SEO

Google PageRank is Dead at Last

by Melvin · Oct 11, 2014

We knew it was only a matter of time before Google finally (completely) kills the ever famous toolbar pagerank and it seems to have been validated by a Google employee.

The toolbar PageRank is basically the “Google PageRank” of a page that appears when you have a toolbar or use a tool that shows it. Ranging from 0-10, this metric demonstrates how powerful a page is search-wise. Most websites have a pagerank of 0 to 2 while the big ones like Adobe, Yahoo and Google themselves have a PR of 7 to 9.

The Anatomy of a URL: The Components of an SEO-Effective URL

by Melvin · Sep 23, 2013

This is a guest post by Emma-Julie Fox.

The URL or Uniform Resource Locator is the representation of a website’s server IP address. Instead of an alphanumerical long-tail address that will be impossible for people to quickly recognize, let alone memorize, URLs are designed to be easily recalled and read by Internet users.

SEOmoz.com has an excellent graphic image published in 2009 that clearly shows the parts of the URL and what each component is called.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-cheat-sheet-anatomy-of-a-url

The illustration clearly shows what the components of a URL are. There might be some confusion between the folders/paths and the page titles in the URL. Let the diagonal slash be your guide. The folders/paths are indicated by succession diagonal slashes. The page title is the set of keywords right after the last diagonal slash in the URL.

It is usually a sensible sentence or phrase because it is the actual title of the article or topic discussed in the page. The words are separated by hyphens, sometimes underscores, both of which are usually used in lieu of the spaces between the words in the title.

SEO Concerns in URL Construction

If you recall, there was a time during the 1990s wherein using general words in URLs, particularly in domains, was the smart thing to do. At that time people were still warming up to the Internet and still learning how to use search engines. Instead of searching for keywords alone, many would make the mistake of adding a .com at the end of a query.

This was why it was a clever move to simply use general keywords in the domains because it increases the possibility of appearing first on the SERPs.

At present though, this is considered old-fashioned and no longer valuable for SEO purposes. Internet users now know better. It is now considered tacky to use keywords for the URL of a business website that has a perfectly good-sounding company or brand name. Besides, it only confuses users when they see the header of the website bears a name different from the one they see on the domain.

However, evidence shows that incorporating keywords in the URLs can still give a website more bearing on the SERPs. This leads websites to the following compromise: since it’s not a good idea marketing-wise not to use the brand or company name in the domain, the relevant keywords are therefore delegated to the folders/paths, page titles, and named anchor in the URL. These are the components that can help increase the SEO value of a URL.

So how does one come up with an SEO and user-friendly URL?

1. Buy them from domainers.

Domainers are people or companies that create SEO-friendly domains and sell them to any interested individual or business. Many domainers even develop the URL prior to their purchase, parking it and publishing relevant content on the dummy page. This makes search engines recognize the URL, giving buyers significant leverage for their future SEO campaigns.

Some of the most popular domain sellers are GoDaddy, NameCheap, Name.com and 1and1. You may find cheaper rates at lesser-known sellers that are equally good at their job, like Lawrence Ng’s oversee.net.There are also individual sellers that you can find in domain selling markets, like Sedo, Digital Point Forums, and NamePros.

2. Do a keyword research.

Non-brand domain names start with a very thorough keyword research. If you don’t have a brand name or don’t want to use your company name for your website URL, search for keywords that are commonly used by searchers of your niche. Keep things simple and short so that people can easily remember your website.

3. Follow your sitemap for interior page URLs.

It is customary for all other pages within a website to have lengthy URLs. They are made up of the domain and the folders or navigational links under which they belong. As much as possible, use the folder names in the URL so that page viewers will get the gist of the page’s location by merely looking at the navigational links. This can also help crawlers index newly-published pages more quickly thanks to the logical placement and labeling of the webpages.

4. Use the brand or business/company name.

Using it for a website URL is a smart move as far as branding and SEO is concerned. Coupled with marketing for the products or services offered in the website, people will be able to easily recall brand-oriented URLs.

Branding is closely associated with SEO in the online arena since the goal is basically to become a thought leader—that when people think of your niche or general products and service you can provide, it’s your company or website that they will think of first. By having the brand or company name in the URL, you can simultaneously optimize your website and your brand name.

How to write an SEO-effective URL is another matter that is worthy of its own discussion. The items in this article are merely suggestions on how you can start with choosing/buying/creating a URL.

Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media Inc, a Vancouver based SEOcompany that caters to businesses across North America. If you would like to invite the author to write on your blog too please contact www.pitstopmedia.com.

Using Social Media to Boost your SEO strategy

by Melvin · Feb 28, 2013

This is a guest post by Charles Hammerman

In this rapidly changing online environment, social media plays a very important part in gaining exposure. News spreads like wildfire throughout the main outlets, and there’s no better way of getting a message across to a large number of new people. It wasn’t long ago that SEO and social media were two pretty different things, but recently they seem to have blended in to one online marketing strategy.

For this reason, utilizing social media is essential for any aspiring business. Nowadays, half of the world’s population is on websites such as Twitter and Facebook, and it hasn’t taken long for the world’s biggest brands to reach out across the globe and gain a whole new customer base. There are countless stories of social media posts from companies going viral.

This is an example of why social media is so important, and why it should not be discounted from a company’s SEO strategy. In fact, more and more companies have now begun to make use of social media in order to bring about an increase in the number of followers, and visibility that their pages get. If you browse Twitter, you’ll find famous companies have their own accounts which provide live updates of what’s happening with the business, and what’s new. This is the kind of thing you should incorporate.

Getting it Right

If you are looking to use social media to your own advantage and boost your SEO strategy, it is important for you to make sure that you follow this few steps.

Firstly, it is important for you to create a plan of what you are going to do during your social media campaign. Gaining popularity on a social media website is not necessarily difficult, but making sure that you maintain the level is what’s really important. This is where some companies may fail.
It is important for you to make sure that you create accounts on all of the major social media websites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and create an identity for you and your brand. Whatever you share on one of your pages should also be done so on the other pages, which helps in creating a unified identity for your business.
The most important thing that you must keep in mind during your social media campaigns is to always treat your visitors well. The real point of social media is to interact with the people, to talk to them and gauge their reactions and opinion. It would be a poor decision to ignore what your users are saying. Try to interact with your readers and viewers as much as possible.
The final thing to make sure you get right is the content itself. It’s all very well posting regular updates, but if you don’t have anything good to say, then nothing is going to get shared, which means that you won’t boost your online presence at all. Be as interesting as possible, and capitalize on breaking news that’s relevant you your industry or niche.

Charles Hammerman is an international SEO and social media marketing specialist based in the UK.

Maximizing Search Traffic For Old Blog Posts

by Melvin · Apr 15, 2012

If there’s a type of blog entry that is potentially getting traffic from search right now, its undoubtedly your old blog entries. As we all know, search engine traffic takes time. No one really writes or puts out something, and then expects search engines to start sending traffic to that content as soon as its published. That’s why its really more long term and that I always tell people to just do the basic search stuff, but not get too obsessed with it. In short, do other online marketing stuff as well and don’t really on Google.

In this blog entry I would just like to share some ~~rambling~~ stuff regarding search engine traffic here in this blog. As you all know, I haven’t been blogging actively for quite a while now and in fact I’m not that much into the game anymore. So understandably, the traffic that this site is getting is considerably lower than ever. And because of that, its easier for me to spot the increased search traffic that I started getting.

While the traffic increase for the past 18 months is not massive, its very evident that I started getting more traffic from search and that comes with me not posting that much during the period of increase. And the traffic is still consistent as of this writing. More search traffic when not posting too much, amazing? No.

The truth is even if I am posting consistently, I would still get the same (or more) amount of search traffic because the content that are getting the hits from search are old blog entries.

Now I’m not really a search guy. I wrote before about writing for search engines but I don’t mostly work with doing SEO stuff. I love putting out content and engaging but I’m not a search guy. However, the reason I started getting more search traffic is quite a bit surprising.

About 3 years ago I wrote a cheesy post about the best birthday gift for the girl that I love (or more accurately I have a crush with). That was college days so please understand that I was dealing with puppy loves and whatnot. :p. Now, I noticed that I started getting like 10-20 hits a day regarding keywords related to that blog entry. I was obviously surprised because the article was not written in a way that one would expect it would get traffic.

So when I got convinced that I had to do something to get better traffic, I studied the Analytics and Webmaster Central data even more. And then I edited the said blog entry to try to ‘massage’ it more and eventually get better rankings. I’m not really able to follow it closely because of work but for the past 2 months, I realized that I’m now getting 30-50 hits from search from keywords that are related to that blog entry. It was fascinating because I never really expected it to get traffic from search at all. Also, its on the first page of Google right now when you search for ‘best birthday gifts for girls’ which I thought was amazing.

And now there are some other keywords that I never intended to rank for that are ranking well and are getting me some traffic.

Moral Lesson

So what’s the moral lesson of this blog post? The lesson is to never underestimate traffic from search engines. But another is that when you feel like you are starting to get some, don’t be afraid to make modifications to that specific blog post. You have all the data to look at from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central and it reveals almost everything to help you. Do some tweaks and those little tweaks can definitely help.

My stance on not getting too caught up with doing SEO is still the same and I don’t still consider myself as a guy doing search engine optimization primarily but it definitely gives me some things to experiment for now. And getting search traffic and maximizing it is something that I know will be useful in the long run.

How about you? What’s your no.1 tip in maximizing search traffic?

Does Directory Submission Still Work? Get Links Pro Review

by Melvin · Dec 10, 2011

Directory submission used to be one of the more popular link building techniques that people used to boost their search rankings. Back then, doing submissions was a must. However these days, many SEO experts seem to conclude that doing submissions isn’t worth it anymore. But is it really the case?

Well to help us answer that, let’s review Get Links Pro first, a company that does manual directory submissions and also other link building methods.

Get Links Pro Review

As mentioned above, Get Links Pro provides manual directory submissions and other link building services like blog comments, do-follow profile links, article submissions, local citations and etc.

Get Links Pro’s services start at $8 for 50 Social Bookmarks package and go up to $200 for 2000 Directory Submission package. They also provide a monthly type of directory package which costs a walking $25 for 250 monthly directory submissions. The owner told me that this monthly package was more popular than the other ones.

Overall, most of the categories are pretty flexible in which it allows you to choose from a small package up to a big package.

Aside from this, they also provide a combination of all of their services and this falls into their link building services. For this, they combined 5 different types of methods which help ensure diversity in link building profile. For example their ‘fantastic package’ provides 100 directory submissions, 50 article submissions, 15 profile links and 5 dofollow comments at an affordable price of $39. The higher end of these combinations is called the ‘Incredible Package’ which costs $1,455.

If you decide to go this route, I would suggest picking what’s suitable for you for the immediate moment. They have 9 different combinations for the link building service that you can choose from so if you’re just a small startup then obviously the cheaper one could work well for you. This is also ideal since links are coming from multiple sources which mean it’s much more diversified and less spammy.

Here is a screenshot of some of their link building packages:

Get Links Pro Website

If you arrive at Get Links Pro website, you can see that it’s a pretty simple and neat site. The navigation is good although it could be a bit confusing at the start. For example, you would initially think that they only do manual directory submissions since it’s the primary description on their site. Also, I think some packages could be named better like a ‘fantastic package’ for instance could be named as a ‘beginner package’ or anything that describes it better.

Another thing worth-noting is that most of their category-specific packages are not done efficiently (in my opinion). You will have to scan through a long generic pack of text before you can see the pricing and the content of the package. I definitely think that the pricing and packages should be the first thing seen when someone goes in there. The text can then come below that (like their link building services page. 😉 ). Lastly, I don’t think people would want to read a long text so it probably wouldn’t harm if they decrease the text, and get straight to the point.

Support and Other Miscelllaneous Stuff

As far as support, I think they’re just doing it fine as they have 5 “I’m online” live chats. Yes 5 different live chats. Seriously I’ve never seen any service or website that lists 5 different live chats that you could talk to so as long as these chats are for real, then I think it’s a big plus on their part.

Aside from that, I think everything is fine on their end. They have lots of pages (FAQ’s, About, Affiliates, etc.) so if you really want to know them more and the services that they provide, you can definitely spend some time reading about them first. Lastly, I think the URL structure on some of the pages is quite funny as it seems to be ‘rerouting’ some pages to a temporary link or something. A good example would be clicking on their logo (i.e. has some index.php?’parameters’ instead of just the main index url).

Conclusion

So is it still worth spending money on manual submissions? Specifically companies like Get Links Pro? My personal opinion is that directory submissions are still useful and if done correctly, it can still create a diversified link profile that can rank you well for certain key terms. In fact, I know some people that rely on this alone in getting their niche sites up in the search engines. But again, submissions must be done correctly and I don’t think there’s anything better than manual submissions like what Get Links Pro does.

So if you want to get ranked and you don’t have time to do it yourself, check out Get Links Pro. I’m sure there would be a package there that would suit your needs.

Why a Blog is your Best Marketing Asset

by Melvin · Oct 10, 2011

I have been blogging for about 4 years now and it still never ceases to amaze me how a blog can be utilized as a powerful marketing asset for whatever you’re doing. For example, this blog alone has helped me do a ton of things just because I write here. It has that leverage that gives you a pretty good advantage over your other competitors in your market. Aside from that it allows you to do direct response marketing better than ever since you’re hardly pitching them anything but rather just giving out good content.

Anyway there’s a huge contest over at SEM-GROUP in w/c I am currently participating right now. My writing entry to that contest is entitled Your Best Internet Marketing Asset – Your Blog. It’s a detailed blog post about what I said above. It also tackles how blogging alone covers all of the other components that you probably already need in order to succeed in marketing your business online. Again you can help me win the contest by reading my contest entry.

It’s not a traffic-getting contest actually but rather just a writing contest. However, its one of those rarely lengthy blog entries that I usually do and I think you can benefit greatly from that.

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

Contest Media Partner

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Vertical Measures Internet Marketing Services

Whitney Michael Segura Greenhouses for Sale

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Ana Hoffman – Traffic Generation Cafe Web Traffic

James Brown James Brown

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Understand Technology with TechFume

The Tech Blog TechnoZeast

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Sales Nexus online CRM

SEO Prize Sponsors

David Harry A full years membership at SEO Dojo, a value of $250.SEO Training Dojo

Lifetime membership to: My Blog Guest. MyBlogGuest.com is the free guest post exchange community where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

Link-Assistant.Com SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) SEO tools

SEMrush.com – the best tool to spy on your competitors ($210 value) www.semrush.com

3 month Pro subscription to Raven Internet Marketing Tools ($297 value) Raven Internet Marketing Tools

Is a Uniform Domain Name a Requirement in Blogging?

by Melvin · Aug 31, 2011

As newbies in blogging we are constantly taught that its a good practice to match the domain name of our blog to the market that we are into. So for instance if I’m blogging about tulips flowers, my domain name should be something like ‘pinktulipflowers.com’ or ‘tulipsflowersguide.com’. I can’t choose a domain name like ‘girlsoverflowers.com’ or ilovenmsname.com’. Yeah, I know the sample url’s are kinda creepy. =p

But does it really mean we need a uniform domain name or something that’s related to our niche? I myself is not a pretty good example as far as this is concern. This blog for instance is an internet marketing/blogging blog. But the domain name is too personal as it has my name on the domain name. Lots of my friends even think that melvinblog.com is nothing but a personal blog and people don’t initially realize that this blog is not really a personal blog.

Another concern is the branding. A blog like ‘internetmarketingsecrets.com’ can more likely be recognized as a marketing blog rather than a blog like [myfullname.com]. Of course this could also play a psychological role to your potential visitors. Imagine, a first time visitor comes in to your site because he was directed their by Google. And then he saw that the domain name is somehow very far from the topic he’s looking into. What do you think would be his reaction/response?

The last factor is the search engine rankings. This isn’t so much of an issue when you’re blogging in a general niche like ‘making money online’ or ‘buying cars’ or ‘insurance’. However it could play a crucial factor when you’re into microniches. Example is when you’re targeting your audience locally. A site like seomalaysia.com has a better chance of ranking better than a site called raneshabdulrahman.com when it comes to providing search optimization services to Malaysia. Or maybe a very small yet targeted niche like ‘beta fish’ in which most audience if not all come from search engines. That would then become a much bigger factor.

Defying the Odds

What I mentioned above are mostly the general rules that most people will really give you especially when you’re just starting out. And to be honest that should really be it. It doesn’t seem to make that much sense to have an unrelated domain name to the niche that you’re blogging to right?

But still we have lots of sites to reference to as far as not following that rule when it comes to naming domain names. Good examples in this niches are johnchow.com, shoemoney.com, entrepreneurs-journey.com, davidrisley.com. All of which have horrible (unrelated) domain names to begin with but they’re definitely the top guns when it comes to making money internet marketing kind of niche.And then we have crazier domains like icanhazcheezburger and a whole lot more raking in tremendous amount of search traffic without following the so called ‘standards’ with on-page optimization.

So I’ll leave it up to you. Honestly, I know people are obsessed with blogging and naming their blogs after them (or their nickname) so that might be the reason why. But considering a uniform domain name is still should be an option and besides, there’s really no harm in trying to be ‘uniformed’. What say you?