://www.google.com/trends
Google Video [50]http://video.google.com/
Google Web Accelerator [51]http://webaccelerator.google.com/
Google Web API [52]http://www.google.com/apis/
Google Web Search [53]http://www.google.com
Google Zeitgeist [54]http://www.google.com/press/intl-zeitgeist.html
Please leave a comment if you have more Google services to add or subtract (some beta items don’t last
long).
Visible links 1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. https://www.google.com/adsense/
3. https://adwords.google.com/
4. http://google.com/analytics/
5. http://answers.google.com/
6. http://base.google.com/
7. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
8. http://blogsearch.google.com/
9. http://www.google.com/bookmarks/
10. http://books.google.com/
11. http://google.com/calendar/
12. http://catalogs.google.com/
13. http://code.google.com/
14. http://www.google.com/codesearch/
15. http://deskbar.google.com/
16. http://desktop.google.com/
17. http://www.google.com/dirhp
18. http://earth.google.com/
19. http://finance.google.com/
20. http://groups.google.com/
21. http://www.google.com/intl/en/holidaylogos.html
22. http://images.google.com/
23. http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/
24. http://labs.google.com/
25. http://local.google.com/
26. http://mail.google.com/
27. http://maps.google.com/
28. http://www.google.com/mars/
29. http://mobile.google.com/
22 c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’
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30. http://moon.google.com/
31. http://www.google.com/movies?q
32. http://www.google.com/musicsearch?q
33. http://moon.google.com/
34. http://pages.google.com/
35. http://www.google.com/ig
36. http://www.google.com/reader/
37. http://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller
38. file://localhost/home/blogbooker/tmp/bhydq65r/
39. http://www.google.com/romance/
40. http://scholar.google.com/
41. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
42. http://www.google.com/searchhistory/
43. http://www.google.com/sms/
44. http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1
45. http://talk.google.com/
46. http://toolbar.google.com/
47. http://www.google.com/transit
48. http://www.google.com/translate_t
49. http://www.google.com/trends
50. http://video.google.com/
51. http://webaccelerator.google.com/
52. http://www.google.com/apis/
53. http://www.google.com/
54. http://www.google.com/press/intl-zeitgeist.html
Ubuntu Linux (2007-07-20 08:59:07)
What about Searchmash, Google’s testing ground for new features: http://www.searchmash.com/
Shell Harris (2007-07-26 10:06:36)
i hadn’t heard of searchmash.com but I like it. Thanks for the link.
abi (2007-06-21 14:13:25)
google’s programmers search engine http://devshots.com Devshots returns Google search results, but emphasize on
programming related sites and resources. So the search result will be smart and accurate.
Audi (2007-05-25 05:33:13)
Nice list, eventhough google suggest is inside google labs, I think it deserves its own link. And maybe Google’s url
removal service @ http://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller
Shell Harris (2007-05-25 10:10:55)
Thanks, Audi. Done and done. ”Google Remove URL” was added.
1.3.4 Internet Marketing with Articles - SEO Tip Week 12 (2007-03-22 06:50)
[1] If you have been involved in the mad world of search engine optimization for any time you know
that building links to your site is importance in achieving high search engine rankings, especially in Google.
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You might also know how important writing and submitting articles can be in your quest for one-way links
which lead to page one results.
Before starting an article marketing campaign, make sure you invest in a sound strategy. You don’t want to
write an article, submit it and then forget it. Article writing should be part of a bigger SEO plan. What
do I mean? Well, I like real world examples and Big Oak has many great [2]SEO success stories, so lets
take a look at one of our many successful clients who have used articles in their SEO campaign: [3]Danforth
Diamond.
Articles, A Gem of a Strategy
Danforth started with us with a brand new site, no search engine visibility and a small budget. Of course
they had lofty goals. They wanted to rank highly for search terms such as diamond engagement rings and
[4]engagement rings. Both are very competitive search terms and needed an aggressive, yet [5]ethical [6]SEO
Company. We have helped them achieve the rankings they were hoping for ([7] #4 in Google, for engagement
rings) and article marketing was an important part of the SEO process.
We have published many [8]well-written articles for Danforth, with a variety of links from the author’s
box and the article itself pointing to the jeweler’s home page and internal pages of the site. Quality writing
is a standard at Big Oak and this has allowed us to have a greater distribution across of the Internet which
provides more inbound links for Danforth. Be sure your writing stands above the competition. Take a look
at similar articles and be sure your article says something new or at least says it better.
SEO and the Article: Working Together
So what is the strategy I’m talking about? Use articles are part of a coordinated marketing effort. Back
up your article with multiple SEO strategies to make the article more effective. Danforth decided to sell a
new metal called Palladium. They are ranked [9] #3 in Google for the search term ’Palladium Jewelry’ and
rank well for other palladium search terms so our strategy works. Here is how we did it. (Links show actual
examples)
1. Write the landing page for [10]palladium jewelry.
2. Write [11]article about palladium and why it is a good choice for jewelry. Distribute article.
3. Write [12]press release about palladium being available at Danforth Diamond. Distribute press release.
4. Frequent posts on [13]company blog about palladium.
5. Focus link building with keywords such as palladium, jewelry, rings, etc.
6. Be patient a few months and watch top rankings appear.
Trusting the Article Source
All of these steps were vital to search ranking success but article marketing was key. Not only did it provide
one-way links, it gave the potential customer information about Palladium so they could make an informed
decision. It also established Danforth as a trusted and knowledgeable merchant, which made buying from
them with confidence a given.
Running a successful SEO campaign requires a lot work and expertise. Well, it requires a lot of quality
writing and expertise. Don’t overlook the importance of article marketing and be sure to use it wisely with
other SEO efforts. It will be a better tool as part of a holistic SEO strategy rather than a one-shot, short-
sighted strategy.
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Article Submission Sites
It is good practice to find article sites that specialize in your article’s topic. It will give you a higher chance
for being published and makes backlinks more relative. Be on the lookout for sites that have articles catering
to your web site’s subject matter. You can easily find such sites by searching for your ”keyword” + article
in the Google search box. Here are some generic article submission sites we use at Big Oak.
• Idea Marketers - [14]http://www.ideamarketers.com/writers.cfm
• Buzzle.com - [15]http://www.buzzle.com/secure/become-edit or.asp
• Article Central - [16]http://thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/suggest.asp
• Go Articles - [17]http://www.goarticles.com/ulogin.html
• EzineArticles - [18]http://ezinearticles.com/submit/
• AMAzines - [19]http://amazines.com
• Article City - [20]http://www.articlecity.com/article submission.shtml
• NetterWeb.com - [21]http://www.netterweb.com/articles/
• Article Insider - [22]http://www.articleinsider.com/start.php
There are hundreds more to be sure, but I would say less than 30 generic article submission sites are worth
your time when submitting. Be sure they article submission site you are looking into will provide good
marketing exposure for your masterpiece!
–
We hope you are learning from our [23]weekly SEO tips. If you have any suggestions or questions, [24]please
let us know. If you submit a good question, we may use it in our tips. If you wish to contact Big Oak to
help you drive traffic and sales to your site we look forward to speaking with you. [25]Contact us today!
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/portfolio/clients/full-client-list.php
3. http://www.danforthdiamond.com/
4. http://www.danforthdiamond.com/engagement_rings/index.html
5. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
6. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
7. http://www.google.com/search?q=engagement+rings&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:
official&client=firefox-a
8. http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jill_Renee
9. http://www.google.com/search?q=palladium+jewelry&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:
official&client=firefox-a
10. http://www.danforthdiamond.com/palladium/index.html
11. http://ezinearticles.com/?Palladium-Jewelry:-The-Affordable-Treasure&id=288163
12. http://www.prleap.com/pr/47545/
13. http://www.danforthdiamond.com/blog/palladium-jewelry.html
14. http://www.ideamarketers.com/writers.cfm
15. http://www.buzzle.com/secure/become-editor.asp
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 25
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16. http://thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/suggest.asp
17. http://www.goarticles.com/ulogin.html
18. http://ezinearticles.com/submit/
19. http://amazines.com/
20. http://www.articlecity.com/article_submission.shtml
21. http://www.netterweb.com/articles/
22. http://www.articleinsider.com/start.php
23. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
24. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/contact-big-oak.php
25. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/contact-big-oak.php
Bill (2007-04-09 16:01:16)
All good stuff. The trick with article marketing, I find, is to actually write an article that’s really worth reading AND
is easy to read. If Digg and Reddit are anything to go by, ”easy to read” often means having a list structure, or at
least avoiding large and off-putting blocks of text.
Shell Harris (2007-04-09 16:20:41)
Bill, I agree. We try to walk the thin line and write quality material in our articles giving them a new point of view
and then we try to make it easy to digest for the casual reader.
Brian (2007-03-26 21:49:55)
Great post, very informative.
Wesley Warren (2007-03-26 12:38:36)
Nice article. Writing quality articles is a great way to build up readers and links.
kabababrubarta (2007-03-26 19:19:46)
Cool! kabababrubarta
WordPress Wizard Advice (2007-07-29 22:53:57)
I must say there is considerable amount of info in this article. First I did not know so many sources of writing articles.
Secondly you have outlined the article marketing with step by step process that makes it easy for people who are just
starting up the seo of theoir site and know very little about it.
1.3.5 Graphic Headlines Can Work for SEO - SEO Tip Week 13 (2007-03-30 07:30)
[1] This examples in this tip are no longer online. The recommendations are still the same. Using
graphic headlines are still okay if you use the title and alt tags.
This week’s tip is for those sites which are graphically heavy or rely on a specific typeface for their headlines.
While we at [2]Big Oak SEO always prefer a HTML text headline, we understand that sometimes the client
or designer would really prefer to use a typeface that isn’t available through HTML. Instead of being heavy
handed and insisting the site be changed to all HTML text we have gone with another, simpler approach.
Let me clarify this: I would prefer to see HTML text used and with all things being equal
HTML text will always be better than any techniques applied with graphic text.
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As I have written in the past, I feel that examples are the best way to learn and we have applied this tech-
nique to [3]Grote Consulting, a long-time client of Big Oak.
You can view the [4]Performance Appraisal page we will be using in the example.
We used the following HTML code to place a tag around our graphic text and allow the search
engines to read it as a heading:
The key is using both the alt tag and the title tag within the image source HTML code. Matching both tags
with the same text is helpful. The search engines may devalue the alt and title tags, but when they conform
with the HTML text and title of the page they can contribute to higher search engine rankings.
Further using this web page as an example I have provided a link the the [5]Google cache for this page.
The H1 header is clearly identified even though we used graphic text on page. And finally, to prove that
Google respects the proper use of this SEO technique I did a search for the H1 header ’Effective Employee
Performance Appraisal Tools’ and the example page is the [6] #2 result in Google.
Let me repeat this, using HTML text is always better, but using graphical text with the technique I have
shown you will help your rankings too. If you try spamming the alt or title tag in the image code you are
abusing this technique and lower rankings will follow. Use this wisely and be honest when adding text to
the alt and title tags, especially when wrapping an H1 tag around them.
–
Hope you have enjoyed this weekly [7]SEO tip. If you have any suggestions or questions for Big Oak,
[8]please let us know. If you submit a question we like, we may use it in our tips. [9]Contact Big Oak SEO
to help you drive traffic and sales to your site.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
3. http://www.groteconsulting.com/
4. http://www.groteconsulting.com/expertise/performance-appraisal.asp
5. http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:http://www.groteconsulting.com/services/performance-appraisal/index.
asp&hl=en&strip=1
6. http://www.google.com/search?q=Effective+Employee+Performance+Appraisal+Tools&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=
org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
7. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
8. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/contact-big-oak.php
9. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/contact-big-oak.php
emil (2007-03-30 15:01:54)
wow, thanks for the tip. I will use this !
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 27
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Shell Harris (2007-03-31 00:07:07)
Emil, Glad you found this useful. If you do use it, please submit a link. I think it is extremely helpful to see examples
when giving out SEO tips.
Seo (2008-01-15 19:17:46)
the page and the rankings are gone today but the experiment is interesting..of course the keyword is not very difficult,
that page has some links using similar anchor text(more than 20) but the experiment is still pretty interesting for me.
Would like to test it without the links pointing to that page though and weight better the factors of this equation.
Thanks
1.4 April
1.4.1 Every Web Page Should Be Unique - SEO Tip Week 14 (2007-04-06 06:23)
Every page on your web site should have its own story and clear message. You must be sure that the search
engines have no doubt what each page should rank well for. Do not mix signals or too keyword phrases on
a page. If you are selling [1]vinyl replacement windows, have a page directly focused on that product line.
If you look at this [2]example link from [3]Creative Energy, a local [4]client of Big Oak, you can see the
focus on vinyl replacement windows is clear from the content.. Being a local Richmond, VA company, their
goal for this page was top placement in Google for the search term ’Richmond vinyl replacement windows’.
They have the [5] #1 and #2 listing. But we also have them [6]ranked #12 for the term ’vinyl replacement
windows’. How did we accomplish this?
We gave this page individual attention and that made the difference. Let’s look deeper and check out
the factors that make a web page unique in your web site.
Title
The title sets up the page for the search engine. Short and direct, this is a good title that states clearly what
the page is about to the search engines.
Vinyl Replacement Windows from Simonton Window | Creative Energy of Richmond,
Virginia
Meta Tags
While the [7]importance of meta tags is questioned, using the description tag has its uses. And if you are
going to use it, make sure it mentions your targeted key phrases. Thr meta description tag on our example
page also contains the key phrase vinyl replacement windows.
Even though the meta keyword tag is ignored for the most part, if it is part of your plan, make it count and
make it different for each page.
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Keyword Density
I just wrote post on the [8]myth of OPTIMAL keyword density, but having the keyword phrase on the page,
of course, makes good sense. If you check out the keyword density for this page for the term vinyl replacement
windows it is 4.21 %. This may be a little high but if you read the page it doesn’t feel ”spammy” so it is
acceptable. Remember, you are writing for the search engines and people.
Linking, External and Internal
Make sure you have a few keyword-rich links to your important pages from external sites and your internal
links. This is referred to as [9]deep linking and will help your site’s ranking.
Here you can see an [10]article written for the replacement windows with the exact link text we want in
the author’s box. For the internal linking, the footer on Creative Energy’s web site contains a link to the
Vinyl Replacement Window page with the link text ’[11]REPLACEMENT WINDOWS’, a good text link
even without the keyword ’vinyl’ included.
Building Your Web Site One Page at a Time
As you can see this page was given the individual attention it needed to show high in the search engine
rankings, but the real message of this [12]SEO tip is that this page is has its own voice on the client’s site. If
you view the other product web pages for Creative Energy you will find they follow suit with targted titles,
meta tags, content and linking. Take the time to craft each web page individually and take care to spend
time on the components I’ve listed.
1. http://www.creativeenergyexteriors.com/windows.htm
2. http://www.creativeenergyexteriors.com/windows.htm
3. http://www.creativeenergyexteriors.com/windows.htm
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/portfolio/clients/full-client-list.php
5. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=OY7&q=
richmond+vinyl+replacement+windows&btnG=Search
6. http://www.google.com/search?q=vinyl+replacement+windows&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:
en-US:official&hs=hDS&start=10&sa=N
7. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/use-the-meta-description-tag-seo-tip-week-3/
8. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/keyword-density-myth/
9. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/deep-linking-seo-tip-week-4/
10. http://www.centurionexteriors.com/nashville_windows/lower_bills.html
11. http://www.creativeenergyexteriors.com/windows.htm
12. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
WordPress Plugin Advice (2007-07-16 22:36:35)
This is not the first place I heard that internal linking does help SEO, but somehow you did not explain why. May
be You have reserved that for some other post ?
Shell Harris (2007-07-26 10:10:12)
Internal linking helps the same way that external linking helps. Links from inside your site count just as links from
outside your site. The big difference is you can precisely control what your internal link text is and where it points
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 29
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to. Take care of your own ”house” first and use your linking strategically before going after external links.
1.4.2 Register Your Domain for More Than One Year - SEO Tip Week 15
(2007-04-13 07:27)
I have an easy [1]SEO Tip this week. Make sure you register you domain name for more than one year.
Register it for a minimum of three years and more if you can. This is especially important for new sites.
The search engines, particularly Google, want to see that you believe your site is going to be successful.
They also want to be sure that your site will be meaningful. A good indicator can be fort the length of
time you register your domain. And the first place they check is with your domain register company (e.g.
[2]Godaddy.com).
Google has also filed United States Patent Application 20050071741 stating this very fact.
”Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway
(illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain
expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus,
the documents associated therewith.”•
Another good reason to increase your domain registration period is it will prevent you from accidentally
losing the domain name because you overlooked or didn’t receive the reminder email to renew.
While this tip is not going to rocket you to #1 in the search results, it can provide a quicker exit from
the [3]Google Sandbox and may provide some boost in your rankings. With so many contributing factors
why overlook one of the easiest things to do. Go ahead and renew, it’ll do a website good!
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http:///
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/googles-sandbox-effect.php
Vjeko (2007-04-20 07:36:25)
Hi to all! I don’t have a lot experience but I am certain that this is very important factor. I have just realised why
my site went down from 10th postion to 80th!!! I am not joking. I was on free server and the service was free ’for
ever’. When I changed IP address of the site, and paid domain for 1 year it went down. Regards, Vjeko from Croatia.
Shell Harris (2007-04-14 11:43:08)
There are many sources that agree with my post. Here is another article about this from [1]Search Engine Guide.
Google has also filed United States Patent Application 20050071741 backing up my theory.
Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely
are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in
predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.
Of course there are also people who think this is a ploy cooked up by the domain name registering companies. I still
hold that it is good business practice and a small investment. Whether you do it for 10 years or 2 years is up to you.
I still say it makes sense for a host of reasons, betting rankings is just one of them.
1. http://www.searchengineguide.com/hartzer/005144.html
30 c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’
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Orderer (2007-04-14 07:24:58)
Is that a fact? I always only pay for a year in advance cause I figure I can’t trust the registrars for too long a period
of time. Would you please share the source of the info, if there is one? Thanks a lot!
1.4.3 Submit Press Releases - SEO Tip Week 16 (2007-04-20 06:41)
Submit Press Releases for Link Building
[1] Finding one-way links to your website can be a tough task. Finding quality one-way links to your
websites can be even more difficult.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people put links to your site without you even asking them to? Well, sub-
mitting a press release can help accomplish this. Similar to my tip on [2]SEO[3] with articles, using a press
release to build links and increase search engine rankings can also be effective. What so many people overlook
submitting press releases, which are copyright free, is the fact that you can put links to your site within the
content of the press release. We used this method of promotion for our [4]online toy store client and you can
see one of their [5]press releases.
Not only can you place helpful links to your home page in the body of the press release but you can
use [6]deep linking and link to interior pages of your website. Deep linking is often harder to do as most
websites would rather link to your home page. We use PRweb.com and the cost is higher to use text links
rather than actual URLs.
Press Release Submit Site
As I wrote, PRweb.com does charge a fee for submission, but there are many free press release submission
sites as well. Here are some that we also use:
• [7]www.24-7pressrelease.com
• [8]www.prfree.com
• [9]www.prleap.com
• [10]www.pressbox.co.uk
• [11]www.press-world.com/add
• [12]http://www.express-press-release.com
• [13]http://www.free-press-release.com
Press release submission is not the magic bullet for SEO success, but it is a valuable tool in the SEO
consultant’s toolbox. Whether it is a product release, a major hire, or a strategic acquisition you can make
the press release perform double duty as both a internet marketing tool and a link building tool. Big Oak
provides [14]press release writing & submission as part of our SEO strategy.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/internet-marketing-with-articles-seo-tip-week-12/http://www.bigoakinc.com/
blog/internet-marketing-with-articles-seo-tip-week-12/
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 31
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3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/internet-marketing-with-articles-seo-tip-week-12/http://www.bigoakinc.com/
blog/internet-marketing-with-articles-seo-tip-week-12/
4. http://www.sillyasstoys.com/
5. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/2/prweb204256.htm
6. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/deep-linking-seo-tip-week-4/
7. http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/
8. http://www.prfree.com/
9. http://www.prleap.com/
10. http://www.pressbox.co.uk/
11. http://www.press-world.com/add
12. http://www.express-press-release.com/
13. http://www.free-press-release.com/
14. http://www.bigoakinc.com/capabilities/seo-press-releases.php
Abdul Hayi Mansoor (2007-08-05 02:59:13)
Very informative and profession. Would be of great help for me in future.
1.4.4 SEO and Flash - SEO Tip Week 17 (2007-04-27 07:08)
Flash-based sites have problems with SEO or ”Skip This Intro”
Update: I laughed out loud after reading this post theGoogleCache.com. View the [1]Should I Make a Flash
Site Flowchart?
Using Flash is a slippery slope, even [2]Adobe’s Flash page is light on the Flash. I hesitate to bring up
this topic as it can be very heated. Why, I myself used to be an avid Flash developer about 8 years ago.
But back then not many people understood the concept of SEO or Internet Marketing and Google was just
a twinkle in the Internet’s watchful eye.
Well, now SEO has become one of the fasting growing industries on the Internet and Flash has lost some of
it’s...well, Flash. In other words, more often than not, we search frantically for the ”Skip This Intro” button
when we see animation start flying around the screen. If not the first time then definitely the second time.
We don’t have time for Flash intros and tedious downloads in today’s world. We want information and we
want it fast. Flash is contrary to this in many cases.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Flash, and think it can be helpful and entertaining of sites for entertainment,
gaming and site’s that have inherit brand popularity such as [3]Coca-Cola. Most of us running a business on
the web need visitors, customers, users and clients coming to our sites. Truth is though, it is hard to find a
Flash website vs. a non-Flash website. Yes, I know that [4]Flash can be indexed, I also know that an HTML
site will beat a Flash site every time when all things are equal.
Of course, using Flash in a traditional website can be fine and dandy. When used efficiently, Flash can
enhance a website without damaging it’s search engine rankings. But Flash must be used with caution.
If all of your content and menus are in Flash, search engines will have a harder time following the links. If
you feel strongly about using Flash, be sure to create an HTML version of the page as well. Your users will
thank you as they will now be able to find your site with the help of the search engines. You may wish to
block the Flash version of your pages from the crawlers with a robots.txt file, since you don’t want your
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pages indexed twice. If your website contains Flash, be sure put the navigation outside of the Flash content
or the search engine spiders won’t be able to navigate your site. Your content should also reside outside of
Flash’s influence.
Think of Flash as accent material for you site. Use it for graphical callouts, [5]product images, interac-
tive portions of your site and anywhere you can enhance the user experience without causing problems for
the spiders or confusion for the user. Remember, never use Flash as your entire site if you want any search
engine visibility. This is important because you can optimize the [6]page title, [7]meta tags and other content
placed on invididual pages making sure each [8]web page is unique.
Finally, give your users a Flash and a HTML version of your site. Watch the visitor stats and I’m bet-
ting you see a much higher number of visitors view the low-bandwidth verision of your website. In any case
you will have given the spiders something to follow and the search engines something to index and searchers
something find. It may seem like extra work, but the traffic you will acquire from it will be worth it.
1. http://www.thegooglecache.com/?p=46
2. http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/
3. http://www.coca-cola.com/home.htm?lang=en_US
4.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/09/07/google-can-now-index-flash-an-interview-with-michael-marshall
5. http://www.cartoonsmart.com/product_display_techniques.html
6. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/how-important-are-page-titles/
7. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/use-the-meta-description-tag-seo-tip-week-3/
8. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/every-web-page-should-be-unique-seo-tip-week-14/
jefe (2007-06-15 22:31:01)
Site needs traffic because Search Engines are not picking up your Flash? Then submit your Flash based website for
free at FlashSEO.net! HOW DOES IT WORK? Search engines will Index our pages, direct traffic to your new auto
created page on our site, and then we direct the traffic to your website automatically. Free Services: Search Engine
Optimization for Adobe Flash Sites and Directory
Voluntary Death (2007-04-29 14:31:30)
I like Flash too but that was ages ago. I still do include flash or do flash projects and accept clients who wants flash.
However, personally, my site is now a blog and most of the other sites are now blogs too. Well, why? Just as you’ve
said, search engines love blogs and non-flash sites more than flash.
1.5 May
1.5.1 Search Engine & Directory Submissions - SEO Tip Week 18 (2007-05-04 14:37)
[1] Directories are an easy way to build links because anyone can submit and get listed. Directories
can, therefore, be of little use for the same reason. Of course getting in directories can be time consuming
but it is a one-time affair and usually worth the time. They provide one-way links which will increase your
online presence. Not all directories are created equal and paying for the better ones is often money well
spent.
Inclusion Tips
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Select the best category for your site and follow the instructions on the submission form carefully.
Write your descriptions without sensational text. Descriptions of sites should describe the content of the site
concisely and accurately When submitting to directories, make sure to vary anchor text and use keywords
in the description and title fields.
Choose the most appropriate category for your site. Finding a category that best matches your
site’s theme or content will increase traffic from the directory and provide higher quality one-way link to
your site for the search engines to follow.
Good Directories
A few of the more search engine friendly directories for valuable links are the following:
[2]Yahoo! Directory: The Yahoo! Directory is the biggest and oldest directory on the web, and one
of the few directories that can provide traffic.
[3]DMOZ: The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is a free, volunteer-run directory. Google and many
other sites pull information directly from DMOZ and display the description in the search engine results.
[4]Business.com: A huge business-related directory.
[5]Best of The Web: One of the oldest directories on the web.
[6]Aviva Directory: A well-marketed directory.
[7]GoGuides.org: Another well-run directory that has been around a while.
Blog Directories
Here are some recommended blog directories.
[8]MyBlogLog: Everyone who reads a web site or blog can learn about and engage with one an-
other, and in the process take the conversation to a whole new level.
[9]Blogcatalog: Labeled as ”the premiere blog directory on the internet”. Promote your own blog or
find blogs on various topics.
[10]Bumpzee: join a community, you are fed with an ever-updating list of blogs and blog posts sub-
mitted and chosen by like-minded individuals.
A more complete [11]list of online directories is on our website. Aviva Directory has has a list of
the [12]best directories.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://search.yahoo.com/dir?fr=yfp-t-501
3. http://www.dmoz.org/
4. http://www.business.com/
5. http://www.botw.com/
6. http://www.avivadirectory.com/
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7. http://www.goguides.org/
8. http://www.blogcatalog.com/
9. http://www.blogcatalog.com/
10. http://www.bumpzee.com/
11. http://www.bigoakinc.com/limb/seo-directories.php
12. http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/
John Hunter (2007-07-04 19:05:06)
The [1]Curious Cat Cool Connections directory has been around for over 10 years and provides SEO friendly links.
The ”catch” is it is actually designed to be used by people and only the best sites are included (plus the scope is
limited). But for the right sites it is a useful resource, I think.
1. http://curiouscat.net/cool/
Akhilesh (2007-05-08 19:19:17)
It’s sad that the good ones are not free and that the free ones (like DMOZ) have a lengthy review process. I’m not
into blogging for the money, and so can’t spend any. Oh well.
Andy Beard (2007-05-08 09:36:00)
You should probably add sites like MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Bumpzee to the list. I get more traffic from them
every day than I receive from DMOZ over a few months, and the links they are already providing are more valuable.
Shell Harris (2007-05-08 09:47:12)
Great suggestions, Andy. I have placed links to these sites for blogs in this post. Thanks for taking the time to
comment, I’ve always been a big fan of your blog. And purely coincidentally I added a link to Bumpzee today from
my [1]Dofollow post. I submitted my blog as well.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/nofollow-no-more-seo-blog-joins-the-minority/
1.5.2 Control What Gets Indexed - SEO Tip Week 19 (2007-05-11 13:47)
[1] Before reading this tip, make sure that you have read the tips from week 7 ([2]Duplicate Content &
URL Canonicalization) and 14 ([3]Every Web Page Should Be Unique) to understand why unique content is
valuable.
Under normal circumstances, you want every page to be unique, and for there to be one, and only one,
URL displaying that content. However, there are situations where you might use multiple URLs for specific
purposes, such as tracking your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. Giving your PPC ads individual specific
URLs makes them easier to track in your website statistics or analytics packages.
Example Original URL: www.company.com/mypage.html
Example PPC Ad URL: www.company.com/mypage.html?src=ppc001
The problem with giving ads unique URLs is that they may end up being indexed by the search engines,
especially Yahoo. The best solution is to use a [4]301 redirect to the original URL for that page, thereby
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capturing any importance the individual URLs may have. If you cannot use a 301 redirect for technical or
other reasons, you can stop these URLs from being indexed with your robots.txt file.
If you only have a few URLs that you want to disallow, you can list them individually:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mypage.html?src=ppc001
Disallow: /mypage.html?src=ppc002
This can become problematic if you are trying to disallow hundreds or even thousands of different URLs.
This is where wildcards come in. While wildcards are not part of the standards of robots.txt files, Google,
MSN, and Yahoo all support them. This can be extremely helpful in trying to get rid of some of those tricky
content duplication problems.
The two supported wildcards are the asterisk ”*” which matches any sequence of characters, and the dollar
sign ” $” which signifies the end of a URL string. Trailing asterisks are redundant, and not needed, since
that is the natural behavior of the robots.txt standard.
CompUSA Example
The [5]CompUSA home page is indexed hundreds of times by Yahoo with many variations of referral and
tracking parameters.
If they wanted to get rid of all URLs with parameters on their default.asp page, they could use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /default.asp?
Additional Examples
If you have printable versions of all your HTML pages that contain ” print” in the URL, you would use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /* print*.html $
If you use a session id parameters called ”sessionid” with users who are logged in, you would use:
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User-agent: *
Disallow: /*sessionid=
If you have a private folder called ”private memories” and you don’t want hackers being able to know the
full name of the folder simply by looking at your robots.txt file, you would use::
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private*/
As you can see, there are many uses for the robots.txt file now that all of the big 3 search engines support
wildcards. Hopefully the official specification for robots.txt will support wildcards in the future, and all bots
will understand them.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/duplicate-content-url-canonicalization/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/every-web-page-should-be-unique-seo-tip-week-14/
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/how-to-do-a-301-redirect/
5. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A//www.compusa.com/default.asp&bwm=p&bwms=
p&searchbwm=Explore+URL
Francisco Cheng (2007-06-29 08:28:18)
Good post, this could be very useful information.
Orderer (2007-05-16 11:17:30)
Wow that compusa stuff is really weird.
Chris Alexander (2007-05-18 09:55:32)
Yes, the noindex meta tag will also accomplish this. However there are many instances where it’s difficult, or not
possible, to use the noindex meta tag.
Perfect Wealth Formula (2007-05-17 20:54:15)
Can you use the noindex meta tag to accomplish this?
Shell Harris (2007-05-13 22:27:04)
Chris, That is a great tip and one that can literally bring your site back into the rankings practically overnight.
1.5.3 SEO for Interior Webpages - SEO Tip Week 20 (2007-05-18 13:45)
Most websites focus on their home page which is of course a good idea. It is the most important page of
your site whether you are looking at search engine optimization, internet marketing or customer conversion.
Making sure you homepage is optimized and marketed should be of primary importance, but be sure not to
forget your interior pages.
Often the arm chair optimizer will make the mistake of only trying to rank their home age. By this I
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mean they will only build links to the home page or make sure it is titled with the most important keywords
and so on. And while the home page should get the most SEO love, it is also important to your online
marketing success that you show your interior pages some SEO attention. Do you interior pages that aren’t
ranking well, but should be? Not every keyword can be crammed on to your home page, although I’ve seen
it attempted. A car dealer has [1]tried this approach.
Supporting the Home Page
While marketing the home page is a monthly focus for us here at Big Oak, we are also aware of the power
interior pages have for converting visitors into clients. We think of the home page as a lobby that helps direct
you to the page that will provide the information or product you are searching for. If we can skip the lobby
altogether and get the user directly to the page that would be better. That is unlikely to happen without
providing [2]deep linking to your interior pages.
Marketing Interior Pages
I like providing examples so here are some real world examples from our own clients. Our client ExhibitDeal
provides [3]trade show displays and accessories. Their number #1 term is ”trade show displays” and as of
today May 18, 2007 they are ranked #1 in Google ([4]Trade Show Displays Ranking). They also rank #1
in Google for the term ”trade show flooring ([5]Trade Show Flooring Ranking Screen Shot). If you click the
links to view the screen shots you will notice the #1 ranking for trade show flooring is an interior page of
ExhibitDeal.
Trying to rank the home page for trade show flooring would have been impossible. So we marketing both
keyword phrases for their respective pages and achieved high ranking rankings for both. Currently the trade
show flooring page has [6]89 backlinks according to Yahoo. Not an extremely large amount but decent
amount when a targeted strategy is applied to a single interior page. Of course it helps that the site has
[7]4,374 links overall, but only [8]3,009 links are pointing to the home page.
Obviously it works for ExhibiDeal. Leading searchers to a page about trade show flooring when the search
matches will increase sales.
Choosing Interior Pages for SEO
Decide on a a few interior pages that can help your conversion efforts. If placing a user directly on an interior
page, bypassing the home page, would help the sale or get them calling wouldn’t you want that? After you
have decided which pages might help your business if they ranked well, maybe 2 or 3, start optimizing them
and then start link building.
Providing deep linking to these pages will allow your site to have increased value overall and not just
on your home page and the search engines like to see a site with popularity throughout on just on the home
page. This can increase you authority and your ranking for your entire site.
Sound link a lot of work? It can be, but the rewards will be a website with much higher search engine
visibility. If you need help, [9]Big Oak SEO is available.
1. http://www.wheelanddeal.com/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/deep-linking-seo-tip-week-4/
3. http://www.exhibitdeal.com/
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/trade-show-displays-1.gif
5. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/trade-show-flooring-1.gif
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6. https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.exhibitdeal.com%2Fproducts-flooring.
html&bwm=i&bwms=p&bwmf=u&fr2=seo-rd-se
7.
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fexhibitdeal.com&bwm=i&bwmf=s&bwmo=&fr2=seo-rd-se
8. https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.exhibitdeal.com%2F&bwm=i&bwms=p&bwmf=
u&fr2=seo-rd-se
9. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
1.5.4 Finding the Perfect Link - SEO Tip Week 21 (2007-05-25 07:04)
[1] This week’s SEO tip gets to the heart of the linking question. We know we need links, but what
kind of links? (See our article on [2]Dissecting Links) Well, what if we could choose a link to have all the
qualities that would benefit our site? This ”perfect link” would benefit our SEO efforts, and it would be use-
ful at driving traffic through clicks as well as inflating our link popularity and increasing our search engine
rankings. Of course, this is can be subjective and I always welcome differing opinions, so if you feel I’ve
missed something, please add your comments to this post.
The anatomy of a perfect link:
• It would be a simple HTML link as follows: keyword phrase.
• The anchor text would would include keywords that are important to your site.
• It would be part of a sentence, which would be part of a paragraph.
• The content surrounding the link, and the entire page, would be on topic with your site.
• It would reside on a site with a similar theme as your site.
• The page would have links to other sites similar to your site.
• It would be on a [3]trusted site, with the site itself having backlinks from many sites including .edu
and .gov sites.
• The link would drive direct traffic to your site...targeted, highly converting traffic.
• It should be an [4]authoritative site.
• The site the link resides on should be popular and well-read.
I think you can also see why the perfect link is only slightly easier to find than [5]Bigfoot or [6]Nessie - much
of the link’s perfection is derived from the site and page where the link resides. The old adage in real estate
applies to link building too, it all about location, location, location!
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/newsletter/200701/link-building.php
3. http://www.seobook.com/archives/000661.shtml
4. http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?p=145797
5. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/01/24/SC86886.DTL
6. http://paranormal.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_search_for_nessie
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1.6 June
1.6.1 Keep Fresh Content on Your Homepage - SEO Tip Week 22 (2007-06-01 20:15)
[1] Adding fresh content to your site and your homepage is an often heard bit of advice from SEO
consultants and advice columns. Yes, It is a good idea to keep your content up-to-date and fresh, but using
information that isn’t pertinent to your site such as a weather feed or generalized information you can find
on a host of other sites, it isn’t likely to draw much attention from the search engines. You need something
more substantial and more on topic with your site.
Look for content that speaks to your audience. For example, maybe you own an SEO company and adding
new content to your home page looks like a good idea. Well, if you write a blog on a consistent basis then
your own blog posts can become homepage content through an RSS feed. As a matter of fact we have
implemented this very tactic today on our own home page. If you look at the [2]Big Oak homepage you will
see an area that is displaying an RSS feed of this blog ([3]SEO Blog) with a snippet from the two most recent
blog posts. Now we have content that will change whenever this SEO blog is updated and most of the time
the posts will be on topic. The search engines will notice my home page changes frequently and visit more
often and give our site a higher value because of this.
If you aren’t an avid blogger, you can add content from other blogs or from search result and news feeds,
but this can draw traffic from your site if your visitors follow links included in the third-party feeds.
Problems can occur as fresh content can cause your rankings to change based on the content displayed,
but these fluctuations are usually minor and the benefits outweigh the negatives. Keeping a watch on your
fresh content should be part of your strategy.
Be creative and think about what content would be of use to your visitors. Think about adding new
products to the homepage or specials that change frequently. The key is to stay vigilant and automation is
good answer. RSS feeds are a great way to do this and many shopping carts have the option to provide an
RSS feed. Other ideas are writing tips, maybe [4]52 Industry tips in advance, that change out weekly. They
don’t have to link anywhere and can simply be placed on the home page every Monday and so on. It is
important to make it fun and easy, otherwise it will become a struggle especially if you are trying to provide
the content yourself rather than displaying content from other sites or feeds. Be sure to get permission if
you aren’t sure about copyright issues when using the content from other sites.
Please pass along any ideas you have for keep your homepage fresh with relative content.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
Shell Harris (2007-06-02 13:10:19)
Joel, We use a program called [1]CaRP from Gecko Tribe that pulls our RSS feed from our blog (or any RSS resource)
and will place the pulled content anywhere you like. It is configurable and inexpensive. It is only for PHP though.
I’m sure there are other programs like this for ASP if needed. But the idea is the same. Be careful and make sure the
pulled content is not part of a javascript feed, it must be real html or else the spiders won’t read it.
1. http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/
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joel cohen (2007-06-02 12:50:50)
Putting a summary of your recent blog post is a great idea to do to your homepage. Do you just add this in each
week, or would you recommend inserting a widget of your blog post. Would a widget have the same SEO advantages
as opposed to just inserting text copy?? Thanks, Joel Cohen www.RestaurantMarketing.com
joel cohen (2007-06-02 13:23:31)
You got me on the PHP and ASP bit. I”m just a marketing guy! Can you tell by looking if my blog
www.RestaurantMarketingBlog.com would be compatible to the Carp program?
Shell Harris (2007-06-15 08:34:48)
The best source for checking backlinks for me is Yahoo’s [1]Site Explorer. Yahoo is the most accurate.
1. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Gavin (2007-06-05 18:51:41)
Good article and very true. I have found that good content that update regulary can help with search engine place-
ment. Just as long as the content is rich in keywords and relevant to your website, you will be fine
Suchmaschinenoptimierung (2007-06-14 19:21:04)
Can somebody tell me where i can get a ”realtime” backlink check for free for the SEO Results? I have the problem
that every backlink checker in the Search Engines gives a different result â⠬â¬S sometimes more than 500 + or
-. Do you also know which is the best backlink checker in web for an SEO beginner? Thank you for your answer and
greetings.
Shell Harris (2007-06-03 11:36:56)
Your blog is using PHP so you can install CaRP on the your blog and push an RSS feed to it. If you want to pull
blog posts from that blog you will have to have PHP installed on your destination server.
1.6.2 Keep Current on SEO Techniques - SEO Tip Week 23 (2007-06-09 22:09)
Obviously one of the most important parts of an SEO Company’s success is keeping up with the new trends,
latest techniques and search engine news. The best way to do that is to read the best SEO blogs out there. I
have listed some in my blogroll to the right. I hold them all in high esteem, and of course, I would recommend
reading my own [1]SEO blog.
SEO Forums
Keeping up to date with SEO forum browsing is also a good idea. Here are some of my favorites:
• http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/
• http://forums.seochat.com/
• http://www.highrankings.com/forum/
• http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
• http://www.seo-guy.com/forum/
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[2] Search Marketing Standard Magazine
I have recently discovered something almost unheard of in the Internet world, a printed magazine that still
has relevance. It is [3]Search Marketing Standard. I read my first issue this month and was impressed with
the wealth of information and the breadth of subjects covered.
As an avid researcher and online reader it is refreshing to sit away from my desk, or outside, or at my
home, or anyplace other than my office, and read a printed document. There is something comforting even
in the this digital age about holding a glossy magazine and flipping casually through the pages. I even looked
at the advertisements, something we have trained our eyes to avoid online.
Looking at a colorful magazine is one thing, finding it useful and informative is quite another. Search
Marketing Standard did a nice job in both areas.
Search Marketing Standard (SMS)
The issue of Search Engine Marketing Standard that I read (picture to the right) covered many topics
in the search engine marketing arena. Of course they had articles about search engine optimization and
search engine marketing, but they also gave commentary about social media marketing, SEO certification
and a few other gems, including blogging and linkbaiting.
One of the most useful items in this issue was a very informative listing of SEM training courses and
certification. I would have like to have seen a review of each course, but that could be very subjective,
time-consuming and costly so I can understand the omission.
I also felt a nice job was done bridging the sometimes enormous gap between beginners and profession-
als in the SEO industry. It is something I try to do on this blog so I was pleased seeing SMS attempt this
as well.
SMS also realizes a magazine without a website is a missed opportunity, so they have built a compan-
ion site. While you can’t read the published articles (why would you subscribe if you could?) they certainly
don’t withhold information about the SEO tips and advice. The site is a useful tool for research with [4]help-
ful blog posts.
Yearly subscription to the magazine starts at just $15 for 1 year/4 issues for US-based readers and $20
for international subscribers (shipping included). [5]Click Here to subscribe today, I recommend it.
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1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/search-marketing-standard-magazine.jpg
3. http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/
4. http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/blog/2007/02/
6-surefire-strategies-for-bringing-your-old-blog-posts-back-to-life.html
5. http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/subscribe.html
Jason (2007-06-25 22:43:33)
I find it so hard to keep track and up to date in all the different forums. I’d also like to add wickedfire.com to the list
for seo discussion with attitude
1.6.3 Underscores vs. Dashes - SEO Tip Week 24 (2007-06-15 15:58)
[1] Spaces should never be used in a URL or file names because the space character gets translated to
” %20” by the browser, and this can wreak havoc with both readability and statistics or analytics programs.
The question then remains, which is better to use instead of spaces, underscores ” ” or dashes ”-”.
As far as Google is concerned Big Oak consists of one word, ”Big Oak”, and Big-Oak consists of two
words, ”Big” and ”Oak”.
The reason Google does not treat the underscore as a word separator is because Google was created by
programmers who knew that programmers often wanted to search about programming. Many computer
programming languages use the underscore character in such ways that CLASS is different from CLASS.
Because of this, I always recommend using dashes instead of underscores in your filenames and URLs.
Be careful not to use too many dashes in your domain name, as that could get your site flagged for other
reasons. I prefer to have a domain name with no dashes, and to use dashes where appropriate in the directory
and file structure.
Example URL:
[2]http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
Other things about Google to keep in mind when choosing filenames and URL structure.
• There is no difference between lower-case and upper-case: big oak, Big Oak, BIG OAK, and biG Oak
are all the same.
• The ampersand ” &” is a word seperator: Big &Oak is treated as two words.
• Singular words are not the same as plural words: oak and oaks are treated as different words.
• Google cannot read words that are within other words: bubble will not be seen inside of bubblegum.
As with any tip, keep in mind that it’s a combination of many factors which will ultimately decide your
placement in the search engine rankings and quite often every little bit counts.
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Update: A Test
I created a [3]test page to illustrate how Google reads words.
Examples:
A search for [4]Test travveran shows the sample page.
A search for [5]Flibstopper Test shows the sample page. The two words are even highlighted in the
URL. The word ”test” appears in the page title.
A search for [6]travveran shows no results in Google. Google did not read my made-up word from
the URL or content because it only appeared in phrases with underscores.
A site search for [7]choosing colors shows all the pages in our [8]Out on a Limb section because
those two words appear in the navigation on all pages.
A site search for [9]”choosing colors” (in quotes) shows no pages because those two words do not ap-
pear together in our site, choosing colors on the test page is treated as a single word.
A site search for [10]”the blue pill” (in quotes) shows our test page since dashes are treated as word
separators.
A site search for [11]”bush seo” (in quotes) shows our test page since the ampersand ” &” also acts
as a word separator.
Similarly Google can find the page with [12]reality tv and [13]bubblegum, but it cannot find the
page with [14]bubble or [15]1971.
Even though many of the stranger examples have little relevance to SEO, it’s a good idea to under-
stand how Google reads and understands words.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/limb/my-flibstopper-test_travveran.php
4. http://www.google.com/search?q=Test_travveran
5. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Flibstopper+Test
6. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=travveran&btnG=Search
7. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.bigoakinc.com+choosing+colors&hl=en&filter=0
8. http://www.bigoakinc.com/limb/limb.php
9. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.bigoakinc.com+%22choosing+colors%22&btnG=Search
10. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.bigoakinc.com+%22the+blue+pill%22&btnG=Search
11. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.bigoakinc.com+%22bush+seo%22&hl=en&filter=0
12. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.bigoakinc.com+reality+tv&btnG=Search
13. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.bigoakinc.com+bubblegum&btnG=Search
14. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.bigoakinc.com+bubble&btnG=Search
15. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.bigoakinc.com+1971&btnG=Search
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Chris Alexander (2007-07-10 15:11:57)
Using a single hyphen or even a couple hyphens in a domain name is perfectly fine. If you have a domain name with
5 or more hyphens, then you could run into not only SEO problems, but usability problems as well. It’s my personal
preference not to use hyphens in domain names, because it’s easier to tell some one, ”Go to big oak inc dot com,”
instead of saying, ”Go to big hyphen oak hyphen inc dot com.”
Francisco Cheng (2007-06-29 08:29:53)
I never completely understood why we use dashes instead of underscore. Now that I read your post, it really makes
sense.
Wordpress Advice (2007-07-10 14:44:59)
I must ask why having a hyphen in your domain name is a bad idea, while it is not bad for filenames. I heard this
from others as well. I have a single hyphen in my domain name. Is that bad ? or you just consider having more then
one as bad ?
Chris Alexander (2007-06-25 11:34:02)
Steven, I wouldn’t worry about the number of hyphens in the blog post title or file names. I was warning against
registering a domain name with too many hyphens. For example, making your domain name something like search-
engine-optimization-seo-website-design-application-developmen t-services.com is probably a very bad idea in many
ways.
Wordpress Advice (2007-07-09 22:28:40)
Two Thumbs up. You made me a fan. I guess I have to read the rest of your advice for the last size months.
Steven (2007-06-22 18:10:22)
Chris, you mention that too many hyphens are not a good thing, and I agree. Most blog posts, including mine, have
several hyphens but the search engines seem to still index and find the pages. Do you think there is any harm in blog
URLs including hyphens?
MorganLighter (2007-06-16 20:59:36)
Chris - Thanks for the tips on using ”-”, ” ” and ” &” as well as upper and lower case. I learn something everyday -
Thanks again.
1.6.4 SEO Titles, Using the Title Tag - SEO Tip Week 25 (2007-06-22 05:35)
[1] Page titles are one of the most important parts of any web page, especially when performing search
engine optimization. A page title is located at the very top of your browser’s window. It can bring traffic
in abundance or completely isolate your site. Knowing how to properly word a page title is critical to your
site’s SEO success. Let’s look at how page titles can be used to increase your site’s traffic.
Snowflakes and Titles
It is said no two snowflakes look exactly the same. Well, the same should be said for page titles on your site.
Every page on your site should have a different focus from the other pages on your site, or you are re-
peating yourself and duplicating content. So if all your pages are telling a different story, shouldn’t they all
have a different title? And that title should effectively reflect the content of the page.
c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’ 45
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Missing an Opportunity
In my daily web searches, I see many missed opportunities with poorly titled web pages. Pages simply named
”Untitled” or ”Untitled Document” can be found in the millions (79 million were found in a Google search).
Search engines depend on titles to gather information about your web pages. And a page title without a
unique description does not help the search engines - in fact, a generic page title makes the page nearly
impossible to find...
Putting Your Company Name in the Title Tag
I’m not against putting your company name in your page title - after all, it will help build brand awareness.
But, I am against putting only your company name in the title and until you become a household name, I
would suggest putting your company name at the end of your title. The focus of your web pages should be
on what people would search for to find your company. In other words you want targeted keyword phrases
in the title. Let me give an example:
If your company name is ”Miller & Sons” and you sell fishing equipment near Whitefish,
Montana you should not limit your title to ”Miller & Sons”. Instead try ”Fishing Rods & Reels in
Whitefish, Montana - Miller & Sons”. With this you are netting traffic searching for your product,
your location and your company name. Keeping the location in the name is very important if
you are serving only a regional or local market.
Let Your Copy Be Your Guide
When deciding on your page titles, read the page first and let that guide your decision. If you can’t confine
the theme of your page copy into a concise page title, you may need to break the copy into more than one
page.
If you sell toys on your site, your page copy should have the keyword ”toys” and so should your page
title. Even better it should include what type of toys. Do you sell dog toys? Cat toys? [2]Children’s toys?
Your title should convey this. Adding in other possible search terms is also a good idea. An example of a
toy site home page title could be ”Children’s toys and games - toys for boys and girls of all ages” You have
your most important keyword, ”toys,” listed twice and have added some other important keywords such as
”games,” ”boy” and ”girl.”
Suppose one of the sub pages of your toy site showcases Leap Frog’s Discovery Ball. What type of toy
is this? It’s an educational toy and you should use that in your title along with the actual toy name. This
gives you an opportunity to be found in the search results for the toy name, the popular toy company and
the heavily searched key phrase ”educational toy.” A title catering towards SEO for this example would be:
”Leap Frog Discovery Ball - Educational Toys”. Since the more targeted term is the name of the toy you put
that first. Educational Toys would be shown first on a category page.
Now that you have integrated your keyword phrases from your page copy into your title, you’ll find that
getting found in the search engines is a much easier task.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.sillyasstoys.com/
Business Blogger (2007-06-23 10:20:23)
Great tips that every blogger should follow.
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Web Design Lincolnshire (2008-04-01 09:44:43)
Page titles are very important if done correctly you can make the difference on your search engine rankings.
1.6.5 Click Here For More Information - Bad Text Links - SEO Tip Week 26
(2007-06-29 19:28)
If you have been following this blog or looking into SEO you know how very important [1]building links
can be to your site’s success in the search engine rankings. Link building involves two types of links: Links
pointing to your site (external linking), and links on your site pointing to other pages of your site (internal
linking). While we don’t always have the ability to control external linking, a poorly worded internal link
is inexcusable. The single, easiest and least low effort thing to remember is to make your links descriptive.
If that is too much to remember, then just remember this, no links should be labeled click here,” ”more
information,” ”read more” or any other variation of these words.
I realize this might bring disagreement from the user experience community but I think we can all agree that
your average user doesn’t need to be told to click a link and if it isn’t obviously a link (underlined) you have
bigger problems on your site with usability.
Every time I see a ”click here” link I shake my head at the wasted link opportunity that is being lost.
You probably know how powerful link text can be in helping your rankings so it shouldn’t be a surprise to
find that the site that ranks for the term ”click here” doesn’t even have those words within the text of the
page that is ranking for ”click here”. Care to guess what company’s site is ranking for it?
I’ll give you a hint; you’ve most likely downloaded the application and probably more than once. The
site, or page actually, ranked number one for the term ”click here”is the [2]Acrobat Reader download page.
Make sense? This clue might help: [3]Click here to download Acrobat Reader. This proves the power of the
text in your link, so why waste it with a non-descriptive textual link?
I can provide thousands of examples, but let’s look at a few examples where a descriptive text link would be
much better.
• [4]Prevent Blindness Home Page I found six instances of the phrase ”Find out more here”. I’ll use one
example from the home page:
Early Detection Key to Preventing Vision Loss from Glaucoma More than 2 million Ameri-
cans over the age of 40 have glaucoma, but many of those living with the disease don’t even know
it. - [5]Find out more HERE
Instead, remove the ”Find out more HERE” and place the link on the headline text and best
of all it doesn’t require any rewriting:
[6]Early Detection Key to Preventing Vision Loss from Glaucoma
More than 2 million Americans over the age of 40 have glaucoma, but many of those living with
the disease don’t even know it.
• [7]Apple’s iPhone Page Being the huge Apple fan that I am it pains me to point to them as a bad
example, but the new iPhone page is just that, a bad example. On this page I count five ”read more”
links and one ”learn more”•. It can be argued that Apple doesn’t need SEO help for the iPhone, but
the principal and lost opportunity still applies.
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• [8]Joint Commission Home Page I count five ”read more”• links, incredibly listed below descriptive
titles without a link. What better way to get listing for their top stories than linking to them with
keywords in the story? Placing the link on the headline would solve this, much like we suggested for
the Prevent Blindness site.
• [9]Burst Media Contact Page One of the more ridiculous offenders of the ”click here” mistake.
Making simple changes would have helped all of these sites make better use of their internal linking as well
as helped with their site’s ranking for the words in the link.
Of course, going beyond the decision to not use useless text links and thinking about the best keywords
and phrases to use will help even more. A few seconds, or better yet, a few minutes applied to thinking
about your internal, contextual linking can bring in great rewards. Take the time and...Think before you
Link!
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/linking-building/
2. http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
3. http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
4. http://www.preventblindness.org/
5. http://www.preventblindness.org/news/releases/121906_1.html
6. http://www.preventblindness.org/news/releases/121906_1.html
7. http://www.apple.com/iphone/
8. http://www.jointcommission.org/
9. http://www.burstmedia.com/about/contact.asp
Wordpress Advice (2007-07-10 14:53:37)
90 % of wordpress blogs utilize their front page with more tag. This result in a teaser of the story. Although the title
is made a link as well, but do you think using more tags like this is bad as well. I don’t see more tag used on your
front page. Would it not duplicate contents in some areas of your site or have you taken care of that ? [1]When Pros
Get It Wrong | Using More Tags
1. http://contents-magic.com/21/wordpress/robotstxt-when-pros-get-it-wrong/
Shell Harris (2007-07-10 18:11:24)
I have to admit that I change my opinion of using the more link sometimes. My last opinion is to only use it when I
have a particularly long blog post. I use it then so I am not monopolizing my blog home page with one post. I don’t
worry about duplicate content because it only stays on the home page for a week or two and there is so much other
content on the home it doesn’t get flagged as duplicate content or if it does it is only for a short time. In the end
I’d rather have the whole article available on the home and sent in the RSS feed. It is a personal preference and for
today, I stand by it. ;-)
Billy (2007-07-01 15:18:21)
Certainly easy to point out to clients on what’s wrong with their unoptimized link anchors, but it is hard for them
to implement your recommendations because high level management like to treat their website visitors as idiots (who
need to be directed to click here).
Mike Belasco (2007-07-16 22:15:26)
I’ve also seen this taken the extra step. Let’s say for management you need to keep the click here link. If you add
a ’keyword rich’ link as in the examples here and then implement the ’click here’ in Javascript, the search engines
will really only count the text link as the link, and ignore the JS implementation. I believe I learned this from Leslie
48 c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’
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Rhode who created optilink
Shell Harris (2007-07-02 12:06:02)
Billy, Yes, we often run into management that will have their own ideas about what is best, but gentle reminders that
they are paying us to help them can work. Sometimes though, they don’t. All we can do is keep trying.
Marti (2007-07-01 04:50:25)
If anything, putting a proper link text is recommended for usability and consistency. Not everyone ”clicks” to activate
a link (some tap with a stylus, some use a keyboard and it seems fingers are all the rage now) and more importantly
this sort of text doesn’t really help you figure out what the link target is.
1.7 July
1.7.1 Flat Site Architecture is SEO-Friendly - SEO Tip 27 (2007-07-06 11:56)
Why you should use a flat site architecture rather than a deep, or nested, site architecture if SEO is impor-
tant to your site?
[1] In my previous life as a website designer and HTML developer I loved to have a folder/directory for
everything. While I’m not a organized person (ask my wife) I did like keeping my files structured in clearly
labeled directories. So nesting directories 4 or 5 levels deep was common practice. When I transitioned to
an [2]SEO specialist my ideas on structuring files and site architecture began to change and here is why.
A flat site offers quick access to all the pages within the site. A minimal number of clicks are needed
to find all the pages within your site, usually no more than three clicks is ideal. According to the views of
the search engines (SEs), less clicks mean higher importance. The view of the SEs are that more important
information will be easier to reach. Home page information is the most important, one click from the home
page is secondary information and two clicks is tertiary information and so forth.
Think of it like bodies of water. Your home page is the ocean and off of the home page are large rivers
and then smaller rivers, then streams, then creeks and brooks and finally the smallest trickle of water is all
that is left. Don’t let you products, services or information be at the end of the trickle, drying up eventually.
Closer to the ocean is always better and that is how the search engines will rank your pages too.
I’ve seen some site place everything in the root folder and this isn’t good practice either. Structure your sites
as to what makes sense, but be aware that more clicks can mean less viewers, both for search engine traffic
and visitors on your site.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/our-company.php#shell
Shell Harris (2007-07-08 17:43:04)
Urbanist, Google will spider your entire site unless you instruct them otherwise. You can code your xml sitemap with
numbers relating to the importance of each page. If you have the time to do it it can’t hurt but with a large site it can
be time consuming. Building external links to important pages may be a more reliable options as Google will notice
more links and usually give more importance to those page.
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Shell Harris (2007-07-08 17:50:39)
Susan, if you are using Wordpress, which is what I know and recommend you can set up your permalinks to be
at the top of the the site architecture. You’ll notice on our blog we follow this convention for our posts (Ex.
[1]www.bigoakinc.com/blog/create-a-website-sitemap-seo-tip-week- 6/). I looked at your blog and is appears to be
set up this way as well. Everything looks good and I don’t see that you need to change anything. Your directory
structure is flat and Google has almost 400 pages indexed for your site. Rest easy, you have done well. Thanks for
the mention on your site and I do love Stumbling.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/create-a-website-sitemap-seo-tip-week-6/
Michael Haislip (2007-07-17 14:26:36)
Flat architecture is good usability, too. I hate going to site with nested directories and getting lost. My first instinct
is to hack off the extraneous parts of the URL in an attempt to get back to some sort of navigational element. But,
usually, I get a 404 because most servers are set to not display directory content by default. Was that too complex?
It makes sense in my sleep-deprived brain.
Susan (2007-07-08 16:14:19)
I understand that a flat structure can certainly help with fewer clicks, less muss and fuss etc. what I don’t get is how
this can be applied to a blog, or more intimately my blog. I am sitting here thinking that everything is really no more
than 3 clicks away. The homepage links to all the archives, categories etc. Sorry not trying to be dense just trying to
see how I can apply this tip to my particular situation. Thanks. I would like to thank you for making my stumbling
that much more enjoyable. Your blog made the [1]Life Is Risky Blog Stumbling for today! (Note: The post is updated
as I am stumbling. If you don’t see your site listed check back!)
1. http://lifeisrisky.com/blog-stumbling-8-july-07/
Urbanist (2007-07-08 03:41:07)
Good advice - but what do you think about submitting something like a Google Sitemap in order to clarify what are
important vs. redundant pages on a site. Do you think that helps them sort through things and give more importance
to what is important to your site?
Marios Alexandrou (2007-07-28 11:09:39)
Unless I misread this post, it sounds like you’re talking about two different issues with a flat architecture. When
discussing architecture you can look at the folder structure and you can look at how many clicks something is away
from the home page. If something is in 4 sub-folders, but requires just one click from the home page, would you say
the site has a flat architecture? I believe a while back folder depth mattered, but now it’s largely about click depth.
Shell Harris (2007-07-28 21:35:29)
For SEO purposes I am referring to the depth of your sub-folders. When we began our work with Snagajob.com that
is something we changed immediately with good results. There were items that were one click from the home page
but 4 levels deep when looking at the URL. That is not good for SEO. Keep your important pages as close to the root
as you can with minimal clicks to get there.
1.7.2 Research Your Competition with Yahoo Site Explorer - SEO Tip Week 28
(2007-07-13 09:55)
[1] I’ve got a simple [2]SEO tip today. As an SEO Company we are always doing competitive research.
Many of our clients are astounded at the wealth of information that can be discovered using Yahoo’s [3]Site
Explorer especially for competitive link research. Site Explorer can help you track down the links pointing
to your competition and allow you to contact those same sites and request or pay for a link to your site.
50 c 2008 ’http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/’
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Yahoo’s search engine also provides information about competitor backlinks. You can find tools to do
this for you but going to [4]Yahoo! Search and typing in the following commands will work just as well.
• If you are looking for web pages that link to multiple competitor, usually you will find good backlink
pages like this, you would type in: linkdomain:competitor1.com, linkdomain:competitor2.com
• We also should all know how important .edu and .gov links can be to our site. So why not look for
competitors who have these links. I’ll give an example as if I was looking. I would type in a keyword
such as ”seo” and then do a search for only .edu domains. I would type in: [5]seo site:.edu Replace the
.edu with .gov for government backlinks.
Of course there are many other things you can do for research and seeing what advanced options are available
can be a great catalyst so be sure to view the [6]advance search options in Yahoo! for more ideas.
Google also has [7]advanced search but I think Yahoo! does a better job with options and functionality,
especially when it comes to researching backlinks.
Please send any suggestions or add them to the comments on this SEO tip. We are always looking for
new ways to improve our SEO research methods.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
3. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
4. http://search.yahoo.com/
5. http://search.yahoo.com/search?n=10&ei=utf-8&va_vt=any&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vd=all&vf=all&vm=
p&fl=0&p=seo+site:.edu
6. http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced
7. http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
WordPress Advice (2007-07-14 08:09:14)
Probably this is th only area in which yahoo has a lead over Google. Google does not give you accurate results, I
know that is on purpose. As Google want to create a mist around the way they index. I had been only using yahoo
to check back links for a few of the domains. but combining two domains in one query is new to me.
Free SMS Andy (2007-07-16 01:18:30)
I’ve found Yahoo Site Explorer extremely useful for searching my competitors backlinks. The Google search seems
broken in comparison The challenge though is trying to get your own links back from those sites! Any tips on that?
Turism (2007-07-23 08:49:58)
Until I read your post, I never used yahoo for these kind of queries. After reading I gave it a try and it really gives a
different result, and I think more accurate results than Google.
Shell Harris (2007-07-26 10:13:27)
Free SMS Andy, The big challenge IS getting links from your competitor’s backlinks. We do all that we can starting
with an email or a phone call (Yes, you can call people to request links). If an exchange is appropriate that can work
as well. Offering them content such as a article that would be useful for them is a good idea and can have links to
your site within and finally offering a financial reward is often accepted for placing a link.
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m7mmad (2008-02-16 00:07:45)
Really helpful information , Thanks .
1.7.3 Google’s Supplemental Results - SEO Tip Week 29 (2007-07-20 18:19)
[1] Google is indexing more pages now then ever before, but that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes
these pages get sent to the [2]supplemental index instead of the main index. It’s perfectly normal for most
sites to have some pages in the supplemental index, but if your main pages (and especially your home page)
get sent to the supplemental index you’ll likely not see much traffic from Google any more.
My site’s listed in the supplemental results, what does that mean?
As Google states, ”Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index.” Google will always show results
from their main index before showing results from the supplemental index. This means that supplemental
pages will almost never show up for searches, and will only show up for super specialized searches if few or
no results come from the main index. With so many blogs and tag pages out there, even [3]crazy many-word
searches will bring back at least a few non-supplemental results.
How did my site get in the supplemental index?
One way pages end up in the supplemental index instead of the main index is a lack of PageRank (PR). This
could be because you orphaned the page (no [4]links pointing to it), the page lies too many clicks away from
your home page, or your home page itself has a very low PR. If this is the case, you should work on your
[5]link building to those important pages of your site and build up their PageRank.
The other way your pages end up in the supplemental index is by having [6]duplicate content on your
page. This could be because you used the same manufacturer written product description that dozens of
other sites use, you copied content from another website, or your pages have very little content and too much
template which is duplicated on all pages. If this is the case, try writing unique content or changing your
template so it doesn’t have the same elements on every page.
I changed my pages, what’s next?
Now that you’ve fixed your pages, it can be a long and hard process for getting them out of the supplemen-
tal index because the supplemental spider doesn’t come along very often. You should create or edit your
[7]Google sitemap XML file and hope that will be enough. If that doesn’t work, try changing the name
(URL) of those pages and delete the old file.
Feel free to add your own observations about supplemental results here, we’d love to hear your stories.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.google.com/intl/en_extra/webmasters/faq.html#label
3. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B2GGGL_enUS175US175&q=purple+butterflies+blue+tables+clowns+
jumping+one+foot+juggling+peaches+bowling+pins+grapes+star+wars+joss+whedon+is+my+master+now&btnG=Search
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/internal-linking-seo-tip-week-5/
5. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/finding-the-perfect-link-seo-tip-week-21/
6. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/every-web-page-should-be-unique-seo-tip-week-14/
7. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/sitemap-support-from-msn-yahoo-and-google/
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Kirkwood (2007-07-25 15:37:31)
If you delete the old pages and rename them, should you 301/302 them for those who do happen to stumble onto
them? Or would that just keep them stuck in the supl. ??
Shell Harris (2007-07-28 21:42:29)
I can give you tip that I did for a pet site of mine, [1]Smoothie Recipes. I had the same problem, about 95 % of my
pages were supplemental. I did three specific steps which helped dramatically. I have over 300 recipes on the site, but
I have almost 100 pages in the normal index, a huge increase. Here are the tasks I did which I think really helped: I
started pointing links to some interior pages (recipes) by using a random post plugin. It places random post links on
every page. I created a most popular blog post page, such is on this site as well if you look in the top nav. This also
creates nice links to old posts and helps show visitors what is popular. And finally I made sure all my pages have a
different meta description. Try these tactics and let me know how it works for you. Good luck!
1. http://www.smoothieweb.com/
Some Guy (2007-07-27 17:38:16)
I had a bunch of pages in the supplemental index and assumed it was due to Wordpress’ structure. I created a
good robots.txt, optimized titles, created 301 redirects. Slowly - slowly - google began properly excluding pages in
accordance with the robots.txt file - but still, several weeks later, my supplemental count is horrible - sometimes 90
%. I guess it just takes a really long time to shake them out.
Chris Alexander (2007-07-24 12:23:44)
Hello WordPress Guru, That is a problem many blogs face. I’ve seen some large blogs with 90 % of their indexed
pages be in the supplemental results index. There used to be [1]a method for easily checking your supplemental pages
vs. main indexed pages in Google, but Google seems to have stopped that functionality. A [2]site search on your
domain shows 44 pages indexed & by my count 15 of those are in the supplemental index. That’s a pretty good ratio.
1. http://www.seobook.com/archives/002047.shtml
2. http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:contents-magic.com&num=100&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&filter=0
WordPress Guru Advice (2007-07-24 11:29:57)
The duplicate content issue is what keeps me awake at night. Since WordPress creates many URLs to reach the same
contents I used to think that I get penalized. Though there are some who say that it is only a penalty when you have
contents duplicated outside the domain. What do you think ?
Shell Harris (2007-07-25 15:47:59)
Using a 301 permanent redirect is this safe and wise choice here. Sometimes you can do a 302 in the beginning and
the change to a 301 after the new page gains popularity, but I’d just do the 301 and move on.
1.7.4 How to Find Relevant Links - SEO Tip Week 30 (2007-07-27 08:02)
[1] SEO companies have two major functions when working with their clients: optimize the site content
and finding quality, relevant links. So please forgive me if you already know this simple yet effective [2]SEO
tip, I’m sure those new to the SEO game will find it helpful. This tip on [3]link building will help you find
link opportunities but it will be up to you to acquire link placement.
I am posting this tip in response to a question I receive on a continuing basis from perspective clients.
How do you find links?
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We have many methods but the simplest way to find links, that aren’t paid links, is to search for them.
Searching with the right terms will increase your efficiency and success in securing the maximum number of
links in the shortest time. What are these terms? I’ve listed some of the search terms we use to find good
linking sources. Of course there are many others to try but this list should get you started.
Search Terms to be used with your keyword or phrase:
• Add URL
• Links
• Resources
• Related sites
• Related urls
• Submit a link
• Submit a site
• Submit URL
• Suggest a link
• Suggest a site
• Suggest URL
• Suggest an URL
• Directory
• Recommended Sites
• Add Profile
• Add Site
• Article
For example, if you are trying to find quality links to help market your website which is selling pet turtles
(We bought two, Bear and Grylls, while on vacation last week.) you would type into the Google search box
something like this: ”add url” + pet turtles. It would give you these results [4]Links for Pet Turtles. The
page shows five promising link opportunities that are already in the Google index. From here you can try
more of the search phrases and then try different keywords and phrases to match with them.
There are also free tools that will help in finding backlinks. Some that I like are:
[5]http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php
[6]http://tools.seobook.com/general/link-suggest/
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If you have any other tips on finding links, please share by commenting, we are always looking for new
and better ways to do our jobs.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/ten-great-link-building-idea-sites/
4. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=RGq&q=
%22add+url%22+%2B+pet+turtles
5. http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php
6. http://tools.seobook.com/general/link-suggest/
Cheap Web Hosting Phil (2007-07-29 16:33:39)
That’s a very comprehensive list of the different search terms. I only ever searched for submit link and add url/link.
Thanks!
WordPress SEO Advice (2007-07-29 16:21:09)
Well, I guess finding the relevant pages in the age of Google is not the biggest problem. the real problem for me is
how to persuade people to actually link to me.
SEO Specialist (2008-01-23 05:34:38)
Found you by searching for ”how to find relevant links seo” and thats exactly what i found, Thanks
1.8 August
1.8.1 How to Improve Local Search Results - SEO Tip Week 31 (2007-08-03 11:42)
[1] In SEO, local search should never be overlooked. It can provide a boost in traffic has a higher
tendency to convert more visitors to customers since most people prefer working with local companies, even
SEO companies.
Here are some factors that Big Oak SEO feels are important and should be considered when trying
to get higher rankings for your site, whether or not you are marketing to a national or local market. I have
tried to list them in order of importance but it really depends how important local traffic is to your site.
Location in the Title of your Pages
Including your city and state, especially if you are counting on local customers is imperative. Don’t overdue
it, but be sure to include it. I talk about this in detail on my [2]SEO Titles: Using the Title Tag post.
Link Building with City and State Keywords
When building links to your site, include some with local terms like we do in this example: [3]Richmond
Virginia Search Engine Optimization Company. You get the idea.
Tell the Search Engines Where You Work
The physical location of your site should be on the footer of every page. If you work from home, get a P.O.
box and list that address. It is important for the city, state and zip code be on every page.
Submit Your Site to Google’s Local Business Center
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You can’t get found in a search unless Google knows where you are. Submit your business to [4]Google’s
Local Business Center even if you don’t have a website...yet.
Keep Your Contact Page Connected
Your physical address should be at the top of the contact page, above your contact form. At the very least
it should be easy to find and accurate.
Link to your address on the Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. For example, go to [5]Google Maps
and then do a search for you physical address. After finding your location you will see a ”Link to this page”
link. Click that and then copy and paste that link on your contact page.
Adding written driving directions will allow for many local keywords to be included so having this
in addition to a link to maps.google.com is a good idea.
List Coverage Area
Big Oak SEO is located in Glen Allen, Virginia, but very few people have heard of or search for Glen
Allen. We are in the [6]Richmond, Virginia area so we use Richmond in our footer and mention it on our
[7]company page as well as other local locations. Try to include the metropolitan areas on your site if that
is what people will be searching for.
Add Listings in Yellow Pages, Superpages & Similar Sites
While I don’t often feel the cost is warranted for phone book sites, if you can get a free listing or a discount
because you are already paying for a printed listing it can help to have a link pointing to your site from the
online listing.
Provide a Local Phone number on Every Page
It is a no-brainer to have your 800 present at the top of every page, but be sure to list your local number in
the footer as well. Don’t forget to include the area code.
List your Site in Directories for Local businesses
Sites like [8]Yelp.com and [9]Citysearch.com are good places for local businesses. They can also provide real
traffic and not just higher rankings. I’m looking more into Yelp and hope to write a post about them soon.
Get your site or business reviewed
I think this is undervalued in importance, but getting a few reviews from a site like CitySearch and Yelp is
a good thing for search engine rankings. Submit your site and ask friends to review for you. Of course this
isn’t applicable to all businesses, but it should be part of the marketing plan if you count on local consumers.
Google Coupons
This isn’t new but not many people are using it. [10]Google coupons was announced in August 2006. It may
help your ranking, but it can’t hurt, especially if you have actual cost savings to offer over your competition.
Do you have any ideas or have any advice that has worked for you concerning local search. If so,
send us an email or submit a comment to this post. We are always looking for new ideas to share.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/how-important-are-page-titles/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/
4. http://www.google.com/local/add
5. http://maps.google.com/
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6. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/richmond-virginia-seo.php
7. http://www.bigoakinc.com/company/our-company.php
8. http://www.yelp.com/
9. http://www.citysearch.com/
10. http://www.google.com/press/annc/maps_coupons.html
Universos Virtuais (2007-08-04 15:07:42)
Shell, thank you for sharing this SEO tip. I am trying to learn about SEO. Here in Portugal we have some local SE,
that have 50 % of the searches, the other 50 % are from Google. Yahoo just is known for advance internet users!!
Have a great weekend!
Brian Whaley (2007-08-09 15:50:35)
This series of articles is fantastic! I have referred my readers to 52 SEO Tips as a primary resource for SEO Tips on
my blog, http://btw73.blogspot.com. Keep up the great work!
Local Biz Bits (2007-08-04 11:02:29)
These are great tips. Another idea is to create a separate busines profile page, which links to your main website.
Shell Harris (2007-08-07 11:33:24)
Adding a business profile page is a great idea. You can do this on other sites, but of course adding it to your own
site is easiest of all. I can see it being used in addition to your About page. Good suggestion. Can anyone provide a
example? I did find this site with and about us page on Big Oak we added. http://www.aboutus.org/BigOakInc.com
1.8.2 Google Supplemental Index Label Disappears (2007-08-09 15:40)
Google representatives posted this on August 1st, ”Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so
far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as ”Supplemental
Results.””
Well, this isn’t good news. Google announced that the supplemental index label is being removed. Google
claims, ”The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow,”
but I’m still skeptical. This now means we won’t know which pages need help and which pages are doing
well. We use the supplemental label to help us see which pages need more attention as well as to see if a
page can provide a quality link.
The bottom line is this, the supplemental index will still be there, we just won’t know which pages are
in and which pages out. Seems to me Google is providing less information and trying to keep SEO compa-
nies and site owners in the dark.
Supplemental Results are pages residing in Google’s supplemental index, a secondary database containing
pages of less importance, as measured primarily by Google’s[1] algorithm.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
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1.8.3 Squidoo for Traffic & Link Building - SEO Tip Week 32 (2007-08-12 17:19)
[1] Update October 29, 2007: Well, after a brief few months my first Squidoo pages have acheived PR
values of 5 and 4. My Jean Grey Squidoo Lens is a PR5. So as a high PR link building service Squidoo
works quite well.
As an search engine optimization consultant I sometimes have a hard time deciding what is the best use of
my time. Research, link building, writing or what have you. Well, this week I did more research than usual
and found a site that I had heard about, but had yet to fully explore: [2]Squidoo. What is Squidoo? Well,
to put it simply, it is a collection of web pages that users can build on any topic, and I mean any topic that
you can imagine. And if you can’t find it, you can create a new page on Squidoo yourself. Squidoo says you
can do it in under 5 minutes, but you’ll want to take longer to build a respectable page, or ”lens” as they
call it.[3] Once you do you can add modules that let you make money from
affiliate sales to online stores such as Amazon and Overstock. I don’t know how much of a money making
opportunity it is and I would dare say you [4]can’t make a lot of money with Squidoo, but it did give me
some ideas on how to use it for SEO purposes. As a business owner and website owner, you can use Squidoo
for two important tasks to help your website: link building and visitor traffic.Testing SquidooI decided to
test this out and I built two lenses for fun. I like smoothies, so I tried my hand at creating a [5]smoothie
drink lens to support my personal [6]smoothie recipe blog. It was simple to build and I followed the advice
for getting the word out and then spent the next 4 days investing a few spare moments here and there,
adding new content and pulling information from my smoothie recipe blog and now I have a fairly large
lens, compared to most. As of today (8/12/2007) there were over 213,000 lenses on Squidoo. My smoothie
lens was ranked #132 and at times has been as high as 128 with less than 8 hours of work total over one
week. The second lens is for a favorite comic book character, [7]Jean Grey (Phoenix) from the X-men and
has done for pure entertainment and even that has achieved a rank as high as #376. The lenses were fun to
build and I enjoyed both immensely.
Getting Traffic from Squidoo
Okay, big deal on my ”success” within Squidoo, it hasn’t earned a single cent yet and might not
ever. I have many links on my smoothie lens pointing to my smoothie blog and the good news is that these
links have driven more traffic to my smoothie blog in the last week than all other incoming site traffic
combined. The reason it has been successful is the fact that the Squidoo lens I created is already showing
up in the search results, after less than a week, for terms related to smoothie recipes. ([8]See results.) So
it is driving traffic to my smoothie blog and could be doing the same for your business. If you sell toys
you may want to create a Squidoo lens one of your products like yo-yos. The idea is to create a lens about
something specific so your lens can rank for it and then link to your site. Which brings me to my other
reason for creating a lens. My SEO heart practically skips a beat.
Link Building with Squidoo
As any SEO company can tell you, [9]link building is the most time-consuming and hardest part of
our jobs. Everything come down to link building. That is what increases your rankings, helps people find
you and so forth. If you have an SEO company working for you now and they aren’t putting forth a majority
of their time finding and placing links for you, it is time to move on. With Squidoo you get an awesome link
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building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on
the page and what is written around it. It also comes from a high PR site. It is almost the exact definition
of my idea of the [10]perfect link. If you look at my smoothie lens you can see dozens of links pointing to
my smoothie blog. And not links just to the homepage, but [11]deep linking to internal pages which are
important links very difficult to get usually. Well, with Squidoo you can make many deep links which will
help your site’s search engine visibility and increase rankings to those deep pages. One-way, keyword-rich,
high-quality links are all made easy with Squidoo. If you spend a little time with your lens you may soon
see it increase to a [12]PR 4 or [13]PR 5 webpage on its own and we know how hard PR 4 and 5 links can
be to get on our own.
Google & Squidoo
Of course, with all good things there come people who look to ruin it by misuse. Well, the same
can be said of Squidoo. Many spammers have tried and are trying to create a glut of spammy pages on
Squidoo for the purposes of SEO. Google saw this and minimized the importance of Squidoo but in return
Squidoo has made spamming harder and set the bar higher for a Squidoo lens in hopes of getting more
quality lenses. It looks as though Squidoo may have weathered the fury of Google and for the time I would
recommend highly creating a quality Squidoo lens to help your own site. Heck, create more than one if you
need it, but be good stewards if you do and create lenses that have weight of their own and are not a pure
marketing ploy. Those lenses will be the most effective in the long run and help Squidoo remain a useful
tool in your marketing tool belt.
Final Thoughts on Squidoo
Give it a try, it will only take an hour or so, despite the 5 minute promise from Squidoo, and then
see what you think. We will be including it as part of our work for our clients, as we do with all new
strategies that can help. Of course, Google could decide they don’t appreciate the work being done by
Squidoo members, Squidoo could decide to make all links not SEO-friendly (nofollow or redirects) or any
number of SEO killing decisions, but until then I personally think it is a good use of a few hours.
YouTube Video about Squidoo Marketing
You can find many videos on how to use Squidoo and here is one of the better ones I watched.
tag, twice if you can use it in another form, but
don’t feel compelled to have it twice. Once is usually sufficient. Example: How to Use Key-
words
• Use it once in your Meta Description Tag. This won’t help with your SEO efforts, but can help convince
users to click your search results. See more about this at my meta description post. Example:
• Use it at least once in your H1 Tag . This should be main heading or title of your web page.
On this blog post the H1 title is ”How to Use Keywords”. The H1 tag should different on each page,
and not the web site name. Only use ONE H1 tag on any given page.
• Use it in one of your subheads. Your subhead should be an H@ tag. H2 tags can also, and
should, hold secondary keywords, but including the main keyword is effective. Most web pages would
benefit from subheads from a user perspective as well as for optimization help.
• Depending on the amount of body text on the page, you should try to include keywords within the
text at least 4 times. This comes with a BIG CAVEAT though. Only do this if it makes sense and
doesn’t appear spammy. Remember you are writing for human and search engines. Spammy content
can ruin all the efforts you made to get the user to the page. Be sensible and read your content. If too
many keywords are making it sound silly, take them out. Avoid keyword stuffing.
• If you have images on the page, and it makes sense, you should add it to the alt tag.
• If you have images on the page, and it makes sense, you should add your keyword to the image title.
This isn’t something most people to but it is helpful, in my opinion and only takes a few seconds.
So your image tags should look like this: .
• Add your keyword to link in other pages of your site, pointing to the page you want ranked. Linking
out from the page you want ranked is fine, but do not use the keyword you want that page ranked for
in the anchor text.
I think this will cover your optimization efforts. Of course tweaking my suggestions is encouraged and even
necessary most times, but this is as good a guideline as any to start with. After you have used your keywords
don’t forget to begin link building using the same keywords. Your efforts will be rewarded.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
(2007-11-29 01:53:21)
I’m gald i came upon your blog here. I wasnt sure how to use keywords accordingly. I have just started blogging a
coupld days ago and i just kinda wrote a whole bunch of blogs. Then I started to get a little more serious today. If
you can help me a little that would be nice. Here is a link. I hope you can give me a few pointers!
mackie (2008-01-15 09:01:24)
that would be a great help in choosing the right keywords targeted for a site..having right keywords of choice will is
one way of inpage optimization that will help in acquiring the potential visitors..really nice post
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Daphne (2008-01-17 05:52:22)
this is definitely a great source of information in terms of choosing and using the right keywords for a website. Getting
your right keywords on the first process of the on-page optimization could lead your site into success in ranking thru
major SE’s.
Shell Harris (2007-12-01 10:14:42)
Anon, You didn’t include a link in your post.
Haden (2008-03-17 04:53:43)
Nice to read this summary. Really it is a great post. SEO is a growing field now a days.
[1]http://www.sysconpl.com/blog
1. http://www.sysconpl.com/blog
Optimizare Google (2008-01-18 16:24:15)
Is a good idea to add a keyword also in the URL ..not sure how important it is in the ranking algorithm, but is bolded
when matching the search. That means Google believe is useful and relevant for the search-as it bolds the keywords
in title and page content. And second it can increase CTR for that listing. Also is important how someone uses
keywords in the Title-which is the most important on page factor in my opinion. Thanks for the tips. Marius,
1.9.4 PRWEb vs. PRNewswire Press Release Service for SEO - SEO Tip Week 38
(2007-09-25 18:31)
[1] When submitting press releases as part of our SEO services we are often asked why we chose
[2]PRweb.com as our vehicle for submission rather than PRNewswire. When compared across our big three
parameters PRWeb is the better service for our purposes. PRNewswire seems more like something large
companies use to get out news because they send your release more to journalists and less to Web outlets.
This summarized it nicely: ”Services such as PRNewswire and Newswire provide a far more targeted channel
to specific demographics than the cheaper alternatives, however unless you’re willing to pay top-rates, the
SEO benefit (on a keyword level) is less.”
Pricing
PRWeb.com is more affordable, which our clients certainly appreciate.
PRWeb PRNewswire
No membership fee. Their "average" press release costs is $80 with
the SEO Visibility option being $200. Membership based with annual
fee of $150. From their site: "The cost of distributing your news
release is determined by the newsline you select and the length of
your news release. Each newsline covers a specific geographical area
ranging from local, regional, national and international. Prices start
at $180 for a city/metro or statewide distribution. A national
distribution starts at $680."[3]PRNewswire Toolkit
Reach
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The reach appear to be better on the web, which is our focus.
PRWeb PRNewswire
"Gets picked up in leading online news sites like Yahoo! News, Google
News, Ask.com, and Topix. Additionally, your press release is
distributed through a host of other online news sites including our
own PRWeb.com and eMediaWire.com, which deliver over 50 million page
views each month." "Your message will reach mainstream and industry
[4]trade media, thousands of [5]web outlets and PR Newswire for
Journalists, a digital media channel serving more than 85,000
registered journalists across the globe." No mention of Google News "
among 3,600 of the world’s most widely accessed Web sites"
Cached Pages
Of course this is just one example, but Google may index PRWeb better as well.
PRWeb: [6]August 28 press release - [7]Cached
PRNewswire: [8]August 28 release - Not cached
Both sites have their advantages, but for SEO, it would appear the PRWeb.com is still the best choices
for helping your rankings.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.prweb.com/
3. http://toolkit.prnewswire.com/wsjsb/distribution.shtml
4. http://www.prnewswire.com/company/trade.shtml
5. http://www.prnewswire.com/company/online.shtml
6. http://www.prweb.com/releases/phonics/reading/prweb547676.htm
7. http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:http://www.prweb.com/releases/phonics/reading/prweb547676.htm
8. http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-28-2007/0004652852&EDATE
Gabriel Gervelis (2008-01-01 21:59:29)
I have not used PRWeb or PRNewswire, however i am in need of a good press release system. Thanks for the info,
leaning to PRWEB!
1.10 October
1.10.1 Google Alerts for Link Building - SEO Tip Week 39 (2007-10-02 22:29)
As a senior member of a successful SEO company I’m always on the lookout for ways
to make my job easier. Usually my job consist of defining an SEO strategy that will help our clients achieve
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high rankings in the search engines. High Rankings are supported by high-quality links, so how do we find
high-quality links without doing a lot of work?
Hello, [1]Google Alerts.
Google Alerts is a nifty tool that will monitor Google results with predefined search terms and then email
you those results. They will send the email to you once a day, as it happens or once a week. You can insert
any topic or query that you wish to keep tabs on.
For example, you can type in a competitor’s business name and/or his web address as an search term
alert. Every time Google finds the search term they will send an email detailing where it was found in an
email. It is like having a paid researcher always on call for free.
How best to use this for SEO you ask? Easy, here are just a few ideas. Let’s assume you have written
an article or press release. You submit it through your normal channels but then you set up Google Alerts
to notify you everytime it finds the exact title of your article. Be sure to put the search term in quotes so it
looks for an exact match (”My Article Title”). Now you can track in real-time where you article gets picked
up and then contact any of the sites that have placed your article or press release and contact them directly
about a partnership. Maybe the next article you write can be given more prominence on their site or you
can provide the webmaster original content with embedded links to your site.
Or you can track competitors by their name and URL find websites where that information has been posted
and follow the same strategy by offering original content of your own. If you find a blog that has posted
about you or your industry maybe you can become a contributor.
You can track a product name or service you want to sell or any word or phrase that will help you market
your site to the search engines. And since Google is providing the information, you have a good shot at
Google finding your link the next time they visit the site you have partnered with.
As with most SEO strategies you need to be creative with this idea and strike while the iron is hot. Constant
alerts can keep you motivated and attentive to the market within your industry as well helping you keep a
vigilant eye on your competition.
Has anyone employed this strategy for link building? I’d love to hear success stories.
1. http://www.google.com/alerts
WelcomeToMyIsland (2007-10-29 10:22:58)
I don’t know why I didn’t find out about Google Alerts sooner! Thanks for telling me about it!
Southwest SEO (2007-10-21 20:10:45)
I’ve used Google Alerts for monitoring keywords and articles but not for link building. I’ll have to give your suggestion
a try
Arnie - Link Building Pro (2007-10-22 20:25:25)
Ah one of my best secrets is now out... Google Alerts! Use them all the time. Speaking of letting some secrets out...
We are building a new site called Link Building Best Practices and are looking for success stories. For the next few
weeks, anyone can log in as a contributor and post their best practice stories & suggestions. In exchange for writing
a post, they get to add text links back to their site in the post. Do a Google search for ”link building best practices”
– our site is ranked #1. It’s a new site, so no PR yet, but as you can tell, we are building traffic and links to the site
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right now. Easy way to get free contextual links and publicity for link building expertise! Check out a Submit Post
at [1]Link Building Best Practices.
1. http://www.linkbuildingbestpractices.com/submit-a-post
Wordpress Consulting (2008-03-31 17:32:12)
Hey, I’ve commented here a couple of times and wanted to invite you to join this panel I’m putting together to discuss
Universal Search and its implications on SEO. If you wanna be part of it, just sign-up in the comments on this page:
http://www.bradleyspencer.com/archives/97 and I’ll get a hold of you in a week or two when we start the email panel.
Thanks, Brad
Columbus Web Design (2008-03-22 17:21:13)
Another great way to use this is using both ”link:www.mysite.com” and ”site:www.mysite.com” to see (respectively)
when people link to you, and also when your new pages get indexed on Goog. Thanks, Brad
1.10.2 Unique Product Descriptions - SEO Tip Week 40 (2007-10-08 12:11)
[1] This is a niche SEO tip, but if you fall into the category of those who resell products and are going
against many other competitors selling the same item you will find this extremely valuable. If the manu-
facturer supplies you with the product description then it is likely that many of your competitors are using
that same description which means you may be devaluing your product page because the search engines see
your product page as duplicate content. Or your page might not even show up as Google would consider
your site duplicated material not relevant enough to make the cut due to lack of popularity when compared
against other sites showing the same results.
Here is a perfect example of how duplicate content can hurt your site rankings and your traffic. I picked a
random child’s toy: Turbo Twist Math by Leap Frog. I did a search using the manufacturer’s initial text
in the product description (”Be a Math Whiz with Turbo Twist Math”) and here are my [2]Google search
results. If you visit the link you will see only one result with the following text underneath:
”In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to
the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can [3]repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
Google is telling you that this description is used so often that they are only showing you one result. You
must expand the list to see other results which is still only 6 which could mean they are not even including
the dozens or hundreds of other similar listings in the results. This is an extreme case since I’ve searched for
a specific phrase, but the theory still applies: Duplicate content will hurt your rankings.
You will have a much better chance of showing in the search results if you add your own unique infor-
mation about the product you are selling or the service you are providing. This is good for SEO but also
for better converting potential customers. Feel free to interject your own opinions or thoughts on why the
product is useful and include information your visitors might be wary to know. Anything you can write of
add to distinguish your product information from other sites will help.
Being different is better.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=mIk&q=
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%22Be+a+Math+Whiz+with+Turbo+Twist+Math%22&btnG=Search
3. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Be+a+Math+Whiz+with+Turbo+Twist+Math%22&hl=en&safe=off&client=
firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=Cy4&filter=0
Web Design Lincolnshire (2008-04-06 03:41:31)
Amazon are great for creating product reviews, customers do this for them. Increasing a social network status and
expanding the brand.
Stephan Miller (2007-11-26 16:26:52)
Sometimes you do luck out and happen to be the only one who sells a product online. And every now and then
you find a niche full of the products. I lucked out there with one site. Now everyone else has the duplicate content,
including our vendors since our site ranks higher and has been around a while.
1.10.3 Build Links with Blogging - SEO Tip Week 41 (2007-10-18 12:33)
As any SEO company will tell you, link building is the backbone of a successful SEO campaign so many of
my posts revolve around methods of building links without actively searching out links. If you can create
buzz and get links naturally just by having creative and helpful content you will increase your chances of
higher rankings.
[1] One of our clients, F. Curtis Barry & Company, [2]a warehouse consulting firm, has done an
incredible job writing on their [3]multichannel company blog. They have done so well that their blog actu-
ally has a higher PR value than their company blog. The blog acquires links more naturally and therefore
has the opportunity to drive traffic to their company site, so having the blog rank well is good thing; it is a
online sales tool that is at work 24 hours a day.
In our experience with writing and managing blogs for our clients we have discovered that writing about
other blog posts can sometimes have a side affect of a link pointing back to the post from the outside blog
post. For F. Curtis Barry this backlink came from the Wall Street Journal. The post on the F. Curtis Barry
Blog commented on an article (and linked to it) by the Wall Street Journal and a few days later traffic
was coming from an automated link back on the WSJ artilce. It is good thing to get traffic and links from
WSJ.com...and we didn’t even have to ask.
Be careful though, writing about other comments and posts is a good strategy but only when done with
sincerity. It can show that you are only writing about other articles for pure marketing results if you aren’t
careful. Have a valid and well-thought out opinion if you do try this. Also realize that you may not receive
a link back or that the link may have a no follow attribute negating any link juice ([4]We DoFollow links).
So be sure your post is valid on its own merits.
Comments and linking to blog posts on this site are always welcome. We check out links to our con-
tent all the time and will comment on other posts about us frequently. Have anything to add? Please add a
comment or post on your own blog.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.fcbco.com/services/warehousing-distribution.asp
3. http://www.fcbco-blog.com/
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/nofollow-no-more-seo-blog-joins-the-minority/
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1.10.4 Avoid Blinding the Search Engine Spiders - SEO Tip Week 42 (2007-10-22 13:11)
[1] Last week I was asked to consult with a design firm. One of our new clients was using a design firm
to build their new site. I was asked to provide some advice when designing for search engine optimization.
At Big Oak we are not SEO Nazis who insist everything must be HTML text and the site must be visually
lifeless. Far from it. I was a web designer not to many years ago so I am very sensitive to outside influences
giving direction to your design, especially when your artistic integrity is being put at risk. After all, most
design shops are trying to build a impressive portfolio and ”search engine people” appear to be the enemy of
design to some.
With this in mind I submitted some things to be wary of, but didn’t need to be avoided. I explained
that the idea is to let the search engines know what your page is about and you have to have some text for
the spiders to read in order to do that. So these items can be added, with moderation and strategically, but
remember to think like a spider when you do.
Graphical text: Spiders can’t read graphic text and and I would prefer to use HTML text for all text,
but headlines can be enhanced through graphics so using graphic text is okay, but be sure you are using the
title and alt tags with these images. Wrap it in a H1 tag if that is warranted for a heading.
Read more about this on my previous post: [2]Graphic Headlines Can Work for SEO.
Images: Obviously spiders can’t read images whether they are text images or otherwise. Our main con-
cern is an all image page. All images means no text, which means no traffic. Images are okay, even for
navigation as long as you are using a [3]sitemap and text navigation in the footer. Of course all images
should have alt tags and title tags as referenced above in an earlier post.
Flash Animation: This may be news to some of you, but the spiders don’t read Flash and although you can
add some context to your Flash through programming, I would never rely on that entirely. Instead use Flash
as an enhancer and let the site speak through body text on the page.
If you do decide to create an entirely Flash site (may the SEO gods be with you) then be sure to cre-
ate an alternate HTML version for the spiders and for those of us who prefer good ol’ HTML sites.
Read more about this in my earlier post: [4]SEO and Flash
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/graphic-headlines-can-work-for-seo-seo-tip-week-13/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/create-a-website-sitemap-seo-tip-week-6/
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/seo-and-flash-seo-tip-week-17/
1.10.5 YouTube or Self Hosting Videos - SEO Tips Week 43 (2007-10-29 14:32)
[1] Rarely would I ever give advice that included putting material on an external site rather than your
own site. But when considering videos I have to say that making sure it is branded correctly and posted
to YouTube.com is critical. YouTube.com gives small businesses the possiblity to have national exposure,
possibly even more than a a network advertising campaign. It would require an extremely viral video but it
has been done by many companies as well as individuals.
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There are just too many viewer on YouTube.com to pridefully say you are going to post your video on
your site and wait for the video linkbait to catch on. With YouTube.com this can happen overnight with the
right video and your traffic would be derived from the grass roots marketing of your video on YouTube.com.
Once the video is posted on YouTube.com you can post it on your site and YouTube.com will pick up
the link to your site. It will be tagged with NoFollow, so no link juice, but it will provide traffic through the
link. You will also want to brand the video with your web address.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
Quality Nonsense (2007-11-06 22:19:14)
Don’t forget that video hosting can also be a revenue source if you already have traffic. According to a Revver press
release, [1]WillItBlend.com earned $9k in Revver commission between January and July this year. Plus, of course,
there’s no reason you can’t cross-post videos to YouTube too.
1. http://www.willitblend.com/
michelle (2007-11-23 04:52:52)
You get more customization if you host it on your own site and your vidoes will probably get lost in the sheer number
of vidoes uploaded everyday. It could be a good ideal to host the video on your website and also send out videos to
the useal sources.
Gil Tabasa (freelancecowboy.com) (2007-12-10 01:00:17)
You provide such great tips, It’s hard to find simple but effective ways to market your site using SEM but you make
it happen. Best wishes!
SEO Videos (2008-01-05 15:44:09)
I really agree that the inherent nature of Youtube makes it a gold mine for the marketers. I agree with your blog post
and looking forward to your posts.
tapety (2007-11-20 00:07:39)
It is good that someone writes articles which really matter. Thank you for this information, it’s full of useful knowledge
which is hard to find in tons of rubbish in our famous world wide web. Regards and good luck!
1.11 November
1.11.1 Finding Links with High PageRank - SEO Tip Week 44 (2007-11-02 16:00)
Link exchanging has certainly lost favor and some SEO consultants don’t do link exchanges period. I am
also of the mind that link exchanges don’t count for much, but I also know that link exchanges can be part
of a SEO strategy. Two of our largest clients are still employing targeted link exchanges and are ranked
highly for very competitive terms.
So, if we can all overlook the great swell of negativity for link swaps lets take a look at how to find good
exchanges. There is an excellent tool from SEOChat.com: [1]Page Rank Search Tool. If you visit this page
you can type in your keyword and then a phrase with ”exchange links” or ”add links” and it will find the
strongest ranking page with those terms. A real world example: ”diamonds” exchange links
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With some modifications, you can also use it for non-reciprocal link building and article placement. Be
creative![2]
1. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/
2. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/
Shell Harris (2007-11-21 12:37:28)
We publish what we do and it has worked for us. There are very few ”secrets” to SEO and those things that are secrets
are probably going to be frowned upon by the search engines, which is why they may be secrets. Wow, I confused
myself. We disclose most of what we do and hopefully our readers will share as well.
Dan Anton (2007-11-07 04:03:45)
This sounds like an extremely useful tool. Seriously thank you very much as I am against link exchanges or have
heard nothing but bad things, but this tool sounds like it would help find a credible partner(s)
Inchirieri Masini (2008-01-16 15:42:02)
I like this tip to find related sites with high PR Thanks for sharing it with us.
BlogOxide (2007-11-20 11:45:07)
I read somewhere that about 80 % of SEO is still unpublished, but this blog tipping so much on SEO seems a com-
pletely different story! Good tips BTW, and yes, the tool does work!
1.11.2 Images Provide SEO Traffic - SEO Tip Week 45 (2007-11-11 23:33)
[1] Any good SEO campaign will put the emphasis on ranking your site for the content of the site.
But overlooking the images on the site can be a big mistake especially if your site is selling products which
naturally use imagery as part of the sales pitch. So why not use those image to draw visitors through organic
image search?
Your first step should be to set up a Google Account where you can use [2]Webmaster Tools. Inside the
Webmaster tools you will find an option under Tools named ”Enable enhanced image search”. When this
option is enabled Google will start cataloging your images for placement in the search engine results for
images which can increase your traffic, especially if you can show in the search results that show images
above the organic search results. (See example of [3]Google search with images above organic results for the
search term ’oak tree’)
After you have instructed Google to look for your images, you want to be sure your images are telling
Google and the other search engines exactly what they are about. How do you do this? Here are some things
to pay attention to and think about when using images. I’ve listed them in order of ”my importance”.
1. Image Size Does Matter - Larger images tend to rank better. Most image results that show in the top
three I have done test searches on have been over 280 pixels in both directions. Bigger images make
sense to show first, all other things being equal. I would shoot for 300 x 300 to be safe.
2. Image Close to Relevant Text - Keyword above or below the image in the same DIV -or- keyword in
the same paragraph as the image, close to the image. Keyword should be in the same (table
cell) as the image.
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3. Page Title & Page Theme - The title, content and image should all be connected.
4. File Name - It can be difficult to add the name of the image to the file name, especially if the shopping
cart software doesn’t allow it, but when you can, be descriptive.
5. Alt Tags - Alt tags are designed to provide alternative text when the images cannot be displayed.
They should be descriptive of the image. Example:
6. Image Title Tags - This text shows up when you rollover the image in a popup. They should also de-
scribe image. Example:
7. Image Sitemap - Okay, this is an idea which may or may not be of any help, but it certainly can’t hurt
and if you feel your images are important enough to help your rankings then creating a sitemap with
descriptive links to your important images might be the extra boost to get your images to the top of
the search engine results.
Alt/Title for images have been spammed too much (like Meta tags) so I don t think they play much of a
factor at all anymore in images search.Please share any successes you may have had with image search or
ideas you have tried. I’m especially interested in anyone who has tried an image sitemap or what you think
of this idea.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
3. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=oak+tree
Marios Alexandrou (2007-11-12 17:30:49)
I agree big images are good, but you can’t always have big images on the page. So to deal with this, display a
thumbnail and link that thumbnail to the larger version. Google is smart enough to understand which URL is the
referrer and which URL has the large image. This way you can get the benefit of context from the copy surrounding
the thumbnail while still getting the boost from having a large image.
Shell Harris (2007-11-12 19:52:13)
As usual you give a helpful and insightful post, Marios. Thanks for the advice and your time to post.
John Simpson (2007-12-22 02:28:19)
I’ve heard of and I employ 1-5 whenever I perform SEO duties on someone’s site, but I was not aware of 6 & 7. Thanks
for the information. John Simpson SBTV.com
1.11.3 Find Competitor Backlinks with MSN Live - SEO Tip Week 46 (2007-11-20 11:30)
Update 1/15/08: This feature is no longer working with MSN Live.
Check on the backlinks from your competitors is part of the competitive analysis of any good SEO con-
sultant or ”expert”. Up until recently using [1]Yahoo to research competitor backlinks was the only search
engine you could do this in effectively. Well, now Live.com is also back in the game and showing you backlinks
to websites. But they also have a nice trick for using keywords to narrow your search.
If you visit Live.com and search for the following: +linkdomain:www.bigoakinc.com ”seo tips” you will be
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show search results that have links pointing to bigoakinc.com and also have the phrase ’seo tips’ on that page
that links to bigoakinc.com. Be sure to include the plus sign (+) at the front or else you won’t get any results.
You can click this link to see the Live.com search results for yourself: [2]+linkdomain:www.bigoakinc.com
”seo tips”.
This can be an extremely useful research tool and adding the keyword phrase to the search makes it a
even more valuable tool in your [3]SEO toolbox.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/research-your-competition-with-yahoo-site-explorer/
2. http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%2Blinkdomain%3Awww.bigoakinc.com+%22seo+tips%22&go=Search&form=QBRE
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/seo-toolkit/
Optimizare Seo (2008-01-14 12:57:19)
Is not working today...maybe was working back when you wrote the post. I tried with many sites and keywords and
nothing.
web design Longview (2007-11-27 23:35:28)
Ah very good. I was wondering what the trick for MSN was, but hadn’t really looked into it. Thanks
Shell Harris (2008-01-15 10:40:14)
Live.com is no longer allowing this to work. Shame, it was a very nice feature.
fitness singles (2008-02-14 10:11:11)
Good post, it’s always good to know who is linking to your competitor.
just a guy (2007-11-20 14:31:28)
Great tip and much fun. The keyword addition is really nice. I’ll waste lots of time reviewing this on all my site.
thanks!
1.11.4 The Dangers of Buying Links Through a Service - SEO Tip Week 47
(2007-11-28 16:01)
[1] Should you buy links through a link service? Ever since Google slapped [2]Text-Link-Ads.com (it no
longer appears in the first 30 results for its own name), that is a question webmasters have had to wrangle
with more than ever. Generally, Google regards buying links as a form of spam and as threat to their business
model.
Google hasn t been shy about punishing sites who engage in this behavior lately either. Many who bought
and sold links with Text-Link-Ads have reported a significant drop in their PageRank since the last Google
update. This is partly because escaping the eyes of Google is difficult. Doing a search for [3]function tla ads
will uncover all the sites selling links using Text-Links-Ads who have not yet upgraded to the latest TLA
plug-in, which hides this information. If Google can see who is selling links, they can logically conclude who
is buying them as well.
[4]JohnChow.com s recent Google slap represents one of the more drastic punishments doled out to a web-
master. Chow had ranked number 1 in Google for the keyword make money online for over a year, but
he also aggressively pushed link selling services. Now, he doesn t even appear in the top 30 results for the
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keyword John Chow. (He clocks in at #57). A cynic might point out that Chow s collapse coincided with
his decision to remove Google adsense ads from his site.
Analyzing Google s behavior becomes confusing when one considers that Chow s site still has a toolbar PR
of 4. Likewise, Text-Link-Ads still boasts a PR of 7.
If one wants to remain in the good graces of Google, avoiding the use of link brokers such as TLA or
TNX.net would probably be judicious. But reading Google s mind is not an easy task, as evidenced by the
erratic nature of their penalties.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.text-link-ads.com/
3. http://www.google.com/search?q=function+tla_ads&num=100&hl=en&rls=en&filter=0
4. http://www.johnchow.com/
Shell Harris (2007-12-11 15:53:40)
I think that buying text links is always going to be a part of the SEO landscape. I believe the world Google paints
with only the best site’s getting real links is a false reality. If that were the case many times only the sites with brand
recognition or the most marketing dollars will actually get real links. Small businesses won’t be able to compete.
Seo (2008-01-16 15:16:11)
of course their money us good because they can advertise their services through Adwords...isn’t that cute G?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en &q=text+ads+links &btnG=Search we take our cut and you can sell and
buy links safe..
Patrick Altoft (2007-12-03 14:43:29)
I try to avoid buying links altogether nowadays.
Webmaster Marty (2007-12-04 16:55:17)
Same as Patrick above, i try to avoid buying also. It’s not worth it, being penalized would be too much for me to
handle lol. Good post. Marty.
Terry Reeves - Mr Unkie to you (2007-12-04 17:44:57)
Personally, I have never really understood link buying. I know some webmasters feel this is the only way to gain
PageRank quickly. However, the site with the greatest PR is not always the site on page one. Buying links for the
traffic does not seem to be the best way to spend money either as text link traffic can be very thin. This whole text
link slap does not bother me at all. Google has been warning of this for years.
1.12 December
1.12.1 Wordpress Plugins Help Google Index Your Blog - SEO Tip 48 (2007-12-05 00:14)
Having the best blog in the world, won’t do any good if no one knows it exists. Make sure Google visits and
indexes all your posts with a few simple plugins. These are for Wordpress only, but why would you be using
anything else? The following Wordpress plugins will help provide numerous links to older posts on your blog
that might otherwise be buried. The added benefit is your blog readers will also be inclined to read more
posts when using these plugins.
Similar Posts
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URL: [1]http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/
This plugin will search the text of all posts and display other posts which are similar or related. This will
help provide links to older posts making them more accessible to the reader and to the search engines.
All in one SEO Pack
URL: [2]http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/
This plugin is a must have SEO plugin and combines all many SEO features in one plugin, where beforehand
you needed two or three. You can control the following options with this plugin:
• Define your home page title, description and keywords
• Define your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats
• Use categories for META keywords
• Avoid indexing of duplicate content (prevents indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages)
• Autogenerate descriptions
This particularly replaces the SEO Title Tag many blogs use.
Top Posts
URL: [3]http://www.macalua.com/2007/02/01/top-posts-by-category-plugi n/
This plugin will post your most read blog posts automatically a blog page, providing a good starting point
for new readers. While giving new readers some direction if you have an overwhelming number amount of
posts, this will also provide the search engines with a direct link from a top level page to deep posts in your
blog. Think of it as a super sitemap.
You can also create a smaller top post list that can be shown on every post of you blog in the right column.
Making sure your blog is well read by readers and well known by search engines is a critical step towards
increasing your blog’s popularity.
1. http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/
2. http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/
3. http://www.macalua.com/2007/02/01/top-posts-by-category-plugin/
Jo Dane (2007-12-10 19:53:54)
Absolutely stellar! Great tools for blogs to add ’spiderability’ ! That ”similar posts” plugin is deceptively simple.
However if you tend to blog on related topics (and who doesn’t) that can help get older posts read by new readers
who usually don’t delve too deeply into the archives. James Brausch, whose blog I also read, expounds on the virtues
of using a blog to gather traffic to sell your products more efficiently.
Web Design Lincolnshire (2008-04-06 03:37:48)
The SEO All in One pack is a great plug-in and easy to use.
PR Online (2008-01-04 23:48:54)
Great Plugins! All in one SEO Pack is very nice. Thx for sharing.
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Riccardo Giuntoli (2007-12-05 06:40:51)
In the new version of my blog i’ll put for keywords tags and not categories like the All in one SEO Pack do. What do
you think about it?
Suchmaschinenoptimierung (2007-12-05 20:22:20)
where can i find this in german language? my english is to bad. but i think this wordpress tool can help me with my
avz-projects. if you can help my - please post here.
1.12.2 Digg-ing Links by Commenting Socially Responsibly - SEO Tip Week 49
(2007-12-11 15:37)
[1] Social Bookmarking is in fashion and many people are submitting web pages to digg.com, stumble-
upon.com and delicious.com. I have written about the advantages to [2]bookmarking your own web pages
with these social sites and how your traffic can increase (see [3]StumbleUpon Shark Surfaces). But what do
you do if you have nothing worth bookmarking at the moment but want to get involved and build links at
the same time? Try intelligently commenting on other bookmarked pages. I’ll use Digg as an example since
they follow commented links and are the giant in social bookmarking.
Take some time and search through Digg for a article that has been ”dugg” and is related to your site’s
content and make a comment on it. Usually there are relatively few quality comments and as long as you
are genuine and thoughtful you stand a good chance of keeping your comment and your link. The key is to
make sure the link to your site is related to the dugg subject matter. While this can be done easily, what
else can be done to utilize Digg’s popularity?
Try following the link to the dugg web page see if that allows comments. If the content is on a blog
you can probably comment on it there as well. That page will have many links coming to it, especially if
it was popular on Digg, so placing a comment with a link to your related web page will benefit from the
[4]Digg popularity.
Maybe this is perceived as an around about way to get a link, especially since it may be a no-follow link,
but the traffic will usually be more targeted traffic with a higher chance of converting once the visitors reach
your site.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/social-bookmarking-seo-tip-week-8/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/stumbleupon-shark-surfaces/
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/diggn-it-social-media-optimization/
SEO Specialist - Terry reeves (2007-12-11 17:02:00)
Thanks for that tip. I was not aware that Digg comments are followed. I am really not a big fan of Digg. I have too
much to do to participate at the level you need to become successful there.
Angela (2007-12-21 10:50:42)
Many people with websites are still not aware of the great benefits of social bookmarking sites. Indeed social book-
marking is a great way of getting backlinks, and more importantly traffic to your website.
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1.12.3 Go Green, Recyle Old Links - SEO Tip 50 (2007-12-14 20:50)
Well, I m almost done with my [1]52 SEO tips, only 3 more to go so I m trying to finish strong. And since
going green is the theme lately, I m following the trend. Recycling links can be an important part of your
link building campaign.
We often overlook the links we already have or links we didn t actively build ourselves. Your site may
already have links pointing to it, but if those links aren t keyword-rich links then you are missing out on
potential SEO benefits.
Let me give you a great example of a missed opportunity. SnagAJob.com is a leading job search web-
site and the have thousands of links pointing to their site. A large number of links is a good thing, but the
majority of their links have the link text Snagajob in the anchor text. Many of these links are on EDU
sites which pass along wonderful link popularity but so much is wasted when the anchor text is your domain
name, or worse, your website address (www.snagajob.com).
As part of our strategy for SnagAJob we have been contacting sites with SEO-unfriendly links asking the
anchor text to be changed to keyword terms they are trying to rank for such as part-time jobs, [2]jobs, job
search, etc. Our success rate is much higher than seeking out new links. And keyword-rich links that have
age is a great combination for moving up in the search results.
Do a [3]backlink check with MSN for your site. MSN allows you to search for anchor text too which you can
see how to do in my [4]MSN backlink check post. Look for links that could be improved such as those using
just your domain name and start contacting those sites linking to you. Requesting changes to your anchor
text is a worthwhile investment of your time that could reap better rankings in the search engines.
Going Green never felt so good and your site may thank you with an influx of new traffic.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://www.snagajob.com/
3. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/using-backlinks-in-msn-live/
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/using-backlinks-in-msn-live/
diggpig (2008-04-14 20:54:37)
Based on your experience in SEO, how long will it take for a new link with a keyword as anchor to weight on a site s
rankings for that keyword? Right after the page with the link was re-indexed?
diggpig (2008-04-14 20:54:19)
@Shell: Don t get me wrong..I never said you are wrong or right. I just pointed out a few potential problems with
your method which is great anyway. Maybe I am too cautious but those were the problems that I thought should
be taken in consideration. And you didn t mention that client had already 90 % links with the domain name in it :)
Marius,
diggpig (2008-04-14 20:54:09)
I still stand by my tip especially when the client in question has such a high number of links with the url already.
Almost 90 %, so they have plenty of domain name links. We targeted links on high authority pages and we have
seen great improvement with this strategy for highly competitive terms involving search terms for job search . We
haven t had anyone remove the link yet. We have many examples of link building in our link building category:
http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/linking-building/ Thanks for all your comments. Shell
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diggpig (2008-04-14 20:52:40)
J.J. I really try to take everything Matt says with a grain of salt. You must remember that Matt still works for Google
and therefore has Google s best interests at heart, which he should. On the other hand making sure your links are
descriptive is also a good thing that Google likes so why wouldn t you go back and change the links to make a better
user experience. It wouldn t make sense for Google to penalize the rewriting of a link to help users know what they
are click towards.
diggpig (2008-04-14 20:52:47)
Furthermore, it is Google who rewards sites with targeted search results based on the anchor text of the links pointing
to the site. If this was a bad thing, it would not work the way it does. I have found this process to be much more
effective that simply starting a new link building campaign for an established website.
diggpig (2008-04-14 20:52:56)
I must disagree and here is why: 1. Changing an old link on an old domain and old page doesn t make sense in the
eyes of a search engine. Why would do that? - would be their question. 2. Any link passes link juice and you can
always use internal links to have the desired keyword targeted on each page. 3. If I offer a clean link to a site that
I like and appreciate and I receive this kind of mail-please use a keyword for my links- I would remove the link, not
changing the anchor text. 4. Having backlinks with the domain name in it is very natural for search engines so we
need those too. 5. Great posts on your blog-hope you will add some real life examples on old classical link building
methods. Thanks, Marius
diggpig (2008-04-14 20:52:30)
This is still considered to be unnatural in Matt Cutt s America.
1.12.4 Nofollow Helps Internal Linking and Conversions - SEO Tip 51 (2007-12-20 15:45)
I am a big fan of [1]Marketing Sherpa and I have recommended them before when I posted [2]’About Us’
pages can increase conversions. Well, another Marketing Sherpa study has caught my attention, describing
how [3]words increase conversions.
A few months ago I wrote an SEO tip explaining why you [4]don’t want to use ’click here’ for SEO, but we
also know conversion rates increase when visitors are instructed to ’click here’, ’read more’, ’buy now’ and
so on. What is an SEO company to do?
How can search engine optimization and good user experience coexist? Both are important to the suc-
cess of your website, but at times they seem at odds with each other. The solution is very simple, if not well
known. Use the ”nofollow” tag on the ’click here’ links and make sure you also have a descriptive link with
keyword-rich text available as well.
While the ”nofollow” tag was originally set up as a spam fighter, it can be used with surgical precision
to increase conversions, without hurting you SEO campaign. ([5]Read more about the uses of nofollow)
It helps because it will tell the search engines not to count or follow the link with the nofollow attribute.
This means the keyword-rich link, without the nofollow, will be followed, helping the destination page’s link
popularity.
How do you use nofollow?
Normal link:
Click Here
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Adding the nofollow attribute:
Click Here
Using it on your site might look like this:
[6]Click here for the best deals on [7]dog treats.
The HTML code would look like this:
Click here for the best deals on dog treats.
Finally, SEO and Site Usability living in perfect harmony, until we start talking about [8]graphics vs. text.
;-)
1. http://www.marketingsherpas.com/
2. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/about-us-page-lifts-ecommerce-conversions/
3. https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=30124
4. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/click-here-for-more-information-bad-text-links/
5. http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728
6. http://www.bestbullysticks.com/
7. http://www.bestbullysticks.com/
8. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/avoid-blinding-the-search-engine-spiders-seo-tip-week-42/
Pinky (2008-01-24 08:08:54)
Nice tips.
SEO Solutions (2008-01-25 16:04:57)
Using the no-follow command could really help a site in terms of polishing its outbound links and controlling PR pass
Seo (2008-01-15 18:24:27)
Maybe you guys should write an article about how to detect hidden text on sites...I recommend disabling CSS and
the sites are very different right? Of course is risky for a client’s site..think about competitors who can find that and
report it to Google..this is the stuff Google bans a site for..trust me works very well..too bad... I was starting to love
your blog Good luck Marius,
Dan - Life Coaching (2008-03-26 06:30:07)
That’s really helpful and immensely simple! Thanks for this.
Gabriel Gervelis (2008-01-02 04:08:02)
Using noFollow tags to control link juice is a good idea. I have used noFollow and shot out links from home pages
with no worries!
Omaha SEO (2008-03-28 22:08:26)
”Nofollow” links are still followed. They just don’t pass weight. Search engines lie. This is similar to how pages that
you insist that you do not want to be crawled in your robots.txt are still crawled by Yahoo.
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Matt (2007-12-20 16:32:12)
yeah, I would tend to avoid ”click here” like you stated but no follow is a good solution around it. I was going to make
some links on my site no follow like about/faq but realized someone might need/want to find it through SE’s.
1.12.5 Create an Wonderful Super Awesome Resource Directory - SEO Tip 52
(2007-12-28 15:11)
[1] If you have been playing the SEO game for long you know that using directories are one way to
build links. How effective this is to your SEO campaign is debatable nowadays. But I’m not talking about
submitting your site to other directories, I’m recommending you start your own directory. I can practically
hear the moans and protests through the Internet now. Let me explain my [2]modest proposal. Here are
some ideas for creating your own wonderful super awesome resource directory.
Build the directory on your current site. Do not start a site just for the sake of being a directory.
There are thousands of unsuccessful directories and we shouldn’t be adding to the overcrowded market. You
can see an example of a [3]resource (vendor) directory we have created for [4]F. Curtis Barry & Company.
The directory was created as a subsection of their business site so it resides in their main domain.
Be selective. This directory isn’t supposed to be all-inclusive, it is being created to be a resource for
your customers. It should have perceived value so only include vendors that are recommended by you or
your company.
Be opinionated. This is YOUR directory, right? Well, say what you want but back up what you
say. Give your opinion. Why was this vendor or company selected for placement in this directory? Let your
audience know.
Be verbose. Make the directory worthy of being read. After all, you aren’t including many compa-
nies. Remember, it is a privilege and only the best get included so you won’t have to write about a large
number of companies or products, but you should write enough to be helpful about each one. Each listing
should have its own detail page - often the company selected will give you all the text you need. If you don’t
like what they have written or the tone of writing ask for edits. More than likely they will accommodate.
Be Greedy. The point of creating this directory is to build links. This can be accomplished in two
ways. The first is through [5]reciprocal linking (more on the other link building method later). Your
directory is free or at least it should be. You don’t want your directory listings to be paid, it would reduce
the validity of the listings. If you are gong to provide a link to outside companies with content and a
recommendation, then asking for a link in return seems reasonable. At the least, they should link to their
own detail page.
Be Proactive. This isn’t a ”build it and they will come”scenario. You will have to solicit companies
you want to include in your directory. After you have set up your categories (if needed) and have added
a few companies you may start receiving requests at some point, but be vigilant and only let in the top
companies that you would recommend. You don’t want to compromise your directory’s integrity with
low-quality listings.
Reap the benefits. Here is the second way to build links. Now that you have a selective and high
quality directory, other sites will be more inclined to link to it of their own accord. You have created ”link
bait” and will attract links pointing to you industry resource directory.
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To wrap this up, here is the main idea to keep in mind. The directory should be considered useful
by all parties. You should request links and use the directory as a link bait opportunity. The directory
should represent only the best, recommended companies in your industry and should be focused.
This will require some work but you will also have created a useful tool that will attract attention.
The time you use to build this directory will be well spent. You may even show up in the search results for
the companies you list.
Good luck on your wonderful super awesome resource directory.
52 SEO Tips
I also want to thank everyone who reads this blog and has been here for my year long commitment to
creating a new [6]SEO Tip every week. This is the final tip out of 52 SEO Tips for the year 2007. It started
as something I thought I could in a few minutes once a week, but turned into a much bigger effort as I
tried to create tips that were more than just writing ”Do keyword research.” It has been fun and frustrating
and I’m glad to have completed my goal. There will be more SEO tips, but not every week. I’ll also be
attempting to write more commentary now that I can focus less on SEO tips. So keep coming back and
keep commenting and maybe we can both learn something.
1. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
2. http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
3. http://www.fcbco.com/vendor-resource-guide/vendor-resource-guide.asp
4. http://www.fcbco.com/
5. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/why-reciprocal-linking-works-for-seo/
6. http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/category/52-seo-strategies/
byron2Peter K. Carr (2007-12-30 17:28:09)
I d like to build a directory& Do you recommend I build it entirely on my own, or use a canned program to do it?
Shell Harris (2007-12-30 17:30:18)
I would do it by hand, especially if you have a knowledge of HTML or a program to help such as Dreamweaver. The
whole idea behind the directory is it should be small, and not look like a typical directory that only has a short anchor
text link and a description underneath. You should aspire to have a few important categories and no more than 3 or
so listings in each. Each listing would have robust information that would help visitors make decisions. A few quality
entries is much better than a lot of low quality entries.
SEO for Yahoo Small Business - Terry Reeves (2007-12-28 16:34:09)
This tip is one that can create tremendous benefit to the small specialty niche or business and is a great idea for any
local or regional web site. The best part is you can actually get visitors to recommend content for the directory which
makes adding the content much easier. Allow them to submit their own reviews or opinions and soon your directory
is social. The possibilities are endless.
Shell Harris (2008-01-15 10:42:00)
Has anyone seen examples of selective directories? I would like to post some examples.
Seo Tips (2008-04-04 02:48:33)
links working now....have to fire my copy writer!
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Web Design Lincolnshire (2008-04-03 09:18:51)
A high traffic website is an asset. If you have lots high traffic coming towards your website, then you can advertise
on the website. A high traffic website can open many opportunities to you and your blog, website, business or brand.
Internet Markting Amsterdam (2008-03-17 08:05:38)
This will require a lot of work! But hee.. linkbuilding is a lot of work. It’s a synonym: Linkbuilding = a lot of work.
:)
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52 SEO Tips - Jan-Dec 2007
presented by: Big Oak SEO
http://www.bigoakinc.com
contact@bigoakinc.com