So it’s a new year…have you forgotten anything?

Here’s a hint:

Ever see a site with a copyright statement 6 months out of date? Even big-shot corporate blogs make this mistake. But on a young, growing blog, it looks particularly bad.

Or perhaps you don’t have a copyright statement at all? Tsk tsk.

Why don’t we automate this, so we’ll never, ever have to think about it again? Here’s how to do it in WordPress:

1. Log in to WordPress, and go to Theme Editor.
2. Choose “footer.php”.
3. Delete your current copyright statement (if it exists), and insert the following code:&copy; 2008 – <?php echo date(Y); ?>…replacing “2008″ with the date you started your blog.
4. If you wish, put your name adjacent to the copyright, being sure not to disturb the php date tag. See mine below for an example.
5. Done.

Happy New Year! Anyone got a good detox recipe?

Clicking on the a suggested related topic then returns the new results, and presents related queries for the new search. As you keep exploring related topics, the old searches remain onscreen, represented as the “tail” of your current search:

The related searches could use some work – so far I haven’t found them to be incredibly useful, and overall the Google Wonder Wheel is a bit of a toy. But what a toy it is – I’ve spent quite a bit of time enjoying it so far. Hopefully as the experiment continues, the results will get better.

Another less flashy, but more useful feature that comes along with the Google Wonder Wheel is the new Timeline view. A search on “baseball” seen in Timeline view allows you to zero in on results related to a certain year, and even month. For example, by clicking through to May of 1862, I can see that the Star Spangled Banner was first played at a baseball game on May 15th of that year:

The results aren’t perfect- some irrelevant content slips through based on passing uses of the search term – but for researchers and students, this will be pure gold.

Several other alternate views are included in the Google Wonder Wheel experiment as well, including longer textual excerpts, and a different type of image search which presents images from relevant pages inline with search results.

The Google Wonder Wheel has been dubbed an prototype, and is only available to some users. However, if you’d like to give it a spin, all you need to do is set a cookie in your browser to tell Google you’re participating. Here’s the trick:

Go to google.com. With Google loaded in your browser, paste the following code in your address bar and hit return:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Nothing happens…at first. But now perform another search in Google, and on the results page you’ll notice a small “Show Options…” link just below the Google logo. Click this, and you’re off and running.

Now the question is: will this change the way you search, or is it just a toy?

For two weeks now, Google has been testing a behavioral targeting system on its partner sites and YouTube. Correction: according to this Google Blog post announcing the program, it’s not actually “behavioral targeting”, it’s ”interest-based advertising.” The words “behavior” and “targeting” do not appear in Google’s announcement.

The idea is simple: Google tracks your activity via a cookie, and if you are surfing pages about car repair or interior decorating, Google’s sites serve up ads that target you based on that behavior. Of course they make it sound warm, fuzzy and universally beneficial, saying that if you don’t mind “relevant” ads coming up based on your searches, you shouldn’t mind them coming up based on your other behavior. According to the post:

Keyword advertising has been so successful because it’s useful to users, advertisers and publishers — everyone’s interests are aligned. We believe that interest-based ads will create the same virtuous cycle, by giving users more relevant ads, while generating higher returns for advertisers and publishers.

I was unaware advertising was part of a “virtuous cycle”.

Fortunately, in apparent response to last month’s FTC report (.pdf), which warned the ad industry to provide privacy protections on behavioral advertising or risk government regulation, Google has provided some opt-out mechanisms. Of course, you’ll have to find them. And most people won’t, since they won’t even be aware their behavior is being targeted. 

However, if you want to stop Google tracking your behavior, here are some methods to do so:

1. Google’s Ad Preferences Manager. Under the ironic title “Make the ads you see on the web more interesting,” you can either choose categories of ads you specifically want to see (“Industries > Chemicals > Coatings & Adhesives”…oh boy!), or click the “Opt out” button. This button will disable Google’s tracking cookie. However, if you ever clear your cookies, this setting will be lost, and you’ll opt back in by default.

2. Google’s Advertising Cookie Opt-Out Plug-in. This browser plug-in will allegedly stop Google tracking, and is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Users of Safari, Chrome and other browsers are simply provided with instructions to change their cookie acceptance settings. This means these users must change a global setting that affects other activities in order to avoid Google’s watchful eye.

3. Google is a member of the Network Advertising Initiative, which provides its own opt-out tool for “targeted advertising”. This tool also requires global settings changes for users of some browsers. Ironically, since the opt-out is itself a cookie, usually you’ll have to actually loosen your cookie restrictions to get it to work.

4. Switch to Yahoo?  Sorry, no. They already instituted behavioral targeting last month.

Personally, I’m not going to stop Google tracking my behavior just yet. I think I’ll make a game of it. My browsing patterns are so bizarre and unpredictable, I’m a bit curious to see just what they think I’m interested in. Maybe I’ll even throw them off the trail on purpose…

This morning I ran across this video of Matt at a conference discussing SEO, with a particular focus on Wordpress blogs. Though experienced SEOs should know most of this info, there will be something in here that is new to almost anyone, and beginners in particular will benefit.

And as a bonus, a more advanced talk from SEO pro Stephen Spencer on “SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make”:

And everyone knows what a wiki is for: letting anyone contribute, right?

Well, not necessarily. A wiki engine (the software used to create and run wikis like Wikipedia) doesn’t actually care if you use it to make a “proper” wiki or not. 

In fact, since wiki engines allow some users access to edit pages and stop others, what if you only allowed yourself access? Do you then still have a wiki? Or just a really easy-to-edit web site? One that you can edit from anywhere you can get to the internet?

But what about the plain-vanilla wiki look? What about the history/revision links, last edit information, and all the other clues that the user is looking at a wiki engine? 

Enter our friend the CSS stylesheet, and one of our favorite commands,

{display:none;}

Voila! Restrict access and hide the wiki features, and you have an easy-to-edit, open-source-powered web site. A few examples:

http://www.yanb.be
http://www.ifccc.org
http://nitens.org/taraborelli

OK, so they still look pretty plain, but they certainly don’t look like wikis. And with some CSS trickery, they can look like anything you want.

A wiki engine is simply that: an engine. And like any engine, it provides power; what you do with it is only limited by your ideas.

Here’s a quick tutorial to get started (specifically using the Wikka engine, but the concepts involved will work with most others):

http://docs.wikkawiki.org/InvisibleWiki

And a quick video tutorial:

How to run an invisible wiki from AcademicProductivity on Vimeo

After the last part of our Google keywords series, you should now have a spreadsheet of possible keywords for your site, sorted by “keyword difficulty”, with your best targets marked in bold. What these represent are your best opportunities to appear in high positions in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for these keywords. When a user searches on your chosen keyword, you want to appear as high in the results as possible.

What we’ve done so far is narrow down your possible Google keywords to the ones with the best ratio of competitive pages to search traffic. Lots of search traffic and few competing pages = big, fat target.

The next few steps take a bit of work and some creative thinking, but they’re worth it.

Keyword Relevance

Now we want to take the possible Google keywords we’ve identified, and find the ones that will work well with your site. Look at the bolded keywords in your spreadsheet – are any of them already prominent in your site? Is one in the title? Is one the subject of many pages/posts? Is one a synonym for something you write about frequently? Answer these questions for each of the top keywords in your spreadsheet, and mark the ones most relevant to your site’s content in red. Now we’ll check the answers more scientifically.

Current Site Indexing

Before we proceed, we need to make sure your site has been indexed by Google, especially if it is relatively new. You can check by following this link, and then substituting the URL of your actual site for “yoursite.com”:

Google search: site:http://yoursite.com

If there are no results for your site, you haven’t yet been indexed. If that is the case, take these two steps:

1. Go to Add Your URL to Google’s Index and add your URL. You’ll have to wait a while for it to show up, so the sooner the better.
2. If you have FTP access to your site’s files, make sure you have a file called robots.txt in your root folder. If you want your entire site indexed, its contents should read only as follows:
   

   User-Agent: *
   Allow: /

   If you don’t have access, don’t worry – this is generally set by default anyway.

If there are results for your site in the above search, you have already been indexed, which means we can now check the Google keywords you’ve marked in red.

Current Keyword Indexing

Return to the site-specific search, site:http://yoursite.com, and add your first keyword phrase (in quotation marks) to the front of the search query. For example, if the first red keyword in your spreadsheet is “merchant services”, search Google for “merchant services” site:http://yoursite.com.

If the results are accompanied by a message that “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed,” click the link to ”repeat the search with the omitted results included”.

Note the number of results. Near the top of the page, look for a line like this: “Results 1 - 6 of 6 from yoursite.com for “merchant services“. Create a new column in your spreadsheet, and type in the number of results next to your keyword. Repeat this process with all of those you’ve marked in red.

Now you know exactly how many times you’re indexed for each of these possible Google keywords. If you’re already indexed many more times for one or two, these are natural targets, since you’re mentioning them frequently already. If this happens, put a box around these in your spreadsheet to mark them.

The Dirty Work

If no natural targets emerge, start breaking up your keyword phrases, and repeating the search on the most important word. In the example above, you’d try just “merchant”. If you get more results, consider whether the references to “merchant” in your site could be tweaked to use the keyword “merchant services” instead or in addition.

If you’re still not coming up with results, look at your red targets, and try to think if you’ve used any synonyms on your site. Can you replace them with the keyword version, or add the Google keywords into the same content without disrupting the flow of your writing? If this is feasible for your site, repeat the above search using these currently-used synonyms. If you get results, mark the spreadsheet appropriately, with a note next to the results column indicating what synonym you searched on.

Repeat this until you get two to three keywords marked in boxes. Rank these according to difficulty, general relevance to your site, and current indexing, and determine a top keyword, a second and possibly a third. These will be your final targets.

Next time, we will integrate the selected Google keywords seamlessly and elegantly into your content and site design.

By now, you should have repeated the steps in part three until you have a long list of possibilities listed in your spreadsheet. Depending on your subject, try to get to a list of at least 20 possible keywords (remember that the term “keyword” refers to a word or phrase).

Now return to Firefox, and open up your “Google keywords” bookmark folder in tabs, so that all the pages are open in one window.

Google Keywords Research

Copy the first keyword from your spreadsheet.

First we’ll check for additional related terms based on search traffic. Go to the second tab in your Firefox window, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Paste in your Google Keywords in quotation marks, type in the CAPTCHA text if necessary, and click “Get keyword ideas” to see the results.

Next, in the “Match Type” dropdown menu, select “Exact”. Click the “Approx. Avg. Search Volume” header to sort by search popularity. Be sure to use the average search volume – this is a monthly average for the past year.

Look for additional related keywords with similar amounts of search traffic, and add these to your spreadsheet. Scroll down to “Additional keywords to consider” and look for additional related, popular keywords. Add these as well. Leave this window open, you’ll be returning here. If you are informed that you have been logged out upon returning, simply refresh the page.

Assessing the Competition

Click the “SEO for Firefox” icon in the bottom right of your Firefox window if it is grayed out, making sure it is activated. When your research session is over, be sure to turn if off again so that your IP isn’t banned for too much activity.

Now go to your third tab, Google search. Paste in your Google keywords in quotation marks, and click search. In the results, note all the additional information added by the SEO plug-in.

Look through the top 10 results for your keyword phrase, and check the first bit of added info, “PR”. This is the Google PageRank at the time of the last public update, denoting the “strength” of the page with a number from zero to 10. With some solid SEO and link building, you have a great shot at beating 0 – 2 ranked pages, a decent shot at 3 – 4, and 5 and up will be tough. Note an approximate average PR for your front page competition (figure the exact average if you like), and type this in the second column of your spreadsheet next to the keyword.

Next, go to the third tab, Wordtracker GTrends. Paste in your Google keywords and click “Hit Me”. If your keyword appears in the results, click the graph-style icon and wait for the query to complete. This returns the number of competing sites for that keyword, and the approximate daily traffic to the number one page. Note Wordtracker’s recommendations. If you get one green checkmark, type an X in column three of your speadsheet. If you get two checkmarks, this is an excellent target, and place two X’s in your spreadsheet.

Go to tab four, the Keyword Difficulty Check Tool. Paste and click submit. Note the difficulty rank that is returned – the lower the better. Type this number in the next column in your spreadsheet.

Sorting the Results

Repeat the above steps for all of your keywords. Now sort your Google keywords spreadsheet by the last column, the Keyword Difficulty rank, from lowest to highest. Look for the lowest difficulty rank, with the highest number of XX’s in the previous column, and the lowest average PR competition. These are your best opportunities to achieve a high ranking. Highlight these in bold and save your spreadsheet.

Next time, we’ll refine our list, and get more information about our selected Google Keywords. I know this seems like a lot of work, but stick with it – it will be worth it.

Note: most information you’ll find on these techniques is about making money. The idea is to target Google keywords and then build a site around them, with the purpose of gaining traffic and raking in money. But I’m going to explain the reverse – taking the site you have, finding the right keywords to target, and optimizing your site so that people organically find your content. However, these techniques can be adapted to either goal. Perhaps in the pdf version I’ll explain the money-making aspect as well, but for now let’s just get an audience for your site.

Note for linguists: in this arena, the term “keyword” can apply to a word or phrase, although it is singular. For example, we refer to “Italian sports cars” as a “keyword”.

Now, having assembled the tools described in part two of this series, you’re ready to do your research. First, brainstorming:

1. Open up a fresh spreadsheet (pen and paper will do if necessary, but we’ll want to sort the results later).
    
2. Place your cursor in the first cell on the second row (leaving the top row open to place headings later).
    
3. Imagine you are asked the question by a stranger: “What is your web site about?” Answer this question in a short phrase. For example, “victorian furniture”, “1970s punk rock”, or “the meaning of life”. Type it in the box and hit return to move down one cell. If you think of several answers, repeat this as many times as necessary.
    
4. Imagine this stranger asks you to be more specific. Enter your answers, for example, “late victorian furniture”, “1970s New York punk rock”, or “the meaning of life in Greek philosophy”. Get creative with phrasing, and think of terms you mention frequently.
    
5. Now try to get even more specific, like “pseudo-oriental Victorian”, “1970’s Greenwich Village punk”, or “Aristotlean Nicomachean ethics”. Try to keep these phrases as short as possible. Do this for a few minutes, but don’t spend too much time. This is just the beginning, and we’ll refine our choices later.
    
6. Save your spreadsheet as “Google keywords” or the title of your choice.
    
7. Open up your site and look around. Were your answers accurate? Are you really writing about what you thought you were? Add more entries to your spreadsheet if more answers strike you.
   Now we’re ready to start using our toolbox.
    
8. Open Firefox. In the toolbar, look for the “Google keywords” folder you created in part two of this series. Click this once, scroll down and click “Open All in Tabs”. Numerous tabs will load, containing all of your research tools.
    
9. Go to the first tab, the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. This is actually a tool for advertisers, but it suits our purposes very well. Copy the first keyword from your spreadsheet, and paste in the “word or phrase” text field. Click “Find keywords”.

You may only get one or two results. If so, try removing a word from your query and clicking again. For example “late victorian furniture” returns one result, but “victorian furniture” returns 69.

Look down the list and see if any of the results might be reasonable answers to the question “What is your web site about?” If so, these are possible Google keywords.

10. Leave everything right where it is, and go to part four of this series, when published. There, we’ll talk about which of these are worth targeting and why.

Again please note this post is 600 words long, and mentions “Google keywords” six times.

The reasoning behind this is that visitors could spam popular sites with comments just to get links back and improve their search engine rankings. Especially troublesome were people who would sign their comments with names that were obviously just Google keywords, such as “New Jersey air conditioning repair” or “Best mortgage rates”. Since most comment systems link the commenters name to their site, it was a cheap way for spammers to get some link juice for their sites. Usually the comments would be cut-and-paste jobs that added no value to the conversation (“Great job! Awesome post.”) and the culprits would leave them on hundreds of sites. The sole purpose was to gain backlinks, not to contribute anything.

And so the “nofollow” attribute was added as the default in blogging software. This attribute tells search engine spiders not to follow and index the link, thus removing the incentive to spam. And indeed it has worked. No incentive to spam = no spam. The free market does its job. Hooray!

However, some bloggers feel that if someone takes the time to contribute something of value, they deserve at least a “dofollow” link back. (Side note: technically there is no “dofollow” attribute. When you see references to “dofollow” or “yes-follow” links, it simply refers to the absence of the “nofollow” attribute).

The “dofollow” movement has been spreading around the blog world for a couple of years now. There are popular plug-ins which tell blogging software not to add the “nofollow” attribute to comments/trackbacks, and even search engines which specifically list only “dofollow” blogs. It’s all a great communal, open-source, happy joy-fest…except that the spammers are back. The cost of wanting to spread a little link love to your commenters? Loads of bogus comments to sift through and delete.

So what’s the middle way? Enter “dofollow trackbacks”. This plug-in for WordPress removes “nofollow” from trackbacks, but not from comments. Thus when someone cites your post in their blog, they receive a link back, but commenters still get “nofollow” links. There’s still no incentive to go around leaving worthless comments, but people who link to you automatically get something back.

I’m instituting it on this site as of now. It looks promising, but we’ll see how it goes, and I’ll report on the results at a later date. For now, count me with on the “You Trackback, I Follow” movement, and let the games begin.

1. Download Firefox. This is not a matter of personal browser preference; it’s the only browser compatible with the tools we’ll be using to research and refine our Google keywords. The fact that it’s also the best browser around is coincidental.
    
2. Download the SEO For Firefox add-on. This browser extension will add all the research capabilities we need, and then some. Click “Install” when the dialog box opens, and then click “Restart Firefox” when you are given the option. When Firefox restarts, you’ll see an SEO icon in the lower right corner of the browser. Left- or control-click this, and choose “Options..”. 
    
         

   In the SEO for Firefox preferences, uncheck “Enable/Disable SEO For Firefox”. Yes, we want this disabled by default until we turn it on. We’ll be setting this to automatically pull some information, so if we leave it on for normal browsing, we risk having our IP banned. We can activate it with one click when we need it.

   For now, you can leave the next box, enable/disable of ‘nofollow’ links unchecked.

   Finally, in the “Mode” column, change “PR” and “Age” to “Automatic”. Everything else can remain as is. Close the Preferences window.

3. In the top Firefox menu, click “Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks..”. Click on “Bookmarks Toolbar”, and then in the drop-down menu above, choose “New Folder…”. Name this “Google keywords“, or the term of your choice. You’ll see the entry in your toolbar. If you don’t, click “View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar”.
    
4. Navigate to each of the following sites (it will be easiest to open the page you’re reading now in Firefox, so the links open there). Upon reaching each one, click “Bookmarks > Bookmark This Page”. In the dialog box, look for “Folder”, and click the down arrow, choose the “Google keywords” folder you made in the previous step, and click “Done” to add the bookmark to that folder.Go to each of these pages, and bookmark into the new folder:

   Google Search-based Keyword Tool
   Google AdWords Keyword Tool
   Google Search (with quotation marks)
   Wordtracker GTrends
   Keyword Difficulty Check Tool
   SEO Book Keyword Tool
   Nameboy Domain Name Generator
   Ontology Finder – Related Keywords Lookup Tool
   Synonym.com  

   We’ll only be using Nameboy if we happen to need a domain name, but it’s good to have it in there just in case.

5. Finally, you will need to keep track of your research. I highly recommend using a spreadsheet program. There are a variety of them out there, including free, open-source choices. You won’t need to be a wizard with them for our purposes. All we’ll be doing is some entering and sorting.

That’s it for today. Next time, down to business.

Note: this post is exactly 500 words, and mentions “Google keywords” five times. Are you getting the idea?