MSEOKING - MEASURING & TRACKING SUCCESS

They say that if you can measure it, then you can improve it. In search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEOs track data about rankings, referrals, links and more to help analyze their SEO strategy and create road maps for success.

Recommended Metrics to Track

Although every business is unique and every website has different metrics that matter, the following list is nearly universal. Note that we're only covering those metrics critical to SEO - optimizing for the search engines. As a result, more general metrics may not be included. For a more comprehensive look at web analytics, check out Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators from Avinash Kaushik's excellent Web Analytics Blog.


1. Search Engine Share of Referring Visits

Every month, it's critical to keep track of the contribution of each traffic source for your site. These include:

Direct Navigation: Typed in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.
Referral Traffic: From links across the web or in trackable email, promotion & branding campaign links

Search Traffic: Queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine

Knowing both the percentage and exact numbers will help you identify weaknesses and serve as a comparison over time for trend data. For example, if you see that traffic has spiked dramatically but it comes from referral links with low relevance, it's not time to get excited. On the other hand, if search engine traffic falls dramatically, you may be in trouble. You should use this data to track your marketing efforts and plan your traffic acquisition efforts.


2. Visits Referred by Specific Search Engines

Three major engines make up 95%+ of all search traffic in the US - Google and the Yahoo-Bing alliance. For most countries outside the US 80%+ of search traffic comes solely from Google (with a few notable exceptions including both Russia and China.) Measuring the contribution of your search traffic from each engine is critical for several reasons:

Compare Performance vs. Market Share

By tracking not only search engines broadly, but by country, you'll be able to see exactly the contribution level of each engine in accordance with its estimated market share. Keep in mind that in sectors like technology and Internet services, demand is likely to be higher on Google (given its younger, more tech-savvy demographic) than in areas like cooking, sports or real estate.

Get Visibility Into Potential Drops

If your search traffic should drop significantly at any point, knowing the relative and exact contributions from each engine will be essential to diagnosing the issue. If all the engines drop off equally, the problem is almost certainly one of accessibility. If Google drops while the others remain at previous levels, it's more likely to be a penalty or devaluation of your SEO efforts by that singular engine.

Uncover Strategic Value

It's very likely that some efforts you undertake in SEO will have greater positive results on some engines than others. For example, we frequently notice that on-page optimization tactics like better keyword inclusion and targeting has more benefit with Bing & Yahoo! than Google, while gaining specific anchor text links from a large number of domains has a more positive impact on Google than the others. If you can identify the tactics that are having success with one engine, you'll better know how to focus your efforts.


3. VISITS REFERRED BY SPECIFIC SEARCH ENGINE TERMS AND PHRASES

The keywords that send traffic are another important piece of your analytics pie. You'll want to keep track of these on a regular basis to help identify new trends in keyword demand, gauge your performance on key terms and find terms that are bringing significant traffic that you're potentially under optimized for.

You may also find value in tracking search referral counts for terms outside the "top" terms/phrases - those that are important and valuable to your business. If the trend lines are pointing in the wrong direction, you know efforts need to be undertaken to course correct. Search traffic worldwide has consistently risen over the past 15 years, so a decline in quantity of referrals is troubling - check for seasonality issues (keywords that are only in demand certain times of the week/month/year) and rankings (have you dropped, or has search volume ebbed?).


4. CONVERSION RATE BY SEARCH QUERY TERM/PHRASE

When it comes to the bottom line for your organization, few metrics matter as much as conversion. For example, in the graphic to the right, 5.80% of visitors who reached SEOmoz with the query "SEO Tools" signed up to become members during that visit. This is a much higher conversion rate than most of the 1000s of keywords used to find our site. With this information, we can now do 2 things.

Checking our rankings, we see that we only rank #4 for "SEO Tools". Working to improve this position will undoubtedly lead to more conversion.
Because our analytics will also tell us what page these visitors landed on (mostly http://www.seomoz.org/tools), we can focus on efforts on that page to improve visitor experience.
The real value from this simplistic tracking comes from the "low-hanging fruit" - seeing keywords that continually send visitors who convert and increasing focus on both rankings and improving the landing pages that visitors reach. While conversion rate tracking from keyword phrase referrals is certainly important, it's never the whole story. Dig deeper and you can often uncover far more interesting and applicable data about how conversion starts and ends on your site.


5. NUMBER OF PAGES RECEIVING AT LEAST ONE VISIT FROM SEARCH ENGINES

Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an essential metric for monitoring overall SEO performance. From this number, we can get a glimpse into indexation - the number of pages the engines are keeping in their indices from our site. For most large websites (50,000+ pages), mere inclusion is essential to earning traffic, and this metric delivers a trackable number that's indicative of success or failure. As you work on issues like site architecture, link acquisition, XML Sitemaps, uniqueness of content and meta data, etc., the trend line should rise, showing that more and more pages are earning their way into the engines' results. Pages receiving search traffic is, quite possibly, the best long tail metric around.

While other analytics data points are of great importance, those mentioned above should be universally applied to get the maximum value from your SEO campaigns.


Google's (not provided) Keywords

In 2011, Google announced it will no longer pass keyword query data through its referrer string for logged in users. This means that instead of showing organic keyword data in Google Analytics, visits from users logged into Google will show as “not provided.” At the time, Google said they expected this to effect less than 10% of all search queries.

Soon after, many webmasters started reporting up to 20% of their search queries as keyword (not provided). Google responded by saying that the 10% figure was an average across all worldwide sites and that some differences would exist based on country location and type of website.

With the launch of Google+, webmasters fear that more and more users will create, and log into, Google accounts. This would result in an even greater percentage of “not provided” keywords.

How this will eventually play out is anyone's guess. In the meantime, smart SEOs and web analytics experts have devised workarounds to try and recover some of this missing keyword data, although nothing can substitute for the real thing. Read more about dealing with (not provided) keywords in this blog post.


Analytics Software

The Right Tools for the Job


Omniture
Fireclick
Mint
Sawmill Analytics
Clicktale
Coremetrics
Unica Affinium NetInsight
Additional Reading:

How to Choose a Web Analytics Tool: A Radical Alternative - From Avinash Kaushik way back in 2006 (but still a relevant and quality piece)

Yahoo! Web Analytics
(formerly Indextools)
Google Analytics
Clicky Web Analytics
Piwik Open Source Analysis
Woopra Website Tracking
AWStats
While choosing can be tough, our top recommendation is Google Analytics. Because of it's broad adoption you can find many tutorials and guides available online. Google Analytics also has the advantage of cross-integration with other Google products such as Webmaster Tools, Adwords and Adsense.

No matter which analytics software you decide is right for you, we also strongly recommend testing different versions of pages on your site and making conversion rate improvements based on the results. Testing pages on your site can be as simple as using a free tool to test two versions of a page header or as complex as using an expensive multivariate software to simultaneously test hundreds of variants of a page. There are many testing platforms out there, but if you're looking to put a first toe in the testing waters, one free, easy to use solution we recommend is Google's Website Optimizer. It's a great way to get started running tests that can inform powerful conversion rate improvements.


Metrics for Measuring

Search Engine Optimization

In organic SEO, it can be difficult to track the specific elements of the engines' algorithms effectively given that this data is not public, nor is it even well researched. However, a combination of tactics have become best practices, and new data is constantly emerging to help track direct ranking elements and positive/negative ranking signals. The data points covered below are ones that we will occasionally recommend to track campaigns and have proven to add value when used in concert with analytics.

Metrics Provided by Search Engines

We've already discussed many of the data points provided by services such as Google's Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft's Webmaster Tools. In addition to these, the engines provide some insight through publicly available queries and competitive intelligence. Below is a list of queries/tools /metrics from the engines, along with their respective applications.

Employing these queries & tools effectively requires that you have an informational need with an actionable solution. The data itself isn't valuable unless you have a plan of what to change/build/do once you learn what you need to know (this holds true for competitive analysis as well).


Google Site Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org - useful to see the number and list of pages indexed on a particular domain. You can expand the value by adding additional query parameters. For example - site:seomoz.org/blog inurl:tools - will show only those pages in Google's index that are in the blog and contain the word "tools" in the URL. While this number fluctuates, it's still a good rough measurement. You can read more about this in this blog post.

Google Trends

Available at Google.com/Trends - this shows keyword search volume/popularity data over time. If you're logged into your Google account, you can also get specific numbers on the charts, rather than just trend lines.

Google Trends for Websites

Available at Trends.Google.com/websites - This shows traffic data for websites according to Google's data sources (toolbar, ISP data, analytics and others may be part of this). A logged in user account will show numbers in the chart to indicate estimated traffic levels.

Google Insights for Search

Available at google.com/insights/search - this tool provides data about regional usage, popularity and related queries for keywords.



Bing Site Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org - just like Yahoo! and Google, Bing allows for queries to show the number and list of pages in their index from a given site. Unfortunately, Bing's counts are given to wild fluctuation and massive inaccuracy, often rendering the counts themselves useless.

Bing IP Query

e.g., ip:216.176.191.233 - this query will show pages that Microsoft's engine has found on the given IP address. This can be useful in identifying shared hosting and seeing what other sites are hosted on a given IP address.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Available at Microsoft Advertising - a great variety of keyword research and audience intelligence tools are provided by Microsoft, primarily for search and display advertising. This guide won't dive deep into the value of each individual tool, but they are worth investigating and many can be applied to SEO.


Ask Site Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org inurl:www - Ask.com is a bit picky in its requirements around use of the site query operator. To function properly, an additional query must be used (although generic queries such as the example above are useful to see what a broad "site" query would normally return).


Blog Search Link Query

e.g., link:www.seomoz.org/blog - Although Google's normal web search link command is not always useful, their blog search link query shows generally high quality data and can be sorted by date range and relevance. You can read more about this in this blog post.



Page Specific Metrics

Page Authority - Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank.

mozRank - mozRank refers to SEOmoz’s general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority (or popularity). mozRank is very similar in purpose to the measures of static importance (which means importance independent of a specific query) that are used by the search engines (e.g., Google's PageRank or FAST's StaticRank). Search engines often rank pages with higher global link authority ahead of pages with lower authority. Because measures like mozRank are global and static, this ranking power applies to a broad range of search queries, rather than pages optimized specifically for a particular keyword.

mozTrust - Like mozRank, mozTrust is distributed through links. First, trustworthy “seeds” are identified to feed the calculation of the metric. (These include the homepages of major international university, media and governmental websites.) Websites that earn links from the seed set are then able to cast (lesser) trust-votes through their links. This process continues across the web and the mozTrust of each applicable link decreases as it travels "farther" from the original trusted seed site.

# of Links - The total number of pages that contain at least one link to this page. For example, if the Library of Congress homepage (http://www.loc.gov/index.html) linked to the White House's homepage (http://www.whitehouse.gov) in both the page content and the footer, this would still be counted as only a single link.

# of Linking Root Domains - The total number of unique root domains that contain a link to this page. For example, if topics.nytimes.com and www.nytimes.com both linked to the homepage of SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org), this would count as only a single linking root domain.

External mozRank - Whereas mozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both internal and external links, external mozRank measures only the amount of mozRank flowing through external links (links located on a separate domain). Because external links can play an important role as independent endorsements, external mozRank is an important metric for predicting search engine rankings.



Domain Specific Metrics

Domain Authority - Domain Authority predicts how well a web page on a specific domain will rank. The higher the Domain Authority, the greater the potential for an individual page on that domain to rank well.

Domain mozRank - Domain-level mozRank (DmR) quantifies the popularity of a given domain compared to all other domains on the web. DmR is computed for both subdomains and root domains. This metric uses the same algorithm as mozRank but applies it to the “domain-level link graph”. (A view of the web that only looks at domains as a whole and ignores individual pages) Viewing the web from this perspective offers additional insight about the general authority of a domain. Just as pages can endorse other pages, a link which crosses domain boundaries (e.g., from a page on searchengineland.com to a page on www.seomoz.org) can be seen as endorsement by one domain for another.

Domain mozTrust - Just as mozRank can be applied at the domain level (Domain-level mozRank), so can mozTrust. Domain-level mozTrust is like mozTrust but instead of being calculated between web pages, it is calculated between entire domains. New or poorly linked-to pages on highly trusted domains may inherit some natural trust by virtue of being hosted on the trusted domain. Domain-Level mozTrust is expressed on a 10-point logarithmic scale.

# of Links - the quantity of pages that contain at least one link to the domain. For example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and http://www.loc.gov/about both contained links to http://www.nasa.gov, this would count as two links to the domain.

# of Linking Root Domains - the quantity of different domains that contain at least one page with a link to any page on this site. For example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and http://www.loc.gov/about both contained links to http://www.nasa.gov, this would count as only a single linking root domain to nasa.gov.


Applying that Data

To Your Campaign

Just knowing the numbers won't help unless you can effectively interpret and apply changes to course-correct. Below, we've taken a sample of some of the most common directional signals provided by tracking data points and how to respond with actions to improve or execute on opportunities.

Fluctuation

In Search Engine Page and Link Count Numbers

The numbers reported in "site:" and "link:" queries are rarely precise, and thus we strongly recommend not getting too worried about fluctuations showing massive increases or decreases unless they are accompanied by traffic drops. For example, on any given day, Yahoo! reports between 800,000 and 2 million links to the SEOmoz.org domain. Obviously, we don't gain or lose hundreds of thousands of links each day, but the variability of Yahoo!'s indices means that these numbers reports provide little guidance about our actual link growth or shrinkage.

If you do see significant drops in links or pages indexed accompanied by similar traffic referral drops from the search engines, you may be experiencing a real loss of link juice (check to see if important links that were previously sending traffic/rankings boosts still exist) or a loss of indexation due to penalties, hacking, malware, etc. A thorough analysis using your own web analytics and Google's Webmaster Tools can help to identify potential problems.





Falling

Search Traffic from a Single Engine


You're under a penalty at that engine for violating search quality or terms of service guidelines. Check out this post on how to identify/handle a search engine penalty.
You've accidentally blocked access to that search engine's crawler. Double-check your robots.txt file and meta robots tags and review the Webmaster Tools for that engine to see if any issues exist.
That engine has changed their ranking algorithm in a fashion that no longer favors your site. Most frequently, this happens because links pointing to your site have been devalued in some way, and is especially prevalent for sites that engage in manual link building campaigns of low-moderate quality links.
Falling

Search Traffic from Multiple Engines

Chances are good that you've done something on your site to block crawlers or stop indexation. This could be something in the robots.txt or meta robots tags, a problem with hosting/uptime, a DNS resolution issue or a number of other technical breakdowns. Talk to your system administrator, developers and/or hosting provider and carefully review your Webmaster Tools accounts and analytics to help determine potential causes.
Individual

Ranking Fluctuations

Gaining or losing rankings for a particular term/phrase or even several happens millions of times a day to millions of pages and is generally nothing to be concerned about. Ranking algorithms fluctuate, competitors gain and lose links (and on-page optimization tactics) and search engines even flux between indices (and may sometimes even make mistakes in their crawling, inclusion or ranking processes). When a dramatic rankings decrease occurs, you might want to carefully review on-page elements for any signs of over-optimization or violation of guidelines (cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.) and check to see if links have recently been gained or lost. Note that with sudden spikes in rankings for new content, a temporary period of high visibility followed by a dramatic drop is common (in the SEO field, we refer to this as the "freshness boost").
“Don't panic over small fluctuations. With large drops, be wary against making a judgment call until at least a few days have passed. If you run a new site or are in the process of link acquisition and active marketing, these sudden spikes and drops are even more common, so simply be prepared and keep working.”

Positive

Increases in Link Metrics Without Rankings Increases

Many site owners worry that when they've done some "classic" SEO - on-page optimization, link acquisition, etc. they can expect instant results. This, sadly, is not the case. Particularly for new sites, pages and content that's competing in very difficult results, rankings take time and even earning lots of great links is not a sure recipe to instantly reach the top. Remember that the engines need to not only crawl all those pages where you've acquired links, but index and process them - given the almost certain use of delta indices by the engines to help with freshness, the metrics and rankings you're seeking may be days or even weeks behind the progress you've made

MSEOKING - MYTHS & MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SEARCH ENGINE

Over the past several years, a number of misconceptions have emerged about how the search engines operate. For the beginner SEO, this causes confusion about what's required to perform effectively. In this section, we'll explain the real story behind the myths.

Search Engine Submission

In classical SEO times (the late 1990's), search engines had "submission" forms that were part of the optimization process. Webmasters & site owners would tag their sites & pages with keyword information, and "submit" them to the engines. Soon after submission, a bot would crawl and include those resources in their index. Simple SEO!

Unfortunately, this process didn't scale very well, the submissions were often spam, and the practice eventually gave way to purely crawl-based engines. Since 2001, not only has search engine submission not been required, but it is actually virtually useless. The engines all publicly note that they rarely use "submission" URLs , and that the best practice is to earn links from other sites. This will expose your content to the engines naturally.

You can still sometimes find submission pages (here's one for Bing), but these are remnants of time long past, and are essentially useless to the practice of modern SEO. If you hear a pitch from an SEO offering "search engine submission" services, run, don't walk, to a real SEO. Even if the engines used the submission service to crawl your site, you'd be unlikely to earn enough "link juice" to be included in their indices or rank competitively for search queries.


Meta Tags

Once upon a time, much like search engine submission, meta tags (in particular, the meta keywords tag) were an important part of the SEO process. You would include the keywords you wanted your site to rank for and when users typed in those terms, your page could come up in a query. This process was quickly spammed to death, and eventually dropped by all the major engines as an important ranking signal.

It is true that other tags, namely the title tag (not stictly a meta tag, but often grouped with them) and meta description tag (covered previously in this guide), are of critical importance to SEO best practices. Additionally, the meta robots tag is an important tool for controlling spider access. However, SEO is not "all about meta tags", at least, not anymore.
Keyword Stuffing

Ever see a page that just looks spammy? Perhaps something like:

"Bob's cheap Seattle plumber is the best cheap Seattle plumber for all your plumbing needs. Contact a cheap Seattle plumber before it's too late"

Not surprisingly, a persistent myth in SEO revolves around the concept that keyword density - a mathematical formula that divides the number of words on a page by the number of instances of a given keyword - is used by the search engines for relevancy & ranking calculations.

Despite being proven untrue time and again, this myth has legs. Many SEO tools still feed on the concept that keyword density is an important metric. It's not. Ignore it and use keywords intelligently and with usability in mind. The value from an extra 10 instances of your keyword on the page is far less than earning one good editorial link from a source that doesn't think you're a search spammer.


Paid Search Helps Bolster Organic Results

Put on your tin foil hats, it's time for the most common SEO conspiracy theory: spending on search engine advertising (PPC) improves your organic SEO rankings.

In all of the experiences we've ever witnessed or heard about, this has never been proven nor has it ever been a probable explanation for effects in the organic results. Google, Yahoo! & Bing all have very effective walls in their organizations to prevent precisely this type of crossover.

At Google in particular, advertisers spending tens of millions of dollars each month have noted that even they cannot get special access or consideration from the search quality or web spam teams. So long as the existing barriers are in place and the search engines cultures maintain their separation, we believe that this will remain a myth. That said, we have seen anecdotal evidence that bidding on keywords you already organically rank for can help increase your organic click through rate.


Search Engine Spam

As long as there is search, there will always be spam. The practice of spamming the search engines - creating pages and schemes designed to artificially inflate rankings or abuse the ranking algorithms employed to sort content - has been rising since the mid-1990's.

With payouts so high (at one point, a fellow SEO noted to us that a single day ranking atop Google's search results for the query "buy viagra" could bring upwards of $20,000 in affiliate revenue), it's little wonder that manipulating the engines is such a popular activity on the web. However, it's become increasingly difficult and, in our opinion, less and less worthwhile for two reasons.

1. Not Worth the Effort

Users hate spam, and the search engines have a financial incentive to fight it. Many believe that Google's greatest product advantage over the last 10 years has been their ability to control and remove spam better than their competitors. It's undoubtedly something all the engines spend a great deal of time, effort and resources on. While spam still works on occasion, it generally takes more effort to succeed than producing "good" content, and the long term payoff is virtually non-existent.

Instead of putting all that time and effort into something that the engines will throw away, why not invest in a value added, long term strategy instead?

2. Smarter Engines

Search engines have done a remarkable job identifying scalable, intelligent methodologies for fighting spam manipulation, making it dramatically more difficult to adversely impact their intended algorithms. Complex concepts like TrustRank (which SEOmoz's Linkscape index leverages), HITS, statistical analysis, historical data and more have all driven down the value of search spam and made so-called "white hat" tactics (those that don't violate the search engines' guidelines) far more attractive.

More recently, Google's Panda update introduced sophisticated machine learning algorithms to combat spam and low value pages at a scale never before witnessed online. If the search engines' job is to deliver quality results, they have raised the bar year after year.

This guide is not intended to show off specific spam tactics, but, due to the large number of sites that get penalized, banned or flagged and seek help, we will cover the various factors the engines use to identify spam so as to help SEO practitioners avoid problems. For additional details about spam from the engines, see Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster FAQs (pdf).

The important thing to remember is this: Not only do manipulative techniques not help you in most cases, but often times they cause search engines to impose penalties on your site.


Page-Level Spam Analysis

Search engines perform spam analysis across individual pages and entire websites (domains). We'll look first at how they evaluate manipulative practices on the URL level.


One of the most obvious and unfortunate spamming techniques, keyword stuffing, involves littering repetitions of keyword terms or phrases into a page in order to make it appear more relevant to the search engines. The thought behind this - that increasing the number of times a term is mentioned can considerably boost a page's ranking - is generally false. Studies looking at thousands of the top search results across different queries have found that keyword repetitions play an extremely limited role in boosting rankings, and have a low overall correlation with top placement.

The engines have very obvious and effective ways of fighting this. Scanning a page for stuffed keywords is not massively challenging, and the engines' algorithms are all up to the task. You can read more about this practice, and Google's views on the subject, in a blog post from the head of their web spam team - SEO Tip: Avoid Keyword Stuffing.


Manipulative Linking

One of the most popular forms of web spam, manipulative link acquisition relies on the search engines' use of link popularity in their ranking algorithms to attempt to artificially inflate these metrics and improve visibility. This is one of the most difficult forms of spamming for the search engines to overcome because it can come in so many forms. A few of the many ways manipulative links can appear include:

Reciprocal link exchange programs, wherein sites create link pages that point back and forth to one another in an attempt to inflate link popularity. The engines are very good at spotting and devaluing these as they fit a very particular pattern.
Link schemes, including "link farms" and "link networks" where fake or low value websites are built or maintained purely as link sources to artificially inflate popularity. The engines combat these through numerous methods of detecting connections between site registrations, link overlap or other common factors.
Paid links, where those seeking to earn higher rankings buy links from sites and pages willing to place a link in exchange for funds. These sometimes evolve into larger networks of link buyers and sellers, and although the engines work hard to stop them (and Google in particular has taken dramatic actions), they persist in providing value to many buyers & sellers (see this post on paid links for more on that perspective).
Low quality directory links are a frequent source of manipulation for many in the SEO field. A large number of pay-for-placement web directories exist to serve this market and pass themselves off as legitimate with varying degrees of success. Google often takes action against these sites by removing the PageRank score from the toolbar (or reducing it dramatically), but won't do this in all cases.
There are many more manipulative link building tactics that the search engines have identified and, in most cases, found algorithmic methods for reducing their impact. As new spam systems emerge, engineers will continue to fight them with targeted algorithms, human reviews and the collection of spam reports from webmasters & SEOs.

Cloaking

A basic tenet of all the search engine guidelines is to show the same content to the engine's crawlers that you'd show to an ordinary visitor. This means, among other things, not to hide text in the html code of your website that a normal visitor can't see.

When this guideline is broken, the engines call it "cloaking" and take action to prevent these pages from ranking in their results. Cloaking can be accomplished in any number of ways and for a variety of reasons, both positive and negative. In some cases, the engines may let practices that are technically "cloaking" pass, as they're done for positive user experience reasons. For more on the subject of cloaking and the levels of risk associated with various tactics and intents, see this post, White Hat Cloaking, from Rand Fishkin.

"Low Value" Pages

Although it may not technically be considered "web spam," the engines all have methods to determine if a page provides unique content and "value" to its searchers before including it in their web indices and search results. The most commonly filtered types of pages are "thin" affiliate content, duplicate content, and dynamically generated content pages that provide very little unique text or value. The engines are against including these pages and use a variety of content and link analysis algorithms to filter out "low value" pages from appearing in the results.

Google's 2011 Panda update took the most aggressive steps ever seen in reducing low quality content across the web, and Google continues to update this process.


Domain Level Spam Analysis

In addition to watching individual pages for spam, engines can also identify traits and properties across entire root domains or subdomains that could flag them as spam. Obviously, excluding entire domains is tricky business, but it's also much more practical in cases where greater scalability is required.

Linking Practices

Just as with individual pages, the engines can monitor the kinds of links and quality of referrals sent to a website. Sites that are clearly engaging in the manipulative activities described above on a consistent or seriously impacting way may see their search traffic suffer, or even have their sites banned from the index. You can read about some examples of this from past posts - Widgetbait Gone Wild or the more recent coverage of the JC Penney Google penalty.


rustworthiness

Websites that earn trusted status are often treated differently from those who have not. In fact, many SEOs have commented on the "double standards" that exist for judging "big brand" and high importance sites vs. newer, independent sites. For the search engines, trust most likely has a lot to do with the links your domain has earned. Thus, if you publish low quality, duplicate content on your personal blog, then buy several links from spammy directories, you're likely to encounter considerable ranking problems. However, if you were to post that same content to a page on Wikipedia and get those same spammy links to point to that URL, it would likely still rank tremendously well - such is the power of domain trust & authority.

Trust built through links is also a great method for the engines to employ. A little duplicate content and a few suspicious links are far more likely to be overlooked if your site has earned hundreds of links from high quality, editorial sources like CNN.com or Cornell.edu. On the flip side, if you have yet to earn high quality links, judgments may be far stricter from an algorithmic view.
Content Value

Similar to how a page's value is judged against criteria such as uniqueness and the experience it provides to search visitors, so too does this principle apply to entire domains. Sites that primarily serve non-unique, non-valuable content may find themselves unable to rank, even if classic on and off page factors are performed acceptably. The engines simply don't want thousands of copies of Wikipedia or Amazon affiliate websites filling up their index, and thus use algorithmic and manual review methods to prevent this.

Search engines constantly evaluate the effectiveness of their own results. They measure when users click on a result, quickly hit the "back" button on their browser, and try another result. This indicates that the result they served didn't meet the user's query.

It's not enough just to rank for a query. Once you've earned your ranking, you have to prove it over and over again.


So How Do You Know If You’ve Been Bad?

It can be tough to know if your site/page actually has a penalty or if things have changed, either in the search engines' algorithms or on your site that negatively impacted rankings or inclusion. Before you assume a penalty, check for the following:


Once you’ve ruled out the list below, follow the flowchart beneath for more specific advice.

Errors

Errors on your site that may have inhibited or prevented crawling. Google's Webmaster Tools is a good, free place to start.

Changes

Changes to your site or pages that may have changed the way search engines view your content. (on-page changes, internal link structure changes, content moves, etc.)

Similarity

Sites that share similar backlink profiles, and whether they’ve also lost rankings - when the engines update ranking algorithms, link valuation and importance can shift, causing ranking movements.

Duplicate Content

Modern websites are rife with duplicate content problems, especially when they scale to large size. Check out this post on duplicate content to identify common problems.

While this chart’s process won’t work for every situation, the logic has been uncanny in helping us identify spam penalties or mistaken flagging for spam by the engines and separating those from basic ranking drops. This page from Google (and the embedded Youtube video) may also provide value on this topic.

Getting Penalties Lifted

The task of requesting re-consideration or re-inclusion in the engines is painful and often unsuccessful. It's also rarely accompanied by any feedback to let you know what happened or why. However, it is important to know what to do in the event of a penalty or banning.


Hence, the following recommendations:

1If you haven't already, register your site with the engine's Webmaster Tools service (Google's and Bing's). This registration creates an additional layer of trust and connection between your site and the webmaster teams.

2Make sure to thoroughly review the data in your Webmaster Tools accounts, from broken pages to server or crawl errors to warnings or spam alert messages. Very often, what's initially perceived as a mistaken spam penalty is, in fact, related to accessibility issues.

3Send your re-consideration/re-inclusion request through the engine's Webmaster Tools service rather than the public form - again, creating a greater trust layer and a better chance of hearing back.

4Full disclosure is critical to getting consideration. If you've been spamming, own up to everything you've done - links you've acquired, how you got them, who sold them to you, etc. The engines, particularly Google, want the details, as they'll apply this information to their algorithms for the future. Hold back, and they're likely to view you as dishonest, corrupt or simply incorrigible (and fail to ever respond).

5Remove/fix everything you can. If you've acquired bad links, try to get them taken down. If you've done any manipulation on your own site (over-optimized internal linking, keyword stuffing, etc.), get it off before you submit your request.

6Get ready to wait - responses can take weeks, even months, and re-inclusion itself, if it happens, is a lengthy process. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of sites are penalized every week, so you can imagine the backlog the webmaster teams encounter.

7If you run a large, powerful brand on the web, re-inclusion can be faster by going directly to an individual source at a conference or event. Engineers from all of the engines regularly participate in search industry conferences (SMX, SES, Pubcon, etc.), and the cost of a ticket can easily outweigh the value of being re-included more quickly than a standard request might take.

Be aware that with the search engines, lifting a penalty is not their obligation or responsibility. Legally, they have the right to include or reject any site/page for any reason. Inclusion is a privilege, not a right, so be cautious and don't apply techniques you're unsure or skeptical of - or you could find yourself in a very rough spot.

MSEOKING - SEARCH ENGINE TOOLS AND SERVICES

SEOs tend to use a lot of tools. Some of the most useful are provided by the search engines themselves.

Search engines want webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, so they provide a variety of tools, analytics and guidance. These free resources provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else.

Below we explain the common elements that each of the major search engines support and identify why they are useful.

Common Search Engine Protocols


1. Sitemaps

Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. Sitemaps also come in a variety of formats and can highlight many different types of content, including video, images, news and mobile.

You can read the full details of the protocols at Sitemaps.org. In addition, you can build your own sitemaps at XML-Sitemaps.com. Sitemaps come in three varieties:

XML

Extensible Markup Language (Recommended Format)

This is the most widely accepted format for sitemaps. It is extremely easy for search engines to parse and can be produced by a plethora of sitemap generators. Additionally, it allows for the most granular control of page parameters.
Relatively large file sizes. Since XML requires an open tag and a close tag around each element, file sizes can get very large.
RSS

Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary

Easy to maintain. RSS sitemaps can easily be coded to automatically update when new content is added.
Harder to manage. Although RSS is a dialect of XML, it is actually much harder to manage due to its updating properties.
Txt

Text File

Extremely easy. The text sitemap format is one URL per line up to 50,000 lines.
Does not provide the ability to add meta data to pages.
2 Robots.txt

The robots.txt file, a product of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a file stored on a website's root directory (e.g., www.google.com/robots.txt). The robots.txt file gives instructions to automated web crawlers visiting your site, including search spiders.

By using robots.txt, webmasters can indicate to search engines which areas of a site they would like to disallow bots from crawling as well as indicate the locations of sitemap files and crawl-delay parameters. You can read more details about this at the robots.txt Knowledge Center page.

The following commands are available:

Disallow

Prevents compliant robots from accessing specific pages or folders.

Sitemap

Indicates the location of a website’s sitemap or sitemaps.

Crawl Delay

Indicates the speed (in milliseconds) at which a robot can crawl a server.


An Example of Robots.txt
#Robots.txt www.example.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow:

# Don’t allow spambot to crawl any pages
User-agent: spambot
disallow: /

sitemap:www.example.com/sitemap.xml


Warning: Not all web robots follow robots.txt. People with bad intentions (i.e. e-mail address scrapers) build bots that don’t follow this protocol and in extreme cases can use it to identify the location of private information. For this reason, it is recommended that the location of administration sections and other private sections of publicly accessible websites not be included in the robots.txt. Instead, these pages can utilize the meta robots tag (discussed next) to keep the major search engines from indexing their high risk content.

3. Meta Robots

The meta robots tag creates page-level instructions for search engine bots.

The meta robots tag should be included in the head section of the HTML document.


An Example of Meta Robots
<html>
  <head>
    <title>The Best Webpage on the Internet</title>
    <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World</h1>
  </body>
</html>

In the example above, “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” tells robots not to include the given page in their indexes, and also not to follow any of the links on the page.


4. Rel="Nofollow"

Remember how links act as votes? The rel=nofollow attribute allows you to link to a resource, while removing your "vote" for search engine purposes. Literally, "nofollow" tells search engines not to follow the link, but some engines still follow them for discovering new pages. These links certainly pass less value (and in most cases no juice) than their followed counterparts, but are useful in various situations where you link to an untrusted source.

An Example of nofollow
<a href=”http://www.example.com” title=“Example” rel=”nofollow”>Example Link</a>
In the example above, the value of the link would not be passed to example.com as the rel=nofollow attribute has been added.
5. Rel="canonical"

Often, two or more copies of the exact same content appear on your website under different URLs. For example, the following URLs can all refer to a single homepage:

http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/default.asp
http://example.com/
http://example.com/default.asp
http://Example.com/Default.asp
To search engines, these appear as 5 separate pages. Because the content is identical on each page, this can cause the search engines to devalue the content and its potential rankings.

The canonical tag solves this problem by telling search robots which page is the singular "authoritative" version which should count in web results.

An Example of rel="canonical" for the URL http://example.com/default.asp
<html>
  <head>
    <title>The Best Webpage on the Internet</title>
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com">
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World</h1>
  </body>
</html>
In the example above, rel=canonical tells robots that this page is a copy of http://www.example.com, and should consider the latter URL as the canonical.


Search Engine Tools

Google Webmaster Tools - Popular Features

Google Webmaster Tools

Settings

Geographic Target - If a given site targets users in a particular location, webmasters can provide Google with information that will help determine how that site appears in its country-specific search results, and also improve Google search results for geographic queries.

Preferred Domain - The preferred domain is the one that a webmaster would like used to index their site's pages. If a webmaster specifies a preferred domain as http://www.example.com and Google finds a link to that site that is formatted as http://example.com, Google will treat that link as if it were pointing at http://www.example.com.

URL Parameters - You can indicate to Google information about each parameter on your site, such as "sort=price" and "sessionid=2". This helps Google crawl your site more efficiently, ignoring those parameters that produce duplicate content and increasing the number of unique pages Google can crawl on your site.

Crawl Rate - The crawl rate affects the speed of Googlebot's requests during the crawl process. It has no effect on how often Googlebot crawls a given site. Google determines the recommended rate based on the number of pages on a website.

Diagnostics

Malware - Google will inform you if it has found any malware on your site. Malware is not only bad for users, but will have a severely negative effect on your rankings.

Crawl Errors - If Googlebot encounters significant errors while crawling your site, such as 404s, it will report these and identify where Googlebot found the link to the inaccessible URL.

HTML Suggestions - This analysis identifies search engine unfriendly HTML elements. Specifically, it lists meta description issues, title tag issues and non-indexable content issues.


Your Site on the Web

These statistics offer unique insight to SEOs in particular, as they report keyword impressions, click-through rates, top pages delivered in search results, and linking statistics. Beware, many SEOs complain that the data in Webmaster tools is often incomplete and offers rough estimates at best.

Site Configuration

This important section allows you to submit sitemaps, test robots.txt files, adjust sitelinks, and submit change of address requests when you move your website from one domain to another. This area also contains the "Settings" and "URL parameters" sections discussed in the previous column.

+1 Metrics

When users share your content on Google+ with the +1 button, this activity is often annotated in search results. Watch this illuminating video on Google+ to understand why this is important. In this section, Google Webmaster Tools reports the effect of +1 sharing on your site performance in search results.

Labs

The Labs section of Webmaster Tools contains reports that Google considers still in the experimental stage, but important to webmasters nonetheless. One of the most important of these reports is Site Performance, which indicates how fast or slow your site loads for visitors.


Bing Webmaster Center

Bing Webmaster Center

Key Features

Sites Overview- This interface provides a single overview of all your websites' performance in Bing powered search results. Metrics at a glance include clicks, impressions, pages indexed and number of pages crawled for each site.

Crawl Stats - Here you can view reports on how many pages of your site Bing has crawled and discover any errors encountered. Like Google Webmaster, you can also submit sitemaps to help Bing to discover and prioritize your content.

Index - This section allows webmasters to view and help control how Bing indexes their web pages. Again, similar to settings in Google Webmaster Tools, here you can explore how your content is organized within Bing, submit URLs, remove URLs from search results, explore inbound links and adjust parameter settings.

Traffic - The traffic summary in Bing Webmaster reports impressions and click-through data by combining data from both Bing and Yahoo search results. Reports here show average position as well as cost estimates if you were to buy ads targeting each keyword.


SEOmoz Open Site Explorer

While not run by the search engines, SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer provides similar data.

Features

Identify Powerful Links - Open Site Explorer sorts all of your inbound links by their metrics that help you determine which links are most important.

Find the Strongest Linking Domains - This tool shows you the strongest domains linking to your domain.

Analyze Link Anchor Text Distribution - Open Site Explorer shows you the distribution of the text people used when linking to you.

Head to Head Comparison View - This feature allows you to compare two websites to see why one is outranking the other.

Social Share Metrics - Measure Facebook Shares, Likes, Tweets, and +1's for any URL.



Search engines have only recently started providing better tools to help webmasters improve their search results. This is a big step forward in SEO and the webmaster/search engine relationship. That said, the engines can only go so far with helping webmasters. It is true today, and will likely be true in the future that the ultimate responsibility for SEO is on the marketers and webmasters.

It is for this reason that learning SEO for yourself is so important.

MSEOKING - GROWING POPULARITY AND LINKS

For search engines that crawl the web, links are the streets between pages. Using sophisticated link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to each other and in what ways.

Since the late 1990's search engines have used links as votes - representing the democracy of the web's opinion about what pages are important and popular. The engines themselves have refined the use of link data to a fine art, and complex algorithms create nuance evaluations of sites and pages based on this information.

Links aren't everything in SEO, but search professionals attribute a large portion of the engines' algorithms to link-based factors (see Search Engine Ranking Factors). Through links, engines can not only analyze the popularity of a website & page based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also metrics like trust, spam, and authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources (see mozTrust). Authority models, like those postulated in the Hilltop Algorithm, suggest that links are a very good way of identifying expert documents on a given subject.


Link Signals

used by search engines
Before embarking on a link building effort, it's critical to understand the elements of a link used by the search engines as well as how those elements factor into the weighting of links in the algorithms. Search engines use links in many different ways. While we don't know all the link attributes measured by the engines, through analysis of patent applications, years of experience and hands-on testing, we can draw some intelligent assumptions that hold up in the real world. Below is a list of notable factors worthy of consideration. These signals, and many more, are considered by professional SEOs when measuring link value and a site's link profile.

Global Popularity

The more popular and important a site is, the more links from that site matter. A site like Wikipedia has literally 1000's of diverse sites linking to it, which means it's probably a popular and important site. To earn trust and authority with the engines, you'll need the help of other link partners. The more popular, the better.

Local/Topic-Specific Popularity

The concept of "local" popularity, first pioneered by the Teoma search engine, suggests that links from sites within a topic-specific community matter more than links from general or off-topic sites. For example, if your website sells dog houses, earning links from the Society of Dog Breeders matters much more than earning links from an off-topic, roller skating site.

Anchor Text

One of the strongest signals the engines use in rankings is anchor text. If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, that page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted phrase in that anchor text. You can see examples of this in action with searches like "click here", where many results rank solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.

TrustRank

It's no surprise that the Internet contains massive amounts of spam. Some estimate as much as 60% of the web's pages are spam. In order to weed out this irrelevant content, search engines use systems for measuring trust, many of which are based on the link graph. Earning links from highly trusted domains can result in a significant boost to this scoring metric. Universities, government websites and non-profit organizations represent examples of high-trust domains.

Link Neighborhood

Spam links often go both ways. A website that links to spam is likely spam itself, and in turn often has many spam sites linking back to it. By looking at the totality of these links in aggregate, search engines can understand the "link neighborhood" your website exists in. Thus, it's wise to choose those sites you link to carefully and be equally selective with the sites you attempt to earn links from.

Freshness

Link signals tend to decay over time. Sites that were once popular often go stale, and eventually fail to earn new links. Thus, it's important not only to earn links to your website, but also to continue to earn additional links over time. Commonly referred to as "FreshRank," search engines use the freshness signals of links to judge current popularity and relevance.

Social Sharing

The last few years has seen an explosion in the amount of content shared through social services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Although search engines treat socially shared links differently than other types of links, they notice them nonetheless. There is much debate among search professionals as to how exactly search engines factor social link signals into their algorithm, but there is no denying the rising importance of social channels.


The Power of Social Sharing

How Google+, Twitter and Facebook Change the Game

The years 2011=2012 saw a huge rise in social sharing and its effects on search. Google, in particular, began to incorporate a huge number of social signals into its search results. This involves serving personalized results to logged-in users that include content shared by the searcher's social circle (Facebook, Twitter and others). Normally, these results might not appear in the top ten, but are promoted because of this social influence.

The potential power of this shift towards social for search marketers is huge. Those with large social circles, who share a lot of material, are more likely to see that material (and their face) promoted in search results. For publishers, this means its beneficial to have your content shared by these same highly influential folks with large social followings. For Google in particular, this is especially true of content shared on Google+.

Are Social Shares the Same as Links

In a word, no. Although there is evidence that social shares such as Tweets, Likes, and Plusses affect rankings, at this time links are considered a far superior and more lasting way to promote the popularity of your content than any other method.


Link Building Basics

Link building is an art. It's almost always the most challenging part of an SEO's job, but also the one most critical to success. Link building requires creativity, hustle, and often, a budget. No two link building campaigns are the same, and the way you choose to build links depends as much upon your website as it does your personality. Below are three basic types of link acquisition.


1. "Natural" Editorial Links

Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content or company. These links require no specific action from the SEO, other than the creation of worthy material (great content) and the ability to create awareness about it.

2. Manual "Outreach" Link Building

The SEO creates these links by emailing bloggers for links, submitting sites to directories, or paying for listings of any kind. The SEO often creates a value proposition by explaining to the link target why creating the link is in their best interest. Examples include filling out forms for submissions to a website award program or convincing a professor that your resource is worthy of inclusion on the public syllabus.

3. Self-Created, Non-Editorial

Hundreds of thousands of websites offer any visitor the opportunity to create links through guest book signings, forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. These links offer the lowest value, but can, in aggregate, still have an impact for some sites. In general, search engines continue to devalue most of these types of links, and have been known to penalize sites that pursue these links aggressively. Today, these types of links are often considered spammy and should be pursued with caution.


As with any marketing activity, the first step in any link building campaign is the creation of goals and strategies. Unfortunately, link building is one of the most difficult activities to measure. Although the engines internally weigh each link with precise, mathematical metrics, it's impossible for those on the outside to know this data.

SEOs rely on a number of signals to help build a rating scale of link value. Along with the data from the link signals mentioned above, these metrics include the following:

Ranking for Relevant Search Terms
One of the best ways to determine how well a search engine values a given page is to search for some of the keywords and phrases that page targets (particularly those in the title tag and headline). For example, if you are trying to rank for the phrase "dog kennel", earning links from pages that already rank for this phrase would help significantly.

SEOmoz mozRank
mozRank (mR) shows how popular a given web page is on the web. Pages with high mozRank (popular) scores tend to rank better. The more links to a given page, the more popular it becomes. Links from important pages (like www.cnn.com or www.irs.gov) increase a page's popularity, and subsequently its mozRank, more than unpopular websites.

A web page's mozRank can be improved by getting lots of links from semi-popular pages or a few links from very popular pages.

Domain Authority
SEOmoz Domain Authority (or DA) is a query independent measure of how likely a domain is to rank for any given query. It is calculated by analyzing the Internet's domain graph and comparing it to tens of thousands of queries in Google.

Competitor's Backlinks
By examining the backlinks of a website that already ranks well for your targeted keyword phrase, you gain valuable intelligence about the links that help them achieve this ranking. Using tools like Open Site Explorer, SEOs can discover these links and target these domains in their own link building campaigns.

Number of Links on a Page
According to the original PageRank formula, the value that a link passes is diluted by the presence of other links on a page. Thus, getting linked-to by a page with few links is better than being linked-to by the same page with many links on it (all other things being equal). The degree to which this is relevant is unknowable (and in our testing, it appears to be important, but not overwhelmingly so), but it's certainly something to be aware of as you conduct link acquisition.

Potential Referral Traffic
Link building should never be solely about search engines. Links that send high amounts of direct click-through traffic not only tend to provide better search engine value for rankings, but also send targeted, valuable visitors to your site (the basic goal of all Internet marketing). This is something you can estimate based on the numbers of visits/page views according to site analytics. If you can't get access to these, services like Google Trends for Websites can give you a rough idea of at least domain-wide traffic, although these estimates are known to be wildly inaccurate at times.


It takes time, practice, and experience to build comfort with these variables as they relate to search engine traffic. However, using your website's analytics, you should be able to determine whether your campaign is successful.
Success comes when you see increases in search traffic, higher rankings, more frequent search engine crawling and increases in referring link traffic. If these metrics do not rise after a successful link building campaign, it's possible you either need to seek better quality link targets, or improve your on-page optimization.

5 Link Building Strategies

Get your customers to link to you.

If you have partners you work with regularly or loyal customers that love your brand, you can use this to your advantage by sending out partnership badges - graphic icons that link back to your site (like Google often does with their Adwords certification program). Just as you'd get customers wearing your t-shirts or sporting your bumper stickers, links are the best way to accomplish the same feat on the web. Check out this post on E-commerce links for more.

Build a company blog. Make it a valuable, informative and entertaining resource.

This content and link building strategy is so popular and valuable that it's one of the few recommended personally by the engineers at Google (source: USA Today & Stone Temple). Blogs have the unique ability to contribute fresh material on a consistent basis, participate in conversations across the web, and earn listings and links from other blogs, including blogrolls and blog directories.

Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking

In the SEO world, we often call this "linkbait." Good examples might include David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors, Compare the Meerkat, or the funny How Not To Clean a Window. Each leverages aspects of usefulness, information dissemination, or humor to create a viral effect - users who see it once want to share it with friends, and bloggers/tech-savvy webmasters who see it will often do so through links. This high quality, editorially earned votes are invaluable to building trust, authority, and rankings potential

Be newsworthy.

Earning the attention of the press, bloggers and news media is an effective, time honored way to earn links. Sometimes this is as simple as giving away something for free, releasing a great new product, or stating something controversial.

Find directories or listings of relevant resources.

You can find many of these on SEOmoz's Directory List or use the search engines themselves to find lists of pages that offer outbound links in this fashion. For example, try searching for allintitle: resources directory at Google and notice the millions of results. Be careful: links that are easy to get often carry risks when pursued aggressively and in volume. A diverse, well rounded link profile is always best.

Show Me the Money

An Aside on Buying Links

Google and Bing seek to discount the influence of paid links on their search results. While it is impossible for them to detect and discredit all paid links, the search engines put a lot of time and resources into finding ways to detect these. Websites caught buying links or participating in link schemes risk severe penalties that will drop their rankings into oblivion. Conversely, many search professionals wish the search engines would do more to discourage link buying, which in many cases still works.

As such, we at SEOmoz recommend spending your time on long term link building strategies that focus on building links naturally. You can read more about this in this blog post.

MSEOKING - HOW USABILITY, USER EXPERIENNCE & CONTENT AFFECT SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS

Google's freshness update has created a surge in business website blogging. The update has affected a large percentage of search results, giving companies a real reason to integrate their blog page into their main website. The update has meant that the first few pages of search results are usually populated with blogs and articles that relate to that specific term; more so than business websites (not including long-tail keyword or local searches).

As an example, if you were interested in buying an iPhone and searched for an exact term 'iPhone' (short-term keyword), the first page of results will be filled with blogs, reviews, news articles and message forum posts relating to that topic. Conversely, if a search is made for 'buying an iPhone' (long-tail keyword) or 'mobile phone shops in London' (local keyword), the result pages will be populated with business websites.

This article will cover two related topics: how to improve your website's SEO with blogging and how to improve your blog's SEO.

Your business website's SEO can be improved by a blog in the following ways:

Fresh Content

A blog page will provide your site with fresh content. When search engines crawl your website they will notice the frequent updates and new URLs and recognise that this is updated content. The freshness update mentioned earlier will be taken in to consideration when ranking is determined.

New Keywords Targeted

Blogs are a great way of adding additional keywords to your website. When another website links to your blog using these keywords, link juice is passed along with it. This helps your site rank for these keywords and adds to the list of keywords you were already targeting.

Enhancing Niche Authority

Blogging about your particular niche builds authority. A blog that gives useful tips and instructions to visitors helps acquire expert status. If a potential customer has a choice between two businesses, they are more likely to choose the one that demonstrates in-depth knowledge through their blog than the one that doesn't.

Going Social

Blog posts are easily shared on social media. This brings in social signals that assist your website's search engine rankings. Sharing your own content on social networking platforms increases interaction with users and enhances word-of-mouth marketing.

Internal Linking

Blogs allow you to build internal links into your main website and this passes link authority to your homepage and inner pages. Links can be made from your products/services pages to any relevant blog post and posts can be linked to one another if the subject matter is related. If you have downloadable PDFs or a subscription form on your site, a call-to-action on a blog post that links to these landing pages will not only encourage interaction and increase conversions, but also pass on link juice. Your blog posts could also receive links from other authoritative pages, which would pass authority with them. Internal linking also allows you to use anchor text associated with your chosen keywords. External websites are likely to link to your page with generic anchor text such as 'click here' or 'read more', but having internal anchor text that you control allows you to use targeted anchor text when linking your pages.

SEO and Images

It is important to SEO any images on your blog. This can be done by the use of the image alt text attribute and correct file naming conventions. The images will then be found via the Google image search and can drive an increased volume of traffic to your website.

Natural Linking

Well written and informative blog posts will generate links naturally. Asking other websites to link to your blog might seem a little pushy, but if people, groups or businesses find your blogs insightful and helpful they are likely to create links under their own steam.

Trust Building

Some visitors to your website will know exactly what they want and will immediately engage with your services or products. This means you will require a website that is simple to navigate and quick to convert. Most visitors, on the other hand, may be a little sceptical about your expertise and will want to be convinced before they do business with you. Having a blog on your website is an excellent way to build up trust. By sharing professional experiences or case studies and offering information on your niche topics you can become more personal and instil a degree of confidence. As the content on your blog grows, trust will be established with your visitors, which will increase traffic, popularity and enhance your websites SEO.

Below I have listed some points that should be considered in order to ensure that your blog is targeting the right users on the web:

Blog Hosted as a Sub Domain

By hosting your blog as a sub domain of your main site and not as a separate domain or subdirectory ensures you will reap the best SEO benefits. It is best practise to host your blog with a web address similar to 'blog.yourwebsite.com'. This will mean that you have only one site to maintain and the link juice that your blog attracts will benefit the main website as well.

Trending Keywords

Research trending keywords with Google Trends or any other keyword research tool available on the internet and write a blog about the latest trending subjects in your particular niche.

Insert Keywords

Insert keywords into your blog article in a manner that makes sense and reads correctly. Ensure that you have used correct spelling and grammar. Search engines are very clever determining user-experience and reward blogs that are written with the human user in mind rather than for search engine ranking.

Blog titles should contain the target keyword and be no longer than 70 characters. The title is usually incorporated into the blogs URL and is good for the blog's SEO.

Integrating Social Media

Visitors to your blog are more likely to share your post if social share buttons are clearly visible. Providing social share buttons not only improves usability, but also helps to strengthen the social signals from your site. This in turn, as mentioned earlier, improves your blog's SEO and result page rankings.

Interaction on your Blog

Interaction on your blog can be enhanced by asking questions and inviting opinion at the end. Examples of this could include; What do you think? or Have you experienced this? If your blog is comparing two different items or strategies, ask your visitors which one they prefer. When you are sharing your post on a social media site, ask a question that is related to your blog. Answer any comments that left on your blog and encourage debate. Seek out blogs and forums in your niche and post comments saying that you have blogged on similar subjects. All this will encourage interaction with visitors to your site and signal frequent use to the search engine crawlers.

Driving traffic to your website by using a blog is the most natural form of search engine optimisation. All major search engines will reward a website that has an informative and interactive blog page and you'll soon see your website rise up through the rankings. Schedule a little time each week to write good quality blog pages and post frequently, about two or three times a week if time allows. Make the blog consistent and relevant to your niche market and watch your fan base and rankings grow.

MSEOKING - KEYWORD RESEARCH

The Article Writing Genie Returns to Grant Three More Wishes

Today, we bring back the mystical Article Writing Genie to respond to some new requests from real Expert Authors.

He’s been receiving plenty of questions recently about keywords, so he decided to focus in that direction for this wish granting session. Here are wishes from a few lucky members and what the genie had to say:

Wish #1: Genie, there are so many keywords in my niche to choose from. Give me the keywords and keyphrases that are trending right now so I know where to focus my future articles.

The Genie Says:

Every niche is a little bit different, but many authors run into this problem. They get excited about article writing and have so much of their expertise to share, but they just don’t know where to start. Plus, they want to make an impact on people right now by focusing on keywords that are currently relevant.

There are three ways to approach this situation. You:

Provide timely advice around topics that may change in the future
Write evergreen articles that have more staying power
Use some combination of both
The problem with the first solution is that your time-sensitive article loses relevancy over time. For example, an article based on the key-phrases “summer 2011″ and “fashion trends” will be highly relevant this year, but when 2012 comes around, it’s no longer relevant.

Evergreen content is the type of content that stays relevant every year, all year round. Aim for the best of both worlds by writing a combination of both trendy articles and evergreen ones.

Here’s where to start: Do keyword research with tools like Wordtracker, Goodkeywords and Google’s Keyword Tool, to build a list of the keywords that are currently popular. Then, go through the list and mark each of the ones that seem to be trendy topics. Make sure you have a mix.

Then, each keyword becomes a new article or a whole set of articles. Also, take a look at the success of your own articles by checking the Keyword Referral Stats on your account.

Wish #2: Genie, what’s the long tail? I've heard it mentioned before, but I’m not sure how it can be applied to my overall writing strategy.

The Genie Says:

First, if you’re looking for a basic overview of what the long tail looks like, check out this video and its accompanying PDF [316KB]. The long tail distribution curve indicates that the most general, basic keywords at the head of the tail generate high levels of interest, but there’s also a high level of competition at the head. As you move down the curve, the keywords become more specific and there’s less of an audience, but it’s also less competitive.

Further down the long tail is where your expertise comes in the most handy. It’s where the most detailed articles come from and where you’ll be able to accurately target the types of people looking for your content.

However, don’t focus solely on writing for the tail of the distribution. You want to have a wide range of articles covering a lot of different keywords and key-phrases to maximize your exposure. Aim for about 20%-30% of your articles on the keywords at the head of the curve and the remaining 70%-80% at the middle and long end of the curve.

Wish #3: Genie, grant me this one wish to always use the perfect balance of keywords.

The Genie Says:

At first, this seems like a tall order, but it really isn't as difficult as it sounds.

First, don’t try to stuff extra keywords into a sentence that already sounds natural. You aren't going to be doing yourself any favors if you do that. Instead, write naturally for your audience.

Always test the readability of your articles before you submit them by reading them aloud. If something doesn't sound natural when you read the article aloud, revise it until it does. Never sacrifice readability for anything else.

On the other hand, if your articles tend to go off-topic and don’t stay focused on your targeted keywords, the search engines may not recognize your article or index it. Articles like that may be easy-to-read, but they won’t get you any closer to optimizing your content for search engines. To avoid that, create an outline for the article before your start. Then, you should be able to stay on topic and not stray away from your topic and keywords.

MSEOKING - THE BASICS OF SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

The work of search engines is limited to crawling the web and interprets content to bring back the information and display the results. So, it is important to know the basic technical aspects of building and modifying the web pages in order to make them for search engines, and for the human visitors.

In order to be listed in the search engines, your content should be in HTML text format. Despite advances in crawling technology, Images, Flash Files, java applet and other non-text contents are virtually invisible to search engine spider. The easiest way to display your words and phrases is to place them in the HTML format. Images, Flash file, Java-applets and other non-text contents can be assigned by providing engines a text description of the visual contents.

The search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive key-word based indices. By using tools like Google's cache, SEO-browser.com, the MozBar or Yellow pipe; it can be observed what elements of your content are visible and index-able to the engines. If you are curious about exactly what terms and phrases the search engine like to see on web pages, there is a good tool like "Term Extractor". They will display words and phrases in the order of frequency. However, it is wise not only to check the text content, but also to use tool like SEO Browser to double-check the pages you are building, are visible to the engine.

Crawlable Link Structure

The search engines need to see the content of the pages in order to list pages in their massive keyword-based indexes. They also need to have access to a crawl-able link structure. This structure allows the spiders browse the pathways of a website in order to find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or obscuring their navigation in ways that search engine cannot access. It holds back their ability to get pages listed in the search engines. Without crawl-able link, the spider cannot reach the important pages, in spite of the good content, good keywords targeting, and smart marketing.

Keyword Usages & Targeting

Key Words, the building blocks of the language, are the fundamental to the search process. As the engine crawl and index the content of the pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in key-word base index. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web pages in one database, the engines have millions of smaller database, each centered on a particular key word. This makes it faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need within fraction of a second.

Key word Domination

Keywords dominate our search intent and interaction with the engines. When the search is performed, the engine knows which pages to retrieve based on the words entered into the search box. For obvious reasons, search engine measures how the keywords are used on the pages to help determine the 'relevance' of a particular document to a query. One of the best ways to optimize a page's ranking is, therefore, to ensure that the key words are prominently used in the title, text and meta data.

Myth of Keyword Density

The question of keyword density arises whenever the topic of keyword usages and search engines comes together. But, this is wrong assumption. Keyword Density is not the part of the search engine. It provides far worst result than many others. Keyword density is the more advanced method of key word analysis. The notion of keyword density value predates all commercial search engines and the Internet, and can hardly be considered an information retrieval concept. Key word density plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents or assign weight to term. What is the value of keyword density to the optimizer? It is unfortunate that key word density always does not always help optimizing the page rankings. We have little chance to create formulas that will be helpful for true optimization.

On-Page Optimization

Key word search is only a small fraction of the search engines' ranking strategy and there are still so many best practices which are very close to optimizing the pages. When working with one of your own site, there is a recommended process.

First, use the keyword in the title tag at least once or twice if it makes sense. Try to keep the keywords as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. You may find additional value in adding the keywords more than 3x, but in reality, but adding more words or phrases tend to have little or no impact

Secondly, use the keywords at least once in bold by using either the

<strong> or <b>
tag, as they are considered equal by the search engine.
Thirdly, use the keyword once in the URL

Fourthly, use it at least once in the meta description tag.

The future may be uncertain, but in the world of search, change is constant, and it is inevitable. For this reason, the search engine marketing will remain persistent in the diet of those who wish to remain competitive in the web world. Those with the best knowledge and experience of ranking will only receive the best benefits of traffic and visibility.

MSEOKING - WHY SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING IS NECESSARY

Search Engine Optimization or (SEO) can be extremely crucial for the success of any kind of online business, since more than 90% of all online visitors will get access to the websites via different search engines. So, the only way to virtually establish your business on the enormously expanding internet is by knowing the right optimization techniques.

Actually the search engines are just like our phone books, but they work on the much larger scale as compare to our phone books. You can find thousands, in fact millions of businesses and companies that are offering various services you need.

Hence, this is quite clear that it's very difficult to find the website of your company when there are thousands of local, national or international companies are doing business in the same niche as yours. Following are some other benefits of the various optimization techniques that will certainly help you in knowing "Why SEO is Necessary for Business."

- The key tool for every online business owner is search engine optimization which helps them to get more customers to their business's website. It is extremely crucial to get the potential traffic to the website and also maintain a good level at the search engines. Basically the main and primary aim of the various SEO techniques is to get the repetitive and potential customers to the website.

- There are so many convenient ways that work under the banner of search engine optimization like RSS Feeds and link building that has the ability to create a great positive impact on an online business.

- The search engine optimization which is based on the specific keywords which are used in the website's content can generate some potential traffic that will ultimately help in the revenue generation and success of an E-commerce site or online business.

- When it comes to the customer finding your website, then the ranking of your site matters a lot. When a customer or visitor search a keyword which is related to your online business through a search engine then it will pass through the SERP's. Your website will get the specific ranking which depends on the quality and relevancy of the content which is published on your website. Therefore, this ranking can be easily increased with the help of different SEO techniques.

- Remember, it is extremely important to practice the optimization of the website with ethics. There are many webmasters who are using the negative part of SEO in order to get better results in a short time period. But the fact is that all these techniques will eventually trap them under the crawler and they would not get any kind of benefit from these techniques.

- SEO is the best way to promote the business on the World Wide Web. All the competent and experienced SEO marketing companies will always make sure that the business of their client gets an all-round promotion and maximum exposure.