SEO – Google’s Author Rank

I found an interesting article on SEO-News.com that I thought you would be interested in reading. It was written by Lauren Hobson.

As the obvious objective in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to get your site properly setup to be recognized and ranked well in the search engines, this article is perfect for helping you get better rankings in the search engines while utilizing a new tool that Google is offering authors!

Here’s a quick excerpt:

If your small business has a website, you’re an author. At least in the eyes of Google you are an author, and recent updates to Google’s Author Rank mean you can now claim and get credit for the content that you own (or “authored”) on your website, blog, article sites, and social media.

Here’s how Google explains its updated Author Rank system: “Assuming that a given agent has a high reputational score, representing an established reputation for authoring valuable content, then additional content authored and signed by that agent will be promoted relative to unsigned content or content from less reputable agents in search results.”

What does that mean? It means that if the content on a page is tied to an author who has a strong Author Rank in Google, that page’s search position will be higher than if it was not tied to an author, or if it was tied to an author with a lower Author Rank …

 
If you’d like to read the whole article, you can find it here: http://www.seo-news.com/googles-author-rank-credit-where-credit-is-due/

Enjoy and I hope this helps you with your seo research.

 

SEO Keyword Placement – As Important As The Words Themselves

When writing content for a website, making it SEO compliant does not simply rely on having the right keywords in large enough volumes on the page. Although a good keyword volume will certainly help you – it certainly will not hurt – there is more that you can do to send your page ranking higher. In many cases, it can be something as simple as where you put your keywords that propels you from page two of the results up to page one. Bear in mind that no-one knows search logarithms like the search engine creators, so following some advice that comes from them will always help.

For one thing, the placement of keywords in what you consider your “title” section will be relevant. If you are running a blog like this one, using your keyword in your title is not essential, and for the ease of natural reading it should probably not be something you do every time – too much repetition is jarring for the reader, because after a while all they can think of is you keyword. However, regular use of keywords in titles will pay off – Google weights what is in the title more heavily than what is in the text.

Additionally, and in a way connected to this, the placement of keywords in links will also help you. Most blogging platforms immediately turn the titles into links. In addition, rather than leaving a link in its “naked” form – for example www.thisisalink.com/link – you should seek to make it a titled hyperlink with the text including your keyword. This, too, is weighted more heavily than an isolated keyword reference.

Black Hat SEO – A Bad Idea Disguised As A Cunning Plan

Since the development of Search Engine Optimisation as a concept, there has been a fairly obvious temptation for some people to try to rig the system in their favor by using the principles of SEO in a less-than-honest way. Because the idea of SEO is they keywords create cash, the idea that has occurred to a lot of people can best be summed up in the following sentence: “If they want keyword volume, we’ll give them keyword volume”. This tends to occur in the shape of website text that contains nothing but keywords.

Of course, this means that the website will be scarcely readable, if it is readable at all, but the trick is usually applied by webmasters who don’t really care if you actually read what is on the site. Usually they will use it as a landing page that immediately redirects you to the site they want you to read. It will happen instantly and you will not see the landing page, but it will have done its job. For the reader it may be little more than an inconvenience, but for other people operating in the same niche, it is cheating.

The main reason that tricks like this are a bad idea has only a small amount to do with the fact that it is cheating. In actual fact, it is incredibly limited as an SEO tool because Google and other search engines check for such tricks and will relegate any such site in their rankings – so not only is it dishonest, it is also ineffective, which is what will really stick in the craw of the people doing it.

Heavenly SEO Practices: Site Maps

Reduced down to its simplest form, a sitemap is just a list of URLs. For something so completely basic, it’s incredible to find how very important sitemaps can be when it comes to successful SEO.

To add pages to search engine results, engines send out what is known as a ‘bot’ or a ‘spider’. This non-human bot will search the internet for pages, and whatever it finds will eventually be indexed – that is, included in a search engine results pages. Yet there are literally millions of websites on the internet, and sometimes waiting for a search engine bot to crawl your page and index it – well, it can literally take weeks.

This is where the sitemap comes in. The sitemap is a “heads up”, basically calling the search engine’s attention to all of your website’s content.

When your website is complete, you will need to build your sitemap (or ideally, build it as you go along). This can be done using a simple Notepad .txt file, with a list of URLs of each page of your site, written on a separate line and then uploaded to your server. Alternatively, if you are using WordPress self-hosted, you can install a plugin called “XML Google Sitemaps” – which automatically generates and updates your sitemap as you go along.

The plugin will generate a URL (Universal Resource Locator) – usually www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, or alternatively use your .txt file, upload it and obtain the URL yourself. You should then take the URL of your sitemap, and submit it to all of the major search engines, using a tool such as Google Webmaster Tools. When submitted, the engine will know to send a bot to crawl the pages you’ve submitted – and will usually do so in a matter of days. Sitemaps really can make indexing that easy, and are therefore an absolute must when getting your site properly setup for SEO.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #4 “Linking To Bad Sites”

Have you ever heard the phrase ‘falling in with a bad crowd’? Well, if you link to websites that search engines consider ‘bad’, that’s the search engine optimization equivalent of falling in with a bad crowd. While your website may not be intrinsically ‘bad’ in itself, if you promote (by linking) sites that violate the terms and conditions of major search engines, you’ll be tarred with the same brush. While it’s unlikely your site will be completely blacklisted, you may see a sharp fall in rankings position – or even be removed from the search rankings altogether.

This, of course, begs the question: how do I know what a ‘bad’ site is? After all, if someone links to you, you’re probably going to want to do the decent thing and return the favor That’s what so much of website building, networking and promotion is all about – right? So how can you be sure you’re not destroying your own search engine chances by linking to a poor site that search engines consider bad?

It’s tricky, but the basic answer is to use your gut. How does the website look? Does it look professionally designed, properly maintained? Is the content unique, or does it all sound familiar, or is the English terribly written?

On a more technical basis, you can check the PageRank of the site, and also its standings with Alexa. This should give a good understanding of the website in question’s general standing, and whether or not it’s the kind of crowd you want to be associating with. Also familiarize yourself with the Google terms of service, and scan the site for any obvious violations. If it passes, feel free to post a link back.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #1 “Hidden Text”

Anyone with a basic understanding of search engine optimization will know that text on a website plays a large part in how you are ranked in search engines. In fact, it could be argued that the textual content of a website is actually the most important thing for search engines.

It’s therefore natural for the cunning mind to wonder if it’s possible to introduce sections of ‘hidden text’. Imagine you’re not the best writer in the world, and you don’t want to have to spend a lot of money outsourcing content creation. Yet at the same time, you’re aware of the importance that search engines place on textual content. So rather than writing poor articles yourself, trying to jam your keywords in, you can simply write the keywords into a spare section of your website – and then change the font color so it is the same, or virtually the same, as the background of the page. Suddenly, your website is stuffed with keywords, but all without having to publish poor articles or ruin the look and feel of your website in general.

This practice goes by a variety of names, including font matching and keyword stuffing. However, whatever you call it, it’s a bad idea.

Why? Well, the reason is obvious – it’s a cheat. Google, and the other major search engines, place an importance on text content because they want their search results to be relevant. Hidden text defeats the point of this, and if you’re caught doing it, you will have your website banned from the search engine – for good. So don’t do it.

Why Is SEO Important?

Think back to the days before the internet, when everyone looked for business listings in the Yellow Pages or a similar hard copy directory. Now, imagine you’re trying to find a plumber. You go to the “P” page, flick through, and only see three plumbers listed.

It’d be a massive advantage for the three plumbers, wouldn’t it? To effectively be all that potential customers see. Well, that’s the power of SEO.

When someone uses a search engine, they type in a set of words to bring up results that are relevant to them. Once the applicable websites appear on the results page, they are rated in terms of ‘relevancy’. Any website which has correctly used search engine optimization will be judged by Google to be ‘relevant’. So if you have correctly used SEO, your website will appear somewhere near the top of the search engine results page – hopefully in the top three.

Why is that so important? Well, studies have shown that the vast majority of those using search engines only click on websites listed in the top three results of any search engine results page. This is where it compares to being only one of three businesses listed in an old-style paper directory like the Yellow Pages. Master SEO, and your website will appear in high in search results, in the slots (one to three) that users click. That naturally leads on to more people visiting your website, and that in turn means more business, more customers, and ultimately more money.