Category Archives: Online Marketing

SEO Audit Outline

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REFERENCE: 

How to Perform the World’s Greatest SEO Audit by Steve Webb, Ph.D.

… Thanks, Steve, for the good reference.
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This article was posted on SEOMoz recently and I thought that it would make a great resource to have on-hand for reference when reviewing a website for SEO quality. The article is written by Steve Webb (see article references on this page) and I have captured the outline here for my reference. Visit the article for all of the full details.

SEO Audit Preparation

  • Crawl Before You Walk
  • Crawling Tools
  • Crawling Configuration
  • Ask the Oracles

SEO Audit Analysis

  • Accessibility
    • Robots.txt
    • Robots Meta Tags
    • HTTP Status Codes
    • XML Sitemap
    • Site Architecture
    • Flash and JavaScript Navigation
    • Site Performance
  • Indexability
    • Site: Command
    • Index Sanity Checks
    • Page Searches
    • Brand Searches
    • Search Engine Penalties
    • Make Sure You’ve Actually Been Penalized
    • Identify the Reason(s) for the Penalty
    • Fix the Site’s Penalized Behavior
    • Request Reconsideration
  • On-Page Ranking Factors
    • URLs
    • URL-based Duplicate Content
    • Content
    • Information Architecture
    • Keyword Cannibalism
    • Duplicate Content
    • HTML Markup
    • Titles
    • Meta Descriptions
    • Other <head> Tags
    • Images
    • Outlinks
    • Other <body> Tags
  • Off-Page Ranking Factors
    • Popularity
    • Trustworthiness
    • Backlink Profile
    • Authority
    • Social Engagement
    • Competitive Analysis

SEO Audit Report

  • Write for multiple audiences
  • Prioritize, prioritize, and then prioritize some more
  • Provide actionable suggestions


URL Trailing Slashes and Canonical URLs

I noticed recently in my Google Webmaster Tools account that Google seems to be honing in on house cleaning for webmasters. Maybe it’s the recent Google updates that have come down the pike in the past twelve months and maybe it’s just my imagination but nonetheless it’s a good habit for webmasters to practice.

The one thing that lead my suspicion of this was the notes on a few of my sites that Google has begun to put into “HTML Improvements area is alerts over trailing slashes in the URL string. For reference, the following URLs are not the same to a search engine:

  1. http://www.mysite.com/page-name
  2. http://www.mysite.com/page-name/
  3. http://www.mysite.com/page-name/index.html

Because I generally don’t link to any index.html files directly inside of directories, the first two in the list were of particular concern to me and not the third.

The solution is to put the following three lines into your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.[^./]+$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

That will automatically enter the trailing slash to the url if it is not already present. Remember to keep those three lines together in the .htaccess file.

SEO Tips Post Penguin

[quotes_right]Reference:

[/quotes_right]SEOMoz posted an article this week that contained seven great tips for surviving and thriving in the post-Penguin update that Google recently went live with. The article outlines the following tips in depth:

  1. Understand your link profile
  2. Learn what makes a good link
  3. Map out your crawl path / know your crawl path
  4. Know about every page type and noindex the low value ones
  5. Almost never change your URLs
  6. Setup SEO monitoring
  7. Embrace inbound marketing

In addition to presenting clear, quality pointers for webmasters and web marketers, they support their points with great visuals like charts/graphs, video tutorials, and real-world examples.

Ultimately, Penguin is all about search relevance. The better your site relates to your target market the better you will fair as SEO grows and evolves in the near future.

Managing an Ambiguous Brand

[quotes_right]One famous example of search ambiguity is Apple – are searchers looking for the corporation that sells computers, iPhones, iPods, and iPads, or are they searching for the fruit?[/quotes_right]

This article on Search Engine Watch covers the details of managing an ambiguous brand, but it also contains some nice points that apply to any brand. What happens when a searcher is quickly glancing down through the search results pages? How do you attract clicks that are relevant to your site’s content?

Nine tips for managing an ambiguous brand … Read full article.

How To Make Money Online

Here is a great little list that I came across that is made up of 21 items that pertain to general rules of making money online. They are a great starting point for anyone considering an online business.

  1. The first step is to stop Googling things like, “how to make money online.” Not because you shouldn’t want to make money online, but because the stuff you’re going to find by doing that is going to help youlose money online. Sort of like asking a casino owner how to make money in Vegas…
  2. Don’t pay anyone for simple and proven instructions on how to achieve this goal. In particular, don’t pay anyone to teach you how to write or sell manuals or ebooks about how to make money online.
  3. Get rich slow.
  4. Focus on the scarce resource …

Read the rest of the article here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/05/how-to-make-money-online.html

Google Plus: Benefits for SEO

I came across the following three articles this week regarding the emerging SEO benefits of establishing an active business presence in Google Plus.

They do a good job of explaining the significance of Google Plus and its corresponding relationship to Google Search Plus. Here are some of their significant points.

What is Google Search Plus?

Google Search Plus Your World** is the next evolutionary step in determining what is relevant to personalized search queries in that individuals search results are greatly influenced by their circles of friends.

** Google Search Plus: personalized results from your contacts – which may be images, shared posts, or pages that have been given a +1 by your contacts; or even pages on Google+ that you may not be connected to.

The output is search results that display/promote People and (business) Pages in Google+.

Why is Google Plus important for my website?

The most significant reason to get your business on Google+ is simple: The quality and corresponding engagement around your search engine visibility stands to either noticeably improve or gradually decline.

At the heart of this lies the new “Search Plus Your World” algorithm (also referred to as “Search+”), which relies on data collected from logged in Google+ users. The output is search results that display/promote People and (business) Pages in Google+.

Like Facebook, you’ll see updates from those you follow (Circle) in Google+. But unlike Facebook, the content in your Google+ posts may turn into highly ranked search results on Google (again, inside or outside the Google+ environment) – providing keyword and topic-relevant search engine visibility that improves based on your “AuthorRank” and content-specific engagement levels.

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Google Analytics Alternatives

In an article published this week, Search Engine Watch gives a nice overview of alternative website analytics solutions to using Google Analytics.

While Google Analytics has its own set of merits, there are drawbacks. Many people don’t want to continue to feed Google more data – and this trend is growing.

The solutions are comprised of Hosted Solutions (hosted somewhere else for you) and Self-Hosted Solutions (hosted by you).

Alternatives mentioned:

Here is a link to the article.

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Balance Website Ads with Content

In an announcement this week, Google said that they will be tweaking their search algorithym to make things more strict for website publishers who have an excessive number of ads on their websites. This doesn’t mean all websites with ads will be demoted in the search engine results; it just means that there should be a balance and they [Google] are planning on being more strict about it.

In an informative article about the topic, Webmonkey.com does a great job of explaining the change.

Another article on the topic from Ebay’s Partner Network Blog.