Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

How can you fight spam on your blog?

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

MT 3.3 offers a built-in spam protection plugin called SpamLookup. In addition to this plugin, there are several other options you can implement to help stem the tide of spam. Note that the spammers are constantly improving their methods to game the system, requiring constant vigilance on the part of the MT community to keep coming up with new ways to block them.

* SpamLookup
SpamLookup is a Movable Type plugin, developed by Brad Choate, that uses several techniques to identify spam, and then uses user-supplied choices to either moderate or block it. SpamLookup is an integrated part of MT 3.3, so if you have installed the latest version of MT, there is nothing more you need to install. SpamLookup utilizes several blacklist services to check incoming comments and trackbacks against known spammers. It allows you to either “junk” or moderate comments and trackbacks based on different settings for links and keywords. You can even “white list” domains or IP addresses. To adjust the settings on SpamLookup, simply open up your Plugins menu from the System Overview of your Movable Type editing window. Scroll to the bottom and select “Show Settings” from any of the SpamLookup modules. See Neil Turner’s suggestions on Making the Most of SpamLookup and David Philip’s SpamLookup’s Keyword Filter Explained for more information on how to best use this plugin.

* Akismet
Akismet is a distributed spam filtering service developed by the Wordpress community. According to the Akismet FAQ, the way it works is “When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.” MT developer Tim Appnel has created an MT plugin for Akismet (MT-Akismet) which can be downloaded from the Akismet website. Many have found Akismet to be more effective at catching spam than SpamLookup.

* Comment Challenge
Jay Allen’s Comment Challenge plugin requires a commenter to type a keyword into a separate field from the comment field in order for the comment cgi script to run. This plugin effectively halts automatic computer generated spam comments.

* Use a “Captcha”
A captcha is a security code that a commenter must enter in order for her comment to load. The benefit is that it screens out automated comment spam bots. The downside is that it keeps visually disabled people from easily contributing a comment. Arvind has released an SCode plugin to work with MT 3.2 - MT-SCode 1.0.

* Require approval before a comment posts
One way to ensure that your readers never have to see a spam message is that you personally approve comments before they are posted. MT3 has the comment moderation features built-in. (See Settings > Feedback > check “Immediate publish comments from No one”.)

Close old comments.
One way to cut down on blog spam is to reduce the opportunities by closing the ability to comment on blog posts older than X number of days. Mark Carey’s BlogJanitor plugin lets you do just that, and all automatically.

The Quality of SEO Content

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Before starting the first step of the lesson, you are requested to read an article. Don’t worry; I have no plans to bother you more than this simple request. Although all the articles in this web are good as the same as the Search article, I recommend you to read the Search one. After reading it, we can start with the first step of writing SEO contents.
The Search article is a great example of how SEO contents should be written. The self-expression of the text is average, but despite it, it is a high standard of SEO content. Why is that? Well, you always should remember the next rule, which will lead you to a very safe success in the process of writing SEO contents - writing reliable data and using a classic structure of text are the key. Let’s try to be more coherent; when you write SEO content, no matter what issue it contains, try to avoid from false ideas and search for reliable sources. In addition, try to use a classic structure, don’t write a cumbersome text: start with introduction, continue with deep structure (the main content) and finish with summary of the article. Why it’s so important? SEO is a marketing system, if you want to reflect a well profile of your company, business or anything else; your web site is your visit card. Traffic at your web pages will not serve your main goal if quality and reliability are missing. Don’t forget, SEO content is an important and necessary method, but it is not a goal.

SEO Concepts Approach

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

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SEOConcepts takes it’s experience in online marketing, ecommerce and warehousing in helping you define the best approach in a no nonsense going forward plan.

SEOConcepts can handle an overall evaluation of your business or easily assess only the areas you are looking to outsource.

BASIC CONCEPTS OF SEO

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

There are some basic concepts that all search services have to follow. They all follow certain concepts because they are all driven by humans and humans are governed by certain laws of nature. While there are many things different about spidering engines compared to human reviewed directories, specifically in terms of scalability, there are some very important things that are the same. They are the same because whether it is a human doing the indexing and categorizing or a computer program, such as a spider, the spider was programmed by a human and therefore, it can only do what a human told it to do within the limitations of the technology available at the time. The spider is going to do it’s best to emulate what a human would do. It will do whatever it is told to do by a human much faster, but without the skills that are unique to the dominant species.

The moral of the story is, if you want to achieve top placements within an index, whether spider based or human reviewed, you simply have to “think” like a human as opposed to trying to “think” like a computer program. Logic, common sense and human civility towards your fellow man, will win out over any computer language every time. You will get more traffic, (and much, much more importantly — sales), by accepting that you are dealing with a real person, not that different from yourself, instead of thinking you are just a username and password trying to trick a computer.

That is not to say that spidering engines do not have weaknesses that can be exploited, (same goes for human reviewed directories but more on that a little later). they certainly do. It is only saying that to really “see” those weaknesses for what they really are, and “see” how to best take advantage of them to enable you to achieve your own placement objectives, it is a great help to be able to first understand how silly things like hidden text, re-directs and a lot of other on page goofiness is. Once you accept that you are dealing with a human being, although it may be once removed, it is easy to understand what that human being was likely trying to accomplish when they programmed the spider in the first place. Understanding and accepting that gives you a huge advantage over your competitors and opens a lot of doors into the mind of the person or persons creating the index.

It so happens that I am one of the most successful placement specialists on the planet. I’m not claiming to be “the best” or to be some kind of “guru”. I am simply telling you that I have a lot of experience in this field and I have a reputation within the industry for a reason. I really can tell you EXACTLY how to get a number 1 spot on virtually any keyword. I’m willing to bet that there are some reading this even now who can attest to my ability by pointing to their own pages at the top based on something I had addressed. I was able to start doing that by learning and accepting those basic concepts I mentioned earlier.

As long as we are going to open a topic like this, I will help where I can and I believe the best help I can give is to share those basic concepts. What you do with those concepts is up to you. One of my favorite quotes is, “I don’t mind telling you where I think the gold is buried but you have to do your own digging”.

I have said many times in the past that I accept no responsibility whatsoever if you use any advice I give and it doesn’t work. I have no control whatsoever over any action that any search service other than SearchKing may take. I have no inside deal with any service outside of the same PPC deal or trusted feed deals than any one of you could get. So, if you do anything based on what I say and it goes badly, don’t blame me!

On the other hand, I have also often said I am more than happy to accept as much credit as you are willing to give if my advice does help. Still, the purpose of my telling you anything that could apply to search service top placement is more in the way of offering some insight into a different perspective rather than just milking a little verbal pat-on-the-back out of someone. I am only relaying my take on things based on my own personal experiences in the hope of motivating grey matter and intelligent discussion, (present author excluded).

As any discussion of techniques used to get to top spots on search services tends to be heated arguments at worst and lengthy, convoluted and self-congratulatory at best, I will try to keep my offerings at a “reasonable”, (completely subjective term), length. I will discuss the few concepts I am relatively sure of one at a time and only start another discussion after the one has run its course. So here goes the first one.

Best seo tips

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Search engines are internet venues where BILLIONS of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is phenomenal.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and PLACEMENT, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methos of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

How to Optimize Your Meta Tags?

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords.
1. description
2. keywords
Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say “may” because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I’ve noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I’ve seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don’t think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

<meta name=”description” content=”your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization.” />

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google’s search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

Search engine optimization-The Way Backlinks Are Counted

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Similar to the history of your site, the history of the links to your site have gained importance. As was noted in Google’s patent application #20050071741 titled, “Information retrieval based on historical data,” links, like sites, gain weight over time. This point was further clarified in the latest update as sites with longstanding links gained strength while sites with many new links did not see significant ground gained. The “sandbox” on links is functioning in fractions in that after a period of time a link will gain part of it’s weight, after a bit longer, it will gain more, etc. (the exact length of time is of course a closely guarded secret by Google and likely changes as their algorithm does). This means your link building today won’t create any substantial effect on your Google rankings until months down the road.

Additionally, the relevancy of links to your site is still important however Google’s ability to determine relevancy appears to have improved. Pages no longer have to containing the exact keyword phrases to be relevant but rather have to be from related industries. For example, a link to an SEO site from a web design site would be considered relevant even though the keywords on the page are not specifically related to SEO.

Natural links have gained weight over unnatural links. Links that are contained within content areas of a page will be weighted more strongly that links that appear alone or in a directory-style (like reciprocal links pages) as they are considered more natural. When you are having links built to your site try to get them placed within the content (within the description portion of your reciprocal link for example). Also, in link building you will want to insure you’re varying the terms of your anchor text. Creating hundreds of links with identical anchor text will quickly be detected as a link building effort (i.e. not natural) and thus will carry little weight. Different anchor text for your links will appear more natural and thus will have a more positive impact on your rankings.

But in journals there is editorial oversight and a process of underlying journalism. And in some cases fact checkers.

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

The problem with that is that it’s not scalable. What you’re talking about is something like Mahalo and there’s certainly a market for that. In terms of something like Google and being able to find and categorize and present to the world in the form of search results, billions and billions of documents, you can’t do that with human editorial oversight. There’s a scalability issue and I don’t think it’s at odds with ethics. Google puts a lot of effort into making sure there’s a positive user experience represented by people finding information that’s meaningful to them and true.

There are some people subverting the system unfortunately. They make it challenging for organizations that feel in the real world, they’re the best answer for a query. But they’re probably doing a crappy job with their web site and Public Relations SEO and need to synch up their real world dominance in the category with how they represent themselves online from a technical, content and linking perspective. That is, if they want to play in Google’s playground.

What about SEO just for press releases? One of the things you look for with press release optimization is keyword density, right?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

When you stick to specific keyword density numbers, you put yourself at risk somewhat, of hanging your hat on a shingle that will fall down later. Search engines are constantly evolving and changing how they rank web pages.

What you want to do is use your keywords high and to the left of the document. Two or three times, four times maybe. Use general guidelines and focus on the user. It’s a matter of not being too clever and ironic and being literal with the keywords you’re using. Use them high in a document and in links as opposed to saying, “Let’s shoot for a 6% keyword density every time.”

How can SEO can help an organization raise awareness?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

People are looking for information, they use a variety of types of search such as Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as the predominant channels. There’s also news search , blog search and search within social media sites. Any time something can be searched on, that’s an optimization opportunity. Increasing awareness comes from making it easier for people to find you when they’re looking for information.