Category: Search Engine Optimization

After the Google Panda update and especially following the Google Penguin update, webmasters began pooping themselves over low quality links pointed at their sites. Many webmasters have purchased links from Fiverr, participated in link wheels, or otherwise come by craptastic links, so even without using a tool like Open Site Explorer to see who was linking to them, most of those webmasters knew they had low quality inbound links.

Then, people started catching on to Negative SEO, and we suddenly seemingly had confirmation that low quality links pointing to your site could actually harm you.

Putting Negative SEO in perspective

Negative SEO is a tactic that supposedly works, but Google has more or less completely denied that it does despite the algorithm updates and SERP changes that seem to suggest that is not true.

If we both run marketing blogs and you’re beating me in the rankings, I can buy a whole bunch of crappy links pointing to your site, use Xrumer and other tools to build low quality links, and otherwise make it look like you might have been trying to game the search engines. Under Google’s recent algorithm changes, this could earn you a penalty or all out exclusion from search results, which would hopefully bump my website up.

Bad, right?

Right.

This all has caused a lot of people to scream for a link disavowal tool.

Basically, webmasters want a way to give Google a list of links and say, “You see those links over there? Yeah, they’re not mine, so please don’t penalize me for them.”

The problem with this is that:

1. Google seems to hate giving into webmaster requests, so will be slow to comply.
2. Google in all its infinite wisdom and data mining glory will use paranoid webmasters against the rest of us by taking the link disavowal requests as signs of what websites real people (not computers) think are low quality.

So, look at what happens. Google does a decent job of figuring out what websites are good and bad, but plenty of bad results sneak in now and then, don’t they? Google can just release a link disavowal tool, make webmasters feel like they’re caving and doing them a favor, and then match up the sites requested for disavowal with their algorithmically generated crap site list, and badda bing badda bang badda boom, they’ve suddenly got a new, hopefully higher quality list of crap sites.

I’d be concerned.

Well, I have a few concerns:

1. Ignorant and paranoid webmasters will get milked by charlatans that offer a link clean up service.
2. Those same webmasters will be a little overzealous and will ask Google to disavow too many links that are actually good.
3. An onslaught of bad request will cause sites that you and I get links from to be penalized or banned, which will cause our rankings to drop even though we didn’t request a disavowal.

When Google does eventually announce a link disavowal tool, I bet that it will work to everyone’s advantage if they just stay as far away from it as possible and, if someone absolutely feels the need to use it, that it would be best for everyone if they are as conservative as possible.

Very few webmasters really have the time or knowledge to analyze their link profile, and that lack of knowledge could become a major pain for the rest of us.

Blog post and webpage headlines can make or break a visitor’s time on your website. A bad blog post headline is like an uninteresting email subject line, a boring book title, or a poorly written newspaper or magazine article headline. When those are boring, you don’t want to open the email, read the book, or look at the article, do you?

The same goes for your blog post and webpage headlines, but we have to add to this the fact that writing on the web isn’t just how humans. You also have to write with an eye for what people search for so that search engines know to match up your webpages with a searchers search results. You make this possible by using the language your customers use rather than industry jargon. If your customers say CD, you write CD and not album. If your customers say tennis shoes, you write tennis shoes and not sneakers.

Why? Because when I search for tennis shoes in Seattle, Google will show me the results that talk about tennis shoes and not sneakers.

How to Properly Write Headlines for SEO

How you write the headlines for your site has a significant influence on the amount of traffic that you’ll get. They have to be written in a way to attract traffic to your site now and must be versatile enough to attract traffic to your site in the future as well. Here are a few steps you can employ to be successful:

• Include the primary interest you are looking to satisfy with your page. Do not keyword stuff by including everything and the kitchen sink. The more targeted you are, the better chance you stand of ranking well and also at converting website visitors.
• Stick to the point by staying within a limit of 70 characters. After 65-70 characters, research has shown that keywords in headlines tend to have less of an effet on rankings. Long headlines can also appear to be keyword stuffing, which can have a negative effect on your rankings.
• Write unique headlines for every page on your website. The choice of words for your headline is extremely important, so use words that will explain to your visitors what your site is about.
• Use relevant words. Be sure that you understand your audience and create headlines that will convey a complete message about what your site offers.

Keys to Writing Solid Headlines

The headline (also known as the title tag) tells the search engines and readers what your website is about, so it must contain some elements that are related to your business and subject matter. The title tag will help readers decide whether to visit your website or not when it shows up in their search results. For a title tag to be effective, you should consider the following when writing it:

• The length which should not exceed 70 characters, including spaces.
• The most relevant keywords should be forwardly placed in the title tag, with less significant words at the end.
• Keep the important phrases short and simple– do not make them read a full sentence.
• Place the company or website name near the front of the title tag if it is related to your keywords; otherwise, place it near the end of the tag.
• Create a different title tag for every page, of your website. Make sure that you do not duplicate, that each title tag is relevant, and briefly describes the content in the page.

Research from SEOmoz and several other companies has shown a strong correlation between optimized headlines and increased traffic from search engines, social media, email, and other channels. The reasons for this are that optimized headlines are easier for search engines to relate to a searcher’s intent, and they are more attractive for people in any channel to click on.

When you create multiple pages with the same, or highly similar, content, search engines algorithmically pick up on the similarities and either exclude all but one of those pages from search results or show all, but only 1 each time a relevant search is performed.

So, you’re asking, “What’s the problem with that?” Let’s say that you have a website that sells rugs, and in an effort to show up in the search results for everyone, you decide to duplicate one of your pages and just change a few words, so you have a whole list of pages with titles and topics like this:

• Buy a rug today
• Buy a rug cheap
• Buy a rug online
• etc, etc, etc

If the content on each page is essentially the same, search engines pick up on that quickly and decide to show me, the searcher, whichever one they think is relevant. Let’s say your page is the best rug page ever, so I decide to link to it from my blog. Then, my neighbor does a search and finds one of the other pages from the list and links to it from his blog. Now, you have 2 incoming links, but to two different pages, so when the next person searches, the search engine does not have a strong link signal to determine which page is better, but your competitors might only have one page that is awesome and happens to have 10 incoming links. All else being equal, your competitor’s page will outrank you in the search results and will likely get more traffic.

One way to combat this is to use the rel=”canonical” tag in your page header. Rel=”canonical” tells search engines that the canonical, or main, version of the page exists a the link the canonical points at, so when one of the pages on your list gets linked to and search engines follow the link, they can see from your page header that the real version exists somewhere else.

The result of this is that all inbound links to the non-canonical pages count for the canonical version, so when you’re going up against a competitor in the search results, you don’t have one page with 5 links and another with 3 links and another with 8 links going against one competitor page with 10 links. Instead, you have one canonical page with 16 inbound links outranking the competitor page.

How Do You Set-Up a Canonical URL?

A canonical link tag can be added to the header of the HTML page. Just be sure to remember the following:

• Be sure that URLs are normal or standard.
• Modify your Content Management System to show only the URLs you want.
• Once you have chosen your ideal canonical page, ensure that your internal links are consistent so all will lead back to the same site.

On the header of the other pages with less priority or less preference, simply add a tag to show the URL you want Google to index it.

Just add rel=”canonical” link to the head portion on the non-canonical variation of each HTML page and indicate the page of your preference.

If you’re using WordPress, install an SEO plugin, such as WordPress SEO, to ensure that the canonical tag is always present.

Want a little more information?