Ani Lopez's Search Engine Optimization Blog

How context in social media influence rankings in SEO

Sep 21, 2009

Lately some articles are talking about 'web references', 'citations' or 'context', I like to name it, as relevant signal and how this can influence rankings specially for local search.

Now I moved from Barcelona to Vancouver to live some years there, came to my mind it was a nice opportunity to run a little text about this specific subject and get facts and figures more than hypothesis.

To isolate better the effects of test, I did not change anything in this website and the amount of incoming links was the same during all the process. Short time. by the way. Maybe the google caffeine update is starting to make it faster, not sure but lately I can see new pages appear at index really fast.

Testing steps and results

First I checked the position of this blog at google.ca rankings for the keywords 'seo consultant' and it was between 39 and 41.
Then I changed any reference to location 'Barcelona, Espa�a' for 'Vancouver, Canada' in these three profiles: Twitter, Linkedin and Google profile where there are links to this blog.
Not a single anchor text in links changed, just plain text in those pages.
Waited for Google to reindex them all, et volil�, the blog flight up to position 7-9 at google.ca of course.

Maybe Google though: if this guy is saying everywhere he is now in Canada and not anymore in Spain his blog should rank better at my .ca version.

Fantastic! but, you know how SEO is, this things must be handled with care and not making any rule of thumb from them specially if it only has been tested just one/few times.

Take into account that the only thing changed was location, no references to 'seo consultant' what helped anyway to climb the SERPs for the desired Canadian Google site.

Now I've changed he title to see if there is this helps a bit more but this is another story.

Conclusions

During the presentation of Barbara 'Webmama' Coll at IMC Vancouver she talked about how social media is a big playground to expand SEO tactics and here it is where I want to bring the whole thing.

Social media not only from the perspective of a resource to bring more traffic to websites creating brand awareness or buzz in the audience, not even as one more strategy of a link building campaign, just as another way, I want to state, to optimize text beyond the website itself.

The same way sites in your link neighborhood describe yours, as more contextual content you create around a site, in other related social media sites, the better yours is defined, not only for humans but for search engines too and a better definition seems to pay its benefits in rankings.

So, the thing seems to be quite clear, do your keyword distribution along website structure, expand it to any other social media pages you have in your hands and check how this can help your site, it is not going to hurt your site in the worst of cases.

Humans are social beings and the way others are describing you is a big part of you so it is expected to search engines imitate humans somehow. Don't you think?

Any other similar x-files? Opinions welcome.

Internet Marketing Conference, Vancouver 2009

Sep 20, 2009

Although my main goal coming to this marketing conference was a bit more personal, networking to survive after moving to a new city, these conferences are always interesting to learn and share opinions.

Comparing Canada and Europe

Most of the presentations were site optimization oriented and the sites discussed were e-commerces maybe because in Canada internet penetration is really high and online shopping is a big thing. In Europe, specially in the southern countries is not so advanced in this area and we focus more in SEO.

We still like to shop on our way home to prepare a good diner with fresh food.

Second impression is that the tourism business is much more and better online marketed in Europe than Canada, it is a big thing there in the old continent specially in the southern countries, of course.

Regarding similarities something in common is how hard is to sell any kind of online marketing services but I guess this is an worldwide issue. Many attendants asking the pros how they sell their services, how to convince CEOs they need a help to boost selling.

It sounds stupid having to insist offering cure to someone ill but that's the way it works.

Workshops and presentations I attended

First day Google Analytics workshop by VKI Studios (Brian Katz, John Hossack and David Eckman) was a great overview of it. Basic and medium level but a nice opportunity for me to refresh some concepts and learn some tips.

Conferences, second day, started with Avinash and one of his absolutely amazing presentations introducing the subjects to come in his new book Web Analitics 2.0 available this October.

Besides everything he explained about online marketing and analytics he stated a golden rule for companies but a must to apply to any other aspect in life: DON'T SUCK. Period.

Chris O'Neill and Richard Muller from Antartica Digital explained seven real examples of successfully engaging people online delivering meaningful content and value through different channels specially email marketing.

Barbara Coll from WebMama questioned: Search is going real-time, will SEO matter anymore? The conclusion is Yes, it will matter but you have to wide your perspective to use social media as a way to expand your tactics from a pure SEO vision.
Very straight personality and nice person.

I completely agree with her and I'll write about my little experiment in this subject ('web references', 'citations' or 'context') in a next article.

How to evaluate the web analytics maturity model by St�fane Hamen from Immeria was a revealing one, check his blog and you will understand why. Basically he evaluates how good is the analytics culture integrated in a company.

Holly Buchanan explained how to copywrite for the four temperaments, spontaneous, competitive, humanistic and methodical. The idea is simple, your style while writing for any kind of online marketing campaign is something to pay attention or the audience to target won't feel engaged with the message with obvious consequences.

This is something that SEOs don't pay too much attention while working on content optimization because in many cases we don't write just optimize. Something to keep in mind, mental note.

Chris Goward from Wider Funnel explained how to approach the art of site optimization. Very instructive, fantastic tips to take into account while redesigning websites to improve usability and conversions.

This guy knows what he is talking about but if I had to pic one of the things learned it would be: work with hypothesis not tips. It means, no matter how many tips you know to solve a problem, you have to analyze it deeply and build your own approach and method because each case is completely different although they could look similar.

Third day breakout Session 'Search Engine Optimization in a Real-Time world' with Rebecca Kelley (10e20), Gillian Muessig (SEOMoz), Jeff Nelson (Anduro) and Shawn Moore (Think Profits). Seems SEO is quite concerned with social media judging by the questions attendants asked. Again the 'SEO is dead' mantra appeared but I raised hand and said that a so changing discipline can not be dead.

By chance I had lunch side by side with Gillian Muessig, Rand Fishkin's mom, tireless and absolutely adorable talkative se�ora. Gillian, would you mind to adopt me? :)

I could not get to more of the interesting sessions, networking kept me busy.

Just a final note

Canada, Vancouver in particular, is a highly multicultural country, they are proud and I love it. John Hossak from VKI Studios and chair of IIMA did the presentation speech dressing in his perfect Scottish kilt plus traditional accessories.

It was accepted very naturally what reflects how mature Canadians are as society. I would like Spain to be the same in this aspect, unfortunately we are not. Bravo John!

See you all next IMG.

Moving to Vancouver. Online and offline networking experience

Sep 19, 2009

Some of you, my closest ones, already know that this September - October 2009 I move for some years, no idea how many, to Vancouver, Canada. Besides practical issues like arrange immigration papers, rent an apartment, open a bank account and so the first goal to achieve here is to get a job.

You move to a city in the other side of the hemisphere, how do you that? Go figure.

Sure I'm going to state the obvious if I say that nobody is going to offer you a nice job if they don't have a clear idea of who the hell you are, what you have to offer and, previous to any real deal, meeting you in person. Put my brain to work.

I have never been a naturally born public relations guy, I always hated networking for business purposes and self promoting is not definitely my best art although I consider myself an affable one who likes to practice the noble art of conversation.

To add a grain of salt, English talking is not something I feel comfortable with. I have to improve it a lot and being aware I had not my best weapon fully loaded made me feel not self-confident. Fortunately I'm stubborn as a mule and nothing is going to make me dismount the horse I'm breaking.

Here I want to share the way I've been doing it for the pure pleasure of putting it under your magnifying glass to examine critically.

Some keywords to start, bad mailing to finish

Months before moving to the city and as a SEO brained the most easy and expected thing to do was asking google.ca (not .es) about 'seo', 'seo consultant', 'search marketing' and some more related plus the location 'vancouver', them write down in a spreadsheet first 50 results more or less quickly filtering some of them.

First task, distinguish big players from medium, little ones or freelancers (analytics style: relevancy and segmentation). Which ones are the nice to target and contact? Taking a look at their website gives you some idea how serious a business can be.

Unforgivable mistake for online marketing agencies or freelance marketeers having a bad, outdated, non-usable site. You can no imagine how bad quite a lot they are. I should have made a case study.

After collecting their contact details, email or contact fom URL, postal address, phone, etc I sent a quite dense (first error) email explaining the purpose, remarking my experience, knowledge and asking for a job opportunity. I did it in the middle of August (second error).

In conclusion very low response (sometimes I wonder if Canadians read their email but this is another story) and the ones answering back had nothing to offer.

Marketing is learning by failure.

Shake hands online and arrange visits offline

Let's do it old school way, try to get (digitally) in contact and arrange meetings once in the city. I planed to visit Vancouver for 10 days middle September before moving first days of October with this purpose in mind.

Linkedin has helped a lot. Performing searches with related keywords and city you can guess, who is who locally in a certain industry, names and pictures, companies size and specialties and so.

100% of the people I asked to be part of my contacts accepted maybe because I wrote something more personal than the default message and immediately, I started following the ones having Twitter accounts.

That was my way to create some 'awareness'. Before showing up everybody had an slightly idea who I was more or less (the crazy guy from Barcelona coming here while everybody wants to be there).

I could arrange some few but interesting meetings. That was starting to rock!

Hint #1: update your profile pics often, you have no idea how hard can be recognize anybody in a jam packed bar during networking meetings if the pic is outdated.

Fortune knocks at my door: IMC Vancouver '09

Don't remember how it came to me but discovered Internet Marketing Conference was scheduled around the days I was planing to move to the city so no better chance to have all the relevant professionals and companies under the same roof three days in a row.

Luky guy: Launch Party 8 same week

"Launch Party Vancouver is a lively mixer for the city's brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen" in plain English: networking for internet ones.

Two events in a week, what else I could ask? Vancouver seems to be the city of non stop events. Could this be the reason for so many expensive cars here?

The way they do networking helps a lot. People is really friendly, they come to you, introduce themselves and hand in a business card, then you tell your story.

Hint #2: Get printed and take with you business or personal cards. I felt ridiculous telling everybody I had no cards. Fortunately, yes, they have and I could get their contacting details.

Results of the 'self promoting in a rush' experiment

After every IMC day or event, going back home, check the cards collected and continue building relationships.

Even better, people introduced me to third ones I did not recognized or knew nothing about in an early stage of it increasing my chances to achieve the original goal.

Hint #3: Thank those who accept you to be one of their contacts at Linkedin and send a direct message or mention those who follow you on twitter. It is all about human relationships no matter the tools you use, old basic rules of conventional requirements as to social behavior are always a must.

Everything together allowed me to meet 99% of the people contacted previously via Linkedin+Twitter. By the way I use Hootsuite, the finest and more professional Twitter client to manage accounts.

Most of the preferred ones in my list of companies offered themselves to have a more formal meting at their offices to know in detail about my professional background, experience and expertise, isn't it amazingly fantastic?

In fact there was another networking party organized by IMC in a boat but adjusting timezones and all this stress made me to desist as job was mostly done.

Today after IMC closing I enjoyed alone a cold Corona at Art Gallery terrace while a jazz quartet was playing Davis, Coltrane and Monk standards watching the life pass by at always busy Robson Street.

That's it.

Thank you all amigos for your time and patience with my horrible English.

Keywords distribution along web content structure

Aug 03, 2009

This is not an article about keyword finding, keyword density or keyword stuffing. None of those between millions 'how to find the magic keywords bringing all the organic traffic to you'. I assume you did your keyword research and you have a nice bunch of them classified the way you like most. What is next? Keyword distribution it is the subject of this post.

The web content structure thing

Who determines the structure of the content in a website? Designers, programmers, usability experts, copywriters, marketing guys, the nephew of the owner of the company or, in the worst of the cases, all together.

I am not saying that SEO consultant should be the only one doing it because we need some consensus here and the client is who knows better his company, business model, products and market to target but you are the first analysing it as the one in charge for distributing keywords along the website structure so soon you will feel the clear necessity to put some order in this chaos.

If you did the keyword search properly you will have tons of them: top, secondary, long tail keywords, generic or specific ones, combinations (verb + adjective + product + location) in the attempt to capture all the relevant traffic.

Well, it depends in the type of web (corporative, ecommerce�) but a quick look at the content structure will make some of the most typical problems to appear:

Not content enough to allocate the biggest amount of keywords or at east the more important ones
Poor diversity in content to place the maximum number of variations due to single categorization structure
No room for very generic and highly competitive keywords

Some possible solutions.

Poor content in website

Lack of content is the problem in SEO projects you will find more often. If you try to place all the required keywords in such a few content the writing style won't be natural and it will seem you are trying to stuff the text with keywords. Ugly effect.

Sometimes the problem is not quantity but quality, so badly written texts that optimise content is a nightmare and you have to end up rewriting big part of it.

Obvious: add content.

Single category to organise products or services

How users search, game console brand and then accessory type or the other way around? Why not both? Quite sure you will find which way is the preferable in traffic volume terms but no need to reject any possible visit coming from secondary or more specific keywords.

Consider multi categories website structure, this will create more room for variations and combinations for sure.

Highly competitive keywords

A little piece of the big pie is a big piece for me and I don't want to miss it. Imagine your business does not want directly compete for very generic keywords, 'buy phone', because it requires a much bigger investment due to very hard competition and your customer is focused on a segment selling touch phone, PDA phone and smartphones in example.

Does it mean you have to forget about those generic keywords and their traffic? Definitely no but where can they fit and keep text natural?

Some content areas people usually not paying to much attention as 'About' and 'FAQ' pages in example. First, these more generic words can help define better what the web is about and second they represent a valuable resource for internal linking strategy don't you think?

How I like to do keywords in structure

It would be nice one a tool to render the whole web structure just typing the domain URL with filters like 'skip external links', show/hide nofollowed, javascript or image links and spreadsheet file export but don't know any remotely close to it (do you? please drop a note) so no way other than manually write it.

Anyway, you have to go deep into the site to know it really well, even better than de client so you can write down structure while navigating it. Few extra work saving your life latter.

Here it is a sample of a spreadsheet with vertical structure proposal and some more columns to make it easy.

Download this keyword distribution spreadsheet, use as much as you want.

This way whole structure is always at a glance, a global vision helping you distributing better the keywords. Two columns to place the most important ones and secondary by area, section or page, go as deep as required.

Once this task is finished some more columns can be added for URL definition, <title>, <meta-description>, <h1> or any other on page element to optimise. Again, that helps you having in mind the whole site map, the keywords nicely distributed so writing those elements is easy and the result gains in quality.

Some conclusions

Take time to rethink the whole structure and evaluate if it serves perfectly your SEO purposes but always in a natural way, no overdoses.

Ask the rest of the professionals involved in project to share their opinion about the new structure you purpose, four eyes see more than two.

Quite sure you will have to convince the client to add more content or increase the budget to write yourself or hire the service of a copywriter. Advice the client about this possibility from the very beginning not to scare him asking for more money once the thing started.

Ask as soon as possible the developers if the platform used is flexible enough to change the structure or add more parts to it. Sometimes CMSs are so bad that this simple question represents a dead end.

Opinions? Would you like to share your procedure?

Comparing Google Trends for Websites and Google Analytics data

Jun 16, 2009

Although in a moment or another any SEO consultant has checked the traffic trends for a (big enough) site, the competitors of the web you are optimising for sure, nobody trust 100% what shown at Google Trends for Websites obviously.

At Trends for Websites Help page there is information explaining how these graphs are generated and why data is not accurate but as usually at Google's universe tons of words for nothing significant.

The only way I can think to get some conclusions is compare Trends for Websites versus Google Analytics data.

How to compare stats

Look into your Analytics account for sites with traffic enough to have a whole year stats, last 12 months option, at Trends for Websites. Sometimes graphs are weird or incomplete, don't ask.

If you are logged in your Google's account stats will show Daily Unique Visitors number at Y axis.
Drag and drop graph to your computer.

Check if these sites have the same period of data at Analytics. You won't believe how many sites for big well known worldwide brands have not paid real attention to web analytics or had no stats system installed at all, specially if they are not online pure players.

At Analytics go to Visitors > Visitors trending > Absolute unique visitors, dates from 01-april-2008 to 01-april-09 or the period matching Trends, select week view and grab screen shot.

That's it. Now a bit of image work to place both side by side for an easy comparing.

The hard thing here is having enough sites with these characteristics to compare, not to betray the first principle of statistics. I have a few but I wanted to get very different business models sites from different countries to make it a bit more interesting so I asked my colleagues Ram�n Eijkemans, SEO copyrighting expert, Martijn Beijk, local search wizard and Juan Cruz, online marketing consultant, for some more and here they are.

Wesite stats and graphs compared

Trends versus Analytics. Conclusions

No need to be Einstein to notice what happens.

Analytics graphs lines are softer than trends ones, more exaggerated in vertical axis. like electrified.
In many cases last quarter, more recent period, although at Analytics stats are nor clearly going down they do at Trends, something that web analytics expert Adri�n Segovia noticed lately. Maybe, just an idea, as times go bye they become more accurate, who knows.
Daily Unique Visitors volume deserves some trustworthy but not in closer periods as mentioned before and of course not always.
Trends for Websites seems to have a reasonable amount of credibility once you can set a minimum error threshold after comparing some of them.

Now we should compare other similar services like Alexa Traffic Stats but I wanted to start with tools of the same brand (yes, it was easy).

What do you think? Do you want to share here your graphs?

Sitemap strategy for large sites

Jun 02, 2009

Google first introduced Sitemaps in June 2005 and MSN and Yahoo announced support for this protocol in November 2006, Ask.com in April 2007.

You all may know what a sitemap is by now but what about the sitemap.xml of a large site with 5 million indexed pages adding more than 3k pages daily? It is not a simple one you need here, a different approach is required and this is what I want to lay on the table.

Make it easy to search engines

If your site has not sitemap.xml file listing all the pages to crawl they will be indexed if internal link structure is done properly or external links point to pages but, why not making it easy for search engines to crawl your site? Quite obvious.

Sitemaps are beneficial always but I would say 'required' for these cases:

Content or website is new and you want crawlers to get it all asap for a first indexing
The amount of content is huge and changes very frequently like online newspapers, auction, shopping, classifieds, events sites and so
A radical URL structure change for all the site, specially when getting rid of subdomains moving content to directories*

*Subdomains strategy is a waste of relevance in 99% of the cases unless you are somebody like ebay.com (140 million pages indexed) or amazon.com (104 millions).

Sitemap have some limits

Although sitemap files can be compressed using gzip to reduce bandwidth consumption they have a limit of 50,000 URLs and 10 megabytes per sitemap.

Hardly you will overstep this line, unless your site is one of those big ones but multiple sitemap files are supported so this can be achieved with a sitemap index file serving as an entry point for a total of 1000 sitemaps.

Let's check how big guys do it.

Large sites sitemaps analysis

EBAY (Spain)

ebayanuncios.es/ean_sitemap_4_index.xml.gz (sitemaps index for 3 sitemaps)
    ebayanuncios.es/ean_sitemap_4_global.xml.gz (categories, 5.770 URLs)
    ebayanuncios.es/ean_sitemap_4_1.xml.gz (content 40.000 URLs)
    ebayanuncios.es/ean_sitemap_4_2.xml.gz (content 40.000 URLs)

They use <lastmod> tag at sitemap ndex and <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority> at sitemaps.

AMAZON

Amazon's robots.txt refers to 10 different sitemaps or sitemaps indexes, some are grouped by subject. They do not care about maintaining any other tag but <loc>, no <lastmod>, <changefreq> or <priority>.

TV series
amazon.com/sitemap-manual-tv.xml (500 URLs)

Music Artists
amazon.com/sitemap_artists_index.xml (sitemaps index for 5 sitemaps)
amazon.com/sitemap_artists_0001.xml.gz (50.000 URLs)
...

Books
amazon.com/sitemap_index_2.xml (sitemaps index for 1.000 sitemaps)
amazon.com/sitemap_page_2000.xml.gz (50.000 URLs)
...

Sports & Outdoors, Jewelry...
amazon.com/sitemap_backfill_dp_index.xml (sitemaps index for 800 sitemaps)
amazon.com/sitemap_backfill_dp_0001.xml.gz
...

Search results? (don't know, need further investigation)
amazon.com/sitemap_index_1.xml (sitemaps index for 1.000 sitemaps)
amazon.com/sitemap_page_0.xml.gz (50.000 URLs)
...

CNN

Focuses upon helping a search engine find the addition of many new URLs daily. Here they use only <lastmod> tag.

cnn.com/sitemap_index.xml (sitemaps index for 36 sitemaps)
    cnn.com/sitemap_specials.xml (85 URLs)
    cnn.com/sitemap_month.xml (1.578 URLs)
    cnn.com/sitemap_week.xml (452 URLs)
    cnn.com/sitemap_topics_set_j_0.xml (3.700 URLs)
    ...

cnn.com/sitemap_news.xml (139 URLs)
News Sitemap specific tags for online newspapers in use here.

Sitemap strategy

Ok, you have to create a sitemap for a large site so take your time to think:

How your content is organised
Does the categories number changes a lot?
Maybe a sitemap for content structure is required. Just category URLs, no content pages.
Fresh content creation frequency
How many new URLs are created by period of time?
Determine a moment to distinguish fresh content from older one. One day? One week? One day limit example:
First create sitemap just for the ones from today's midnight
A second more large one containing URLs from today's midnight backwards.
Too much content
Is the number of URLs exceeding the limits of sitemaps?
Surpass the sitemap limits creating a larger sitemap index with more sitemaps subdividing URLs by content type, categories, time, or any other logical criteria.
Sitemap files creation
For fresh content URLs make sitemaps dynamically updated on demand, it will consume few resources from server.
For not so fresh URLs at big sitemaps files just a cron job or similar when required based on your decision to distinguish what is fresh. It can be done in low traffic hours for example and server won't suffer so much.

Some things to take in acount

Use <lastmod> tag specially at sitemaps indexes to let the search engines know how fresh are the changes.

List only available URLs, evident but sometimes missed. Rand Fishkin tells you several options to deal with expired content (number 2 my favourite).

Internal search engine driven sites: I would not create URLs for user searches they can be very inconsistent. Just structure/categories and content pages.

If the website can be included on Google News there are specific tags for the sitemap, use them. Warning, no URLs olther than 72 hours listed in sitemaps for news sites.

Do your sitemap submission thing

Allways ad the path at robots.txt with a line like this
Sitemap: http://www.example.org/sitemap.xml

Google
Use Webmastertools to submit the sitemap

Yahoo.com http://developer.yahoo.com/search/
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://example.org/sitemap.xml

Live Search / Bing http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://example.org/sitemap.xml

Ask.com
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://example.org/sitemap.xml

As usual:
Any comment to this sitemaps strategy?
Did I missed something or am I completely wrong?

Dynamic nofollow for fine siloing

May 18, 2009

Having a clear web structure and make the search engines perfectly understand it is one the things I believe as fundamental for a good SEO.

I wrote about the multi categories website structure issue as a first step but let's go ahead playing a bit with nofollow technique, PageRank sculpting and siloing concepts.

Two quotes in one to start

Nofollow attribute is a mechanism that gives the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity, said Matt Cutts
and point it in the very best directions, added Rand Fishkin

PageRank sculpting is about the right way to use the nofollow attribute at internal link structure to let the PageRank flow the under control the way you want so a nice way to make your content structure crystal clear as mentioned before.

Anyhow, a wrong nofollow policy can hurt your rankings but Rand explained few days ago the Dangers of Nofollow. First check the video for better understanding what we are talking about.

Internal link structure

A quick look at any regular web site will draw the typical structure: home, categories (navigation menu), content under categories and what we'll call service pages as contact page, about, sitemap, legal advice and so.

At any page in any level there are links to the rest of categories through the menu and the service pages. This creates a complex net of internal linking without any order of relevance. The consequences are what we are hardly trying to avoid:

A very confusing content structure for search engines
Vertical hierarchy of content or siloing idea disappear completely

The solution here is use nofollow but in a dynamic website things change from page to page and we need some code to distribute nofollow attributes as required or it won't work as desired.

Somehow the page where you are in a certain moment has to know where it is placed inside the general sitemap and code should apply nofollow to some of the links depending on the circumstances of that page.

As I code my own sites it is easy to me implement this technique but for those using Wordpress quite sure there must be a plugin doing something similar. Anybody knows about?

Some diagrams to explain it better.

Home page level links

Basically at home level you want to keep all the paths free of obstacles so all of them are followed.

Links at categories level

Here we start applying some rules:

Service pages are nofollowed, about, contact, sitemap for example
Links to the rest of categories are nofollowed
Links to content pages under the actual category are followed

This will keep some verticality at structure strengthening and preserving theme siloing.

Content level links

Again:

Service pages are nofollowed
Links to other categories but the actual one are nofollowed

Some more rules

If there are subcategories same concept must be applied
Link to home is always followed to keep linkjuice circulating internally from bottom to top
If there is a logo leading users to home page and a text link doing the same always nofollow one of them.
External links: do follow the ones adding value to content, nofollow the rest.

Live example of dynamic nofollowing for a perfect siloing

In the case you need a live example of this dynamic nofollowing idea, please, install the Nofollow display Greasemonkey script for Firefox and navigate this blog taking a look at top right links and menu ones. You will see it in action.

Any thought you would like to share?

Browser icon set for SEO, SEM, IA infographics

May 09, 2009

Sooner or later you will need some nice graphic to illustrate your presentations, consultancy documents or workshops.

Sure you saw or used any of the beautiful infographics made by Elliance. This company offering SEO services also create the best and well known SEM diagrams, what they call 'Search illustrated'.

Yes Lord, I am guilty of including them in my presentations and any other kind of SEO documents but not only that, I have remixed, copy & paste, resize & re-coloured, add, subtract and modify a bit or the whole one.

Oh Lord, I must confess, copyleft concept runs trough my veins and I will assume my punishment so instead keep on infringing Elliance infographics copyright I made a browser icon set under Creative Commons license ready to download, use and reuse as you please.

In fact it is not a graphic telling something it is just a resource for you to create your own SEO, SEM, web information architecture diagrams. Fell free to squeeze it to the max, be creative.

It is the base from I create the graphics you can see at this blog. I also pay attention images or diagrams as part of content.

Here you have it, play with its layers to make it the way you need. As soon as I improve it I'll make the new versions available.

Download the Browser icon set for SEO, SEM, IA infographics (PDF format)

Something you think I missed? Any idea to collaborate with? Drop me a line, glad to hear your opinion if this helps to make it better.

This is just a sample of what you can easy make with it:

Snippets changing at search results

Apr 30, 2009

At SERPs, Search engine results pages, the dark blue title (and link to site) of results is followed by a few lines of text. This is called snippet.

Usually the text you place at the meta description tag is what Google shows there when your page appear at SERPs. This factor is got a moderate importance but we have to pay attention to it, of course.

Having unique meta description for every page tells search engines somehow that we care about the quality of our site and how our pages are presented at their SERPs. The purpose of snippet is double:

Inform, give the user a short descriptive idea of what the page is about
Convince, make them clicking at the link leading to your page and not at the competence ones. A short call to action that helps tilting the balance in your favour

Snippets in practice

Quite easy, the text at your meta description tags goes to SEPRs. Writing good meta descriptions is an art but this is another story.

If the meta tag is empty Google will try to get something relevant to show, selecting a piece of the body text, DMOZ data if any, whatever. Matt Cutts explains how this goes here (sound is awful and promoting the shops selling the worst coffee in the world is a crime but Interesting video anyway).

No 100% control, sometimes bad sometimes good

They recognise to be making changes from time to time to improve this specific part of their service, Google result pages search refinements they say.

This is the description of one of the pages at this blog:
<meta name="description" content="Useless lines before content in Html are wasting time for search engines to evaluate the relevancy of your site. Keep them to minimum and happy indexing!" />

This is how it should be displayed at SERPs

but this is the real one actually

Why this difference?

Google does not trust meta descriptions 100% and is always trying to improve them doing its stuff. In this case article date is placed at the beginning of the snippet and put away part of my text :(

Interesting what big G says about:

The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or by line information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise.

The result in my opinion is worst, date is not important here but here they go and they have the right to do it.

Second reason is html code on page. Check this snapshot for this page at Google's cache:

From top to bottom the date is before the content and it is recognised as a date so my code is helping to make it worst I guess.

Two things I am going to do. First tweak the code of my blog to make the relevant text appear first in html order and second, change the removed part of meta description attempting to make it more attractive for Google. Let's see what happen.

Dynamic changes in snippets

I saw at Analytics someone arrived to this blog searching for 'google site verification html file versus meta tag which is better' so I performed the same search and this is how it appeared at SERPS

Words of the query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold is not new but notice that text snippet is completely changed for better matching the query what is very kind from Google. This behaviour was announced at googleblog a moth ago.

In conclusion, monitor your site snippets and take the required actions to keep them as attractive as possible.

Can you write meta descriptions at your CMS?

Along all my years programming websites I've been gutting as a surgeon as many open source CMSs as possible and as SEO consultant I review for customers their CMS in every project to check how ready are to easy working SEO aspects and recommending changes to improve them.

Find and install the required plugins or extensions for your preferred content management system to make your life easy while working fundamental aspects of SEO on page.

As I build my own CMSs here is an illustrative screen shot of the SEO part of it and how it is integrated with the rest editing options.

A SERPs simulator is integrated what makes it very easy and obvious specially for customers not knowing the importance of it all.

Multi categories website structure. Who needs the canonical tag?

Apr 25, 2009

Last February mayor search engines announced the support of the new canonical tag and everybody went mad.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.web.com/original-content.html" />

Ok, Ok. I recognise it can help in many cases to deal with the infamous duplicated content issue but as I love to do things right from the very beginning, best way to achieve perfect results, the conclusion is crystal clear for me: if you have to do profuse use of canonical tag you have a web structure problem.

101% the origin of this problem is having pages under several different categories what produces duplicated content. Example of same item under different criteria:

mammal
cetaceans
dolphin

carnivores
marine
dolphin

Indexing a site is not collecting all its words to put them chaotically in a bag, search engines try to understand, also through site structure, how they are organised, which is the main subject according to this structure, subcategories related and so. Keep it in mind, it is important.

Multi category structures problem

Now imagine you have to SEO an online store selling mobiles. We have the same device under three or more different categories and the possible URLs. Let's call our mobile device 'C-3Pphone' and may the Force be with you.

Mobiles
C-3Pphone
�

By type
    Smartphones
       C-3Pphone
       �

By OS
   Open source
      C-3Pphone
      �

Note we have a 'file list > file' model or
'category - items list > item' or
'mobiles list > mobile' model, an example:
phone.com/moviles/ (items list linking to item content pages)
phone.com/moviles/c-3pphone.html (item content page)

Duplicated pages, canonical solution

This could be the first idea lighting a bulb in your head, having the same page c-3pphone.html at the end of the different categories or subcategories that equals to three different URLs for the same content, the mobile description.

phone.com/mobiles/c-3pphone.html (content page)
phone.com/mobile-type/smartphones/c-3pphone.html (content page)
phone.com/operative-system/open-source/c-3pphone.html (content page)

Then use canonical tag for all of then but the one we decide is the most important.

Why I don't like the canonical tag solution

Add an extra headache for programmer
Structure seems a bit fuzzy to search engines finding same content under different categories
Canonical should help to fade the relevance of all the copies but it is a patch
Link strength coming from previous pages in structure is not concentrating on the main content page

Single page, simple linking solution

Second approach: no content page duplicates. What? Yes, just a single brave and bold one under the main category. From any other secondary category pages a direct link to that page. Siloing idea comes to play here.

phone.com/mobiles/c-3pphone.html (content page)
phone.com/mobile-type/smartphones/ (list page linking to c-3pphone.html)
phone.com/mobile-operative-system/open-source/ (list page linking to c-3pphone.html)

Benefits of single page simple linking solution

Less pages to maintain, from SEO and technical point of view
Content concentration what makes main subject more relevant
Link love concentrated in the content page what helps it rank better

Going further: subpages

But the online store selling mobiles example can not be so simple, sure you want to relate the page describing the mobile device C-3Pphone with its accessories, a product subpage for any of its characteristics, it is also a smartphone and its operative system is open source. Where to place these sub pages? Where the links to them should come from?

The idea here is to get the links to all the mobile page subpages (Type, SO, related accessories�) from their correspondent secondary categories, something like:
phone.com/mobiles/c-3pphone/ (main content page)
phone.com/mobiles/c-3pphone/open-source-so.html (content sub page)
phone.com/mobiles/c-3pphone/smartphone.html (content sub page)