Archive for the ‘SEO Tips’ Category
In some respects the business world has never been smaller. The world wide web, as its name implies, puts the whole world a mere mouse-click away but, while anyone with an internet connection can theoretically access your own little corner of Cyberspace, in reality it takes a little more effort to fully exploit the opportunities offered by the ‘net.
It’s tempting to think that a monolingual approach will suffice when it comes to your online presence, especially if your native language happens to be English. Widely regarded as the lingua franca or ‘common language’ of the business world, English is also the most commonly used language online, according Internet World Stats.
Look closer at those statistics, however, and you’ll find that, while it is the single most commonly used language, it still only represents just over a quarter of all internet usage.
Additionally, the growth in English usage online stands at just over 281% over the past decade – far less than Spanish (743%), Chinese (1,277%), Russian (1,826%) or Arabic (showing a massive growth of 2,501% over the same period).
There are many social, economic and technological factors that may affect the incidence of internet usage within certain territories but, should these trends continue, the proportion of English speaking internet users will naturally fall further. With internet penetration standing at 33% in Chinese and 37% in Spanish speaking markets (as opposed to 42% in English) there is also still a lot of scope for this potential growth in foreign language markets to continue.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that many English speakers use English only as a second language. While such people might well be able to understand an English-only website, studies have shown that multilingual internet users put far more trust in sites written in their native language, especially when it comes to making a purchase online. 85% of all consumers report that they would require information in their own native language before making a purchase.
Clearly, a monolingual approach to online marketing would severely limit both the inroads you are able to make into foreign language markets and the conversion rates (that is, the proportion of visitors who also go on to make a purchase) within those markets.
Once you’ve decided to take the plunge with a localised or internationalised website (localisation is the adaptation of an existing website to match the culture and language of a particular market. whereas internationalisation is the process of designing a site able to operate in and appeal to different markets from the start), you should notice benefits in your search engine marketing (SEM) results.
The simple reason for this is that, with English being the most widely used language online, there is less competition for rankings in any other single language.
A large part of search engine optimisation (SEO) revolves around identifying popular keywords. As the most commonly used keywords – basically the terms web users type into a search engine – are also the ones most likely to be used by competitors, there’s always a balance to be struck between popular, broad ‘short tail’ keywords and more specific ‘long tail’ keywords. When working in foreign languages online, there will be less competition on both types, making well researched keywords more likely to be successful.
Similarly, fewer inbound links are required in order to boost rankings and, with less competition, ads on local versions of global brand search engines such as Google and Yahoo and on local competitors such as Yandex and Seznam (the market leaders in Russia and the Czech Republic respectively) are likely to cost less.
The importance of successful SEM can’t be overstated. The top Google ranked site for any given search claims 35% of traffic, which is almost as much as the next four slots combined. As it is easier to achieve high rankings for a foreign language site than one in English, this translates as a higher return on investment in foreign language SEM.
The foreign language internet is an often neglected resource but it offers great opportunities for almost any business and these opportunities look set to grow in the foreseeable future.
About the author
Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, one of the world’s fastest growing translation companies. Launched in the UK in 2001, Lingo24 now spans three continents and has clients in more than sixty countries. Lingo24 has translated for businesses in every industry sector. Follow Christian (@l24ca) and Lingo24 (@Lingo24) on Twitter.
Over the last week I have been making some changes to by blog, these changes were made for three reasons – to decrease indexation times, increase crawler activity and hopefully increase rankings and traffic over time. Sadly I cannot publish any results because as usual I have managed to get a -30 Page penalty on a few keywords during a test which was not related to my new changes (The Keyword spam which I tweeted about a few days ago – so instead of posting results I would like to go through the changes that I’ve made then do a follow-up post on the results.
Plug-ins Installed
Google XML Sitemap
Does exactly what you think it does, auto generates a new XML sitemap and pings search engines with the updated version.
Majestic SEO Dashboard Widget
This is a great plug-in from Dan Taylor that displays Majestic’s link growth graphs within your WordPress Dashboard, giving you a good idea of how your blog is growing over time without having to leave your website – this is something which will be important for me during testing the new setup 
nStatistics
If you want a plug-in which will display crawler activity on your blog then look no further, install this plug-in and get pretty graphs displaying both user and crawler activity over time
RSS Footer
I have been doing a bit of work with RSS directories recently and wanted a way to put static links at the bottom of every post in my RSS feed – job done
Feed2tweet
Just your every day auto Tweeter for your new posts.
Tweet old post
Ok so everyone has been wondering what plug-in Michael Grey has been using to display his archived posts, it’s just most people couldn’t be bothered to search for this obvious plug-in (says allot for the SEO community).
WP OnlyWire Auto Poster
Most SEO’s have an OnlyWire account for getting those bookmarks quickly – now you can auto post to OnlyWire via this plug-in every time you publish a blog post.
I’ve Done The Plug-ins Now The Fun Bit
As some people know I have been setting up quite a few profiles recently, most of which have ways to aggregate either your Twitter feed or your blog RSS feed, some of which will even accept your social bookmarking accounts (Example Here) and then give you an additional RSS feed output – which ten leads to some fun with RSS directories and so on.
With this in mind and the fact I’m auto posting links to OnlyWire (which sends out to quite a few places) you can imagine the 1000’s of links that could instantly be built to your new blog post as soon as you hit that publish button .
Now The Boring Bit
Now because I have just suggested a way to fully automate link building for a WordPress blog I thought I should put in a little disclaimer – In no way am I saying go out and do this, as most people know I test things with this blog and sometimes I will blog about these tests, I have not fully tested the above and would never use this technique for any clients. There are people who do this kind of thing already, out of which some make mistakes and get penalties, so be warned!
Most SEO tips contain at least one mention of the importance of ‘freshly updated content’, but what happens to that older content you’ve had sitting on your website for a while?
In fact, there are a 101 ways you can remove SEO penalties. Some of them are tricky, requiring you to understand the more technical aspects of blogging, while many are simple and easy to implement. The steps below can be applied in a day or so, by simply changing the way you blog.
There are times when aged content can be completely irrelevant to current topics or information provided. Yet removing that content may not always be the best course of action as we learned on Kitchen Stools Direct.
If you work things the right way, those older pages may give you the opportunity to leverage your search engine rankings. There are some ways to rework or retool these pages to give them deeper significance and enhance your SEO efforts.
Retooling Aged Content
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you should rewrite or change legacy content. This kind of aged content is often already indexed and contributing to the value of your current rankings.
Instead, consider retooling it by adding some related contextual links into the existing content that contribute further to your deep linking efforts. You may want to also add some new inbound links to that page from other pages within your site to give it fresh relevance.
Restructure Content
Restructuring the content you have on a legacy page is not as simple as just rewriting the words on the page. Before you consider restructuring anything on that page, look carefully at any potential anchor text that can be inserted contextually into the content that could lead to other pages within the site.
Updating old content to contain more current information is fine, as long as the original content itself remains quite similar. This will help to retain the trust that search engines have already placed on the aged content without completely destroying the SEO efforts you may have put into that page originally.
You can also restructure the content so that it can help you achieve a ranking objective for a different set of keyword phrases or terms within the same overall niche.
Renewing Relevance
What may have been relevant content three years ago may be completely outdated today. If there is older content on a site that no longer receives any search volume, it may be time to sacrifice that content in exchange for something with more relevance. However, don’t delete that page or you lose the contribution it has towards your current rankings.
Consider creating new inbound links with anchor text for this page from external sites to give the page a refreshed appeal within the SERPs.
Create a Hub Page
While the content on a particular page may be outdated or aged, the value of that page remains for SEO purposes. It can sometimes be worth the effort to turn that page into a hub page for other related pages within your site.
This can mean adding links to related pages within your site for suggested further reading about that particular topic. This can help pass the trust earned by the search engines from that page to other sections within the same site.
Redirect
If the content in question is out-dated beyond repair, you may need to sacrifice that page completely. However, don’t lose the momentum already built up by your SEO efforts for that page. Rather, put a 301 redirect to good use if you have the capacity to use a server side redirect from http:// requests.
This allows you to still retain the benefits of any inbound links to that page and continue the link flow, yet visitors will be redirected to a page of higher relevance or more recent information. In turn, that new page receiving the redirect will benefit from previous ranking status of the deleted page.
This was a post by Lior who is an online consultant for Kitchen Stools Direct, a bar stools and kitchen stools online store.
A question I get asked a lot is how much body copy do I need for SEO? In the early days I used to say from 250 to 500 words. Now I prefer a more custom approach that I learned from Bruce Clay.
It starts with understanding that different queries will call for different amounts of copy. A searcher performing an informational query “how to use an slr camera” wants more copy than someone performing a transactional query “cheap sony slr camera 398.”
Consequently, Google will try to match the results to searcher intent. So if you want your page to rank for a transactional query, make your page look like a product details page, and pare back the copy. If you want to rank for an informational query, bulk up the copy.
So how do you figure out how much copy you need? Figure out which pages are ranking for the keyword you’re targeting, then look at how much body copy they’re sporting. Clearly Google has decided this is roughly the amount of body copy a page targeting this query needs, so write your page to fit within those parameters.
This just a guide. If all the other pages have 1000 words but you only have 250-words worth of stuff to say about the topic, either re-evaluate the topic or leave it at 250. Don’t sacrifice user experience in the name of SEO.
At the same time, don’t let designers or other marketers tell you “no one wants to read that much copy.” Tell that to Wikipedia. People go online for information, generally in the form of words or pictures. Give people the information they want, no more, no less.
So, the amount of body copy on a page will depend on searcher intent, who’s ranking for the query you’re targeting, and how much you really have to say about the topic.
Cathy Reisenwitz is a Birmingham, Alabama-based SEO. She blogs at Birmingham SEO Blog.
Quite a bit has changed since I my Link Building 101 was published on SEOmoz – most of which still applies to this year but I thought I would take the time to list what I feel will be the important / unimportant link types for 2011.
Social Media Links
Google has admitted that it values links from social media profiles such as Twitter and Facebook even though they are no-follow (unless you put one on your personal Facebook page) but what about other links coming from what we would call social media profiles?
Personally I feel that any link coming from pages containing social media components will be valued higher by Google and possibly other search engines – why wouldn’t they?
Verdict: Important
Site-Wide Links
Since around November / December site-wide links seem to have taken a massive hit, this may be because it is one of the easiest link types for Google to crack down on when looking into link spam – Lists of links containing “money” keywords rolled up one after the other must be easy to spot.
Verdict: Stay Away (or use branded keywords)
Guest Blog Posts
Guest posting is a great way to get links and always has been – provide a great post and that post will get links from Twitter profiles and other blogs to help power your link.
Verdict: Important
Contextual Ad’s
Contextual Ad’s seemed to pop up quite a bit last year (some disguised as Banner Ad’s) and seem to work well for now but I think these types of adverts will be the next link type to be discounted by Google (if they can).
Verdict: Potentially Dangerous
Blog / Forum Commenting
This link type is usually associated with spam, if you do this properly and post a great comment it is more likely to stick and prompt replies from the community. These links are in no way powerful and will not help you rank on their own but they provide you with a good mix of natural anchors and nofollow links which can help build a solid base for other link types and create background noise around your website.
Verdict: Important
Directories
Directories have always been the bread and butter of link building – I’ve seen many posts over the last few months saying there is no point in these BUT people seem to forget about the hundreds of high quality directories out there – when submitting just keep an eye out for spam.
Verdict: Important
At the end of the day these are just my opinions on how important these link types will be to the search engines this year so it would be great if you could leave your thoughts too.
2 months ago today Google Caffeine went live, it promised live indexing which would lead to fresher results, sadly between 25th July right up to now Google’s crawling seems to be at snail pace, for example before and just after caffeine any blog post I published took around 10 minutes to be cached and indexed.
The most recent pages/post published took just a little longer, up to 5 days to be indexed. Why would a search engine which promotes live indexing take 5 days to cache and index a blog post or page of content, when the site-map has been updated and submitted and Google has been pinged the URL? personally I think the servers are under strain with an unexpected amount of pages being published and a heck of allot of crawl errors slowing down the bot.
I make these assumptions because many people will be redeveloping their websites due to everyone wanting to use HTML5 , because of this many people will just redo the content, change the URL structure (maybe mess up 301′s along the way). Anyway that’s just what I think, if you have any opinions please post a comment 
P.S Im going to track how long this post takes to be indexed!
