SEO Advice for Bloggers

When it comes to Google, Matt Cutts is the man. Not only is he the head of Google’s Webspam team, he is the oracle who confirms or denies the swirling rumors of sandboxing, site penalties, Toolbar PageRank updates, and everything else search engine optimizers spend all day obsessing about.

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”:

The Invisible Wiki

Everyone knows what a wiki looks like: Wikipedia, right?

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

Google Keywords Part 5: Finalizing

Class is back in session – please take your seats.

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.