Romania presentation

Editor's Notes

1. THANKS FOR COMING AND THANKS TO MARC LESNICK THE ORGANISER, AND MICHAEL CORFMAN FROM GPWA (WE BOTH SEEM TO BE NOMADS. ONE TIME I WAS ON A BOAT TO CHINA (NO LITERALLY), IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND OF 200 SEATS THERE WERE 4 PEOPLE ON THE BOAT. 3 THREE YOUNG GUYS AND A FOURTH THAT HAD HIS BACK TO ME – BUT ANYONE WHO KNOWS MICHAEL KNOWS THAT EVEN FROM BEHIND YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHO IT IS – HOPEFULLY YOU CAUGHT HIS SESSION THIS MORNING – SO ANYHOW, WHAT A LINE UP OF TOP SEO’S` I’m Gary Beal – MD OF VANGUARD SEO IN LEEDS ENGLAND. CAME FROM THE US 3 YEARS AGO WHEN US LAWS CHANGED – I WAS A SUPER AFFILIATE IN GAMING AND AN SEO SINCE 98 – NOW VANGUARD PRIMARILY DOES GAMING SEO & PPC IVE BROUGHT JON WATT AND ANTHONY MCGRATH WITH ME. THEY ARE HERE TO HELP OUT BEFORE I START LET ME SAY - ALL THE INFORMATION I AM ABOUT TO COVER, PDF AND PPT W/NOTES ARE ALL GOING TO BE AVAILABLE ON GARYTHESCUBAGUY.COM OR VANGUARDSEO.COM FOR FREE. I’M ALSO A MODERATOR ON GPWA WEBSITE AND SEOCHAT – SO I CAN DO FOLLOWUP QUESTIONS IF YOU’RE NOT THE PUBLIC SPEAKING TYPE
2. What you will learn Link Acquisition – Avenues, Penalties, alternative options Auto-posting and Article Spinning (Good & Bad - note disclosure!) Blog/Forum Spamming/Creation (note disclosure!) RSS Feeds for Building Free Links My Favourite Tools International SEO (Geotargeting and Subdomains) Canonicalisation (Who, What, Where???) Important, But Often Forgotten SEO Tactics Social Bookmarking and SEO Longtail SEO Integration and Implementation Black Hat v. Whitehat How To SEO A New Or Young Website Question & Answer Session
3. Buying links Negatives; Monthly charge to maintain and they are still not permanent Link integrity (lost PR, additional samepage links, nofollows, etc.) Bad neighbourhoods Easily identifiable networks Monitoring the links on 100’s of sites
4. Buying Websites; You own them forever Only monthly charge is hosting Your own links No monitoring charges – just the placement Hand-placed (no automated rss or xml feeds) Worthy investment
5. Buying Websites; Auctions (Flippa) Forums (Digital Point) Use tools like IBP or Shoemoney’s tool (link on GaryTheScubaGuy.com) to identify existing sites w/links – edu’s! SEDO for domain names Google search related blogs and email the owner (many automated tools built for requesting link exchange or placement that can be used for searching related sites and searching the site for contact emails or just use domaintools
6. There are a few other factors to look at before buying a site; Domain Age – 2 years min.unless other factors outweigh this Page Rank – yes it does matter when buying a site because it represents G-Trust Number of existing back links Quality of those back links and are they to any deep pages? How many pages are indexed with Google? Install McAfee Site Inspector on your computer. It will flag any issues to do with bad history, malware or any one of many other problems Will the BL’s stay in place once bought? Other pluses are host location vs. target location, the number of registrants of the domain, DMOZ listing and rankings. If it’s a forum, the number of active members and recent posts are important. Check Wayback.org for historical content & DomainTools Check ValidRank.com for fake Page Rank
7. Build a “101 list”. These get Dugg all the time, and often become “authority documents”. People can’t resist linking to these (hint, hint). Like mine at http://www.ppc-manager.blogspot.com . I did a PPC 101 and PPC 102 lists. 2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to. 3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration). 4. Crea te a l ist of the top 10 myths for a specific category. 5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an “authority”.) 6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It’s an accessibility thing.) 7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site. PPC as a Link Building Tool 8. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you. 9. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles , GoArticles , iSnare , etc. The great thing a bout good artic le sites i s that their artic le pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic. 10. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BL ANK ? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com. 11. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy) . Email it to some handpicked journalists and b loggers. Personalize the emai l message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb , PRLeap , etc. 12. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or conte nt. 13. Trade articles with other webmasters. 14. Write about, and link to, companies with “in the news” pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"]. 15. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links . 16. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to rel evant resources. 17. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant r esources. 18. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry exp ert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site. 19. Submit a story to Digg 20. Hold an ebay auction for a charity – home page link
8. Crawl Errors – advises you of any crawl errors Google finds like broken links or orphaned links. I have seen in some cases a website that has reformatted URL’s or rebuilt a website and neglected or missed using 301 redirects and using this tool have found 100’s of links pointing nowhere (404 error pages). Once they addressed this issue they gained the value of these links and subsequently better rankings.
9. COPY THIS URL SOMEWHERE FOR THE NEXT STEP
10. XML Sitemaps – these (and I make individual ones for data files, pic files, pdf files, doc files, etc.) tell the bots the files you do want indexed and where they are
11. Internal Links – lets you know if you are cross-linked, which may confuse the bots or split influence between two similar pages
12. External Links – tells you who is linked to you. Helpful in optimising anchor text and bad links pointing to non-existent pages
13. Crawl Errors – advises you of any crawl errors Google finds like broken links or orphaned links. I have seen in some cases a website that has reformatted URL’s or rebuilt a website and neglected or missed using 301 redirects and using this tool have found 100’s of links pointing nowhere (404 error pages). Once they addressed this issue they gained the value of these links and subsequently better rankings. It also identifies bad internal link structures (Ie – nofollows, not found 404’s)
14. Top Queries – this shows the top queries to your site which will allow you to improve specific landing pages for quick wins or target terms that have good existing rankings so that you can build new silos or pages to further enhance positions and traffic. In the gaming market the difference between
15. Associate Domains – I’ll get more into this first setting (Geographic Target) a bit later – But for now this is an extremely easy quick win if you have WMC set-up. (This takes 5 minutes). Go into WMC and choose which domain you want as your primary (www or http). The benefit of this is that currently Google sees each as individual pages. Links that you have pointed at your URL may have both and you are losing the full benefit of your back links. You can accomplish this with a 301 but if you don’t know coding this is just as effective.
16. Geotargeting – I’m going to cover this in greater detail in number 6 because it’s actually a huge change in the last 12 months to anyone outside of the states that can be a fantastic advantage to a site with a global market, but for now I’ll just explain what it does. Geographical targeting (selection) in WMC allows you to target a specific region. So if you want to target England, just West Yorkshire, or just Leeds itself, Geographical targeting allows you to do just that. Be careful not to over-filter your target market region as this setting may or may not affect your rankings. Test it out before integrating it permanently.
17. Using Geotargeting for Language and Regional Targeting The various ways that people search and the results the search engines are delivering are evolving rapidly. Smarter queries and more complex algorithms mean that you need to use various techniques to be sure you are showing up in the results. Local search, advanced search, regional search and language-based searches are some of the filters an end-user or a search engine can use in determining who shows up, when they show up and where they show up. Geotargeting is a tool Google has refined and one that you can manipulate to a point in order to increase saturation in any search and in any market. Beyond the obvious on-page considerations, different searches will deliver (in most cases) a different set of results.
18. GEOTARGETING IS WHEN YOU TARGET MULTIPLE REGIONS USING SUBDOMAINS AND TARGET MULTIPLE LANGUAGES USING SUBDIRECTORIES AND LANGUAGE BASED META TAGS AND TITLES
19. What you need to consider are; 1 .Your target market? 2. If you need language based subdomains or subdirectories? 3. Should you move hosting as well? 4. Cost of translation 5. Can I afford to do it all? Thats fairly easy to establish
20. THIS SS SHOWS REGINALLY BASED TRAFFIC NUMBERS
21. 1 .The IP of the end-user (where are they?) 2 .The server location of the website (where is it hosted?) 3 . Any geographically targeted settings in Webmaster Central (as mentioned in the previous tip) 4 .The relationship between the search filters and the resulting web pages (I.e. Did they search for Pages from [region] or Pages in [language] 5 .If the end-user is searching a different extension than the defaulted engine (they manually enter Google.com searching for US or English results in a non-US region. 6. If the end-user is logged into the search engines site (Gmail, iGoogle, Toolbars, Local Search etc.) 7. If they have Google’s SearchWiki or other plugin
22. Do I target a REGION or a LANGUAGE?
23. Target a specific language? 1. Create a subdirectory in the native language (I.e. www.yoursite.com/nl/) 2. Build back links from same language websites 3. Do not use geographical targeting THERE IS A BIT MORE TO ASSIGNING A NEW SUBDOMAIN TO A REGIONALLY BASED SERVER – DROP ME AN EMAIL
24. Target a specific language? 1. Create a subdirectory in the native language (I.e. www.yoursite.com/nl/) 2. Build back links from same language websites 3. Do not use geographical targeting THERE IS A BIT MORE TO ASSIGNING A NEW SUBDOMAIN TO A REGIONALLY BASED SERVER – DROP ME AN EMAIL
25. 1. Are the links from a TLD that matches the destination URL (I.e. .nl linking to an .nl website)? 2. Is the IP linking website located in the same region as the linked URL? 3. Page rank, linking anchor text, additional outbound links on the page linking to you 4. On-page relevancy 5. Language based meta-tags 6. Everything in the above 5 items relating to the linking website/page
26. Get the content rewritten using SEO Tactics Get your hosting setup in the target region Create Subdomains Use the DNS record on the top level domain’s server to point to the ‘A’ (Address) record of that subdomain to the IP of the target host Go to Google’s Webmaster Central and get a new verification code Add the code between your <head> tags (or add an html file) Submit to Google for crawl
27. Get the content rewritten using SEO Tactics Get your hosting setup in the target region Create Subdomains Use the DNS record on the top level domain’s server to point to the ‘A’ (Address) record of that subdomain to the IP of the target host Go to Google’s Webmaster Central and get a new verification code Add the code between your <head> tags (or add an html file) Submit to Google for crawl
28. Get the content rewritten using SEO Tactics Get your hosting setup in the target region Create Subdomains Use the DNS record on the top level domain’s server to point to the ‘A’ (Address) record of that subdomain to the IP of the target host Go to Google’s Webmaster Central and get a new verification code Add the code between your <head> tags (or add an html file) Submit to Google for crawl
29. Get the content rewritten using SEO Tactics Get your hosting setup in the target region Create Subdomains Use the DNS record on the top level domain’s server to point to the ‘A’ (Address) record of that subdomain to the IP of the target host Go to Google’s Webmaster Central and get a new verification code Add the code between your <head> tags (or add an html file) Submit to Google for crawl
30. Get the content rewritten using SEO Tactics Get your hosting setup in the target region Create Subdomains Use the DNS record on the top level domain’s server to point to the ‘A’ (Address) record of that subdomain to the IP of the target host Go to Google’s Webmaster Central and get a new verification code Add the code between your <head> tags (or add an html file) Submit to Google for crawl
31. Get the content rewritten using SEO Tactics Get your hosting setup in the target region Create Subdomains Use the DNS record on the top level domain’s server to point to the ‘A’ (Address) record of that subdomain to the IP of the target host Go to Google’s Webmaster Central and get a new verification code Add the code between your <head> tags (or add an html file) Submit to Google for crawl
32. Get the content rewritten using SEO Tactics Get your hosting setup in the target region Create Subdomains Use the DNS record on the top level domain’s server to point to the ‘A’ (Address) record of that subdomain to the IP of the target host Go to Google’s Webmaster Central and get a new verification code Add the code between your <head> tags (or add an html file) Submit to Google for crawl
33. • To target a language using only subdirectories do not use geographic targeting • You can target a language with both subdomains and subdirectories but if you have a top-level TLD (.com) use subdirectories versus subdomains. • You can use Google geographical targeting on subdomains and subdirectories • Your title should be in the native language and/or use regional slang terms where they apply. • Use language-based meta tags whenever targeting language-based searches • Host subdomains that are for geographical targeting in the target region • When you implement the subdomain strategy, link to it from the original website • Create new sitemaps for each subdomain • When creating meta tags and content be sure to use native slang. • Get back links from same TLD's (get a .nl link to your .nl site in the native language) • If you have a TLD (like .nl or .de) do not use geographical targeting. These domains are already associated with its designated region
34. Canonicalisation – Because of development issues, server settings, programming platforms, and even natural site progression a site may have multiple version of a homepage, or even an entire site. Let’s say you upgraded your site from an html site to a php site. Many times in the crossover pages are left on the server and are crawlable to the robots. These present several issues. You may have the same content and the new page never gets indexed. Links back to you may be to different versions. To mention just two of the most serious issues. I’ve seen a website that had 8 individual and crawlable versions of their homepage live at the same time. This can reduce the strength of your page. (Ever see a site that has a lower homepage PR than an internal page?) The simplest and least painful way to fix this is with 301 redirects.
35. Canonicalisation – Because of development issues, server settings, programming platforms, and even natural site progression a site may have multiple version of a homepage, or even an entire site. Let’s say you upgraded your site from an html site to a php site. Many times in the crossover pages are left on the server and are crawlable to the robots. These present several issues. You may have the same content and the new page never gets indexed. Links back to you may be to different versions. To mention just two of the most serious issues. I’ve seen a website that had 8 individual and crawlable versions of their homepage live at the same time. This can reduce the strength of your page. (Ever see a site that has a lower homepage PR than an internal page?) The simplest and least painful way to fix this is with 301 redirects.
36. Canonicalisation – Because of development issues, server settings, programming platforms, and even natural site progression a site may have multiple version of a homepage, or even an entire site. Let’s say you upgraded your site from an html site to a php site. Many times in the crossover pages are left on the server and are crawlable to the robots. These present several issues. You may have the same content and the new page never gets indexed. Links back to you may be to different versions. To mention just two of the most serious issues. I’ve seen a website that had 8 individual and crawlable versions of their homepage live at the same time. This can reduce the strength of your page. (Ever see a site that has a lower homepage PR than an internal page?) The simplest and least painful way to fix this is with 301 redirects.
37. Canonicalisation – Because of development issues, server settings, programming platforms, and even natural site progression a site may have multiple version of a homepage, or even an entire site. Let’s say you upgraded your site from an html site to a php site. Many times in the crossover pages are left on the server and are crawlable to the robots. These present several issues. You may have the same content and the new page never gets indexed. Links back to you may be to different versions. To mention just two of the most serious issues. I’ve seen a website that had 8 individual and crawlable versions of their homepage live at the same time. This can reduce the strength of your page. (Ever see a site that has a lower homepage PR than an internal page?) The simplest and least painful way to fix this is with 301 redirects.
38. Alt Attributes and Titles in Images – Use alt attributes on images to preserve content integrity while providing internal links for ranking factor. Using the alt attribute in images allows you to reinforce topical relevance with the on page text based content to improve a pages relevance score. Anchor Text Optimization – Use pertinent anchor text and do not waste link equity from excessively linking to non reciprocating pages within a site. Employing anchor text optimization means using relevant keywords to link to relevant pages within a site. Do this enough and before you know it you are virtual theming - creating a secondary navigation contextually through keyword co-occurrence. This can distinguish your site from competitors as each granular layer consolidates ranking factor for a website. This is why Wikipedia dominates search results. Flattening Site Architecture – Keep site architecture as flat as possible or use breadcrumbs to aid in information architecture and crawling. Avoid using sub folders excessively within a website domain.com/categories/products/colour/page.html vs. flattening the url and site by using more descriptive naming conventions for a page domain.com/Super_Audi_R8_Black_2010.html. The closer the more competitive keyword landing pages are to the root folder, the easier it will be for them to gain additional ranking factor, page rank and page strength to express the content on that page. Content Volume - Ensure you have enough content to dominate a competitive keyword. Trying to rank for a keyword with millions of competing pages with a little or no content is a waste of time. You will need topical relevance which means articles, posts and pages all internally linked and consolidated within a clear silo to create the proper on page signals for that keyword. Shoot for a minimum of 300 words that integrate LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) or associated keywords and typical keyword phrases. You can find these using Google’s keyword suggestion tool or better yet look for the bolded print within the snippets when utilising Google’s beta LSA search query by typing a tilde (~) just before your keyword in a search on Google. Also use these keywords and keyword phrases in internal back links and external anchor text links. Contextual Links – Link contextually within related document to select preferred landing pages through virtual theming. If you are on a page about poker rooms, and have a keyword phrase such as “free poker rooms”, link the keyword phrase to the free poker room page. Do this for every keyword/kw phrase (just once per page if it appears more than that) and you have just added a virtual theme to your keywords. This means that each page can now work together collectively to support the parent theme (which is the main/root keyword itself). Load Time – Google has said recently that load time on a site will become a very important issue very soon. Optimise (compress) images, eliminate unnecessary code, note and whitespace. Run the site through a speed optimiser like IBP to identify area of improvement.
39. I RAN A TEST ON SEOCHAT AND POSTED THE RESULTS ON GPWA AND SEOCHAT
40. A post from search engine journal in late 2007
41. Did this test for the first time in 2007
42. Google Alerts - This monitors Google’s data bases and will notify you when content appears that contain the kw/kw phrase that you are looking for. We use this to monitor the effectiveness of Press Releases, monitor the competition, identify new “buzz” in certain industries (primarily gaming), client reputation management and certain content. It can load directly into your iGoogle desktop. Google Trends – This is a tool that shows graphs identifying the traffic trends over time, from the last few years to the last few weeks and allows you to see a snapshot of most any industry. Great for researching your next product offering. Google Insights – This is a supercharged version of Trends. It monitors the actual search queries globally. So if you wanted to see what city, county, country or region had the most activity for a particular search term, this tool does that – and more! It can add delimiters such as time frames, and will also compare regions, compare related keywords and any mix of the above 3 filters. Then it will graph them all for you as well for a clear look. One of my favourite accessories that Google Insights has is that it will monitor the sector for related kw’s that have significantly increased search volume – they call them Breakout Terms and you can have these delivered to your iGoogle desktop as well. I can’t tell you how helpful this is when you are in a highly competitive field trying to find niche or long tail terms to target and get the jump on the big guys. Once we identify these terms we then create pages for them and add them to a silo. So for instance if “Million Dollar Bingo Game” is a breakout term being searched enough to draw a “Breakout Term” notification from Insights, we’ll build a page for it using all the steps mentioned above, add it to a relevant silo, bleed PR to it using no follows, and suddenly we are ranking very well. TIP – We also use the upgraded version of Domain Tools much in the same way. We monitor for our kw (e.g. Casinos). Anytime a domain is purchased with that kw in it we get an email. When we see that all the TLD’s (Top Level Domains like .com, .net and .org) are all purchased at the same time, we know some VC out there is paying to buy them up in expectation of a future site launch. Posh Bingo is a great recent example. We received email notification from Domain Tools, put an Alert on the term, and then watched Insights for a breakout alert. (We monitored the URL as well for launch) XENU – crawls your website and identifies errors, link structure, page size, external links and many other things that are important to the health of your site SEO Spyglass – Gives you a detailed report of your own or a competitors back links and ranks them using important factors like follow-no follow, Page Rank, and other factors. You can even import your Google WMC exported BL report and see if any of the back links to your site are potentially hazardous.  
43. EXCLUSIVE - VanguardSEO’s Dual Depth Back Link Checker – When acquiring a website we want to know who is linking to the sites that are linking to us, rather than just the first level of linking, so we built this free tool. - http://toolbox.vanguardseo.com/td/ SEOMoz’s Linkscape – Another great tool for evaluating a competitors back links, anchor text, and discovering the strongest pages on a site. Majestic SEO – Looks at the back link trends of competitors to identify if a sudden surge in back links could be the reason for their rankings increase, then you can use one of many other tools (Link Assistant, ShoeMoney, SEOMoz) to identify these links that significantly changed their ranking and go after the same links or an equivalent linking structure) Rank Tracker – The best tool I’ve found so far for checking daily SERP (search engine rank positions) checking. It gives historical information and clear signs for increases and decreases from day to day or pre-seo to current day. It graphs everything over the full term of the campaign. It has human emulation and scheduling to reduce the chance of getting blocked. And my favourite; it queries any search engine anywhere as if you were there, so IP concerns aren’t an issue. Firefox SEO Quake Plug-in – Great for a quick look at all of the important ranking factors of the top 10 or just one site. This is a toolbar that allows you to set the values you wish to see like PR, indexed pages, registration date, SBM references, DMOZ, Yahoo, MSN, Baidu, and most other SE’s, plus a ton of other information on the fly.
44. Firefox SEO Quake Plug-in – Great for a quick look at all of the important ranking factors of the top 10 or just one site. This is a toolbar that allows you to set the values you wish to see like PR, indexed pages, registration date, SBM references, DMOZ, Yahoo, MSN, Baidu, and most other SE’s, plus a ton of other information on the fly.