Organic Response

Hitwise reports search engine traffic breakdown… Google is Killin’ it!

Google – 67.9%; Yahoo – 20.3%; Microsoft – 6.3%; Ask – 4.2%; Other – 1.4%

Fresh targeted content and links are the two most important components of search engine optimization. Do the following and you will kill two birds with one stone:

1. Write as many tidbits of advice / words of wisdom / how to’s / fun facts etc… as you can think of that are geared towards the topic of your website. They should be no more than a couple sentences each, a small paragraph at most (try to get at least a few hundred to start – this is why you may want to hire a copywriter for this. I recommend LifeTips. Make sure to do your keyword research so you know what keywords to target. I use Keyword Discovery.
2. Create a page on your site called “Daily ____ Tips” ( or “knowledge nuggets” or “how to’s”, etc…)
3. Create an RSS feed that will present your tips as you upload them daily (How to create an RSS feed)

By creating an RSS feed of daily tips related to your website you provide fresh content for the search engine spiders to crawl daily. Having this information in a feed allows others to syndicate this content on their sites, which will always link back to your site. In my opinion this is the best SEO tip in the book. What’s your best SEO tip?

Aggregating content onto a microsite via RSS is becoming an increasingly popular strategy among PR marketers in the digital space.  Government and non-profit clients have loads of informational content that, if repurposed in an user-friendly manner, can become an effective tool for communicating on the Web.  RSS allows marketers to present this information in a “snackable“ fashion that is appealing to internet users constantly being bombarded with information.  Because of this new strategy, PR marketers need to become smart about the search engine optimization implications of RSS.  RSS and SEO are attached at the hip because of the fresh content and frequent linking intrinsic to syndication.  RSS feeds, however, can become significant search engine visibility assets if utilized in the right way.  Entire link building strategies can and should be built around the submitting of RSS feeds to RSS directories, as well as creating opportunities for your feed to be aggregated on third party sites.  Stephan Spencer gave a great lecture at last years Search Engine Strategies, called RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers.  This is a great place to start learning… 

I finally found an EASY way to add the social bookmarking buttons to my blog posts.  Of course I am weary of overdoing it, but I’ve been trying to find an easy way to “socialize” my blog for some time, so I’m doing it!  Your on your way to Social Media Optimization bliss in just 5 steps:

1. Download Sociable 2.0 here: http://push.cx/sociable
2. Unzip the files to your computer
3. Using FileZilla (or another FTP server) upload the social folder (not just files in it) to the wp-content/plugins folder of your blog
4. Go to your WordPress Admin and activate the plugin on the Plugins page
5. Go to Options and choose which social buttons you want and how you want them presented

 You get to choose from the following 61 sites (but be tactful!):

blinkbits, BlinkList, BlogMemes, blogmarks, co.mments, connotea, del.icio.us, De.lirio.us, digg, DZone, Fark, feedmelinks, Furl, Fleck, Gwar, Hemidemi, IndiaGram, IndianPad, kick.ie, LinkaGoGo, Linkter, Ma.gnolia, MisterWong, MyShare, My-Tuts, NewsVine, Netscape, Netvouz, PopCurrent, ppnow, RawSugar, Rec6, Reddit, scuttle, Shadows, Simpy, Slashdot, Smarking, Spurl, SphereIt, StumbleUpon, Taggly, Technorati, TailRank, Webride, Wists, Wykop, and YahooMyWeb.

My favorite 7 are in bold.  Which one’s do you like?

When you first create a webpage, say your homepage, think of it as an empty container. When an external webpage directs a link to your homepage, think of it as them attaching a tube from their container to your container. Within that tube flows a one way current of liquid, or “link juice,” that pours into your container. When you build out your website with additional pages linked from your homepage, the link juice flows from your homepage through these tubes and into these containers (pages). By receiving more links from external pages you are increasing the sources from which you are getting your link juice, which you then pass internally to other pages within your site. By linking outside your site you are essentially leaking some of your juice with each external link. This leaking of link juice is not, however, a bad thing as long as you link to pages relevant to the topic of your site. What does hurt your link juice supply significantly, however, is having your links point to dead pages (404 Not Found). When you link to a dead page your juice is spilling out of your containers, and effectively diminishing your link juice.

A commonly practiced SEO tactic to ensure that your flow of link juice is not being directed to useless or hurtfull places is called PageRank sculpting. This is the use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the html code when linking to another site, or to an internal page of lower priority, like a privacy or terms and conditions page. Here is what the tag would look like in the page’s source:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” >Visit My Page</a>

So think about your links as tubes with valuable juice flowing through them and hopefully this whole linking thing will make a little bit more sense. You are welcome add to this discussion by describing ways that help YOU better visualize linking and other structural website concepts.

Creating content specific pages on Squidoo is a great link building strategy for SEO. Squidoo is like a more intellectual, content driven version of Myspace that allows users to create pages on their passions consisting of “modules” of written content. The interface allows you to easily insert RSS feeds, Youtube videos, Flickr photos, products from Amazon and more. Creating useful Squidoo “lenses” on topics related to your website, and inserting strategic deeplinks occasionally is a great way to get quality backlinks.

We recently implemented a Squidoo link building campaign with one of our clients by creating lenses for all there major city markets, that focused on providing helpful information to people living in these cities or planning to move to them. Remember, the key is to provide useful relevant focused content on each lense. Don’t be an overt spammer… just a covert one If anyone has had experience using Squidoo for link building please share.