• Websites’ pages are often generated dynamically into HTML from structured data that are directly extracted from databases.
• With Schema.org’s markup standards, Google, Yahoo and Bing can understand the information on web pages through the original structured data and provide rich snippets within organic search results.

Microdata

Schema.org uses Microdata.

We’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. We’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats.

Microdata is a set of tags that is compatible to HTML5 that allows you to display rich snippets for markup types including:

• Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
• Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
• Event
• Organization
• Person
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
• Review, AggregateRating

To markup web page’s content using Microdata:

• http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets allow webmasters with websites containing structured data/content (including review sites, etc) to label their content so each piece of text represents a certain type of data. The structured data/content won’t appear to visitors to webmasters’ sites, but will help Google better understand and present information from webmasters’ web pages within Google SEO results.

Google supports 3 types of Rich Snippets formats:

• Microdata
• Microformats
• RDFa

Before officially launching Schema.org, Google first introduced Rich Snippets in 2009:

• Introducing Rich Snippets – May 2009
• An update on Rich Snippets – October 2009
• A new Rich Snippets format: Events – January 2010
• Microdata support for Rich Snippets – March 2010
• Rich Snippets go international – April 2010
• Recipe view, based on Rich Snippets markup – February 2011

Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool:

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

• Page title tags
• META description tags
• META keywords tags
• META Robots tags

META Tags for SEO

Google offers official overviews (1 and 2) on SEO META tags.

META tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. META tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the META tags they understand and ignores the rest.

On-page search engine optimization (SEO) involves optimizing your web pages’ META tags. The updated Google SEO beginners guide offers the best practices to optimize META tags for SEO.

Page Title META Tag

Page title tags affect Google’s, Yahoo’s and Bing’s search algorithms and your search results’ click through rate (CTR).

• Target Several Keywords without Stuffing Your Page Title – A web page should be triggered by several different keyword search queries and rank.
• Use Symbols to Make Page Title Stand Out in SERPs – Improve the click through rate (CTR) of your web pages’ search results.
• Changing Your Site’s Title and Description in Search Results – Google officially explains how to create good page titles and META descriptions, and how to prevent DMOZ data from appearing in search results.
• Is Your Search Result Sexy? – Know the optimal length of your title tag.

META Description Tag

META descriptions (snippets) are for users to understand what your website offers, and affect your search results’ click through rate (CTR).

• Improve Snippets with a Meta Description Makeover – Google says the quality of your META description affects the click through rate (CTR) of your web page’s search results.
• Optimizing the Page Search Results Snippet: On-Page Tactics – Keywords optimized page titles and SEO optimized META descriptions can improve CTR.
• Two New Improvements to Google Results Pages – Google returns search results in longer description snippets for long search queries.
• Longer Snippets at Google Means? – Experiment with Google’s longer description snippets.
• Introducing Rich Snippets – Show more information in search results with Google’s Rich Snippets.
• Google Webmaster Tools offers reports of your site on duplicate META descriptions, long META descriptions, missing title tags, duplicate title tags, long title tags, and non-informative title tags as HTML suggestions.

META Keywords Tag

Histories and Google’s official confirmation on META keywords tags:

• Google Does Not Use the Keywords Meta Tag in Web Ranking – Google officially confirms META keywords do not affect search ranking of your web pages.
• Meta Keywords Tag 101: How to Legally Hide Words on Your Pages for Search Engines – Keyword stuffing can get your web pages banned from showing up on search engines’ SERP, and relying on META keywords to rank your web pages comes to an end.

META Robots Tag

Use META robots tags to control how search engine bots (e.g. GoogleBot, Baiduspider, Bing’s MSNBot, Yahoo’s Slurp) access your sites.

• Using the Robots Meta Tag – Tell the search engines to index, noindex, follow or nofollow your web pages with NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW and how your search results are to appear in SERP with NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, NOODP.
• Robots Exclusion Protocol: Now with Even More Flexibility – Advanced use of META robots tags with X-Robots-Tag
• What are the Meta Tags NOODP and NOYDIR Used for in SEO? – SEO Boy explains NOODP and NOYDIR attributes in META robots tags.

Robots.txt

Use instructions in Robots.txt when META robots tags alone are not enough.

• Controlling how search engines access and index your website – Google explains robots.txt is the industry standard when you are to control how search engines access/index your websites.
• Robotstxt.org FAQ – What are bots, spiders, crawlers? How do robots index websites? How can you block/exclude robots from crawling/indexing websites or web pages?
• Search Engine Robots Database (List) – Download the list of all search engine robots.
• Baidu Robots.txt – Use Robots.txt to block Baidu spider.

SEO Tools for META Tags

Tools to help you with creating and optimizing META tags:

• SEO Mofo’s Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool – Test how your page titles and META descriptions may appear on Google’s SERP.
• Use Excel to Plan Meta Tags, Titles and URLs for SEO – Create and check your META tags using Excel before going online.

On-page SEO Checklist

Double check your optimized META tags.

• An On-page Optimization SEO Checklist

• Google, Yahoo, and Bing search algorithms

With Bing-Yahoo Search Alliance, targeting the major English-speaking markets through search engine optimization will require to master:

• Google SEO
• Bing SEO

Google’s 200 Ranking Factors

Microsoft’s Bing search engine tried to offer “different” algorithmic search results to Google’s search results, however:

• Bing may still believe Google’s search algorithm is still superior to and produces more relevant search results than Bing’s search algorithm.
• Eric Schmidt once admitted Google’s 200 search engine ranking factors (including Google PageRank) are business secrets.

Danny Sullivan made a list of Google’s ranking factors (incomplete list):

• Presence of search term in HTML title tag
• Presence of search term in HTML body copy
• Use of bold around search term
• Use of header tags around search term
• Presence of search term in anchor text leading to page
• PageRank of a page
• PageRank / authority of an entire domain
• Speed of web site

Google’s ranking factors also contain social signals including click through rates (CTR) and low bounce rates which can be collected through sources from:

• Google Toolbar
• Google’s Cusom Search Engines
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools

Bing Copied Google’s Search Algorithm

Google recently put up an accusation about Microsoft Bing:

• Google discovered in October 2010 that Bing was showing a much greater overlap with Google’s top 10 search results and an increase in the percentage of times listed exactly the same page in the number one spot as Google’s, than in previous months.
• Google set up a bait (i.e. sting operation) by creating 100 “synthetic” searches (i.e. queries that few users would ever enter in Google’s search box).
• Google verified Bing has been indeed copying Google’s search results as within 2 weeks, the “synthetic” search results started showing up on Bing’s search results.
• Google accused Bing for copying Google’s search algorithm when both representatives of Google and Bing showed up in a panel at the ThinkBig Farsight 2011 event.

Bing did not directly deny Google’s accusation and revealed:

• Bing’s search algorithm consists of over 1,000 signals.
• Bing uses clickstream data collected from users who have opt-ed in to share anonymous data when navigate the web.

Danny Sullivan’s provided insights for search engine optimization on both Bing and Google:

Well, as a search marketer, I learned something new – how you rank on Google may have an impact on how you rank on Bing. Probably a tiny impact.

Google said they didn’t use toolbar data for to help sites. But I also pointed out that they do use it for measuring site speed – which is a ranking factor.

Optimize your sites for Bing:

• Be consistent with ranking signals in URL structure, internal linking, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, and robots.txt
• Make it easy for Bing’s crawler, MSNbot, to discover your web pages – e.g. One of Google’s suggestions is to optimize website’s page load time
• Create high quality, original content
• Bing is susceptible to link spam
• Run SEO keyword research through Bing’s keyword tools
• Use information in Bing’s Webmaster Tools

Eye Tracking Study: Google vs Bing Search Results

User Centric conducted eye tracking tests to compare the amount and distribution of attention on Bing’s and Google’s search engine results pages (SERP). The image below was extracted from User Centric eye tracking study:

The test results indicate the users spend more time viewing Google’s organic search results with 14.7 seconds to Bing’s 10.7 seconds. The percentages of users that have viewed the 4 areas of the SERP:

• Sponsored results at the top – Google: 91%, Bing: 90%
• Sponsored results to the right of the organic search results – Google: 28%, Bing: 21%
• Organic search results – Google: 100%, Bing: 100%
• Left pane – Google: 17%, Bing: 18%

About User Centric’s test method on Bing and Google:

• Twenty-four experienced users of both Google and Bing participated in the tests.
• Users’ eye movements were recorded with the Tobii T60 eye tracker.
• The eye tracking study analyzed the percentage of users (i.e. hit rate) who looked at each of the 4 areas and the time (i.e. gaze time) the users spent viewing the 4 areas.
• Each user conducted 4 Google searches (with Google Instant disabled) and 4 Bing searches, in which 2 searches were informational (“healthy food” and “landscaping”) and the other 2 searches were transactional (“engagement ring” and “last minute vacations”).

0

200 Status Code

200 means status ok in which the file request was successful.

301 Redirect

301 redirect means moved permanently and should be used when you are moving your entire site to a different location (e.g. moving your site to a new domain name).

302 Redirect

302 redirect signals a temporary redirect. For example, the file was found but was temporarily located at another URI.

403 Server Code

403 means the document request was forbidden – Access to a URL was prevented.

404 Server Code

404 means a document was not found – The server could not find the URL requested.

A

AJAX

AJAX means Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is a programming language technique that allows a web page to be updated without completely reloading the web page.

Algorithm

Algorithm is a set of rules that a search engine uses to rank web pages according to user’s search queries. Google’s search algorithms use over 200 factors including Google PageRank to rank websites and Google regularly updates the search algorithms.

Revise Google, Yahoo and Bing search algorithms.

ALT Attribute

ALT attribute is a HTML tag (ALT tag) that uses with images and helps screen readers and search engines understand the meaning of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object. The image text description is visible when you “hover” the image.

ALT attribute is also called ALT text.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text (words) that a user clicks on to follow a link.

Webmasters use anchor text as signals for search engines to determine a web page’s relevance. Search engines believe your web page is authoritative for the words that other sites include in links pointing at your website.

B

Backlinks

Backlinks are links pointing from one website to another website. The more high quality backlinks a web page receive, the higher the page ranks in the SERP.

Review the backlinks pointing to your site from other sites through Google Webmaster Tools.

Backlinks are also called inbound links.

C

Canonicalization

Canonicalization, according to Matt Cutts, is:

The process of picking the best URL when there are several choices; this usually refers to home pages.

SEO Book explains canonical URLs are caused by:

• Different host names i.e. www.example.com vs example.com
• Redirects pointing to different URLs i.e. 302 used inappropriately
• Forwarding multiple URLs to the same content, and/or publishing the same content on multiple domains
• Improperly configured dynamic URLs i.e. any url rewriting based on changing conditions
• Two index pages appearing in the same location i.e. Index.htm vs Index.html
• Different protocols i.e. https://www vs http://www
• Multiple slashes in the filepath i.e. www.example.com/ vs www.example.com//
• Scripts that generate alternate URLs for the same content i.e. some blogging and forum software, ecommerce software that adds tracking URLs
• Port numbers in the domain name i.e. example.com/4430 : can sometimes be seen in virtual hosting environments.
• Capitalization – i.e. www.example.com/Index.html vs www.example.com/index.html
• URLs “built” from the path you take to reach a page i.e. tracking software may incorporate the click path in the URL for statistical purposes.
• Trailing questions marks, with or without parameters i.e. www.example.com/? or www.example.com/?source=cnn (a common tagging strategy amongst ad buys)

Webmasters should use consistent internal site linking structure to help search engines index the canonical (correct) version of your site’s URLs and prevent link juice leaking through canonical URLs.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS is a method to add styles to HTML web pages and contains information including paragraph layout, colors and font sizes about your HTML documents.

Cloaking

Cloaking is when a site shows different versions of a web page to search engines and users. Unless the objective is to SEO geo-target users based locations, search engines regard other types of cloaking illegal and may ban your sites from showing up on SERP.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

CMS is a web application that makes it easy for webmasters to update information to websites.

Crawlability

Crawlability refers to the ability of a website to be indexed by a search engine’s crawler. Your site is fully crawlable when search engine crawlers can follow all the links on your website.

Crawler

Crawlers are also known as spiders or bots. Search engine crawlers search the web for pages / content to include in the search engine index. Crawlers are automated programs that follow links on web pages to other web pages. The spider names of Google, Bing, Yahoo and Baidu are:

• Google: GoogleBot
• Bing: MSNBot
• Yahoo: Slurp
• Baidu: Baiduspider

To include your site in search engines index, ensure crawlers can follow links on your site.

D

Domain

Domain refers to a specific website address.

Doorway Page

Doorway pages are web pages created to rank for highly targeted keywords, to redirect users to another web page with other content than they expect. Doorway page is also called bridge page or gateway page.

E

Entry Page

Entry page is the first page a user lands when visiting your site, and is also called landing page.

F

Flash

With Flash, animation and interactivity can be added to web pages. However, most search engine spiders have issues crawling content in Flash files.

Frames

With frames, more than one web pages can be embedded and displayed in one browser window.

Avoid creating your web pages with frames as search engine spiders have issues crawling / determining the text content on web pages embedded in frames.

Forward DNS

Forward DNS is the process to translate domain/host names to the numeric addresses of websites, IP addresses.

H

Head Terms

Head terms are search queries that receive extremely high search volume, for example, “phone”, “music”.

Google Webmaster Tools search queries report allows you to view users’ head term search queries.

Hidden text

Hidden text (or invisible text) is text that is invisible to users but visible to search engines, and is a technique applied to fool search engine spiders.

Google has methods to detect hidden text and regards using hidden text as a way to spam SERP.

.htaccess file

.htaccess file is an Apache directory-level configuration file that can be used to password protect or redirect files. .htaccess file consists of one or more configuration directives located in a website document directory. The directives apply to that directory and all sub-directories.

HTML Site Map

HTML sitemap is a web page that:

• Consists of links pointing to all the web pages of your site.
• Serves as an alternative route (other than the main site navigation) for search engine spiders to crawl your web pages.

Examples of HTML site map documents:

• Google’s sitemap
• PPC Blog’s archives page

Http

Http represents Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

Https

Https represents Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.

Http Referrer

Http Referrer is a program that returns the source of traffic coming to the user’s site.

I

Index

A search engine’s index is a organized and informative database that stores extremely large amount of web documents found by the search engine’s crawler from the web.

For example, your web pages have to be in Google’s index before they can show up in Google’s SERP.

IP Address

Internet Protocol Addresses (IP Addresses) are unique sets of location-based numbers assigned to networks or computers for communicating across the Internet using TCP/IP protocol. An IP consists of a 32-bit numeric address with 4 numbers separated by periods. The value of each number ranges from 0 to 255.

For example, 192.168.8.1 up to 192.168.15.254 are valid IP addresses.

K

Keyword

Keyword is a word that implies a specific topic. For example, “PPC” is the main topic of this blog.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase that is used within the content of a web page.

Keyword Density = A Specific Keyword / Total number of keywords

The higher the number of times a keyword appears in a web page, the higher the keyword density.

Keyword Stemming

Keyword stemming is to expand from a “stem” word and create additional keywords related to the “stem” keyword.

For example, “digital camera” is a stem keyword, and we expand to create new keywords:

Nikon digital camera 14MP
Canon digital camera
Nikon digital camera 3X
Used Nikon digital camera

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique used by webmasters to boost a website’s organic search engine ranking. Webmasters “stuff keywords” by ensuring the same keywords appear on a web page excessive number of times where user experience is usually sacrificed.

Keyword stuffing is completely outdated and adds no value to a website’s search engine rankings today.

L

Link Popularity

Link popularity is the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website from other websites. When many high quality links from other websites (external inbound links) and from your own websites (internal inbound links) link to your site, search engines believe your site is important and your web pages may ranked higher in SERP.

Link Bait

Link bait is when you create content on your site that people will find “valuable” and very interested. Your content have created “values”, eventually other webmasters / people will link to your content.

Log File

A Log file (or web server log) records all information about a website’s incoming and outgoing traffic, including search engine spider activities, that can be analyzed by webmasters to improve a site’s SEO.

Long Tail Keyword

Long tail keywords are highly specific search queries that receive low search volume, for example, “Canon PowerShot SD980 12.1 Megapixel”. Long tail search queries that trigger long tail keywords usually have very high click through rates.

M

META Description Tag

META description tag is where you place a brief description of your web page.

In Google’s SERP, META description tags appear for the web pages that are in the search results. Writing a relevant and unique META description tag for each of your web page is important and can increase your search results’ click through rates.

META Keywords Tag

META keywords tag is an HTML tag that holds keyword phrases, separated by commas on your web pages.

Most search engines do not find META keywords tag useful. Google confirmed META keywords tags do not contribute to organic search rankings.

N

NoFollow

NoFollow (rel="nofollow") is an attribute for webmasters to tell search engines:

• Not to follow any links on a web page
• Not to follow a specific link on a web page

Google suggests webmasters should consider using “nofollow” for untrusted content, paid links or crawl prioritization.

O

Organic Results

Organic results are non-paid search results of web pages that appear in the SERPs.

P

PageRank (PR)

PageRank is Google’s patented technology that was developed at Stanford University and is Google’s SEO ranking algorithm that reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages. Important web pages in Google’s index are:

• Assigned higher PageRank
• More likely to rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERP)

Increase Google PageRank explains:

• When a linked web page that receives two links, one from a more important web page and the other from a less important web page, the link juice from the more important page is considered to be a higher value vote to the linked page.
• Based on the entire web’s link structures, Google uses over 200 signals/factors including the PageRank algorithm to identify which web pages are most important. Then Google combines web pages’ importance, page-based text matching techniques and search query specific relevance to rank web pages in SERP.

Penalty

Penalties are actions algorithmically or manually applied to a site suspected of using spamming techniques and prevent the website from ranking high in the SERP.

Search engines give penalties to websites that implement spamming techniques.

• How many Google penalties are there
• How to handle a Google penalty
• Confirming a penalty

The ban/penalty may be lifted after you have fixed the issues for being penalized. For example, webmasters can submit a reinclusion request to Google.

R

Reverse DNS

Reverse DNS is the process to translate the numeric addresses of websites, IP addresses, to domain/host names. Find out:

• What Reverse DNS serves for
• How to configure the Reverse DNS
• Where to get Reverse DNS lookup tools

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file in the root directory of a website that tells search engines:

• The part of a site that should allow search engine spiders’ crawling.
• The part of a site that should be blocked from search engine spiders’ access.

You can configure robots.txt with instructions to block crawl access from:

• Google’s GoogleBot, Yahoo’s Slurp and Bing’s MSNbot, as the big 3 search engines obey the instructions in Robots.txt.
• Baiduspider: Review Baidu Robots.txt

S

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a search engine marketing technique to improve a website’s visibility within one or more search engines.

Fine more official and unofficial definitions for SEO from Google SEO for beginners.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

A search engine results page (SERP) is the page with search results that is returned to a user, after the user entered a search query into search engine’s search box.

For example, Google’s SERP consists of both organic search results (SEO) and paid search results (PPC).

Search Engine Submission

Search engine submission is a method for search engines to “know” the existence of your new website. Google, Yahoo Bing and Baidu all provide submission pages to webmasters:

• How to get search engine traffic to new websites
• Submit site to Bing
• Submit site to Baidu

Google, Bing and Yahoo allow local-based businesses to manually submit websites to local business search:

• Submit sites to Google, Yahoo, Bing local business search

Search Engines

Search engines defined by Wikipedia:

A search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are presented in a list of results. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.

Search Query

A search query is a keyword or keyword phrase that a user enters into a search engine’s search box field. The search engine then determines the search results to return to the user.

For example, Google Webmaster Tools search queries report shows you users’ search queries in which your web pages showed up in Google’s SERP.

Server-side Tracking

Server-side tracking refers to monitoring web traffic through web server’s log files.

Session ID

Session ID is a unique number assigned to each individual user’s visit (or session) to a website.

Websites that use session IDs can cause duplicate content issues for search engines, as every time a search engine spider requests/crawls a web page from the site, a different URL (with a different session ID) is generated.

Spam

Spams (or webspams) are deliberate search engine marketing techniques to improve search engine rankings by violating search engines’ guidelines. Spamming techniques include:

• Keyword stuffing
• Hidden text
• Doorway pages
• Link farms
• Duplicate content

Spider

See Crawler.

Stop Word

Stop words are words that search engines consider no importance to a web page’s ranking in SERP and do not contribute to keyword density of your web pages.

Examples of stop words include “the”, “and”, “of”, “is”, “for”.

T

Theme

A theme is an overall topic of a web page. Having an obvious topic for your web page will help search engines determine the theme of your page and rank your page in the SERP.

For example, Google looks at the keyword density and keyword stemming of a web page and determines the web page’s theme.

Title Tag

Title tag in an HTML document is where you place the page title of a web page.

• In Google SERP, the content of your web page’s title tag usually shows up in the first line of a search result.
• Using a relevant and unique title tag for each web page is important and can increase the click through rate of your search results.
• Title tag is one of the factors in organic search engine’s ranking algorithm.

Traffic

Traffic is the number of unique visitors or visits (sessions) that a website receives. Programs that can provide traffic information of your site:

• Website’s log file
• Google Analytics

U

URL Rewrite

URL rewrite is a method, mod_rewrite, that is applied to a site’s URLs. Webmasters apply URL rewrites to:

• Change dynamic URLs that are difficult for search engines’ spiders to index to static URLs.
• Sites that are to change directory structures for content re-organization.

User Agent

User agent refers to the software programs’ identity when visiting a website. Spiders and browsers are classified as user agents.

• Spiders: e.g. GoogleBot, Baiduspider
• Browsers: e.g. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer

X

XML Site Map

An XML site map is a document in XML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) format that lists all the web pages of your site. Google encourages webmasters using XML site maps:

Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

SEO Glossary Lists

Webmasters should also review SEO glossary lists created by other SEO experts.

• SEO Book – Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
• SEMPO
• SEOmoz Blog
• SEO Theory
• Search Engine Dictionary

SEO Tips for Webmasters

• Google SEO for beginners: Offers Google’s official SEO definition and fundamental SEO tips, including SEO ranking factors, SEO guides for download and why you should use Google Webmaster Tools.
• Best Google SEO resources Offers tips on domain names and web hosting selection criteria, keyword research, site architecture and url structure, site navigation, canonicalization and content duplication, linking building and paid link issues, google penalties, seo geo-targeting, social media for seo, seo for blogs, universal search, and google sitelinks.
• Google SEO beginners guide update: Google updated the SEO starter guide for all webmasters.

Google Places (or Google’s Business Listings)

Listing your local business on Google Places is free. Your business listing can include:

• Phone numbers
• Physical addresses with ZIP codes
• Hours of operation
• Website URL
• Printable coupons

Google Places allows you to edit individual locations or add/update up to 10,000 locations through Excel spreadsheet format. Your local business listings can take up to 4 weeks to appear on Google Maps after submission.

Submit your website to Google Places. Google officially offers:

• Google Places User Guide
• Google Places Policies / Quality guidelines

Yahoo Local Listing Center

Yahoo offers 2 types of local listings:

• Basic Listing: You can display a free business listing that consists of phone number, physical address, and web site URL, store hours, and a short description of products and services.
• Enhanced Listing: You pay USD 9.95 per month to include all the features of a Basic Listing, and can display company logo with tagline, up to 10 photos, detailed business descriptions and online coupons.

Submit your website to Yahoo Local Listing Center.

Bing Local Listing Center

Microsoft Bing Search Engine offers Bing Local Listing Center which is free.

For example, Bing Local Listing for a local restaurant shows the website URL, locations on Bing’s Maps, editorial reviews and users’ reviews.

Submit your website to Bing Local Listing Center.

SEO Geo-targeting for Small Websites, Local Websites

Besides listing your site on Google Places, Yahoo Local Listing Center and Bing Local Listing Center, optimize your websites for geo-locations:

• SEO geo targeting for a single country
• SEO geo targeting for multiple countries
• SEO tips, marketing tips for small websites

Discover your sites’ search engine optimization issues with the search engines’ official webmaster tools and improve on SEO:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster Tools

Keyword Stuffing Definitions

Wikipedia defines keyword stuffing as:

An unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique.

Google officially defines keyword stuffing as:

The practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results.

Do a Google web search on “Keyword Stuffing” and Google Wonder Wheel tool relates “Keyword Stuffing” to:

• Keyword Stuffing Example
• Keyword Stuffing Search Engines
• Keyword Density
• Keyword Stuffing Limit
• Check Keyword Stuffing
• Keyword Stuffing Webmaster Help Center
• Black Hat SEO
• Inbound Links

Google’s Related Searches shows keyword stuffing relates to:

• Keyword spamming
• Spamdexing
• Link farms
• Link Baiting
• Doorway Pages

Keyword Stuffing Techniques

Keyword stuffing’s purpose is to increase the keyword density of a webpage. Keyword density is the number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times a keyword appears on a page, the more weight the keyword is given by the search engines when a search query matches keyword.

The black hat SEO techniques of keyword stuffing include:

• Placing repeated keywords in the body of a webpage where readability and the meaning of the content are neglected.
• Hiding keywords on a webpage by making the text the same color as the background.
• Stuffing keywords in META keywords tags or in comment tags.
• Over-filling image alt tags with long strings of keywords.
• Placing keywords in cascade style sheet (CSS).
• Filling keywords in noscript tags.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Google and other major search engines today no longer gives good rankings to pages employing keyword stuffing techniques.

• Google’s Matt Cutts insists avoiding keyword stuffing.
• SEO Black Hat explains how search engine detects keyword stuffing techniques.

As over-optimizing your webpages’ keyword density can backfire, focus on white hat search engine optimization techniques by reviewing Google SEO for Beginners and Google SEO Starter Guide.

Web Page Content, User Experience, Related Keyword Research

Keyword stuffing is strongly discouraged as this method:

• Detracts the readability and usability of your web pages.
• Creates negative user experience and high web analytics bounce rate to your site.

When creating website content, focus on user experience by creating useful and informative content that uses keywords in context and without repeating the same keywords excessively. Use keywords that are highly related to the core keywords of your web pages. Use keyword research tools to find the related keywords:

• SEM keyword research tools
• Google Wonder Wheel tool
• Google search-based keyword tool
• Google Insights for Search

For Chinese keywords, use:

• Chinese keyword research tools
• Baidu keyword research tool

• Google’s Algorithm
• Yahoo’s Algorithm
• Bing’s Algorithm

Stephen Noton’s 14 main Points to Google’s search algorithm:

• Website’s IP / server location
• Title of page
• META description
• Domain name
• PageRank of links to the website
• Number of links to the website
• PageRank of links to the page
• Text in the links to the page
• Number of links to the page
• Page’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on search results
• Stickiness of page from search results
• Freshness of page content
• Page theme/keyword density
• Total number of pages on website
• Website’s theme in Google
• Links on page to external websites

Stephen Noton’s 9 additional items used by the Google SPAM check:

• Location on page of external links
• Text surrounding external links
• Uniqueness of page with linking to the page
• Number of links on the page linking to the page
• Maintenance of external links
• Quality of hosting company / name servers
• Name / email used on registration
• Domain registrar used
• Length of domain registration

Stephen Noton’s 9 main Points to Yahoo’s search algorithm:

• Title of page
• META description
• Domain name
• WebRank of website
• WebRank of links to the page
• Text in the links to the page
• Number of Links to the page
• Page’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on search results
• Page theme/keyword density

Stephen Noton’s 6 main Points to Bing’s search algorithm:

• Title of page
• META description
• Text in the links to the page
• Number of links to the page
• Page theme/keyword density
• Freshness of page content

Before your website ranks well on Google, Yahoo and Bing, make sure you monitor how the top three search engines think about your site regarding, pages crawled, crawl rate of your web pages, back links, sitemaps, robots.txt, and error issues such as 404.

Sign up and use the webmaster tools below that are specifically provided to each of the three search engines:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster Tools

Buy-in from Executives

Before In-house SEO can be started, the entire management team (of executives) must be convinced, involved and in agreement. The corporate executives are the people who make strategic decisions on company directions and can authorize your SEO team the use of company resources.

• Analyze the SEO performance of the major competitor websites via Hitwise or ComScore
• Present the data to the management team and explain how the SEO work will benefit the company’s long term growth
• Work out the return on investment (ROI) of your SEO proposal
• Define the workload and the roadmap for achieving your goals
• Track your progress, measure the SEO results (via web analytics tool such as Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics or Omniture) and report regularly to the executives

Site Ownerships

The corporate web site may be divided into multiple sections in which each team has ownership and management responsibility of a particular section. For example, each team probably manages the daily operations of one of the following sections:

• Homepage
• Product categories and sub-categories
• New product section
• Product pages
• Purchase / conversion Flow
• Community, forum and customer-review sections
• Site navigation

The operational managers of the different website sections are the decision makers who ensure the work gets done across the resources they have on hand. These teams decide what content goes on to their own sections and they may have their own content creators and copy writers.

At this level, your SEO team’s job is not only to implement the SEO strategies you have set out, but is to also influence and educate the “site owners”. You will have to find the common goals among your team and each site owner team, and start working towards the goals with the support and resources of the site owner teams.

SEO is not all about ranking in the SERP, so along the line you will have to optimize your conversion flow via web page A/B testing tools such as Google Website Optimizer.

Web Development and Design Resources

The IT department often is where the design and web development resources are, and can be one of the opponents to the SEO team. Even though you may already have executives’ permissions in using resources, you will still have to reserve your web development and design resources in advance.

SEO Best Practices

As Google’s search market share has grown rapidly in the last couple of years, it would make sense to optimize your web site for Google’s ranking algorithm (refer to increase Google PageRank). For the good SEO performance to last, everyone will need to follow a set of search engine optimization standards. Your SEO team must create a best practice guide such as Google SEO for Beginners in which people within the corporation will refer to and follow.

Gordon Choi: Thank Stephen for taking the time to share your thoughts. Can you tell me a little about your online marketing and consulting experience?

Stephen Noton: I started online in 1997, went straight into ecommerce selling automotive racing parts online.  I was only 19 so while I understood the Internet I didn’t have a good understanding of the business side, so after a year I sold off the assets of the company and started into consulting and marketing for other companies on the Internet.  11 years later I’m still doing consulting and working on some of my own passions, which still include car racing.

Gordon Choi: Google’s organic search algorithm has been changing so much in the past several years. Some of the factors once allowed a site to rank well can no longer apply. Where do you see Google applying more weight on the algorithm?

Stephen Noton: Google is getting away from their focus on external links as they are building up more and more signs of a good website.  Google Trends for websites is a good public example of how Google can track the traffic, use, and possible value of a website rather then just looking at links.  When you think about it back links are not the most effective way of assigning value, offline marketing, repeat customers, and traditional WOM (word of mouth) are all excluded if you just look at links.

Gordon Choi: Do you think webmasters should spend their time on creating valuable contents instead of spend large amount of money buying links? Why?

Stephen Noton: Other than the focus on links another misconception on the Internet is creating more and more content, while content is good, too much content can actually harm your focus and your goals.  But your comment on creating “valuable” content is correct, people should be focused on creating, maintaining and improving the content their audiences wants.

Gordon Choi: With those companies you have worked with, what were the major SEO problems they commonly had?

Stephen Noton: It is usually a technology issue, most websites’ backend where built without thoughts of the users and SEO, so correcting a backend for a major website is often a major issue.  Some websites have started from scratch others have patched their systems but the best companies start out with the user in mind long before any coding is done.

Gordon Choi: From your experience working with SEO teams of many companies across the world, do you find it easy or difficult to give SEO consulting and training? If it is difficult, what have been the major obstacles and how have you been overcoming them?

Stephen Noton: I have the unique challenge of language barrier in a lot of my training, so that’s probably the biggest issue.  Other than that training is actually relatively easy as SEO is all about logic.  So often all you need to do is outline the process and the how’s & why’s and 99% of the team can follow.  Overcoming the language barrier is hard, but using drawings, simpler English and the help of a good translator I’ve been able to train in English, Thai, Vietnamese, & Chinese.

Gordon Choi: Some businesses were created without SEO in mind at the first place and they mostly do not believe in SEO or at least do not think SEO is important. How would you go about to convince them SEO will actually help their businesses?

Stephen Noton: A lot of people think SEO is some magic dust or something that only has to do with the coding, but actually it’s all about the user, so when I meet a company that doesn’t understand SEO I walk them through what a good SEO website is and how SEO and usability are almost the same functions.

Gordon Choi: What are the criteria for picking a good domain name?

Stephen Noton: Be something that can become a brand, all too often I see websites being created that have no hope of long term success, simply due to their domain being unbrandable.  While some will say anything can become a brand, I also know that one day scientist might just get pigs to fly but I’d put my efforts into a domain that is: one word/brand name, less then 3 syllables, .com (international/US website) and of course no dashes.

Gordon Choi: What advices will you give anyone who is to buy an existing site that already possesses some level of fame?

Stephen Noton: If possible keep the previous owner on staff/part of the website for 3 months to 1 year.  This will help prevent them walking off with your users, will make the transition to new management within the user base easier and will allow you to learn more about how the site became a success. There is nothing better then watching someone in action to learn, no book or no course can teach you what you can learn by watching someone’s natural ability/instinct.

Gordon Choi: What advices do you have for web sites that are to target the global audience?

Stephen Noton: It’s a big world, think twice before trying to go global, especially if you are trying to sell a product.  Marketing, branding and logistically managing a global project is very costly and time consuming.  Very few companies start global, Mc Donald’s and KFC both started with just 1 restaurant in 1 city, they saw that they had the right idea and the right system of operations and they grew.  This is the same for websites, eBay, Amazon, started with 1 country and even sites like Craigslist which started just in 1 city all proved their idea locally then replicated globally.

Gordon Choi: With Google dominating the search industry, do you think it is a healthy environment? Which sites / companies do you think will give the biggest threats to Google’s business model?

Stephen Noton: Google has so many business models now that it is hard for anything to compete directly with Google as a company, now Google as a search engine, yes there will be changes and there already is.  While in the US Google has the market share, outside of the US there are many countries where Google has little to no market share.  Also think about this none of the search engines that where online when I started 11 years ago are here today, yes Google is big, but thinking that there can be no other possible options in the future is like thinking that the United States is and always will be the most powerful country in the world, one thing is certain on the Internet, things always change.

Gordon Choi: SEO has changed a lot since day one and it is still changing, mostly according to how Google wants it to become. What are the important techniques / qualities that a great SEOer should possess to always keep up-to-date with the fast changing SEO industry?

Stephen Noton: Understand the basic’s of SEO, these really haven’t changed since day 1, which is make sure you have what your user wants and give your user the best experience possible.  Also understand that all search engines even Google are mathematical formula’s and every formula can be understood, while weights/values may change in that formula the inputs/variables are consistent.

Pagerank has not been an accurate indicator to show webmasters how a particular site should be ranked comparing to other sites. Rather, many experienced webmasters and SEO experts have spotted Google, in combating search engine spams, is in favor of using trustrank and domain age to rank websites in the SERP.

SEO is easier than ever and will become a commodity within the next couple of years, as all the optimization rules have been clearly defined and have become standard practices. SEO and web site usability will be consolidated and integrated into each individual company’s business. Web developers and designers will be required to have full set of knowledge on SEO on-page optimization. Branding for a site will become an essential strategy to compliment SEO for gaining trust and popularity from Google.

The future prospects for today’s SEO experts will depend on whether they possess a broad enough scope to evolve their knowledge – what works on the web and what the customers want most from a web site. A person’s full-packaged Internet marketing experience today will become tomorrow’s solid expertise.

When natural search ranking cannot be guaranteed as easily as in the past, Google leaves another effective search engine marketing channel open to search engine marketers – PPC. Those in the SEM industry who are able to overcome the challenges for paid search in 2008 will continue to shine.

2007-05-15: ver 1.19 – Compete.com added! Compete ranking for the current domain now appears in a new bar alongside PageRank and Alexa Rank, with estimated visitors in the menu (can be disabled if not desired). Alexa queries improved to ensure inclusion into Alexa’s toolbar users panel.

Besides the newly added Compete Ranking, the Search Status toolbar already allows webmasters to view Google Pagerank, Alexa ranking and backlinks from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.

Download the toolbar here if you do not have it on your Firefox browser, or wait for the extension update the next time you open up Firefox if you are an existing SearchStatus toolbar user.

Consider the three points below which will make your web pages easily followed by the search engine spider.

Check the directory depth of your site

You should evaluate the directory depth of your web pages. It is always good to avoid creating very deep directory structures in which your web page files are stored. The bad example will look like:

http://www.gordonchoi.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/index.html

A better example will be:

http://www.gordonchoi.com/dir1/index.html

The reasons are that,

• Deep directory structures are difficult to crawl by search engine spiders.
• Deep directory structures are rarely crawled by search engine robots.

Check the link structure of your website

It is important to create a website with link structures that can easily be crawled by search engine spiders. Some websites have been created with search engine unfriendly navigation structures. For example links in Javascript or links on image maps may not be followed by the robots.

If you cannot avoid using Javascript navigation, then the best way is to make a simple text navigation menu at the bottom of your pages.

Check your file name convention

Include your keywords in your file names, instead of naming your files as page1.html, page2.html, and so on. If you do a search on Google for any particular item, you should see that wherever your search keyword appears it is listed in the Google results in bold text. You should normally see this bold text in the title text that is displayed, and in the descriptive text that Google displays under the title text. You should also see it in the URL, if you have included your keywords in the file names. It is even better if you already have some of your keywords in your domain name.

Some webmasters do go further in separating their keywords by hyphens in the file names. This is a good practice but is not absolutely necessary anymore. Nowadays the major search engines are able to recognize keywords within longer text blocks, as this is called keyword stemming.

Check your dynamically created web pages

This is a bonus point. If you are making use of many dynamically generated pages, you may also want to read Crawlability Of Dynamically Created Pages.

SEO is definitely one of the least expensive marketing channel, even if not the cheapest. It can take longer comparing to other methods like PPC advertising, but it is a channel that cannot be ignored.

Whether your marketing strategies consist of an SEO component or not, the following stages of online marketing will always apply:

Stage 1: Increase Traffic Volume

Let say your website provides a service for a small fee. The first obvious thing to do is always to increase the website traffic. Without traffic, it makes no difference whether your service is really good or not.

Depending on your budgets, human resources and skills, whether through SEO or not, at this stage you should always try as much to increase traffic volume to your site.

Stage 2: Improve Site Traction

Once your site has a steady traffic volume, it has traction. It means your audiences love your service and what you are offering. Now your steady audiences have become your repeated visitors.

When your website reaches this stage, you will find ways to bring in more traffic. You will want to work on refining some details on your site which you may have ignored in the past. You will even set goals on increasing your traffic volume by a certain amount each month.

Stage 3: Enhance Site Popularity

If you keep up with your good service to your loyal audiences you have acquired, they will start telling their friends about your service and website. To you this means more traffic, and this time the new source of traffic comes for free.

At this stage, you will start seeing a few competitors emerging all of a sudden simply because they think by copying what you are offering, they will be able to take a piece of your market.

At this moment, you should provide your loyal audiences and new visitors with enhancements to your existing services. Releasing relevant new services should be in consideration as this can distinguish your services to your catching-up competitors. Only by doing this continuously, you will be able to always maintain your head-start to your competitions.

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link. The best-known use for nofollow is blog comment spam, but the mechanism is completely general. Nofollow is recommended anywhere that links can’t be vouched for. If your logs analysis program shows referrers as hyperlinks, I’d recommend using nofollow on those links. If you have a wiki that anyone on the web can edit, I’d recommend nofollow on those links until you can find a way to trust those links. In general, if you have an application that allows others to add links, web spammers will eventually find your pages and start annoying you.

In combating blog comment spam, blog software providers including WordPress, Bloggers, LiveJournal and others have since supporting this by default.

Other than blogs, as a great resource Wikipedia is one of those web properties that had been suffering from link spamming. Basically everyone is allowed to freely edit or add links to it. This led to Wikipedia introducing the nofollow attribute to its all external links. This as a whole may have killed the concept behind link popularity as no one ever gets any link weights from this resourceful site!

To appeal, certain blogs (like Marketing Pilgrim) are very against this idea of Wikipedia and even went all the way to include nofollow attribute to all outgoing links to Wikipedia.

Further support of concept of link popularity can be seen. On his blog, Vinny Lingham even went on to install a piece of software (Do Follow plugin) to disable the WordPress default setting of the blog comments. This allows any comment links on his blog to pass link weights back to the original commentators.

Whether it is to no follow or do follow, as a blogger it is certainly your choice.

Reason #1: Failing to gather information about keyword popularity

One of the mistakes many webmasters make is to do their keyword research only once and then forget all about it. Keywords are changing in popularity all the time with some reducing in popularity while others are increasing. There is no way you can possibly stay informed without monitoring keyword popularity on a regular basis. Also, very often new keywords that lead potential customers to your websites can be discovered from time to time.

After a couple of years of SEO experience, or even a couple of months, you should notice that highly successful SEO campaigns require lots of information and research over a long period of time. In order to keep up with your competition, you must always be in the position of gathering as much information as possible for your SEO campaign.

Reason #2: Focusing on the wrong markets

In the world of Internet, many webmasters tend to compete in very competitive markets, and are not able to find their niche markets. Very often is that when everyone is in, you want to share a piece of it as well. Most webmasters who are in the highly competitive markets have so far failed. Experience and history can tell you that by focusing on some niche markets, webmasters have much higher chance of making successful businesses.

Also because of having chosen one of the very competitive markets to start off with, many webmasters tend to give up easily once they have encountered difficulties.

Reason #3: Making duplicate content across your multiple websites

Duplicated Content is one of the problems we all face on the web. Basically, duplicated content gives user a bad experience besides the major search engines do not value it. It makes things worse when you own all those websites that share very similar content. Google’s Matt Cutts reviewed some websites and warned about using duplicate content across your multiple websites at the 2006 Pubcon.

“The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection.”

The bottom line is that you should not duplicate content on your websites, as you can be penalized by the search engines. Apart from that, look at it from the user perspective. No one wants to read the same thing more than once.

Reason #4: Treating all industries the same

The common belief is that if a webmaster succeeds in the SEO of a certain business in a certain industry, he will be successful in any industry and any business.

Experienced SEO experts do tend to fall into this trap. A webmaster could have made a successful SEO campaign on his web hosting business website, but once he moved on to his next business which can be a real estate business website, he failed.

The truth is that one business can be very different from another. Very often the effort required to get a certain website at the top of search engine rankings is very different from the effort required to get another different site to the same level.

There are categories in which the competition is so tough. Also, the number of competing websites can be so numerous that it is virtually impossible to carry out any successful SEO campaign without adjusting a few things such as focusing a different niche of target market.