Mike's Quarter - technology and cool gadgets blog » Search Engine Optimization

Spy your competition and plan your new project with Semrush.com

Mike — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:21:04 +0000

With billions of sites all over the Internet and still limited topics and niches, it’s a fact that your site will have competitors. Of course, you can outmatch them by offering better researched and more informative content, a better site design and a smoother using experience on your site.

But in the end it’s pretty much all about the traffic, and Search Engine traffic is as good as it gets (not always, but still). Thus, you’ll want your site to rank well, but before that, it all starts from the subjects you pick for your posts. Cause if you’re writing about something nobody is looking for, you’re already playing a game you’re going to lose.

And here’s where webservices like semrush.com come into play, as they help you find out what people usually search for on SEs (Google) and offer you thorough info on keywords and traffic, both organic and paid. I for one have been using this service for many years and it’s part of my research combo when looking for new subjects or brainstorming a new website, next to other services like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker.

In this post, I’ll tell you a bit about a couple of things you can use Semrush.com for, plus what I like and what I dislike about it.

What is Semrush.com ?

First, Semrush.com is a keyword analysis service which analysis over 80 million keywords and 40 millions webdomains, divided in a couple of different data bases, for a couple of different locations (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Rusia, etc). These databases update periodically and use data provided by Google.

You can use this service to identify keywords that drive traffic to various sites (and could drive to yours as well), based on Google’s organic results and Adwords paid service. Below you can find some of the key features of this service:

Provides site statistics

Typing a specific URL gives you information about that one, which includes a general overview at the site’s Google traffic, like you can see in the picture below for ebay.com, one of the biggest sites around. The extra cool thing is that you can type in a domain or a specific URL (a post, category, etc) and get details on that one.

The report below says that ebay.com receives around 29.5 millions visitors from organic searches each month, but based on my own sites, i’d say that the data is rather inaccurate, as I usually get around 3-4 times more traffic that it indicates. Still, it’s a place to start if you want to find details about a site’s traffic or compare different web properties.

Besides organic traffic volume, there’s also the paid traffic included, as well as some estimates on how much that traffic costs or how much the organic traffic coming to your site is worth, probably based on CPC. Of course, those are just estimates, take them with grain and salt.

Besides those, for each site you get the main keywords it ranks for (and their position), organically or in Adwords, main competitors (Organic and in Adwords again), plus info on potential add buyers or sellers , based on targeted keywords. For the same site, we got like 3.5 Million keyword results, so the scale of this tool is just scary and the amount of data it provides.

Now, if you have a free account you’ll only get access to the first 10 results for each case, and those are not really the gold nuggets. You have to go for one of the paid packages if you want to be able to digg deeper.

domain traffic comparisons

You can compare traffic for specific domains and see which one gets more from search engines and when.

provides keyword statistics

Just type a keyword this time and it will show you info on the traffic you can expect from that keyword and many other keywords derived or related to that one. That list can really get huge and will come in extra handy.

Besides that, you get details on the main sites that get traffic for that keyword and its relatives, both Organic and Paid, and some suggestions of related keywords.

Of course, with keywords there are three problems:

the database is a bit outdated (1-3 months) and you can’t use this tool to show you fresh and emerging keywords. But that’s something characteristic for tools such as Semrush.
it lacks filters. I’d love to be able to sort only specific keywords, for instance those with a volume of above 1000 searches per month, or only those that include at least 3 different keywords, etc. Yes, you can download the results (if you have a paid account) and then apply all these filters in Excell, but you’ll need to know how to do this and it’s still more complicated than I would want.
the interface only allows you to sort results by volume , downwards. I would have loved to be able to search them by competition or other criteria as well.

Besides those two main types of reports, Semrush.com also offers you custom reports, but those will cost you extra. Still, if you’re a programmer yourself, you get access to their API and can manipulate the results to your own liking.

Pricing

Now, Semrush.com is offered both free or as a paid service. The problem with the free service is that it will only display the top 10 results in your listings and those won’t help you too much.

The paid plans are quite affordable though, starting at $69.99 per month and getting to $499 a month, based on how deep you want to dig inside those huge databases. SpyFu for instance starts at $79.99, while compete.com start at a whoping 199 bucks monthly fee. See more details in the picture below or via this link.

Wrap-up

All in all, Semrush.com is a pretty powerful tool with a good price, when compared to other similar webservices. It helps you follow your competitors, track down the most profitable and appropriate keywords for your service and also offers results for organic and Paid Adwords traffic both.

However, it’s not a perfect tool, as it has its limitations, some of them more problematic than others. There are two big ones: the databases are quite outdated (usually 1-3 months), which is a problem when trying to find out seasonal keywords, emerging new searches or improve PPC results, as paid adds are usually seasonal and quite volatile, and the fact that the tool only digs through the first 20 results in Google’s results, thus it leaves a bunch of long tail traffic untracked.

As for the minor problems, besides the filters issues mentioned above, I’m not glad this tool only tracks Google results and does not offer any data from Yahoo or Bing (they do have a big share of the searches in the US for instance). Yes, you can extrapolate and say that the same things that go for Google also go for the other search engines, but I would love some accurate data here.

That’s pretty much all. You should just go ahead to Semrush.com for more details, register for a free account and dig around through the available details. Like I said, for me this is a must have tool for competition and keyword research, and it could be for you as well.

Thinking of a SEM career? I have some advices for you

Mike — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:07:22 +0000

I had to think of a couple of advices if would give someone who’s planning on following a career in Internet marketing, and especially the part involving search engines. All these are a part of my previous experience with engines, are not rules by any mean, just my thoughts about the subject.

First of all, make sure you like this. Working with Search Engines might be monotonous and boring some time, and it’s a domain where you have to research and read a lot, all these while sitting in front of a computer .
Read the rules. Learn what you are allowed to do and what not, by reading search engines’ TOS pages. You can find these for Google here: http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS and for yahoo here: http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/ .
Learn all you can about the factors influencing ranking and search engine positioning. There are quite a lot of them, so I’ll recommend you to read everything in here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors .
Research a lot, read as many authorities in this field as you can and try to keep up with everything changing or new in this domain .
Practice a lot. All the SEO rules can be read and learnt in just a couple of days. Everyone can do this, but the thing that makes the difference between a newbie and a specialist is practice. You should build sites, create content, try to rank these sites, try to build links, use virals, social media, forums, use paid search, use everything you can.
Don’t try to fool the search engines by using non-ethical tactics that might not be accepted with the TOSs. In the end, the one fooled you’ll be you, you’ll get your site declassified or banned and you’ll loose all the hard work done before. Remember, only ethic tactics can give you the long range results you need .
Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing is part of the learning process, and most of the time, you’ll only learn things "the hard way" .
Try not to focus on SEO alone. Learn a bit of everything, while focusing on one domain. A little bit of email marketing, coding, graphic designing, copywriting, all these might come in handy sometime.

That’s about it. Of course, lots of other things could be added here, and if you do have something to add, please do. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with a couple of great SE knowledge databases, just a few of the ones you should have in your reader if you plan to become a successful SEO developer:

Image source: here

How to avoid and elude Google’s Sandbox

Mike — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:26:17 +0000

Whenever a new site is launched, Google tries to figure out what this new site is all about. He scans the content and the internal linkage but he can’t determine the site’s theme and topic from that alone. On the other hand, Google knows the authorities in each domain, so he will ask them for a helping hand. How? Through inbound links, links pointing from other sites towards yours. So, before a reasonable amount of quality links from authority pages is not attracted, the site will be sandboxed.

What does sandbox mean?

You can consider Google’s sandbox as an extended probation period for your site. A period given to you to prove you’re worthy. Basically, the sandbox is a penalty or devaluation in the Google SERPs of new sites. Most of the time this devaluation will effect only the competitive keywords targeted, as other long tails searches would do just fine and receive high SERPs positions.

Of course, with proper techniques, there are possibilities to avoid or fastly elude Google’s Sandbox, as you will see down below.

How do i know if my site has been sandboxed?

You can always use these kinds of tools: Sandbox check tool.

Or you can go the safer old fashioned way and try some of the following tips:

are you ranked 1-10 in Yahoo and MSN for a "keywords" search but you’re nowhere in Google?
are you ranked in among the first results for a 8-10 keywords matching exactly a posts title? (try this for several pages, but make sure those pages are indexed)
do you rank well for wider non-competitive terms?
is your site ranking well for a long tail keyword but is way further in SERPs for the same allinachor keyword?

If the answer to all the questions above is yes, then you are facing a "sandbox" problem. You’ll see further down what you have to do in this case.

Can I avoid the Sandbox?

Definitely. Before placing it in the Sandbox, Google gives every new site the initial SERPs boost. If during this short period you manage to "gain Google’s trust" by providing quality and unique content and acquiring a decent number of natural links from other sites, including authorities, you might just skip the probation period. Of course there’s nothing sure here, cause after all we’re talking about Google… But this site for example has never experienced Sandbox, as one of its first articles gained lots of exposure and natural links.

Of course, the best method for avoiding sandbox is to buy an older site (could be expensive though). This will also bring the "age bonus factor" into equation, proving to be useful later on, as we know how much weight does Google put on age in his ranking algorithm.

My site is in the Sandbox. How can i get out? Help!

First of all, there’s no need to panic. This "sandbox problem" sounds worse then it is. With a little bit of work and a decent amount of patience, most of the sites will get over it. So, let’s see what every site owner should do once he is sure his site is affected by a devaluation:

build quality and most importantly, unique content. Give each page an unique title and description (Meta tags of course). Also, each post should have 250 characters (that’s just my opinion) of unique content at a minimum.
get more trusted links. I would not recommend on site wide links (also there are others claiming otherwise), but links inside the content for old and established sites, preferably authorities from your domain.
build links slowly (no more than 10 each week)
only add links that can be considered fully natural. That does not mean directories (except DMOZ or Yahoo Directory) links could be bad, but they will surely be less reputable and trustful than others
don’t get only links pointing towards your home page but also deep links. This helps your site seem less "hollow". After all, if we’re talking about natural links, it’s more then normal that other sites would link to the posts they like rather than your home page, no?
don’t panic and don’t use Black or Grey methods. Anything from spamming to buying links (except buying links inside posts, that would appear to be 100% natural, which are recommended) should be out of the question.

All these methods are just theories gathered from the community. In most cases, sticking to them should get you out of the sandbox, but there’s nothing 100% sure. Anyway, the only real escape from the Sandbox is time. Depending on the competitiveness of your most important keywords, that time can vary from one to six months, with three to four months being the normal duration. In the meantime, continue to improve your site, and be prepared to make a rapid rise once the Sandbox probation ends, cause if you’ve spent the probation period doing the right things, you will…

But i still need traffic!

Most of you won’t settle to working on the site without seeing any traffic during the "sandboxed" months. But don’t worry, there are lots of other ways to get traffic besides Google. Afterall, it’s not safe for any site to rely on only one source of visitors, especially when that source is as unreliable as Google… Anyway, here are the other traffic sources you should take into consideration:

Yahoo and MSN. Even though Google is the dominant search engine, Yahoo and MSN together hold a good amount of traffic (around 50% of Google’s share). So, they could be a great alternative to Google. Trying to rank well in Yahoo and MSN might not be that hard, as their algorithms are not as advanced as Google’s is. Generally, any site with decent links and good On page SEO should do OK here.
linkbaits, viral promotion and social marketing are great ways of generating exposure. It’s true, the visitors will not be as targeted as the ones coming from search engines, but they compensate by numbers. Knowing how to write a proper link bait post and how to promote it is a must, as these methods could hurry your "sandbox exit", by attracting lots of links from related sites.
PPC: if you’re looking for targeted visitors and money are not a problem, you could buy some traffic. Google’s Adwords is some of the best way to do it, but Yahoo and MSN provide their own similar services. It’s just up to you

In the end, the conclusion is pretty simple: Google’s Sandbox in not a myth as some members of the SEO community might claim but it’s not that big bad guy either. All in all, with patience and hard work, everything will end up just great in the end. So remember, when we’re talking about eluding "Google’s Sandbox", time is everything.

The real truth behind SEO Experts

Mike — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:09:13 +0000

I believe thousands of people get scammed every year by so called SEO Experts. Why? Well, because they can’t distinguish lies from the steel cold truth. Because they are too credulous and there are lots of guys waiting to take advantage from it. And of course, because they want great results with as little expense as possible.

So, how can you distinguish the good SEO companies from the fake ones? Well, first of all, learn not to believe in any of the following stories, that the guys from Hobo-Web put together a couple of days ago. I’ll show you only some of the "best" replicas:

We cannot show you results for clients as it is 100% confidential - so i guess i should take your word for it, ay mate?
We KNOW how Google works – well, that surely make you unique. Cause i don’t and i don’t think anyone does, not even Matt Cuts… But hey, that’s just my opinion. You’re the big SEO Expert, you know better…
Toolbar Page Rank Is Everything – Of course it is. And pigs fly. Oh no, wait, they don’t… That means there’s something wrong with your logic? Ironicaly, the PR myth is so deep-rooted. 90% of my clients ask me about it and demand a PR5+ for their site…
Submit To 75,000 Search Engines - Since Google, Yahoo and MSN have like 95% of the worldwide market, and you don’t even have to submit your site on them, what are all the other 74997 search engine submission worth?
We don’t rank for any “seo” terms because we don’t want to – or perhaps because you don’t know how to? Hmmm…

Anyway, clients like to see high figures, so you can’t really blame companies for giving them what they want, can you? But in the end, how can you be sure you won’t be duped when looking for the services of a SEO company? Well’ you can’t, but the risks should be minimal if you take these advices into consideration:

never sign a company that guarantees you results over night. Because we’re talking about a logical and longtime process that can’t happen over night, and which can’t always have the desired results
don’t fall for the big numbers: 50.000 search engines, 10.000 first positions in SERPs, thousands of visitors everyday, etc etc
try to work with companies/people recommended by your friends (or by many others on forums, groups, etc)
ask for previous work references
make sure you know what you are asking for and what are you expecting to obtain from a SEO company

That should be it. Now I’m going back to those Guides i told you in the beginning. If you have other tips and advices, feel free to leave them by.

Being a SEO developer is not cheap

Mike — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:52:19 +0000

I frankly hate January. It’s not because of the new year, but because is one of the months with the harshest effect on my wallet. Why? Well… taxes, imposits, hostings, domain registrations, etc, all have to be paid now. And, if you happen to be involved in the SEO business, perhaps you should have some additional $3000 just for this little thing.

How come? Well, you’ll see. These $3000 dollars are going to be spent just for the basic program licenses and memberships every SEO developer must have. Now let’s see how are these money going to be spent.

Advances Web Ranking – $399

This is a program good at one thing and only one: check rankings and return results. No page critics, no forums or blog links, only ranking. Has lots of complex functions but strikes the user with it’s simplicity, being one of the best SEO applications a beginner can use.

Like other programs, this one has a huge list of engines in which to search data, but unlike other programs, this one has a filter. If you want to check your Google rank simply type Google in the filters box. If you want to see the UK engines, type UK. And so on. Your projects’ progress in time and various graphs and statistics can be saved and looked upon with just a couple of clicks.

Advances Web Ranking Enterprise Edition usually costs around $399, but as i checked the site today, you can get a $100 discount if you buy it til the end of January. Payments can be made via Paypal (my favourite) or VISA/MasterCard card

WEB CEO Professional – $389

I’ve been using WEB CEO for more than 5 years and i must say this one is the program i like the best. perhaps because it has became so familiar to me. Anyway, WEB CEO is a software package of around the main tools that help you promote, analyze and understand the traffic of your sites. Some of the best features include:

Keyword research tool: up to 1000 keyword phrases (with daily search count) per search query
Search engine optimization tool: analyzes your web page and compares important ranking elements with top 10 ranked pages in major search engines, to find out how to improve your rankings.
Check your rankings: a huge time saver for search engine specialists and Website owners who need relevant data.
Link checker: quickly and easily check who’s linking to you, who’s linked to your competitors, and much more.
Always know the status of your site: real time monitoring of your sites (and you can be emailed or telephoned when something goes wrong).

All these can be yours for $389, payable via Visa card. You do get a 30 days money back guaranteed option in case you don;t like the program and its features, but i doubt that could happen.

WordTracker – $329

If you’re into SEO and not using keyword research tools like this one and Nichebot… well, perhaps you shouldn’t have been here

Wordtracker was the first and still is the best keyword research tool available. It offers a massive 300 million keywords database from which you can find out what your target audience are entering into search engines and how many times each keyword has been entered.

There’s a Free Trial version of Wordtracker that can be used to see just how useful this program is. But the vast number of limitations will make you press that buy button pretty soon. Cause you’ll get :

When you type in your main keyword phrase, the paid version brings back 300 words in the left hand column – all related to your main phrase and each one can be clicked on to bring up a list of up to 500 related words in the right hand column.
Keyword basket can hold 5000 keyword phrases compared to only 30 in the trial.
Paid version can give you common misspellings of words. This is superb for PPC campaigns where you want cheap clicks.
Paid version allows you to search for competition in all major search engines, the trial version only works on Altavista
Paid version allows you to set up multiple projects that you can work on at the same time.

Should we say more? This are surelly the best spent $329 you’ll get rid off this year.

NicheBot – $230 ($19 a month)

Nichebot is a cheaper keyword analysis tool that brings together some (but not all) of the data offered by Wordtracker and coraborate it with data from Overture and Google. NicheBOT allows users the ability to create an account to save their keyword searches (called Keyword Basket). This could be handy but it lacks a lot of functionality that would make it a true asset. So all in all, NicheBot can be a pretty good tool if you’d like another keywordd research tool besides Wordtracker.

Seomoz Premium Membership – $399

I’m sure most of you read the top quality materials posted by Rand and Vanessa on Seomoz. You ned an ordinary account for that, but they also offer some premium content and tools for $399 each year. You get access to unique industry guides, tools, tips, tricks, answers, videos and exclusive events. These features and tools make it easier to understand the inner workings of web sites, search engines and other forms of Online marketing that Webmasters constantly use within their business advertising and branding strategies.

SEOBook – $79 (lifetime)

If you’re not sure what this SEO Book, perhaps you should take a look at this review. For those of you who know, Aaroon Wall’s book takes you in a journey through SEO and SEM strategies, being a perfect guide for newbies but a good reading material for experimented developers too.

Here are some of the most important chapters on the book:

A brief history of Search Engine Optimization and the Web.
How to choose a domain name that can help you rank high for your selected keywords.
How to design your site from a search engine perspective.
How to optimize the individual pages of your site.
Why is the anchor text on incoming links important.
How good usability can help your site.
How pay per click works.

Also, as a great plus, SEO Book comes with free updates for life. And since search engine optimization is such a dynamic field, where the rules change every day, it is reassuring to be able to buy an informational product that will always be kept current by one of the most renown experts on the field.

SEO Book also comes with a personalized free 15 minute consultation with Aaron.

BlackHatForums – $1000

I’m sure most of you won’t agree with me here, as $1000 an year spent for a Black hat Forum membership might seem like fool spent money. But, you should take into consideration sometimes Black is the new White, and great results (from the financial point fo view) can be obtained through those methods known only be very few people. And since most good Black Hat communities work behind closed doors, you’ll find some great knowledge in here. I so agree though $1000 is a little expensive so buy this only if you want to use what you’ll learn here.

That being said, you see we’re getting pretty close to the $3000 margin. And we only have a bunch of programs and memeberships. But all of them are a must have for a good SEO developper. Don;t you think so?

How to rank number 1 in SERPs in simple steps

Mike — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:01:30 +0000

Of course there are lots of factors influencing your articles placement in SERPs, but some of them seem to be more important than others. On page SEO has to be taken into consideration, but the OFF page factor should come first. And when we’re talking about OFF page optimization, we’re talking of course about links.

So here’s what you should know about links if you plan to rank number 1 in SERPs for decent searches

Gather links for your pages from relevant sites
Link buying is a very good solution to gather quality links as long as you know how to do it
Don’t buy site wide links. And don’t sell them either
Look for links inside relevant posts to the subject you’re trying to promote. Anchors and relevancy are more important than PR for a back link. So don’t look for high PR links, as they might be very expensive and not necessary worth it.
Make links look natural. Use different link anchors and promote not only your main page, but your deep pages too.
Don’t do reciprocal link exchanges, go for 3-way exchanges instead
Link to the authorities in your niche. Beside the SEO factor, this might get them to notice you.
Try to control the number of outbound links on a page. That does not mean you should be afraid to link to helpful and relevant content if you think it would help your readers.
Don’t use all the link schemes you can read about on the Internet. Offers like: "Get 5000000 back links for 50$" are almost 100% bullsh@t and they might end up harming your sites a lot.
Remember. Link buying is in most cases the fastest way to improve your site’s link popularity. But it is also the fastest way to get your ass penalized or even banned. So be careful and mind your every step… It’s not that hard but if you’re not sure of what you should do, perhaps it might be better to pay a specialist to do it for you.

Search engine optimization tips – indexing and controlling the link juice flow

Mike — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:34:36 +0000

You’ve earned from my previous articles from the search engine optimization tips series a couple of Seo beginner rules and then how to plan and implement a proper link structure for your site. Now it’s time for a new episode, about indexing and controlling PR juice flow trough your site.

There are lots of pages on a site that should not get into SERPs. Why? For many reasons: duplicate content, uninteresting content, very low chances of ranking well etc. So, what should you do with all these pages? Prevent crawling bots to get to them. By using robots.txt or the noindex meta tag.

You can find more about robots, noindex and nofollow from a previous article.

I want to speak here about using nofollow to influence PR juice distribution on your site. In theory, things are like this: You have a PR X page with Y links on it. Every one of these links passes a PR equal to X/Y. So, the lower your Y will be on a page, the more juice will each of the links pass. And here comes the question. Is it worth using nofollow internally on your site?

From my experience, using nofollow internally has no results. But i still use it nonetheless. Why? Because I’ve read many posts from people claiming they had results with this technique and recommending it. And even a friend of mine claims so too… Perhaps, when we’re talking about a limited number of links on a page there might be some influence, but other from that.. i sincerely doubt it. One more interesting thing: Nofollow internally can be used though to pass the link juice to third tier links, skipping the second level ones.

In the end, i must add that you should not have any fear that using nofollow internally is a Black or even Grey HAT SEO method, as Matt Cuts himself admitted that "webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages". Just don’t expect incredible results. this thingy is just one of the hundreds of factors inside the Google Algorithm.

That being said, stay tuned for the next episode of this Search Engine Optimization saga.

On page SEO checklist

Mike — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 09:13:00 +0000

This is a short (actually not so short) checklist of ON page SEO factors i look at when someone asks me to analyze a site. There are others too, more complicated ones. I’ve just decided to share with you the basics… And a little bit more. So, enjoy.

The ON page SEO Checklist

The arborescent structure
- depth of the tree (should be at most 3 levels deep)
- the logic dependence between levels (the child level has to be a particular case of its parent)
- Existence of broken parts of the tree
Link analysis

breadcrumbs (the navigation bar)
link structure (related to the structural tree)
use only absolute links, no relative ones
how is the link built (should contain only lower case words separated with "-"; special character and connection words should be eliminated)
length of the link (65 characters top is the best)
no duplicate links (different links with same content)
links should always end in "/ " (www.mikesquarter.com/article/) due to server loading problems
don’t use links ending with extensions (.htm, .html, .php, etc)
number of links on a single page
title attribute on each link

Menus
- Important keywords in menus
- absolute text links
- using Hs where needed
- Use CSS menus rather than JS or Flash ones
- use nofollow on secondary menus where needed
Indexing and nofollow
- use robots and index only the important pages (usually search and secondary pages should be excluded)
- use nofollow internally
Semantics
- Title, keywords and description – unique for every single page
- using H1 for title, H2 for subtitle, etc
- using the Alt attribute for pictures and Title for links
- using Em, Strong, etc to emphasize parts of the text
- using internal linking
Sitemap
- use a sitemap
- the standard of the sitemap
- put in the sitemap only the links you want to be indexed
Coding
- validate your HTML and CSS code (might be impossible to do this, but take care of the important errors. for example, don’t leave opened tags unclosed, don’t use inappropriate attributes for a tag, etc)
- external CSS
- try not to use JS, Flash unless really needed. If you have to use it, make sure you have external JS.
- Don’t use Frames or iFrames
Gallery
- make sure you have a little bit of content on each picture’s page in the gallery. (A short description of the image would do just fine)
- use the Alt attribute and try to rename the picture accordingly to what you can see in it (actually, according to what you think users will search on Google to find that picture). Be short and descriptive.
- use proper navigation in you gallery
- I would not recommend on using Flash or JS galleries, even though they look quite good. That’s if you want your pictures to be found by Search engines.
Other problems
- personalized 404 page returning proper HTTP status code
- domain canonicalization
- table less design would be appreciated (not needed though)
- keep your page dimension as low as you can (many Internet users in the world still use Dial up you know)

Well, this should help you make a decent analysis on your site. If you need some help, don’t hesitate to contact me. Oh, and if you have anything to add here, just leave some replies. I’m always looking to improve my lists

What do you think about the latest PR Update?

Mike — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:47:01 +0000

I’m wondering what do you think about Google’s latest PR Update. Expected in August, it came in October and with lots of changes. The motto of this update was "Let’s take the paid links down". Thus many sites and blogs that sold/bought links were hit hardly. Here’s how i see it.

Mot of the paid directories had their PRs reduced by 2-4 points. The only ones that seem to have escaped yet are Yahoo Directory, Business, Jayde and BOTW. All of them are old and established domains though. The other were hit, thus all the links from them lost a lot of their weight.

On the other side, there are the blogs that sell/used to sell links. They were hit too. Johnchow and Engadget can be found in the top of the list.

But what are the effects of these penalties. Let’s see. Directories will loose most of their clients, because their links are not worthy anymore and because people will think twice before buying a link, knowing they pay for something that will possibly do them more wrong than good. Blogs will also not be able to sell their links, for the same reasons mentioned above.

These changes attract major penalties in SERPs. Numerous examples can be found on forums and blogs. It’s not because your blogs’ PRs were reduced, it’s because the total link weight getting in your site has diminished. So, if the most important part of your link building campaign consists in paid links… then… you’re screwed(Expect you Google traffic to drop drastically).

In the end, i tend to agree with Google on these PR penalties. They stated for so long the importance of naturalness in their algorithm and it was expected to do something against paid links. Of course, for us, SEO developers, it will be a lot harder now to raise a certain site in SERPs…

What do you think about Google’s move? Do you agree with it or not? Feel free to post your comments bellow.

PR Update

Mike — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:36:41 +0000

Hmmm, we have PR now. I was expecting for a 5 actually but… i have to settle with a 4 now… Doesn’t matter actually, as PR means nothing nowadays. I just hope people won’t start harassing me with emails about link exchanges. I’m not saying i didn’t do them too back in my time, but now link exchanges are just not worth anymore… That’s it

Mike's Quarter - technology and cool gadgets blog » Search Engine Optimization

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