Aug 22
If you’re in a semi-competitive battle for rankings, you might want to re-think your use of keywords on the page. For the specific term/phrase you’re going after, here’s what I generally recommend:
- Used at least once in the title tag, possibly twice (or part of a phrase twice) when appropriate and not spammy looking
- At least once or twice in the meta description tag - not for rankings, but for CTR
- In the H1 tag of the page at the very top - as the true headline of the piece (this is good for users and search engines) Read the rest of this entry »
Aug 22
Sometimes, you’d love to link to your home page with your keyword as the anchor text, but it just doesn’t look right in the top menu or sidebar. An easy way to make your internal anchor text links reference your content with the anchor text you want while still maintaining the sensibility of your permanent navigation is to:
- Place your header/sidebar/permanent nav into an iframe that you serve on every page (that also limits the amount of unique content the spiders have to crawl per page - a nice benefit)
- In your footer, link to your content as you see fit - it makes more sense to use anchor text here and will serve to give you the kind of internal linking you want for both engines and visitors
Obviously, you can overdo this and get penalized, but if employed properly, it’s a great way to leverage your internal link juice in a more optimized fashion.
Aug 22
With Site Explorer becoming the new standard for competitive link research, many folks seem to have forgotten that you can still run some super-spiffy advanced link searches using Yahoo!’s classic link and linkdomain commands in the normal index. For example:
You can get really creative with these to do some advanced link discovery and competitive analysis. I often use them to try and figure out why a site or page might be ranking for a term that it doesn’t appear to be heavily targeting, or to uncover potential targets for link acquisition.
p.s. Even though Microsoft took away their normal link search functionality, the linkfromdomain command still functions, i.e. linkfromdomain:serpexperts.com
Aug 22
For many sites that get a significant amount of traffic from current events style searches, it can be hard to predict what you should write about or feature to help target these terms. However, there’s a few places that can help:
From those pages, you’ll get a good idea of what’s hot right now and what might spread over the next 3-5 days. Use your best judgement and make sure to link to the relevant pages, blog posts, articles on your site about the topic from your home page and other important pages (possibly in a “buzz” or “hot today” mini-section), so you get maximum exposure from the engines.
Aug 22
If you’re attempting to conduct some reputation management through the search results, subdomains are a good choice for very powerful domains. You do have to be careful, because subdomains don’t always pass the same quality/quantity of shared link love (remember my rising tide theory) around the site. However, subdomains, unlike subpages, can fill up the entire search listing if properly employed. You’ll need a very strong site first, preferrably one that has strong links into several top-level sections and is ranking #1 for all the searches you want to dominate. From there, divide up some top level pages into, for example, services.domain.com, contact.domain.com, articles.domain.com, etc. You’ll find that these pages will often rank right below your main domain (and push down the other content) in the SERPs.
Note that this is an advanced tactic and one you should really only employ for reputation management/SERPs dominance. If you’re still trying to build up rankings and link popularity, this probably isn’t a good idea.
A few good examples: Apple, Amazon, CNN, Wikipedia
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