Webenso

Your old posts may need some SEO help

Kathy Alice — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:09:22 +0000

Pagination with WP-PageNavi

One plugin routinely recommended is the WP-PageNavi plugin. What this plugin does is change the pagination on your WordPress blog from from the “Older Entries” and “Newer Entries” links to a set of clickable numbers each representing a page of posts. It’s clear this might be helpful to users, but what is the benefit for SEO?

To understand one reason why it would be useful, let’s examine how page rank is typically assigned to a website. Keep in mind this is an oversimplification of how Google actually works, but it’s useful as a model. Let’s say your site has been assigned a page rank of 5, that means it has 5 points to distribute to all its pages. So if there are 5 links on the home page each link would get 1 point. Now let’s say that page also has 5 links, each of those links would get 1/5 of a 1 point. So what’s the takeaway from this? That the more clicks it takes to get to a given page, the less value Google and the other search engines assign to it.

So if your WordPress blog uses the default, out of the box pagination; your older posts are going to be considered less valuable, because the user and the search engines have to “click” on more links to get to them. This might be fine for some blogs that are more current events focused, but many blogs have good “evergreen” posts, that even written some time ago are still valuable.

How your older posts fare under default WordPress pagination

For example, let’s say blog post #7 was a popular post, ranked well for it’s keywords etc. But I’ve written 6 blogs posts since then, and now it has moved off the home page and even off the first page of its category page. Because it now takes three clicks (see above) to get to post #7, the post gets less “SEO juice” given to it by the search engines.

Now your older blog posts get the attention they deserve!

The WP PageNavi plug aims to solve this by leveling the playing field for your older posts. As you can see, it now takes two clicks to get to the blog post page for post #7. Up to this point I haven’t bothered with installing the plugin – yes, the benefits are clear – but how much difference will it make really? So now, especially since I do treat this blog as a sandbox to try out optimization techniques, I’ve finally installed it. I’m hoping it will help my older posts, but the proof will be if I see an increase of traffic to older posts.

Has your site been hit by Google Penguin?

Kathy Alice — Mon, 07 May 2012 03:32:31 +0000

Google changes have been coming fast and furious. Over the last few months:

Matt Cutts announced in March that a “over optimization” penalty was coming.
Soon after that, many sites received a “unnatural links have been detected ..” message in GWMT (Google Webmaster Tools).
A Google Panda update was released on April 19, 2012.
Google Penguin was released on April 24, 2012.

Google Panda, first released in February 2011, was aimed at lower quality sites. Sites that had thin content, too many ads and overall less useful content saw their traffic drop, sometimes by large percentages. Google has continued to release updates to Panda over the last year, and sites continue to suffer from it.

Google Penguin, is an whole other thing entirely. Its goal is to weed out sites that have been engaging in building “over optimized” (or less charitably – spammy) backlink profiles. This post will focus on detecting a Google Penguin penalty – but the techniques I outline here are useful for detecting an unfavorable impact on your site’s organic traffic for any of the Google changes (algorithmic or otherwise) that roll out with regularity.

What does a “unnatural” or “over optimized” backlink profile look like? Lots of links that have “perfect” keyword rich link anchor text coming from lower quality sites, particularly sitewide links in the footer or in the “blogroll” sections of the sites.

How to check if a Google change has impacted your site

I’m going to assume that you have Google analytics set up on your site, but you should be able to use other analytics software.

First – check your Google Webmaster Tools messages (if you haven’t already) – if you see the dreaded “unnatural links” message – chances are you’ve been hit by Penguin. Although Penguin had a release date, reports by site owners that received the message indicated that some sites saw an impact as early as late March.

Second – look at your organic traffic. Google Analytics reports on ALL your traffic, not just on your organic traffic that you get from the search engines; this includes:

Referral Traffic: Traffic you get from other sites, (including social media sites like facebook).
Direct Traffic: Traffic you get from people typing in your URL (also may include traffic from email links – if the email is not read on a website.
Paid Search: If you use PPC (pay per click) that traffic can be tracked separately.
And finally, Organic Traffic: SEO Traffic you get from the Search Engines that you haven’t paid for.

Organic Traffic in Google Analytics

Like a lot of things in Google Analytics, there are a number of ways to segment out your Organic Traffic for viewing. But the easiest way to do it is to navigate to Traffic Sources –> Search –> Organic in the menu on the left side.

Alternatively, a more advanced technique, is defining a custom segment where you can specify to include the dimension “Medium” to contain “Organic”. Custom segments are useful because you can turn them on anywhere in Google Analytics to filter your data.

Regardless, what you are using, now that you are looking at organic traffic, adjust the dates to look at your organic traffic over the days April 19, 2012 (Panda) and April 24, 2012 (Penguin). If you received a message about “unnatural links” you should start from the date of that message. If your organic traffic is normally erratic, you may need to switch to a “week” view, but generally the “day” view is best.

If you are a brand or a well known personage, you will also need to filter out your “branded” traffic, for example the name of your site, a product you sell or your name. Google algorithm changes and penalties generally don’t impact your branded organic traffic, and if you get a lot of it, this may obscure any change in your keyword based organic traffic.

Click on "Advanced" to get a dialog to help you filter out branded terms

To filter out your branded terms, start by click on the Advanced link that is under and to the left of your chart. This will reveal a dialog similar to the custom segment one where you can specify the keyword terms to exclude.

These techniques are handy whether you have been impacted by a Google change like Penguin or not. Take some time to play around with Google Analytics, there is a lot of power in the tool, and even if you use just 20% of what is available, you’ll be far ahead of your competition.

Moving Beyond On Page SEO and Off Page SEO

Kathy Alice — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:24:09 +0000

Most people divide SEO (search engine optimization) into two buckets – on page SEO and off page SEO. However, with changes in the SEO landscape over the last couple of years, these tactical ways of thinking may have you overlooking some key SEO principles. It’s time to take a bigger picture, more comprehensive view of your site’s SEO.

What is on page SEO?

On page SEO, sometimes also called “technical SEO” is the optimization of various on page factors to help your web page rank better in the search engine results pages. These include factors such as:

Page titles
The h1 on your page
Meta descriptions
alt tags on your images

For these (and more) you are adjusting these on page HTML elements to have keywords that align with what your searchers are looking for.

What is off page SEO?

Off page SEO is also known as linkbuilding. Here you are actively trying to get other websites (preferably authoritative and relevant ones) to link to your website with keywords in your link anchor text.

These are all good tactics, but they are not the full picture of all the things you should think about when you build your SEO strategy for your website.

Here’s the way I think about SEO

Search engine friendliness
Optimization – this is mostly our old friend – on page SEO
User engagement
Promotion – includes, but is not just limited to linkbuilding

Is your site search engine friendly?

What good is your optimized page if the search engine can’t find it? And what if this page appears as multiple pages to the search engine. SEO’s today have to think about getting rid of duplicate content within a site, page load speed (which Google announced it would consider as a signal over a year ago) and submitting XML sitemaps to both Google and Bing.

Is your site engaging?

If users quickly bounce off your website, that is a negative signal to Google and the other search engines. Good website design, good navigation are all considerations SEOs have to take into account. Social media is a factor here, a strong following across the social media channels often turn into backlinks.

Think of off page SEO in terms of campaigns rather than as linkbuilding

Backlinks occur as a result of PR efforts and marketing campaigns. Instead of thinking of getting a couple of links to your website, think about how you can promote your business and what value you can provide that will naturally attract links.

Throw out your keywords and go creative with your blog titles

Kathy Alice — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 03:38:45 +0000

For choosing your blog titles, here’s the advice I’m sure you’ve heard:

Build a keyword list of your blog’s main topic.
Choose some criteria to pick the most promising keywords (search volume, evidence of long tail, competition or CPC)
Write a post that has the keyword term in the page title, post title and at least a couple of times in the post body.

Google Analytics doesn't lie - Sex Sells

I could have come up with a blog title such as “Beware of Facebook’s social reader” or “What are your Facebook social apps sharing about you?” Both are reasonable given the search volume on “social reader” and “Facebook social apps”. But I didn’t. I went for broke and used the title “Four Things You Do To Kill Her Sex Drive”. We don’t always like to admit it, but sex sells and is of interest to a broad audience (many which would find a discussion of Google Analytics totally boring). It seems that it worked, after I published the blog post Sunday night, my traffic jumped up significantly the next two days (see Google Analytics chart above).

This highlights one drawback of using keyword tools, they show you historical data and won’t show you an emerging trend, which often is an excellent source of traffic. Catch such a wave and it will trump your most carefully crafted keyword rich post. Getting in on a new thing such as being the first to write a review of a new product or comment on a recent news worthy announcement are the opportunities to look for. There is a reason why news channels do so well. Twitter is excellent for this kind of prospecting as news is frequently reported there before the mass media picks it up. For regional trends, log in your Twitter account on twitter.com and check out the trends on the left for your area. For worldwide trends spend time with search.twitter.com.

Also, something those of us that write more technically focused content lose sight of, don’t forget the importance of an inviting title. When you write your title, put your audience’s hat on, and ask yourself honestly, does this title compel me to click on it and find out more? Sometimes you just have to lose the keywords and write more creatively to perk up interest.

Hiding Affiliate Links in WordPress

Kathy Alice — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:39:29 +0000

Affiliate links just look plain ugly and there is always the chance that someone will be petty enough to gyp you out of your commission by stripping out the tracking code. As a tangent I noticed a while back, these days Clickbank has a new URL that no longer include the Clickbank username (but still a tracking id). Wonder whether that is working out any better. To avoid this problem you want to hide the original affiliate link with a pretty link. This is what many mean by “affiliate link cloaking”. But cloaking has another meaning, which is showing different content and links to the search engines versus to the humans. That’s really not what I’m talking about here, nor am I going to touch on the topic of hiding affiliate links because Google doesn’t like them. I don’t really have a lot of affiliate links compared to all the content I have, so I’m not worried.

I was looking for a couple of features:

Ability to redirect a pretty link to an affiliate link
Ability to add a nofollow to the link

I had heard good things about GoCodes and was planning to install it. However it is no longer available via the plugin WordPress repository search and hasn’t been updated since 2009. Too bad as it was a nice solution.

One nice alternative is the Pretty Link plugin, which comes in a free version (Pretty Link Lite) and an enhanced version (Pretty Link Pro) which gives you the ability to use javascript to mask your links which might be attractive to the “cloaking” crowd. Not only does it satisfy the above requirements but it gives you tracking and a bookmarklet.

It’s worth pointing out that Google will still follow the link, even if you put a nofollow tag on it (confusingly nofollow doesn’t mean “don’t follow” but rather “don’t pass page rank”, so you aren’t “hiding links from Google”. If that is your goal, you can check into the paid version’s javascript feature.

Four Things You Do To Kill Her Sex Drive

Kathy Alice — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:13:53 +0000

Do you know what your Facebook apps are sharing about you?

If you saw a catchy title like “Four Things You Do To Kill Her Sex Drive” shared with you on Facebook wouldn’t you click on it? I admit that I did. And then I got this:

Washington Post Social Reader Facebook App

Note the “This app may post on your behalf, including articles you read and more.” Ummm, “post on my behalf”? No thank you.

This particular article spawned many comments in the blogosphere about “Facebook oversharing” (Facebook itself calls it “frictionless sharing”). I wonder how many people, who have installed these types of apps, realize that what they read on Yahoo or the Washington Post may get shared with their Facebook friends. I wonder how many changed the “Public” setting before installing. Perhaps it’s not a good thing to let your coworkers know that you are reading up on the latest medical issue you might be experiencing. You think?

Some proactive damage control is called for here. Look through your list of apps that you have given permission to access your Facebook data (Account Settings -> Apps). You might be surprised at what shows up on the list, those apps can be sneaky. Browsing through your Privacy settings is a good idea too. I unchecked the box “My App Activity” for “How people bring your info to apps they use”.

Needless to say, I did not install the Washington Post Social Reader Facebook App – but I did go looking for the original article, which proved difficult to find, even when searching on the Washington Post site. But if you would like to hear DivineCaroline’s take on the article, she’s all over it, and has spread many links to her blog post all over the net. Seems like Google has a ways to go on recognizing original authors.

Maybe Washington Post should investigate the rel author tag rather than relying on this sort of Facebook app for their traffic. And what’s so wrong with allowing a click through to the article even if I say “no thank you” to the app? At least they would get a visit out of me to their site.

Facebook lifts 25 likes requirement for usernames?

Kathy Alice — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:14:01 +0000

Has Facebook lifted the 25 likes requirement that a page needs to get it’s own custom username? When I was messing around with the new Facebook timeline format I noticed a link to “choose username” in the admin panel. Not thinking it would work, because I only had 10 likes on the page, I went ahead and clicked on it anyway, and to my great surprise, I was able to get a username for the page!

Just to quickly recap. When you first create a Facebook fan page, your page will have an ugly looking URL with lots of numbers. The Facebook documentation continues to say that 25 people have to like your page before you can choose your custom username so that you can have a prettier URL for your page.

People have noticed that the 25 like requirement has been lifted before. But it always has been transient. Maybe the limit has been lowered? Or perhaps it is related to the rollout of the Facebook Timeline feature? Whatever it is, there is no guarantee it will last, so give it a try soon.

Facebook Timeline Deadlines are Fast Approaching

Kathy Alice — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:15:37 +0000

Have you published your page with the new Facebook Timeline format yet? The dates by when Facebook will automatically convert your pages are fast approaching:

Personal Profile pages: March 9, 2012
Facebook Fan pages: March 30, 2012

Your life is an open book on Facebook Timeline

I used to think of Facebook as a walled garden. Posts I made to my wall would only be seen by my Facebook friends. No more. Not everything shows up on your Facebook Timeline, but that embarrassing post you made 4 years ago? That you’ve forgotten about? It may be on your Timeline. If you haven’t already reviewed your Timeline (whether you have published it or not), you might want to. Mouse over the post (Facebook now calls posts “stories”) and click on the Pencil part of the button that pops up and you will get the option to “hide” it.

Your Facebook Cover Photo

The Timeline format is quite a redesign from the previous format. No curated group of photos in a strip across the top. And that 180 x 540 profile photo on the side? Gone. The most striking feature is the Facebook Cover photo which takes up quite a bit of real estate (850 by 315 pixels – a bigger height than many website header images!). If you don’t choose your cover photo, you get something like the below:

To add a cover photo, click on the add a cover button as shown above. The user interface is almost as picky and unhelpful as the previous profile photo one which had a habit of failing silently. You won’t be able add anything that is less than 399 pixels wide. So if you designed your previous profile photo to match the exact dimensions of 540 pixels high and 180 pixels wide – you are out of luck – Facebook won’t even give you the image as a choice.

My first attempt was to load an image that was 400 pixels wide – which Facebook allowed, but it looked grainy and stretched out. 800 pixels by 200 pixels? It just shows you half of the image and the repositioning interface didn’t work (there’s that failing silently feature). Your best bet is to shoot for an image that is 800 pixels or more and has a height than is .37 of the width. Larger images like your standard camera pic work pretty well as long as you find a portion of the picture that looks good in the 850 x 315 region (so plan on having the top and bottom cut off). BTW, in case it is not obvious (which it wasn’t to me), to change the cover photo, mouse over the cover and you will get a button.

I’m not happy with the image I came up with, the problem is that I’m using images that are better suited for a website header; but given time, I’m sure I can come up with something better to do with all this real estate.

Get Ready for Pinterest

Kathy Alice — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:34:58 +0000

Have you heard about Pinterest? A virtual pinboard to organize and share the things you love, Pinterest is the latest social media craze. I can hear you groan now, “Another social media network? But I already Tweet, Facebook, Stumble, do Google Plus and LinkedIn!”

Surely you would think social media had reached a saturation point by now. Take Facebook who reportedly started shedding users in the US. Almost like a Starbucks on every corner, it seems that everyone that wants a Facebook account has one. Save China, Facebook has a significant presence in most of the world. The last frontier was Brazil, but Facebook is gaining users there despite an entrenched Orkut.

Pinterest Recipe Board

There are several interesting things about Pinterest that bears looking at. Yes, the concept is not exactly new, it’s an image sharing site; but it has sidestepped (at least for now) the copyright issues that have bedeviled other social sites. When you “pin” an image from a web page that you find on the internet to one of your Pinterest boards, attribution to the original source is automatically included. While the permission of the original author is not part of the transaction, most site owners are fine with (and actively encourage) their work to be shared as long as they get credit. And if not? There is a way to “Report Pin”.

Pinterest is also different enough from Twitter, Facebook and other competitors. You aren’t tweeting links, or “friending”, you are collecting images and sharing them. It’s the next take on a bookmarking service – and as visually appealing (and easy to use) as the iPad Flipboard app. You can use it to save your favorite recipes or plan your next vacation. This makes it useful in a way that Facebook and Twitter isn’t (although I must admit, I have a tendency to tweet links that I want to keep track of).

Source: seomoz.org via Emily on Pinterest

With the built in attribution link and it’s viral nature – not only can you “Like” and “Re-pin” the image within Pinterest itself, but you can Tweet, Facebook Like and Embed the image – there is some serious potential traffic and SEO benefit here. The “Cookies” cartoon is courtesy of a seomoz pin that I embedded. I get a cool fun image and seomoz gets a followed link. Early adopters are reporting that their campaigns are getting a boost from their Pinterest pins.

Pinterest is currently by invitation only. But if you have a mainstream friendly topic: celebrities, food, fashion or travel (or even if you don’t) you might consider jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon.

How will you be using Pinterest?

Is Anchor Text in Backlinks No Longer Relevant?

Kathy Alice — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:29:13 +0000

If you research SEO, you will find that one recommendation is to build backlinks with relevant keyword rich anchor text. This touches on the topic of linkbuilding which is the activity of getting other websites to link to yours. Anchor text in the links with keywords gives Google another signal that your page is relevant to those keywords and should rank for search queries containing those keywords. Or so the story goes.

Recently Google has been publishing blog posts that cover search algorithm changes. Google makes hundreds if not thousands algorithmic changes each year, but some of them have more impact than others, and these blog posts summarizing the recent changes have been popular.

In a November 2011 Google blog post, entitled Ten recent algorithm changes, one bullet was titled “Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors” and included the statement “We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these.” What they mean by boilerplate links is a lot of backlinks that all use the exact same anchor text.

Google has always had an uneasy relationship with linkbuilding, it likes to pretend it is not needed, that if you write great content the links will come naturally. This may be true but it’s very slow as I can attest to (I’ve done almost no linkbuilding for this blog). It doesn’t help that linkbuilding WORKS, I have definitely seen (albeit prior to this announcement) a site rank for a keyword based almost exclusively on the strength of duplicated anchor text in many boilerplate backlinks. However with Google it’s always important to keep in mind that your rankings can change quickly, so the more clever SEOs vary the anchor text in the backlink profile so that it is more natural looking and won’t get devalued by Google as spammy at some point.

So to me this announcement from Google indicated that they were getting more clever at detecting these unnatural link profiles and linkbuilders needed to vary the link anchor text in the backlinks, if they weren’t already.

Peter Prestipino in an article “Inside the Black Box” has a different take on the Google announcement. He thinks it is a sign that Google has begun to deprecate the value of anchor text within inbound links in the influence of search result page titles.” He then goes on to say: “This means all of the work SEO professionals has put into varying the anchor text used in their link-building campaigns may be for naught.” A different conclusion than the one I came to for sure.

Like many things in the SEO world, the reality is that only data from a focused test will conclusively say one way or the other. But I hate to write a blog post that doesn’t offer any conclusive actions to take so here is what I am suggesting:

If you do linkbuilding and you don’t vary the pages you link to nor the keywords in the anchor text – start doing so. Read up on using “partial matching” and “synonyms” in your anchor text.
Make sure there are some natural looking backlinks. Most sites (like this one) have backlinks with the domain name or the author name in the anchor text – yours should too.
Engage in activities to attract links to your site. Promote via social media and learn the art of PR.
Make sure the links you get are from good quality sites that are relevant to your topic. Another bullet in the November post covered “snippets with more page content and less header/menu content.” indicating Google is looking more closely at page content (rather than just the header) to determine what a page is about. If they are truly deprecating the value of the link anchor text, it’s not much of a leap to theorize they are using the page content surrounding the link as a stronger signal.

The more natural you can make your backlink profile look, the less likely you will be affect by Google algorithm changes like these.