And what could be the reason for the upcoming change?  Unfortunately,  no specific details were divulged yet from the email sent to ad agencies. Facebook just wanted to give them advance notices as this might affect their advertising campaigns or Facebook strategy. This is particularly so since Facebook is recommending that ad agencies start using the phrase – “Find us on Facebook”  or “Like us on Facebook” instead of  the current “Became a fan.”

In addition, the email also explained that the new “Like” button will be different from the current “Like” button that Facebook users click whenever they like particular updates of their friends.

Facebook believes that by changing the “Become a Fan” button to “Like”  will increase engagement between consumers and brands as it offers a simple, consistent way for Facebook users to connect with the things they are interested in. Facebook did some research and found out the users are more likely to “Like” something instead of becoming a fan.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Facebook to Change “Become a Fan” Button to “Like” on Fan Pages

There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ – it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge – all you need is:

• A verified Google webmaster central account
• Google Analytics
• Excel

If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Laurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).

Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.

Step 1 – Download the internal links

Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:

Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":

This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note – for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).

Step 2 – Grab your landing pages from Google Analytics

This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics – go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.

Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).

Step 3 – Put both sets of data in excel

Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel – I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:

Step 4 – Vlookup ftw

Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:

Note – that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.

Step 5 – Categorise your urls

Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:

If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.

Step 6 – Pivot table Excel Ninja goodness

Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:

It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:

And:

Step 7 – Combine the two pivots

Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:

Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.

Conclusions

25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic

So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ’search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight – afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.

Update: Patrick from Branded3 has just written a post on this very topic – Patrick’s approach using separate XML sitemaps for different site sections is well worth a read and complements what I’ve written about here very nicely.

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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

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Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend

Thesis Theme for Wordpress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for Wordpress Review.

Scribe SEO – Improve your blog posts with this easy to use built in tool, read my Scribe SEO Review.

KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites, read an Interview with Michael Streko.

TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price, read my Tiger Tech Review.

Advertisement: Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services . #7

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors – March 2010

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Google’s market share slightly rose by 2% from 77.83% in August to 80.08% in September. Meanwhile, Yahoo also suffered a lost from 10.50% to 9.40%.

StatCounter’s CEO Aodhan Cullen said that Bing’s downward trend started as early as mid-August.

In the global scale, the situation is nothing different for Bing. It’s market share also declined from 3.58% to 3.25%. Yahoo likewise suffered from 4.84% to 4.37% while Google surpassed the 90% market share mark rising from 90% to 90.54%.

So, is this an indication that those who were curious about Bing and tested it for some time have finaly  went back to their original search engine? We still have to see results from other analytics provider though. If the trend is similar to other reports well Micrsoft might have to think of other ways to market Bing.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

StatCounter Reports Bing’s First Decline

This week’s roll up mixes a little bit of awesome with a little bit of awesomely bad. But regardless of whether or not you threw a Windows 7 launch party at your house, from Talk Like a Pirate Day to actionable SEO tips, the search industry had no shortage of entertaining headlines over the last couple weeks of September.

• 69 Free Tools to Improve Your Website:
  The Grok, Brian Eisenberg, who rolled out a self branded site, shares a great list of usability and marketing tools.

• Google Launches DoubleClick Ad Exchange:
  95% of Google’s revenue still come from search ads, but with the new DoubeClick Ad Exchange Google is poised to increase their display ad business.

• Matt Cutts – Meta Keywords Not a Google Ranking Factor:
  Matt Cutts or Jay-Z? (If I had a nickel for every time I asked that.) In the video on the Google Webmaster Blog, Matt Cutt’s breaks it down like Beyonce’s beau: Google’s got 99 ranking factors, but a meta keyword ain’t one.

• Maintaining Visual Consistency During A/B Tests:
  Testing competing features can move the conversion needle, but at what detriment to user experience? In a post about maximizing the effectiveness of split tests Andrew Chen talks about the importance of having a central visual design.

• SEOmoz Linkbuilding Guide Updated:
  Thanks to Eric Enge’s hard work, an updated version of the Professional’s Guide to Linkbuilding (free for paying PRO members) is now live on the site. Notable updates include adaptations for the inception of Bing, changes in nofollow, and more detailed explanations in select areas.

• Seth Godin’s Brands in Public:
  Though Godin’s Squidoo powered tool was beaten up for how it was rolled out, he promptly did some damage control and changed the tool from being opt-out to opt-in.

• Delving into the Long Tail:
  Rand talked about long tail searches the other week, but Seer Interactive’s blog post on the long tail serves as a great visual guide to conducting keyword research to identifying your greatest long tail opportunities.

• Top Web Analytics Pain Points:
  Integrating web analytics with other marketing solutions and verifying data accuracy topped the list in Unica’s survey of most common analytics headaches.

• Google Analytics API – Event Tracking:
  You may use the the Google Analytics API to push data to your CRM system. Now, for those with video content, the analytics API can also be used for event tracking.

• Bing Continues to Increase Market Share:
  Google may still be the 800 lb gorilla, but Bing has definitely gained some traction over the last couple of months.

• Introduction to AdWords Bidding Tutorial Video:
  Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, lays out some great tips for beginner’s on how to get started with bid price management.

• Most People Don’t Like Being Ad Targeted:
  The study cited by the NY Times stating that two thirds of people don’t like being ad targeted sparked several follow up posts from both Greg Sterling and Matt Cutts. Regardless of your take on how the study was conducted, the article is worth a read.

• Go For it on 4th Down:
  The statistics support always going for it on 4th down, yet football coaches rarely do. The fascinating New York Times article begs the question of how similar thinking can be applied to your business.     

• Great Linkbait From The Guardian:
  The Guardian released several map infographics that give insight into the global recession.

• Pirate SEO Advice:
  Reading the SEO Skeptic post by Cap’n Long John Keyword is a humorous way to enjoy a belated celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

• New Google Keyword Research Tool in Beta:
  Google rolls out a new and improved keyword tool that has advanced filtering and also pulls in data from Google Insights.

• Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment:
  The Marketing Experiments Blog shares a list of seven things you can test on your site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.

• Yahoo’s New Search User Experiece:
  Yahoo search rolls out a revamped look and feel with increased performance and more personalization.

• Searches for Linkbait Ideas:
  Anne Smarty’s list of ways to uncover linkbait offers several useful queries you can use to identify possible linkbait opportunities.

Top YOUmoz entries:

1. * Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz by MikeTek (Promoted to the main blog)

2. The Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO by  Gil Reich

3. Startup or Corporation? The Life Changing Decision by Mgete

4. Parable of the Lost Link by interactivevoices

• Windows 7 Launch Commercial:
  Just when you thought it didn’t get any better than Songsmith the Windows 7 marketing team reminds us that Microsoft research is not the only Redmond team with an ad campaign that belongs on a VH1 awesomely bad list. And for those who have seen the original, the parody is fantastic, too. 

• Bank Emails Sensitve Information to Wrong Emails:
  All PR is good PR… unless of course you are the Rocky Mountain Bank and you emailed social security, password, and other info to over 1,300 of the wrong Gmail users. Oops!

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Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thanks to this Months Sponsors – September 2009

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As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach. The beauty of the Internet, especially the Internet of 2009 – 2010, is that so many different opportunities are out there to build an online brand, from video distribution to social networking to blogging. I think far too often, especially in the world of linking, too much emphasis is placed on buying static sitewide links in an effort to build “link popularity” and once a specific number of links is established, sites or businesses will “set it and forget it”, becoming complacient with their link numbers and or ranking … only later finding out that they ultimately lose such ranking to more diverse and creative online brands which take a more interesting approach.

The Fall of Sitewide Linking

Over the past year or so, I’ve noticed more and more devaluation of sitewide linking, that is links which are placed on all pages of a website. At one time, sitewide links may have led to higher rankings under the school of thought that the higher number of incoming links with targeted anchor text, but over the past 6 months or so, that value has diminished for obvious reasons.

One issue, especially in the field of paid linking, is that it is usually unnatural for a site to have the majority of its inbound links to come from sitewide linking, and sites which do partake in such link acquisition and development, tend to focus primarily on building those large batches of links, disregarding the more purposeful relevance of precisely targeting link acquisition.

In a nutshell; you usually have to earn the right to obtain a sitewide link, they don’t come out of thin air. Likewise, how natural is it for a newspaper website to link to a payday loan lender from all of its pages? Not natural at all.

Foundational Link Building

In order to earn sitewide links, which would come from links in a template, sidebar or other “sitewide” area under a “friends”, “links” or “resources” section, ideally a website would have to earn and establish its web presence. And how does a site initially establish web presence? Well, before jumping out of the gate by acquiring sitewide links via buys or other methods, I whole heartedly recommend waiting until the incubation period of linking, or a site’s link foundation is built.

Establishing web presence does not just equal linking, it equals site branding. This is done by writing and distributing press releases about your site launch and business news, contributing guest posts on blogs that you have taken the time to build relationships with, developing your branded social profiles across multiple social networking sites, building out your Facebook fanpage, your email newsletter, Twitter account and YouTube profile AND actually using these tools to build your brand. The more connections you make, the more natural links will come.

The incubation period also is the perfect time to build directory links in Best of the Web, Yahoo and other web directories.

Long Term Link Strategy

All too many times link builders, or link development strategists, get impatient … always wanting to jump the gun with hundreds or thousands of links in the first month. But before a site is really going to start ranking or really should naturally be pulling in thousands of links per month, its brand should be built. When I’m working on a client’s overall linking profile, I like to give the client a six month to one year timeline to achieve their long term linking and SEO goals. Sure, using shortcuts sometimes ranking can be secured sooner, especially for an established site, but by building out a long term strategy, the end result is not only going to be more effective, but more natural …. which means a long term result and not a flash in the pan or blip in the Google results.

I would say that generally 10% of the incoming links to the sites I work with come from sitewide links, I like to keep that as a rule of thumb. The real power in linking comes from utilizing the tools given to you by your employer, site or client. Obtain the following marketing material from your client in order to build the more diverse and structured link portfolio in your vertical :

• Video : Video can be uploaded to YouTube and dozens of other online video sharing platforms which not only include links to the site behind the video, but also will show up in targeted search queries for the company name and relevant terms in Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
• Documents : Many companies have PDF’s and libraries of other documents from offline marketing collateral including eBooks, guides, downloads, brochures, flyers …etc. All of these can be used online to assist with link building. Marketing collateral and white papers can be uploaded to your Scribd profile and other document sharing sites. eBooks can be housed on the website and links built to them via press releases or blog coverage.
• Product & Press : Contests, giveaways, donations and joint ventures are a surefire way to build strong links. Holding contests for free product will get your site covered on contest sites and also give you fodder for a press release that can be distributed to news outlets and blogs in your vertical. To get the most out of a giveaway, partner with various non-competitors who attract a similar target market to do a massive giveaway. Also, instead of just donating money to a charity, giveaway a product and or get a giant check printed, call local journalists and make a press conference out of it.

For more info on building out diverse links, see the Link Building Evaluation Guide.

Blogging and Linking

Besides the obvious benefit of bringing in longtail search traffic because of the variety of content and natural language on a blog, hosting an informative company blog or third party blog around your vertical can also bring in a lot of links, and also redirect that sitewide link equity you may be looking for. Sitewide links don’t make search sense a lot of the time, unless they point to a blog. One of the basics of blogging is blogrolling; linking to other industry blogs in your blogroll, and vice versa. By doing so, you can attract a lot of links from other relevant blogs and their link equity.

Don’t stop there however. Make sure that if your blog is hosted on your own site (via blog.site.com or www.site.com/blog) or on a totally different domain, that the blog spreads equity to the main business site. I like to be open and brand a blog as being the editorial arm of a business, therefore it is natural for that blog to link over to the main business site, therefore spreading that relevance to the target page.

Blogs, especially those hosted on third party domains, can assist your overall site and brand in other ways too. First, a targeted news oriented blog around a specific vertical is more likely to be picked up by Google News than a corporate blog. Or if a business plan is generally that of a resource, I would suggest building the site off of a blog.

Case in point : launch blog, get links, get listed in news site, go social on Digg & Stumble Upon, then build out the bulk of the MONEY part of the site off of the already established authority domain.

Like I eluded to above, a blog is much more likely to get picked up in social news sharing networks and it’s also against the terms of services of some of these sites to submit ecommerce or commercial material, so establishing a blog to push socially, then taking advantage of that equity in a responsible manner, may make more sense then first building the ecommerce site then launching a blog off of it.

To add to the equation, it’s also much more natural to start link building via blog commenting. If you represent a blog, chances are you will have a much better chance of being approved by a blog comment moderator.

Here’s some advice on blog commenting in an effort to build links :

By taking the time to comment on blogs, even one or two comments per day can lead to extremely positive results such as reputation building, expert positioning, and the building of inbound links, even if said blogs use the no follow attribute in their comment fields (and if they do not, all the better).

Why not worry about No Follows? Because ALL humans ignore No Follow. If you participate in a blog comment discussion and link to your site, chances are readers of that blog will follow the link … building to your site’s traffic. The more popular the blog, the more traffic you can build.

But do not place a signature link in the comment body itself except for critical circumstances. Linking to your own site in the comment body is not only spammy in nature, but can also get your name, site, email and IP flagged by ’social’ blog spam software like SpamKarma, and get your comments automatically deleted from dozens of blogs which use the application.

Using blatant Anchor Text instead of a handle or name in the Name field of blog comments can have the same result, so don’t do it!

Now Go After Your Sitewides

The reason I started writing this post was to talk about how sitewides may not be as valuable as they once were as they could be an instant red flag for spam, especially if they make up the bulk of your linking profile. After you have first established your online presence, I then would recommend going after some sitewides. This does not always mean you have to buy them, and you should attract some nice natural links by building your online brand, but if you do acquire them in a questionable manner, be smart about it and also keep in mind that if you build smartly, your established linking presence will justify the sitewides you acquire.

Just like traditional marketing and branding, link building should never have a set it and forget it mentality, the industry and serps are always changing, and this is going to influence the way you build links. By keeping your linking on an even keel and setting a natural strategy however, those changes at Google or Bing should not have a massive effect on your ranking, at least your ranking which is attributed to linking and branding, as this core method of smart linking has worked for 10 years, through changes and updates, because it is natural and web presence does not go away.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Natural Link Building : Create an Online Presence and Linkable Brand

How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page?

If you’re in SEO, you probably hear this question a lot. Sadly, there’s no cut and dry answer, but there are sets of best practices we can draw from and sharpen to help get close. In this blog post, I’m going to share our top recommendations for achieving on-page, keyword-targeting "perfection," or, at least, close to it. Some of these are backed by data points, correlation studies and extensive testing while others are simply gut-feelings based on experience. As with all things SEO, we recommend constant testing and refinement, though this knowledge can help you kick-start the process.

HTML Head Tags

• Title - the most important of on-page keyword elements, the page title should preferably employ the keyword term/phrase as the first word(s). In our correlation data studies, the following graph emerged:

  
  Clearly, using the keyword term/phrase as the very first words in the page title has the highest correlation with high rankings, and subsequent positions correlate nearly flawlessly to lower rankings.

• Meta Description – although not used for "rankings" by any of the major engines, the meta description is an important place to use the target term/phrase due to the "bolding" that occurs in the visual snippet of the search results. Usage has also been shown to help boost click-through rate, thus increasing the traffic derived from any ranking position.
• Meta Keywords - Yahoo! is unique among the search engines in recording and utilizing the meta keyword tag for discovery, though not technically for rankings. However, with Microsoft’s Bing set to take over Yahoo! Search, the last remaining reason to employ the tag is now gone. That, combined with the danger of using keywords there for competitive research means that at SEOmoz, we never recommend employing the tag.
• Meta Robots – although not necessary, this tag should be sure NOT to contain any directives that could potentially disallow access by the engines.
• Rel="Canonical" – the larger and more complex a site (and the larger/more complex the organization working on it), the more we advise employing the canonical URL tag to prevent any potential duplicates or unintentional, appended URL strings from creating a problem for the engines and splitting up potential link juice.
• Other Meta Tags – meta tags like those offered by the DCMI or FGDC seem compelling, but currently provide no benefit for SEO with the major engines and thus, add unnecessary complexity and download time.

URL

• Length – Shorter URLs appear to perform better in the search results and are more likely to be copied/pasted by other sites, shared and linked-to.
• Keyword Location – The closer the targeted keyword(s) are to the domain name, the better. Thus, site.com/keyword outperforms site.com/folder/subfolder/keyword and is the most recommended method of optimization (though this is certainly not a massive rankings benefit)
• Subdomains vs. Pages – As we’ve talked about previously on the blog, despite the slight URL benefit that subdomains keyword usage has over subfolders or pages, the engines’ link popularity assignment algorithms tilt the balance in favor of subfolders/pages rather than subdomains.
• Word Separators – Hyphens are still the king of keyword separators in URLs, and despite promises that underscores will be given equal credit, the inconsistency with other methods make the hyphen a clear choice.

Body Tags

• Number of Keyword Repetitions – It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact, optimal number of times to employ a keyword term/phrase on the page, but this simple rule has served us well for a long time – "2-3X on short pages, 4-6X on longer ones and never more than makes sense in the context of the copy." The added benefit of another instance of a term is so miniscule that it seems unwise to ever be aggressive with this metric.
• Keyword Density - A complete myth as an algorithmic component, keyword density nonetheless pervades even very sharp SEO minds. While it’s true that more usage of a keyword term/phrase can potentially improve targeting/ranking, there’s no doubt that keyword density has never been the formula by which this relevance was measured.
• Keyword Usage Variations – Long suspected to influence search engine rankings (though never studied in a depth of detail that’s convincing to me), the theory that varied keyword usage throughout a page can help with content optimization and optimization nevertheless is worth a small amount of effort. We recommend employing at least one or two variations of a term and potentially splitting up keyword phrases and using them in body copy as well or instead.
• H1 Headline - The H1 tag has long been thought to have great importance in on-page optimization. Recent correlation data from our studies, however, has shown that it has a very low correlation with high rankings (close to zero, in fact). While this is compelling evidence, correlation is not causation and for semantic and SEO reasons, we still advise proper use of the H1 tag as the headline of the page and, preferrably, employment of the targeted keyword term/phrase.
• H2/H3/H4/Hx – Even lower in importance than the H1, our recommendation is to apply only if required. These tags appears to carry little to no SEO value.
• Alt Attribute – Surprisingly, the alt attribute, long thought to carry little SEO weight, was shown to have quite a robust correlation with high rankings in our studies. Thus, we strongly advise the use of a graphic image/photo/illustration on important keyword-targeted pages with the term/phrase employed in the alt attribute of the img tag.
• Image Filename – Since image traffic can be a substantive source of visits and image filenames appear to be valuable for this as well as natural web search, we suggest using the keyword term/phrase as the name of the image file employed on the page.
• Bold/Strong – Using a keyword in bold/strong appears to carry a very, very tiny amount of SEO weight, and thus it’s suggested as a best practice to use the targeted term/phrase at least once in bold, though a very minor one.
• Italtic/Emphasized – Surprisingly, italic/emphasized text appears to have a similar to slightly higher correlation with high rankings than bold/strong and thus, we suggest its use on the targeted keyword term/phrase in the text.
• Internal Link Anchors – No testing has yet found that internal anchors are picked up/counted by the engines.
• HTML Comments – As above, it appears the engines ignore text in comments.

Internal Links & Location in Site Architecture

• Click-Depth – Our general recommendation is that the more competitive and challenging a keyword term/phrase is to rank for, the higher it should be in a site’s internal architecture (and thus, the fewer clicks from the home page it should take to reach that URL).
• Number/Percentage of Internal Links – More linked-to pages tend to higher rankings and thus, for competitive terms, it may help to link to these pages from a greater number/percentage of pages on a site.
• Links in Content vs. Permanent Navigation – It appears that Google and the other engines are doing more to recognize location on the page as an element of link consideration. Thus, employing links to pages in the Wikipedia-style (in the body content of a piece) rather than in permanent navigation may potentially provide some benefit. Don’t forget, however, that Google only counts the first link to a page that they see in the HTML
• Link Location in Sidebars & Footers – Recent patent applications, search papers and experience from inside SEOmoz and many practitioners externally suggests that Google may be strongly discounting links placed in the footer, and, to a lesser degree, in the sidebar(s) of pages. Thus, if you’re employing a link in permanent navigation, it may pay to use the top navigation (above the content) for SEO purposes.

Page Architecture

• Keyword Location – We advise that important keywords should, preferably, be featured in the first few words (50-100, but hopefully even sooner) of a page’s text content. The engines do appear to have some preference for pages that employ keywords sooner, rather than later, in the text.
• Content Structure – Some practitioners swear by the use of particular content formats (introduction, body, examples, conclusion OR the journalistic style of narrative, data, conclusion, parable) for SEO, but we haven’t seen any formal data suggesting these are valuable for higher rankings and thus feel that whatever works best for the content and the visitors is likely ideal.

Why Don’t We Always Obey These Rules?

That answer is relatively easy. The truth is that in the process of producing great web content, we sometimes forget, sometimes ignore and sometimes intentionally disobey the best practices laid out above. On-page optimization, while certainly important, is only one piece of a larger rankings puzzle:

(FYI – The new ranking factors survey data is set to release very, very soon)

It most certainly pays to get the on-page, keyword-targeting pieces right, but on-page SEO, in my opinion, follows the 80/20 rule very closely. If you get the top 20% of the most important pieces (titles, URLs, internal links) from the list above right, you’ll get 80% (maybe more) of the value possible in the on-page equation.

Best Practices for Ranking #1

Curiously, though perhaps not entirely surprisingly to experienced SEOs, the truth is that on-page optimization doesn’t necessarily rank first in the quest for top rankings. In fact, a list that walks through the process of actually getting that first position would look something more like:

1. Accessibility – content engines can’t see or access cannot even be indexed; thus crawl-ability is foremost on this list.
2. Content – you need to have compelling, high quality material that not only attracts interest, but compels visitors to share the information. Virality of content is possibly the most important/valuable factor in the ranking equation because it will produce the highest link conversion rate (the ratio of those who visit to those who link after viewing).
3. Basic On-Page Elements – getting the keyword targeting right in the most important elements (titles, URLs, internal links) provides a big boost in the potential ability of a page to perform well.
4. User Experience – the usability, user interface and overall experience provided by a website strongly influences the links and citations it earns as well as the conversion rate and browse rate of the traffic that visits.
5. Marketing - I like to say that "great content is no substitute for great marketing." A terrific marketing machine or powerful campaign has the power to attract far more links than content may "deserve," and though this might seem unfair, it’s a principle on which all of capitalism has functioned for the last few hundred years. Spreading the word is often just as important (or more so) than being right, being honest or being valuable (just look at the political spectrum).
6. Advanced/Thorough On-Page Optimization – applying all of the above with careful attention to detail certainly isn’t useless, but it is, for better or worse, at the bottom of this list for a reason; in our experience, it doesn’t add as much value as the other techniques described.

As always, I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences about the specific recommendations above and the general concept of the "perfectly" optimized page.

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With the impending arrival of Google OS I’ve been spending more time in Google Chrome, and figuring out how to customize things to my liking. Here’s a tip on how to turn off personalized search in Google Chrome.

First thing you want to do is click the wrench icon on the Google Chrome toolbar and select options, when the dialog box pops up, select the manage button next to search engine listings

When the list of search engine pops up choose Google, you’ll see there are three values listed the third one is the one you’re concerned with copy and paste it to your favorite text editor

You should have a text line that looks like this

{google:baseURL}search{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}
sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

That’s the code that google uses to form your search query. To turn off personalized search you need to add the following parameter on to the end

&pws=0

close one dialog box and click “add” a new box will pop up, name your new search engine differently than any of the others (the checkbox will turn green when you do) and paste the code with the [&pws=0] on the end into the bottom box

I prefer all of my searches to be non personalized so I made it my default, but that’s up to you. Execute a search and check for the [&pws=0] parameter and you’re good to go.

photo credit: extranoise

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Turn Off Personalized Search in Google Chrome

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