SEO - Suzannah Porter on Diigo

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Seth's Blog: How to get traffic for your blog

Tags: Blogging, Tips, Traffic, SEO, Linkbait, Seth Godin on 2009-04-12 and saved by 82 people -All Annotations (3) -About

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- Use lists.
- Be topical... write posts that need to be read right now.
- Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
- Break news.
- Be timeless... write posts that will be readable in a year.
- Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
- Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
- Announce news.
- Write short, pithy posts.
- Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
- Don't write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
- Write long, definitive posts.
- Write about your kids.
- Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
- Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
- Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
- Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
- Coin a term or two.
- Do email interviews with the well-known.
- Answer your email.
- Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
- Be anonymous.
- Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit). Do it with every post.
- Post your photos on flickr.
- Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
- Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
- Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
- Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
- Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
- Point to useful but little-known resources.
- Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers--like gadgets and web 2.0.
- Write about Google.
- Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
- Don't include comments, people will cross post their responses.
- Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
- Run no ads.
- Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.
- Write about blogging.
- Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
- Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
- Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
- Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don't bore your readers.
- Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
- Don't interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
- Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
- Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
- Don't promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader's attention.
- Be patient.
- Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful.
- Ping technorati. Or have someone smarter than me tell you how to do it automatically.
- Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
- Write in English.
- Better, write in Chinese.
- Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.
- Don't be boring.
- Write stuff that people want to read and share.

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Article | Makeshift Anchor Text... Link Title Attribute vs Image Alt Tags: Which is Better?

Assessing the impact of an images Alt Text and Image Title on SEO efforts and searchability.

Tags: Articles, SEOBook, Images, SEO, Alt Text, Web Design on 2008-10-14 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (10) -About

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- Wall, Aaron. 2008. Makeshift Anchor Text... Link Title Attribute vs Image Alt Tags: Which is Better? Blog. SEOBook. February 5. http://www.seobook.com/link-title-attribute-vs-image-alt-tags-which-better.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-14
One of the reasons I was so motivated to change the tagline of this site recently was because the new site design contained the site's logo as a background image. The logo link was a regular static link, but it had no anchor text, only a link title to describe the link. If you do not look at the source code, the link title attribute can seem like an image alt tag when you scroll over it, but to a search engine they do not look that same. A link title is not weighted anywhere near as aggressively as an image alt tag is.
The old link title on the header link for this site was search engine optimization book. While this site ranks #6 and #8 for that query in Google, neither of the ranking pages are the homepage (the tools page and sales letter rank). That shows that Google currently places negligible, if any, weight on link titles.
Does the image alt text carry more weight? In a word, yes. Here is now I proved that to myself through yet another site error. :)
One of my hobby sites has a fairly flat file structure, and some of the internal pages are somewhat linkworthy. The site was not marketed aggressively and the only sitewide link to the homepage was the logo, which I forgot to put an image alt tag on. Google ranked 2 pages on the site well for the core keyword, but neither of those pages were the homepage. I noticed the lacking image alt tag, fixed it, and within a week my homepage was outranking the other pages.
If the only link to your homepage is a logo check the source code to verify you are using descriptive image alt text.

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Article | Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?)

How to order your CSS so that your content is seen first to the spiders.

Tags: Articles, SEO, Content, Web Design, CSS on 2008-10-14 -All Annotations (11) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?). Blog. Search Engine Journal. July 28. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/source-ordered-content-seo-beneits-and-drawbacks/7334/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-14
Sometimes it’s very useful to return to basics and refine good old SEO techniques you might forget. SOC (”source ordered content” or “front-loading”) is one such technique that basically incorporates placing content as close to the beginning of the page as possible and using CSS to display page elements where they “belong”.
Here is a very simple example: that’s what you see at the top of a very popular blog: (1) head (+ (2) navigation) => (3) left column => (4) content => (5) right column - that’s the way it is displayed:
So we expect to see content block going after the left column in the page source…. but instead we see content much closer to the top, right after the head navigation (you can also check that with SEO browser):
The only downside (I never felt myself but heard other webmasters report) includes some cross-browser compatibility issues. Can you think of any more method drawbacks? I would be eager to learn about them.
Once again thanks for your post. It is really very informative.

I am not sure about the disadvantages.

Even I have a site in which the navigation bar has many links(its a drop down menu) because of this the content gets pushed down to the bottom of the html page. Even i was thinking the same solution for it. Except home page in other pages placing the navigation menu after the content (using CSS) really am not sure if it is possible or not, lets see.

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Article | 3 Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence

Ways to enable smart keyword density for better SEO

Tags: Articles, SEO, Keywords, Keyword Density, Headings, Content on 2008-10-14 -All Annotations (5) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. 3 Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence. Blog. Search Engine Journal. July 29. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/3-ways-to-give-your-keywords-prominence/7372/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-14

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Article | SEO Checklist: Using Page Headings Correctly | Search Engine Journal

Checklist for proper heading usage to optimize your SEO efforts.

Tags: Articles, SEO, Web Design, Headings on 2008-10-14 -All Annotations (8) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. SEO Checklist: Using Page Headings Correctly. Blog. Search Engine Journal. September 23. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-checklist-using-page-headings-correctly/7723/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-14
While some webmasters question the overall necessity of headings, I insist that they should be used to structure the page content
SEO benefit: H-heading is one of the best ways to give your keywords prominence;
Accessibility and usability: headings enable screen reader and some browser (e.g. Opera) users to use voice and keyboard commands to navigate throughout the page (see this video explaining the importance of headings for accessibility);
Web etiquette: like clean (preferably validated) code, good page structure is the sign of proper behavior and trusted brand.
Here is the checklist of proper heading usage (please add your points or argue mine):

Each of my pages have at least one heading;

I have only one H1 heading per page;

H1 heading is the first heading on the page;

I use the page main keyword in H1 heading of the page;

I use headings to structure content and CSS for visual effects;

I don’t skip heading levels (e.g. H1 to H3);

All other headings (except H1) are subheadings; they are (ideally) thematically connected with the previous-level heading;

I use headings consistently throughout the site;

Headings are short and concise (and thus easily scanned);

Headings extracted from the page represent the summary of the text (i.e. I can guess what the page is about without reading its full content);

I use SEO or web accessibility tools to evaluate the structure of my pages.

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Article | Stale vs Fresh Document as Defined by Google | Search Engine Journal

Determining what is fresh content from what is stale content.

Tags: Articles, SEO, Content, Google, Web Design on 2008-10-14 -All Annotations (13) -About

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An interesting article that shows from a technical standpoint what Google determines to be "Fresh Content" and what Google considers to be stale content. My first thought is nonprofit Wiki. This is why the organiic, brainstorming, and constantly evolving nature of wikis, a trait shared with a nonprofit's issues or cause, could naturally bring a a site traffic. A nonprofit constantly documenting it's watchdog efforts will constantly be considered fresh content. Just another argument as to why nonprofits should absolutely be brining their conversations online.
post by suzannah on 2008-10-04

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Stale vs Fresh Document as Defined by Google. Blog. Search Engine Journal. October 8. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/stale-vs-fresh-document-as-defined-by-google/7755/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-14
Bill Slawski did a great job of summarizing the patent with help of two examples:

The Constitution of the United States is an old document, but it’s not stale. A news article about the “World Series” from 1918 may not be what a baseball fan wants to see when searching for “World Series” this October.
Stale content refers to documents that have not been updated for a period of time and, thus, contain stale data (documents that are “no longer updated, diminished in importance, superceded by another document“).
1. Query-based factor basically refers to analyzing which pages in SERPs are selected by users.

Besides, the search engine tracks which queries one and the same document ranks for: “discordant set of queries” might mean the page is spammy.
3. Traffic - based criteria: a large reduction in traffic may indicate that a document may be stale.
Add Sticky Note
- So if you have a great post that you want many users to get a chance to look at, consider a "top posts" category on your front page. This way, traffic will continue to go toward those posts.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-14
4. User-behavior-based criteria: if people spend too little time on the page (compared with the similar / tightly relevant page), that might mean the document is stale.

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Article | How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search

Using Google Search to diagnose your site health

Tags: Articles, SEO, Web Design, Google on 2008-10-14 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (12) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search. Blog. Search Engine Journal. October 7. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-diagnose-your-site-with-google-advanced-search/7795/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-14
I thought I could outline a few tips on how to diagnose both on-site and off-site issues with Google Search and its advanced operators.
Make sure your site is free from any type of filtering issues: search [yourdomain.com] in Google; if your sites comes up #1 for this query, you are doing alright. If you see other site mentioning your domain ranked first, that’s a bad signal;
Make sure there are no duplicate content problems: search for a pretty long citation from your site (exact match, i.e. in quotes). With a blog, for example, you have a good chance to see the category page (summarizing the post) instead of the corresponding post page;
- Check how many URLs from your site have been indexed: search [site:yourdomain.com] and “dig deeper” into the search results:
Learn if the site has canonical problems (for sites using www): search [site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www] and see if any non-www URLs have been stored in the index);
- Identify most powerful pages of your site:
- Identify most powerful pages of your site (keyword-dependent): search [site:yourdomain.com inanchor:keyword];
- (based on the previous one) Find sites with most potential (to further promote them):
- Find most relevant pages of your site (to further promote them for the specified term): search [site:yourdomain.com keyword] or [site:yourdomain.com key * phrase]
Check your site is crawled and indexed frequently enough: search [site:yourdomain.com] + play with “date range” advanced search option.
Check who (and what) your site is associated with: search [related:yourdomain.com] to identify your site co-citation (i.e. basically, who your promoters also link to).

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Article | 10 Ways to Increase Your Site Crawl Rate

Ways to invite google to crawl your site.

Tags: Articles, SEO, Google, Robots on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (18) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. 10 Ways to Increase Your Site Crawl Rate. Blog. Search Engine Journal. June 24. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-ways-to-increase-your-site-crawl-rate/7159/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-12
Regular and frequent visits by the crawler is the first sign that your site appeals to Google. Thus the most efficient way to get frequent and deep crawls is to develop a website that search engines see as important and valuable.
Note that you can’t force Googlebot to visit you more often - what you can do is to invite it to come. Possible measures to take to increase the crawl rate may include:
Update your content often and regularly (and ping Google once you do) - well, an obvious one, so not much to describe here; in a word, try to add new unique content as often as you can afford and do it regularly (3 times a week can be the best solution if you can’t update your site daily and are looking for the optimal update rate).
Make sure your server works correctly: mind the uptime and Google Webmaster tools reports of the unreached pages. Two tools I can recommend here are Pingdom and Mon.itor.us.
Mind your page load time: note that the crawl works on a budget - if it spends too much time crawling your huge images or PDFs, there will be no time left to visit your other pages.
Check the site internal link structure: make sure there is no duplicate content returned via different URLs: again, the more time the crawler spends figuring your duplicate content, the fewer useful and unique pages it will manage to visit.
Get more back links from regularly crawled sites.
Adjust the crawl speed via Google Webmaster tools.
Add a sitemap (though it’s up for a debate whether the sitemap can help with crawling and indexing issues, many webmasters report they have seen increased crawl rate after adding it).
Make sure your server returns the correct header response. Does it handle your error pages properly? Don’t make the bot figure out what has happened: explain it clearly.
Make sure you have unique title and meta tags for each of your pages.
Monitor Google crawl rate for your site and see what works and what not:
access crawl stats via Google Webmaster tools:
Take advantage of this great Wordpress Plugin that tracks crawl rate for Google, Yahoo and MSN:

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Article | Insane SEO: Blocking Robots.txt from Being Indexed

Robots.txt, indexing, google, and nofollow.

Tags: Articles, SEO, Robots on 2008-10-11 -All Annotations (9) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Insane SEO: Blocking Robots.txt from Being Indexed. Blog. Search Engine Journal. May 28. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/insane-seo-blocking-robotstxt-from-being-indexed/6961/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
Google currently indexes 62,100 robots.txt files. Many of them have a decent PR while others have no backlinks at all (according to Yahoo Site Explorer at least):
According to the forum member:

At any rate, this does bring up the crazy question, how can you remove a robots.txt file from Google’s index? If you use robots.txt to block it, that would mean that googlebot should not even request robots.txt - an insane loop. And of course, you don’t use meta tags in a robots.txt file.

Interesting, isn’t it?
Another board member suggested using an X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header:

<FilesMatch “robots\.txt”>

Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow”

</FilesMatch>
The solution looks pretty good and that’s also nice that SEOs started at last seeing value in the X-Robots-Tag which is vaguely used.

Another question is why on Earth you would need to block your robots.txt file from being indexed and ranked (a much easier solution would be removing the file completely). But that is not at all important in this case. The truth remains the same: webmasters should have and be aware of the ways to hide any of their pages from search crawlers or prevent it from appearing in SERPs.
- Barry Schwartz
  on May 28, 2008 at 1:05 pm
  
  We have a good comment on this thread, which we covered on May 15th, from Googler JohnMu:
  
  Check out his comment at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017139.html#comment-929618
- Ann Smarty
  on May 29, 2008 at 8:31 am
  
  @Barry : I can’t believe I missed it! I do check your blog daily… Thank you for pointing that out to me!
  
  Ok, so two possible solutions:
  
  1/ disallow robots.txt in robots.txt (which won’t prevent the bot to check it);
  
  2/ use an X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header

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Article | Making Sure Your Content Looks Good to Google

Tags: Articles, SEO, Google, Content on 2008-10-11 -All Annotations (7) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Making Sure Your Content Looks Good to Google. Blog. Search Engine Journal. May 5. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-looks-good-google/6834/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
Take advantage of the Domaintools SEO browser; with it you will see the spider’s version of the page (text, links and alt texts) and its optimization score:

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Article | 8+ Ways to Evaluate a Page (Domain Independent)

Ways to evaluate the power of a page.

Tags: Articles, SEO on 2008-10-11 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (13) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. 8+ Ways to Evaluate a Page (Domain Independent). Blog. Search Engine Journal. May 7. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-evaluate-page/6832/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
Besides the overall domain strength, there are quite a number of ways to evaluate a site page power. Even if that’s not your site and you have no access to its internal statistics, you still can find out a bunch about it (eg. its ranking potential and even estimated traffic).
Check for the number of incoming links: search [link:site.com/page] in Yahoo.
Count the page outbound links: FireFox plugin SEOQuake will show you all outbound links: external and internal, ‘dofollow’ and nofollow.
See the page cache data (i.e. crawl rate): date of the cache is the date the page was crawled by Google. There is one SEO Golden rule: what Google likes, we should too - i.e. if Google regularly crawls the page, it must like it; so that must be a good page.
Find the page age (i.e. when Google first found the page): you can find the date yourself using Google advanced search date filter or by using this handy FireFox plugin.
Check Google PageRank - well, believe it or not, but Toolbar PageRank still means something: i.e. the more, the better.
Learn the page social media popularity: i.e. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Digg mentions (I described this method in detail in my recent post on analyzing a website with Delicious). The more popular the page is, the more traffic it gets.
Get a sneak peek into the page Google ranking - with SEODigger tool, you can find out what keywords the page ranks for.
Track the page content freshness: you can try TrackEngine service - with it you will get updated daily of the page changes.
There are other factors that can also be taken into account when analyzing the page (potential) power: page size, value of content (per your opinion), non-linking content, page URL, etc.
How about SEOMoz Page strength tool? I simply loves that. Provides son]me excellent data.

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Article | Black Hat SEO Lessons: Indirect Promotion

Taking Black Hat SEO Lessons and using them for White Hat SEO

Tags: Articles, SEO, Commenting on 2008-10-11 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (8) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Black Hat SEO Lessons: Indirect Promotion. Blog. Search Engine Journal. May 12. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/black-hat-seo-lessons-indirect-promotion/6872/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
I’ve always said that instead of getting angry with black hat SEOs, we should learn from them. Working and often succeeding in really competitive verticals, these people are just forced to be creative.
We’ve had a number of discussions recently on how black-hats take advantage of trusted domains to promote their websites. Here is a quick example: #4 for [viagra] in Google (!).

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Articles | Handling Your 404 Page Properly

How to handle your 404 pages in an SEO friendly way.

Tags: Articles, Blogging, Web Design, SEO, 404 Pages on 2008-10-11 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (6) -About

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We don’t know for sure if Google pays much attention to the site 404 pages but it does show them within Webmaster Tools report as an error that makes many webmasters nervous.

Anyway handling your 404 page properly is an essential part of on-site optimization that is helpful both for your site visitors and search engines.
For 404 notification I am using internally built script for my sites.

I also heard that this WordPress plugin for 404 notification might be useful (but never tried it myself).
- Pratheep
  on May 14, 2008 at 4:34 am
  
  I have custom 404 page for the website, but still i can see a huge list of pages listed in my webmaster tool. how to eliminate it. should we completely block those pages from the bot?
  
  FYI: we have removed many pages of our old html website and it is creating the 404 problem.
  
  Pratheep
- Ann Smarty
  on May 14, 2008 at 4:46 am
  
  @Pratheep - the best way to handle this is to remove ALL references to the nonexistent pages from your site and wait. After the bot revisits your site and sees no references to them, it will update the WT stats (in a time).
  
  You can also block these pages with Robots.txt if they belong to one non-existent directory.

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Article | Image Alt Text Vs. Image Title : What’s the Difference?

Image attributes and SEO

Tags: Articles, SEO, Images on 2008-10-11 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (6) -About

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Most webmasters don’t see any difference between image alt text and title mostly keeping them the same. A great discussion over at Google Webmaster Groups provides an exhaustive information on the differences between an image Alt attribute and an image title and standard recommendations of how to use them.
Add Sticky Note
- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Image Alt Text Vs. Image Title : What’s the Difference? Blog. Search Engine Journal. May 19. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-alt-text-vs-image-title-whats-the-difference/6930/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
Alt text is meant to be an alternative information source for those people who have chosen to disable images in their browsers and those user agents that are simply unable to “see” the images. It should describe what the image is about and get those visitors interested to see it.

Without an alt text an image will be displayed as an empty icon: In Internet Explorer Alt text also pops up when you hover over an image. Last year Google officially confirmed that it mainly focuses on an alt text when trying to understand what an image is about.

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Article | SEO Best Practices for URL Structure | Search Engine Journal

Discussion on formating your URL of posts for better SEO

Tags: Articles, SEO, URL Structure, Blogging on 2008-10-11 and saved by 5 people -All Annotations (11) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. SEO Best Practices for URL Structure. Blog. Search Engine Journal. July 3. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-best-practices-for-url-structure/7216/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
Here is one more evidence in favor of short URL: recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones. So by sticking to short URLs you get both better rankings and better clickthrough.
Unlike a domain name, URL is case sensitive - meaning that if by any reason (your choice or CMS) you stick to a an upper-case version, remember that this can cause a few issues: people are most likely to link to the standard lower case one and you might both lose link juice and suffer from duplicate content issues.
Moving to static URL structure: my (and actually not only my) favorite tactic is to use 301 redirect only for most powerful (in terms of linking and traffic) pages and leave all others to be handled via 404.
Mind your file extensions (i.e. don’t end your URLs with .exe) as they might prevent your pages from crawling.

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Article | Domain Age: How Important Is It for SEO?

Assessing the importance of domain age in SEO

Tags: Articles, Domains, SEO on 2008-10-11 -All Annotations (8) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Domain Age: How Important Is It for SEO? Blog. Search Engine Journal. July 15. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/domain-age-how-important-is-it-for-seo/7296/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
Google’s patent “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data” of 03/31/2005 reviewed by WebmasterWorld forum hugely accounted for these rumors implying that Google does look into domain registration (1) and renewal (2) dates:

(1) … the date that a domain with which a document is registered may be used as an indication of the inception date of the document.

(2) Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. … Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.
Conclusion: domain registration date won’t of course hurt but it will hardly help. So I would focus on registering a new short niche-related and catchy domain name instead of trying to buy an old (previously owned by someone) one.

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Article | How to Organize Your Keyword Modifiers to Create Long Tail Strategy

Ideas for organizing your keywords for SEO, and personal organization goals.

Tags: Articles, Keywords, SEO, Productivity, Information Management on 2008-10-11 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (13) -About

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- Smarty, Amy. “How to Organize Your Keyword Modifiers to Create Long Tail Strategy.” Blog. Search Engine Journal, March 17, 2008. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-organize-your-keyword-modifiers-to-create-long-tail-strategy/6526/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-09-30
Why is it hard to organize your keyword modifiers?

Modifiers are hard to spot because they usually pop up unexpectedly and get lost within ‘more important’ keywords that generate higher volumes of traffic.
So how to organize your keyword lists to get full control of your thematic search modifiers?

1) Word-per-category structure: organizing modifiers based on their semantic meaning in two large categories (general and niche specific) and multiple subcategories. With words of generic meaning you have more freedom: you may use them anywhere throughout your content. For niche specific words the best way is to create a page for each of them. For ‘hair styles‘ term for example niche specific subcategories may include: age, type, and gender:
2) Tree-like table where ‘tree body’ is your core term and ‘tree branches’ are your thematic modifiers (I’ve described this method in my Youmoz post in more detail). This approach is most effective for organizing generic modifiers that can be used anywhere independent of the article main topic. The idea is as follows: you highlight the precedent and antecedent modifiers in different colors to quickly find one when creating new content.
The beauty of this approach is that you can always merge any of these lines to get 5-, 6-, etc word combinations.

You can also throw this data through a pivot table to see how often each word was used (hat tip to fellow Mozzer Vinny).
3) Hierarchic table: from two- to three-, four-, etc word combinations:

This approach can be most effectively used for optimizing website internal architecture.

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Article | Make the Most of SEO Competitive Research : Evaluating the Competition

Using competition research to better your SEO efforts.

Tags: Articles, SEO, Marketing, Keywords, Information Management, Competition Research on 2008-10-11 and saved by 7 people -All Annotations (14) -About

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- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Make the Most of SEO Competitive Research : Evaluating the Competition. Blog. Search Engine Journal. February 18. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/make-the-most-of-seo-competitive-research-evaluating-the-competiton/6386/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
- Is it worth trying to enter this niche? Will I be able to overdo my competitors? How fast? Will long and hard victory be worth the effort? What’s my expected ROI?
- What should I do to succeed in this niche? What shouldn’t I?
- Who are my perspective readers/customers? What are they used to? What do they like?
- Well, and many more, but I will stop here for now not to miss the point.
Step 1. Evaluating your overall competition.

You can either do it ‘at home’ using Google search and Excel or try paid tools returning complete competitor’s report. I usually perform all possible ways of analysis because I (1) cannot fully rely on reports compiled by someone else (be it an automatic tool or another person); (2) do not feel I have the full understanding of a niche unless I spend long hours on searching Google and compiling data into tables (yep, preferably multiple ones, and then combining tables into one table; but that’s just me, you can safely get along with a single solid report).
To save time you can get this information via SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool (it will also provide you with lots of other useful information: average PageRank of the top 10 sites, how many root URLs can be found in top 10 results, etc). Naturally, the best combination is when #1 is high, #2 is low (not necessarily) and #4, #5 and #6 are the lowest possible - the cases framed in green:
Step 2. Finding your direct competitors

After you compiled your targeted keyword list, you can sort by ‘#1 in G‘ column and see the sites that is most often ranked high in Google for your chosen keywords:
1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool (free) is useful for comparing Google advertisers’ competition data and your own findings and also for differentiating commercial terms from non-commercial ones. Keywords enjoying high advertisers‘ competition are most likely targeting potential customers (while more informative [and hence less competitive] phrases usually attract people who are collecting information rather than are really willing to buy). A good way to overcome high competition while sticking to more commercial phrases is to turn (moderately) commercial phrases into long tail (e.g. per our table: ‘Tennessee fsbo‘ into ‘townsend Tennessee fsbo‘).

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Article | Choosing the Domain Name for your Blog

Things to keep in mind when choosing a name for your blog.

Tags: Articles, Domains, SEO, Marketing on 2008-10-11 and saved by 9 people -All Annotations (21) -About

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- Rowse, Darren. 2006. Choosing the Domain Name for your Blog. Blog. ProBlogger. February 16. http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/16/choosing-the-domain-name-for-your-blog/.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-11
Why would you want your own Domain Name?

Having your own domain name is desirable for many bloggers for numerous reasons. For a start if you’re wanting to build credibility and a sense of professionalism around your blog a domain that reflects this can help. Similarly a carefully selected domain name has the ability to enhance the branding of a product, service, business or even person. Domain purchases give the added bonus of email addresses with the same domain (adding to both professionalism and branding) and can enhance your Search Engine Ranking.
Add Sticky Note
- COMMENT: Many nonprofits go to choose a Blogspot address or a Wordpress.com address to start off their blog or to start a microsite for an issue of theirs. In addition to the hassle of transfering it later if it does become successful, you are limited in your branding. Considering how important your organization's name is to its fundraising efforts, it would be better to just start off with all the control you can have over branding.
  posted by suzannah on 2008-10-05
Factors to Consider when Choosing a Domain Name
Thinking of the Future - another factor to consider that is related to my first point of goals and objectives is to consider what your blog might look like in the future. I’ve seen a number of bloggers start up blogs with domains that fit with the topic of the blog initially but which outgrow the domain down the track. In one instance the problem was that the blog started on a fairly narrow topic (a sub-niche) and on a domain that reflected this but that in time it expanded it’s topic as the industry changed. In the end the topic and name just didn’t fit.

Another ‘future factor’ to consider is how many blogs you’re thinking of starting on your domain. Take a look at About.com for an example of how it’s possible to have one domain with many blogs running off it. They blog (yes they are blogs - run by MovableType) ‘about’ hundreds of topics and have a domain name that suits this perfectly. I myself have fallen into the trap of not thinking ahead in this way with my livingroom.org.au domain where I currently have a blog on Digital Cameras. I guess this is an example of how ultimately it doesn’t matter what domain you start blogs on as it’s a blog that does pretty well - however I often wonder how much better if could have done if I’d just thought ahead a little more!

Lastly on the ‘future front’ - don’t pick a name that you suspect might date quickly. Picking a name that is time specific in any way might find you searching for a new domain when it is no longer relevant at some future time.
Name Length - there are a range of opinions on what the ideal length of a domain name is. Technically you can have one with up to 67 characters in it but it is generally accepted that short ones are better for a number of reasons including that they are easier to remember, that they leave less room for making mistakes when typing them in, they are good for word of mouth (online or offline) marketing, that they are more visually pleasing (eg on your business card) etc.

The other argument is that if you are looking for SE traffic that you might like to consider a longer domain name with a number of the keywords that you’re looking for traffic on.

My personal preference these days is for shorter domains if possible, but not just for the sake of being short. Plus short names are very popular and hard to find these days so you might be forced to consider something a little longer anyway.
Numbers? - Another option to consider when choosing a domain on a topic that is quite crowded is to include a number at the beginning or end of it. Once again this increases your chances of finding a domain with your keyword in it but could ‘cheapen’ the sound of your domain (a matter of personal opinion of course).
‘Easy’ Names - Most ‘experts’ in this area argue that a domain name should be easy to spell, pronounce, remember and type. Web users are notoriously lazy and if your site is not easy to find then they might just quickly give up trying to find it. As a result the easier you can make your domain to remember and access the more chance you have of traffic to it from repeat readers.
Keeping it Legal - it is highly recommendable to think seriously about the legal implications of the words you use in your domain name. Avoid trademarked names especially. I know of a couple of instances where bloggers were forced into making changes months into new blogs because of legal threats. Whether these laws vary from country to country I’m unsure - but it’s worth considering if you’re picking a domain that might clash in this way.
The ‘Blog’ Word - One temptations for many bloggers is to use the word ‘blog’ in the name and URL of their blog. This has the advantage of opening up new options for domain names but can also have some costs. For starters it could see the possibilities for expanding your site down the track limited. If one day you don’t want to run your site in a blog format you might feel a bit trapped. The other reason is that if you are wanting to use AdSense as an income stream for your blog down the track, it has a problem of serving ads about blogging when the word ‘blog’ appears too prominently on a site. This is ok when your blog is about blogging - but isn’t too conducive to high ad relevancy if you’re writing on a different topic.
Secure Multiple Domains - One piece of advice that many experienced web-masters recommend is making sure that you secure other similar domain names to the one you eventually choose. For example, if you choose a .com domain name it might be worth getting the .net and .org ones if you can, or perhaps even getting plurals or other logical similar ones. This is not essential but might help you protect your niche in some circumstances.
Opinions of Others - Before you buy that domain you’ve been eyeing off - it might be worthwhile running it by one or two other trusted friends (who won’t run off and buy it themselves). It’s amazing how focused you can become on finding the right name and how that can cloud your judgement. It’s also interesting to see how a name might sound to a person of a different culture to your own. Words mean different things in different part of the world and it could help you avoid an embarrassing mistake or just a dorky blog name.
Previously used Domain Names - It’s worth checking to see if a domain has been previously registered. Spammers often buy up domain names and then abandon them later once they’ve used them up. This can leave these domains banned by Google which gets you off to a pretty poor start.
Some tools you might like to use in selecting a domain name include:

NameBoy

DomainsBot

Whois Source

WordPress Plugin | All in One SEO Pack

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Tags: All In One SEO Pack, WordPress, Plugins, SEO, Utilities, Web Design, Blogging on 2008-10-05 and saved by 35 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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