Deeplinking your way to Success!

Its an often misunderstood important factor in Search Engine Optimization, “Deep Linking”..  while it sounds dark and mysterious its dead simple infact.

If you can visualise pagerank arriving at the index.xxx page of your website and being distributed downstream with each stage filtering out some more and more, until your last content pages pick up very little pagerank, deeplinking is the practice of getting outside links to “deep” within your website with a view to increasing the pagerank distribution to the rest of your website.

An example would be the blogroll link on this blog to my main site, MOGmedia well, thats just a link to the main page of my website, and google will spider the pages and assign value to them using the main page as an entry “doorway”, and in doing so it will drop a bit of pagerank there first before it moves on and values the other pages.

If I were to link to my OTHER website pages from an external site such as:

MOGmedia SEO services

MOGmedia Portfolio of SEO 

UK SEO hosting 

SEO Services Kent 

Contact MOGmedia Staff

These links will pass on the same amount of pagerank to the inner pages of the site.  Now for all intensive purposes the juice that will be passed on from this post is minimal as it will be “diluted” by the total number of outgoing links, but for an example it will do for now….

So, if you are trying to get more pages indexed in your website, choose a relevant “deep” or inner page to link to, and get link building!

anyway, Im off for another calimocho, or four!

MM

The Value of DMOZ Links, Less in 2008?

I have studied DMOZ links in the past somewhat (see “wizards of DMOZ“) and being a long term professional SEOer I have probably submitted more sites than most to the open directory project (DMOZ).  Yesterday while checking the Alexa details of one of my sites I noticed that the description that Alexa uses had changed, to one that I did not recognise - quickly coming to the conclusion that this must have meant that I was now listed in an appropriate category at DMOZ I quickly checked.

I am happy to report that the site was indeed now DMOZ listed, and I quickly followed up with a few checks of my other sites and was pleased to find that a further two more sites had also gained that holy grail of the backlinks, an ODP listing.  I did have other sites already listed in the directory so I started to delve deeper into the ramifications of having a site listed and came up with a few interesting things that I either hadnt noticed, or has recently changed.

The DMOZ link did not (does not) appear in my google webmaster tools at all, and not just for my newly added sites, also for a few sites that I own that have had a listing for nearly 10 years.  To be fair there isnt much activity on those sites and not many other backlinks so Im not 100% sure if google has stopped counting DMOZ links in its webmaster tools,  if so then I wonder what about the other directories that “feed” off the information dumps from the ODP,  surely they will count towards backlinks.

A quick check ensued, and as an example the Alexa Directory did NOT appear as a backlink in the test sites I looked at either in Google’s webmaster tools. So this begs the Question:  Has Google Now Discounted DMOZ from its algorithms?  

In short I can not answer that question immediately but I will certainly do some more investigation and come back to you folks when I know more!

Anyway, off for my cafe con leche!

MM

SEO in 2008 - What we should concentrate on now.

Following on from a few other blog posts of mine this year already,  it seems that the focus for SEO is moving away from that old mainstay of the SEO’er, buying links.

What does this mean in practice?  Well, in my opinion its a great thing as lets face it, in the last two years being an SEO has almost become as ubiquitous as being a webdesigner, and nearly the same as saying you are an IT professional.. Heck every other person I meet these days is an SEO!!  The changes that seem to have been brought about by this latest TBPR update signify the beginning of the end of the wild west period of search engine optimisation, and now it is starting to seem that your onsite content, inc0ming links and link weight as a combination are now much more important that just the incoming links that have been ruling the market for the last few years.

What does this to mean to me?  Well, not much really, as I have never taken on an SEO job before for a site that doesnt have genuine relevant content - but it will mean that many of the link building based SEO’s will either go out of business totally in the next 6 months or have to learn a whole new skillset.  Those of us that have been in the market for 10 years however will remember what SEO was before google placed so much importance on off site optimisation and we simply have to revert in part back to the old days of optimising.

So, to get back to this posts title: What should we concentrate on now….

1) On site Content
2) Organic link growth onto RELEVANT sites, ie. through targeted linkbait
3) Site Updates, increasing RELEVANT page yield per site.
4) W3 compliance (always important)
5) Incoming links from RELEVANT sites.

You have probably noticed a pattern with that list… Relevancy!

Basically I think that MFA sites have been dealt a huge blow in the latest update and if you want to keep SERPs over the next few months I think the only way to fully consolidate your position is to add content, content and more content.  When thats done, add some more content for good luck (or should that be “goo-gle luck”!)

Anyway,  off for my calimocho people,

MM

Has Google finally killed off linksales??

Hey folks,

well the dust is starting to settle after this weeks Q1 2008 TBPR update, (see my previous blog entry) and I am starting to wonder whether google has finally dealt a fatal blow to the online link sales industry.

A Little history lesson, back in the old days of SEO, the onsite content, keywords, META tags and so on were all you had to worry about.  That meant that you could get any site of any age to the number one position, by making sure you had the correct ratio of words to keywords.  This is back in the day when it was DEC’s Altavista that ruled the search engine competition, and Lycos was second and Yahoo were just starting up (this is a long time ago by internet standards!).

When google appeared on the scene, they made it so that the on site SEO was only 20% of the equation, and the off site SEO was about 70%, and this entailed having lots of links back to your site.  Google counted each link as a “vote” for your website.  This created a massive industry of people selling links on their websites to other webmasters to promote their own websites search engine ranking positions, as opposed to buying traffic by way of link advertising.

Google has long made it clear that they disaprove of this practice and have started looking at ways to crack down on this practice, and it would appear that on this latest update to the toolbar pagerank ratings, that they might just have done that. What remains to be seen over then next few weeks and months is whether the current pagerank levels are just an interim update, or if this is it, and we have an all new pagerank algorithm.

If that is the case then all SEO’s the world over will have a lot of learning to redo!

Anyway, off for my coffee!

MM

SEO is nothing without substance

I have been mulling over something over the last few days. I have been contracted to do some SEO work which was nicely paid, but I turned it down.

I didnt turn it down because it was too much of a challenge, or because the client demanded too much, I have managed to do more for most of my customers in the past and the competition in the niche wasnt too high, so why did I turn it down?

The customers product simply had no substance to it. I in many ways come from the old school of marketing. Start with a good product, demonstrate that there is a market for said product, identify the market correctly that you wish to target, THEN set about spreading the word to the potential clients. If the product has no substance it simply wont achieve sales that would render any SEO work useless. Now I could have just taken the money and produced the results, so why didnt I?

Well, that particular client might do a five figure sum on this product, but I dont want to be part of this failure story. If the client heeds my advice and redesigns the core of the product it could do well, and then I would be interested in working with it, but not as it stands. No SEO or SEM (or any other client looking for marketing advice) is going to want to lose money in the long run. If I am part of this current debacle, I bet that customer would not be a repeat user of my services. If he chooses to go ahead with another SEO’er and my predictions turn out to be true, w ell in 6 months, or in two years, that customer might come back to me with a better idea. And that one I will be interested in working on!

Its all down to an ethical approach to marketing I guess. If you have serious doubts as to whether a product will ever turn a profit, is it correct to work on the marketing of it? In my opinion no it is not. Perhaps 5 years ago when I had to look for work it would have been a different story, but for now, those projects are simply not worth the phone call in 3 months when the customer says that funds have dried up and he is broke/gone out of business.

SEO is like any other marketing exercise, if its not a good idea or has no substance, dont bother. Its up to you as an expert in marketing to identify products that just wont work, and do yourself a favour, DONT work on them!

Anyway, its off for my calimocho again,

MM

The Wizards of “Dm”Oz

This ones definately for the soapbox section !

Dmoz - or the “open directory project” as its also known albeit less well known have this paragraph at the start of their about us section:

Since 1998, the Open Directory Project has been the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a passionate, global community of volunteer editors. 

Any SEO’er worth his salt is aware that this is just tosh, of the highest order.  A good case in point is an acquiantance of mine who has recently managed to get a new site a PR7 in record time (less than 10 weeks) for a client.  Dmoz plays a part in this story (along with a few thousand dollars worth of links) - in that the site uses its Dmoz listing to assert a certain authority with google,  and you might be wondering just how the site has got listed in such a short time (I certainly did,  I’ve got about 10 sites that have been waiting from 3 months to three years for a listing).

The answer is simple, the SEO’er in question bought the link, through personal knowledge of the editor of the niche in question. How is this fair? Well it isnt… How can this be stopped? Well it cant.

Where does this lead us? Well surely DMOZ cant possibly claim any authority when things like this are going on. Furthermore, Google should stop regarding it with ANY advantage to any other reputable directory.

Anyway,  rant over.

Im off for a calimocho.

Buenas Tardes Muchachos
MM.

Number 1 for SEO Spain in Google.

Ive had a busy day today, posting on forums, checking my inbox, eating etc. etc. but feel that I have basically achieved very little.

OK I confess, I havent actually had a busy day,  it just looks that way to the outside world which I assume I will become part of again when I eventually leave the computer screen.

One thing that has amused me no end today however has been a few little searches that I have done on google,  just to see the results.  Namely, SEO Marbella (which I confess I did purely to prove a point to myself that whoever was at number one was blackhatting)  and then SEO Spain.  I hadn’t intended on checking the second one, had it not been for the clam that #1 on SEO marbella had made (the site was misterweb.co.uk) that he was number one in both.

What amused me is that on performing that search for #1 in the google index for SEO spain,  the top search result is a birdwatchers website’s section on spain!!  It seems that all the combined jumped up local SEO merchants havent even managed to knock this site of the number one spot for that search term,  which I find hilarious!

Surely by now someone would have identified this as an attractive search term and actively gone for it (and misterweb almost surely has,  but has somehow managed to get his page a “solid” third in the SERPs.).

This has given me an idea - I am going to attempt to get an arbitrary page #1 status for the search term SEO spain, and I will start tomorrow (its nearly supper time and little one needs a new nappy, so like it or not I simply dont have time right now),  and Im setting myself a challenge to get #1 for SEO spain within a few weeks.

How do I intend on achieving this little miracle (ok, miracle is a bit strong,  this aint feeding the 5000,  its merely feeding my not insignificant ego)?  Well,  thats the secret of a good SEO I guess!

If I do manage to achieve this,  I think I might just have to email it to the rest of the local SEO’ers and see just who manages to knock me off it first…  first past the post gets a prize of some sort,  perhaps cash, perhaps just a recommendation on this blog….  we’ll have to see just how good they are.

Anyway,  off for my Calimocho,

Buenas Tardes Muchachos!

MM