SEO, AFFILIATE AND INTERNET MARKETING

I’m a few days behind on my blog reading, so some of these post which would usually cover the last 7 days might extend to 10 days and some of the more recent stuff from the last 24 - 48 hours will have to wait until next weeks recap.

I’m a member and fan of SEOMoz and most recently I’ve been loving the posts by one of their most recent staff members Shor - A Sale Of Two Titties - Is Wordplay The New Foreplay?

SEO By The Sea covered 3 great posts that explore the possible inner workings of Google:

• Google on Using a Knowledge Base of Articles to Make Searches Smarter
• Google’s Profiling Both Users and Sites?
• Google on Fact Extraction and Determining Document Subjects

LinkJuicy interviews Michael ‘GreyWolf’ Grey on Advanced Link Strategies

SEO Roundtable Favorites for the week:

• An Extensive Outline of the SEO Process
• Matt Cutts Clarifies Appropriate Uses of the nofollow Tag
• Optimizing for the Long Tail
• Search Marketing Expo 2007 New York Recap

I’ve also recently started subscribing to HamletBatista.com and have been really impressed with his articles: Advanced Keyword Research — The power of understanding your visitors and Revealing your Competitor’s FULL External Relevance Profile – One of my best kept secrets

SEO Fast Start provide advice on Mastering Both Kinds Of Link Building - Authority & Reputation

Small Business SEM wrote a post on Which Google Products Should a Small Business Use? a few weeks ago and followed this up last week with Which Google Products Should a Small Business Use? Part 2.

Aaron Wall from SEOBook gives us a Warning: New Google Webmaster’s Guidelines and explains Google Lowered My PageRank, Was My Website Penalized?

Marketing Pilgrim tells us that Google Analytics Adds New Features as well as posting an entertaining little ad about advertising: Video: Marketing is No Longer a One-way Dialog

Courtney Tuttle gives us 44 Internet Marketing Articles That Everyone Should Read: Internet Marketers Group Writing Project (I haven’t read them all yet, but the ones I have looked at are quite good).

On the topic of lists - SEO Theory Blog gives us 20 Hard Core SEO Tips

And on a lighter note, Google Is Not The Most Relevant Search Engine According To Google, so perhaps it needs to have some optimisation done - What would Google look like if they had to Optimize for Google

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I was chatting with another local SEO guy today and the topic of Hat’s came-up (black, white, blue, gray and all the variations in-between).

Before I go to much further, it should be known that even though I label myself as a White Hat SEO, I still read about and experiment with some Black Hat techniques. I generally don’t use these for my clients, but without doing this, I would quickly develop SEO tunnel vision.

It’s also important to realise that hat colours can change over time. A technique that is considered White Hat today, can delve into the gray area when people start abusing it. In a years time, that nice new white hat could quite easily have turned black.

I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t matter which hat you wear, as long as you tell your clients what you’re doing and the possible implications of your actions, everything should be fine. In some instances Black Hat techniques can be better than white and vice-versa.

To give you an example, a couple of years ago I worked with a client that brought-out a limited edition product range. They launched a separate website for it, and there were only going to be so many units of this item produced - after that, there would be no more and the website was going to be taken down. For this client, Black Hat techniques were ideal because the site needed to gain some exposure quite quickly, but that exposure didn’t need to be maintained for very long.

I know the example above was for a fairly unique situation, but it all comes back to what the clients long and short term goals are; if they are willing to wait for results or if they want them straight away; and if they wish to keep the results for a long time or don’t mind setting-up new sites each time they are banned.

If your clients site is the shirt, pants, dress or whatever - make sure the hat you choose (be it black, white or all shades in between), matches the rest of the outfit!

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I was chatting with another local SEO guy today and the topic of Hat’s came-up (black, white, blue, gray and all the variations in-between).

Before I go to much further, it should be known that even though I label myself as a White Hat SEO, I still read about and experiment with some Black Hat techniques. I generally don’t use these for my clients, but without doing this, I would quickly develop SEO tunnel vision.

It’s also important to realise that hat colours can change over time. A technique that is considered White Hat today, can delve into the gray area when people start abusing it. In a years time, that nice new white hat could quite easily have turned black.

I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t matter which hat you wear, as long as you tell your clients what you’re doing and the possible implications of your actions, everything should be fine. In some instances Black Hat techniques can be better than white and vice-versa.

To give you an example, a couple of years ago I worked with a client that brought-out a limited edition product range. They launched a separate website for it, and there were only going to be so many units of this item produced - after that, there would be no more and the website was going to be taken down. For this client, Black Hat techniques were ideal because the site needed to gain some exposure quite quickly, but that exposure didn’t need to be maintained for very long.

I know the example above was for a fairly unique situation, but it all comes back to what the clients long and short term goals are; if they are willing to wait for results or if they want them straight away; and if they wish to keep the results for a long time or don’t mind setting-up new sites each time they are banned.

If your clients site is the shirt, pants, dress or whatever - make sure the hat you choose (be it black, white or all shades in between), matches the rest of the outfit!

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If you aren’t familiar with the term Geo Targeting, it’s the method used by search engines to determine where you’re searching from, so they can provide you with (what they think) are the best search results or ads based on your location (ie. country, region/state, city, post/zip code etc.)

How do they do this?

By looking at a number of factors, such as:

• Country-specific domain name - eg. .com or .com.au or .co.uk etc. etc.
• Where your site is hosted - be careful with this as a lot of hosting providers may have their offices in one country, but use servers and equipment based overseas
• Language used in your website content - even things like UK English vs. US English can make a difference due to spelling and colloquialisms
• Inbound Links to your site - are they mainly from other Australian websites, US sites, UK sites etc.
• Listing of your address / location / phone number on your website
• Location of people who look at your site - if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com

7 Simple Geo Targeting Tips for Your Site

Knowing the above information makes it a lot easier to perform a Geo Targeting audit on your site. Here are the things I would do:

1. If you run an Australian website and your main customers / clients are other Australians, spend the few extra dollars and buy a .com.au domain name. If you’re targeting clients in the UK, buy a .co.uk. etc. etc.
2. Apply the same logic (as above) to the web hosting - spend a few extra dollars to have your website hosted in the country that you are targeting.

   Be sure to check that your hosting provider uses equipment based in your country too. If you still aren’t certain you can check their IP’s using SEOmoz’s IP Location Tool.

3. Take the time to check your spelling and use the type of wording your clients will understand and are familiar with.

   For example the term swimwear, swimsuit, beachwear, cozzies, bathers and togs all mean the same thing but people in Queensland, Australia (where I’m from) rarely use the term bathers or cozzies - we wear ‘togs’.

4. An inbound link is like a personal referral or testimonial for your website. Having links from other relevant local sites will be far more valuable with Geo Targeting than having lots of inbound links from overseas sites.
5. Submit your site to local business and local search directories - this can often be one of the easiest methods of attracting local links and local traffic.

   As a rule-of-thumb, just make sure the directory presents well and that you are comfortable being listed amongst the other sites that are in the directory. If you think the directory isn’t great quality, you’re probably right and it should be avoided.

6. Mention your address, location and contact details in the footer of each page - this is one of the easiest things to do which can help tell your clients and the search engines that you are a local business.

   The only time this doesn’t really help is if you have offices in multiple locations. Mentioning a dozen countries / cities in the footer won’t do much for your local profile in each of those places. If this is the case you should build separate sites (or at the very least separate pages) for each location.

7. Build your brand locally as you will usually rank well for your business name before you’ll start ranking for more competitive terms.

   Ensure you promote your site through off-line advertising methods, which can be as simple as including your website on your business cards, letterheads and other corporate stationary.

   This will help you gain local search traffic and as mentioned above, if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com.

I know that implementing all the above suggestions may not be possible - so don’t stress if you can only do 3 or 4 of the things in the list.

Every little bit helps.

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The top 10 searched for terms last month on Google were: myspace, myspace.com, ebay, www.myspace.com, youtube, craigslist, mapquest, yahoo, facebook and myspace layouts.

Despite those terms being the most searched for, a few months ago, Google’s VP of Engineering - Udi Manber gave a presentation at Supernova where he said 20 - 25% of the queries typed into Google on a daily basis have never seen before.

I wasn’t able to find any totally accurate and current figures, but based on some reports over the last few months from Nielsen/Netratings, it suggests that roughly 515,000,000 searches are performed globally each day… which works-out to be approximately 6000 searches done every second.

Now imagine that one in every four (or five) of those searches is totally unique and has never been typed into Google before - that’s a staggering 103,000,000 - 128,750,000 unique searches every single day.

So how does Google and the other search engines rank sites when they don’t know what a quarter of their users are going to search for? It’s a tricky problem that Bill Slawski discusses in his article: Predictive Queries versus Unique Searches

As a website owner, these types of statistics are fantastic. A lot of sites tend to focus on highly competitive terms (and there’s nothing wrong with that as Hamlet Batista points-out) but there are still a lot of non-competitive terms that you can focus on knowing that statistically, someone is likely to search for at some stage.

So how can you ensure that you’re targeting as many appropriate terms through-out your site? Three simple words - Content, Content and Content.

The more relevant content you have on your site, the more chances you have of attracting long-tail search patterns.

So what are you waiting for - stop searching for ‘myspace’ and start writing some additional articles and other relevant content for your website!

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