Free SEO Articles

How can I find the sites hosted on a given IP address?

Here is a quick little Bing trick that can often come in very useful for webmaster and SEMs when sleuthing on the Internet. Frequently, it is nice to know which others sites are hosted on the same IP address of a given site. Some sites provide this information as a premium or subscription service, and call it a reverse lookup. However, Microsoft’s Bing search engine offers it for free and easily.

If you have the IP address of the server you wish to query then head on over to Bing and in the search field type:

ip:www.xxx.yyy.zzz

replacing www.xxx.yyy.zzz with the IP address. Voila, Bing will return a list of sites hosted on the same IP address.

If you do not know the IP address of the site then use a whois lookup (which are freely available on the Internet or with inherent operating system tools.) Then  head back over to Bing to complete the lookup.

Reflections on Article Marketing

There are numerous link building strategies, and I can claim some success using some of them. However, one method that has been a little less successful for me is article marketing. Perhaps I have really only tested the water using this technique, and applying myself to it in a more concerted manner might yield better results.

Here, I wanted discuss briefly my methods and to present a few results.

There are many article directories, but there seems to be clear divisions in their quality, reach and subsequent traffic prospects.

For my first attempt at article submission, I used an automated tool to submit an article to several hundred article directories. Some of the directories were high-ranking and considered larger players, but many were smaller. I saw a subsequent spike in traffic which plateau’d quickly and several links after a month or so. This was over year ago now and the links seem to have disappeared off the radar now. Although this method offers a quick and easy way to submit to many directories, it does not yield easily measurable results because, among other reasons, it is not easy tell when, or even if, your article is accepted.

Shortly after, I decided to concentrate on two of the larger article directories, namely ezine articles and go articles. In the following 6 months, I wrote and submitted 12 solid articles to ezine. So far, these have received 5195 views leading to 155 URL clicks and 730 profile views.

By using selective text searches in Google, it appears that my articles have been used by others and the links have been left in. However, these articles appear exclusively on rel=nofollow pages, so the benefits in terms of link building are of limited scope.

If I were to scale this operation up 10-fold, the effort would have gotten me ~1500 URL clicks assuming linear scaling. I am unsure if this is worth the effort.

Go Articles seems to operate a little differently in that most of the articles are distributed via email. I wrote and submitted two articles to Go Articles and so far they have received a total 350 views. Using the same method above (selective text searches via Google) I see they too have been used, but again appear on rel=nofollow pages and therefore yield no link building benefit.

Is article marketing of this nature worth the effort?

Leveraging Twitter for Search Traffic

These days, social networking sites are legion. They come and go regularly, each, it seems, is destined to have it’s proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Currently Twitter is the ‘in-thing’. It’s a bit like American TV – bite-sized snippets that do not require too much thought to create or, on the receiving end, digest. 140 characters maximum, the TV equivalent of the time between commercial breaks.

The increasing popularity of Twitter has attracted all sorts of branded entities to try to get their wares before your nose. So how is this best done via Twitter?  Here are a few suggestions for leveraging Twitter for SEO and search traffic.

First, choose your username wisely. In fact, choose several usernames wisely if necessary. Try to incorporate your target keyphrases or brand name. Remember, this is the string Twitter uses in your page URL, and moreoever, the string Twitter will insert in to your page’s HTML <title> tag.This can be changed later, through the account settings page.

Second, ensure you optimize your profile’s bio. This is used as your Twitter page’s HTML meta description tag. Although this may not be an influential ranking parameter, it is exposed in search engine results so something compelling and eye catching may lead to increased SE-traffic.

Third, tweet regularly and build followers in an organic, humanistic manner. Mass adders take the back work out of acquiring followers, but they usually only get you other robot accounts as followers which is not a good target audience.

Fourth, use keyword-rich openings to your tweets. Often the first few words of a tweet are exposed in search engine results.

Fifth, seek out your niches. Seek out the larger players in your niche and see who is following them, and follow them. In one niche I have acquired 400+ followers simply by being noticed by other player in the niche.

Sixth, include some linkage, although do not go overboard on this one. Try to introduce linkage in a natural manner and with succinct, keyword-rich descriptions. Blog posts are an obvious target for linkage by using one of the many WP to Twitter auto updaters.

Seventh, link back to your profile at every natural given opportunity. In particular, choose your link anchor appropriately (your name, or brand name or chosen target keyphrase etc.)

Eighth, try to gain popular followers. Your profile can gain link juice through internal linking from popular, or high Pr, Twitter pages.

These are some of numerous ways in which to leverage Twitter for additional organic traffic. Some are common to other quarters of SEO activity. Hopefully, following these you will gain a little more traffic to your site via Twitter.

Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance

Not necessarily cutting edge news, but both the European Union and U.S. Department of Justice recently granted permission to Yahoo! and Microsoft to commence a joint venture where essentially Microsoft will power both Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! advertising network. While it is likely to take many months before the benefits of the alliance reach front end customers, it is great news for anyone who believes Google needs a stronger competitor to keep it on its toes. The Yahoo! Search Marketing blog emphasizes Yahoo!’s commitment to a seamless transition and although it would like to see a migration at least in the US to happen before the 2010 holiday season, it may decide to defer to the 2011 holiday season.

The alliance promises greater reach for advertisers (some sources quote a potential rise by 62% in search volume than on Yahoo! alone), the ability to manage all campaigns through the Microsoft AdCenter interface and accelerated development of new search features among other features.

After installing WordPress

Over the last five years, I must have installed the blogging engine WordPress over 500 times. Which means I have been through the standard post-installation rigmarole 500 times. Although the installation is a relatively quick and painless endeavour these days, perhaps 3 minutes at most, the post-installation drama can take 20 minutes, so a conservative estimate of the time the WordPress installation routine and I have spent intimately entwined over the last five years would be, oh, 11500 minutes, or about 192 hours, or no less than 8 days solid!

Although this procedure has become second nature to me, and has changed very little over the years, this morning, as I inhaled my tea amid the breakfast rush, I thought why not post a reference list here.

We all have our own personal WordPress tweaks and changes, just as we have all standardized on our own series of favourite plug-ins, but here I hope to capture the essentials from an optimization perspective so that anyone installing WordPress can run through the list and within 15-20 minutes have a robustly optimized blog. If you have any additional post-installation optimization tips then feel free to add them in the comments section after the main list.

• choose an appropriate blog tagline; make it relevant to your blog content;
• adjust your permalinks structure;
• install the platinum SEO pack – this contains many standard SEO tweaks, but perhaps most importantly allows you to include unique customized page titles and descriptions for each of your posts and pages;
• add base categories and change the standard ‘uncategorized’ category to something more relevant;
• upload and install a clean, optmized theme;
• customize your ‘About’ page;
• set up a contact page; you could use one of several contact form plug-ins to do this;
• install and configure the XML sitemaps plug-in; submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central;
• optimize your ping list; this is an ongoing tweak but certainly something you should consider early on in the life of your blog;
• remove the default “Hello World” post;
• set up post archives; there are several plug-ins that allow you do to this; alternatively, consider an HTML sitemap for your blog, again there are several plug-ins to help with this;
• install SEO smart links in order to help with internal linking;
• install RJ Marsh’s post-plugin library along with “Popular Posts”, “Similar Posts”, “Recent Posts” and “Recent Comments”; again, these will help with internal linking and expose a greater amount of your content to a viewer landing from a search engine;

The scope of this list is confined to optimization tweaks for a fresh installation of WordPress. There are plenty of other security and performance related tweaks that you might consider too, but perhaps they will form the basis of a post another day.

Image SEO Best Practices

We touched briefly on the ways to increase blog traffic by using relevant images within posts in a previous post. This is a great method of generating additional traffic to your site from search engine image searches. However, how can the inclusion of images contribute to a page’s overall SEO profile? And, moreover, what are some of the recognized best practices when including images on web pages?

Images can be optimizes for various entities (for example, viewers, search-engines, social networking use etc.) which can be said of all forms of page optimization. Here, we concern ourselves with optimization for users/viewers, and for search-engines. There is much common ground, but also aspects unique to each.

Here is a broad checklist for image optimization:

• image relevance – ensure images are relevant to the page content;
• image format – usually jpg and png format; some SEO commentary has suggested a slight bias towards png format in Google image search although this appears not to have been substantiated;
• page title correspondence – matching the page title to the image title and content;
• image title – the image title (or raw file-name) can permit the use of extra keywords; do not waste the opportunity to call an image gone-with-the-wind-cover-scan.jpg instead of DC112092.jpg;
• image alt text – use keyword-rich image alt tags although avoid over-stuffing;
• image size – keep images between reasonable size limits;
• captioning - using captions in WordPress postings seems to increase relevance, though I have yet to fully substantiate this claim;
• keyword vicinity – using your target keywords for the image in the same block level HTML element as the image seems to increase relevance; again, I have yet to fully substantiate this;

The web is a very visual medium, therefore every opportunity should be taken to improve the overall user experience of your site with the appropriate use of images.

The Relevance of Directory Submissions

Submitting to directories has always been an important technique for off site SEO.  However, over the last 18 months several measures seem to have been introduced to prompt renewed awareness when submitting to directories for offsite SEO purposes.

Back in the good old days, as little as 12 months ago, it was possible to compete on mid- to low-high competitive keywords/keyphrases by simply performing a sustained directory submission run of about 1200 directories using your particular keyword/keyphrase as the link anchor.  Within 1-2 weeks you’d be starting to show in the SERPs for your keyword, and usually within a further 2 weeks would see progress in the SERPs.

However, things have changed. Google have wised up to the idea.  It seems the above method still does have an effect, however not the resounding impact it once had, and the effects are temporal. Unless the directory in question has some clout (that is, shows signs of being ‘valued’ by Google by frequently updated cache data etc.) these links soon disappear off the radar.

These days, directory submissions seem to be more about quality than quantity. Gaining a link from a dozen quality directories over the space of 4-6 months seems to be a better time investment than 1200 links from relatively nondescript directories.

If you do wish to perform the former method of bulk submissions, then submitting at a sustained rate over a prolonged period seems to offer up the best results; for example, 50 directories per week for a year rather than 1500 over a two week period.

Although they still have their place in the SEO arsenal, as the paradigm of SE algorithms has shifted from quantity to quality of backlinks, link directories are now less relevant method of increasing SERPs.

Using Images in Blogs Posts to Increase Traffic

Image Search Traffic

Although most blogs are primarily text offerings, consistent use of appropriate images in posts can generate a non-trivial volume of traffic. In the scramble for traffic in a competitive blogosphere, it might be considered indifferent to disregard traffic from image searches.

Recently, I saw an immediate 10% increase in traffic volume to one of my blogs simply by including an image in each post. The images were specific to the content of the post, but remained general enough to offer some cross-niche appeal. Likewise, they were images I had created, or photos I had taken, and therefore were not available elsewhere.

When using images on a blog, keep in mind the following SEO best practices in order to maximize potential traffic gains:

• use keyword-rich alt tags to describe the image;
• use a keyword-rich name for the image file;
• try to use original images – images available elsewhere in the ‘net can be seen elsewhere;
• use images relevant to the blog post;
• if possible, use an image relevant to the title of the blog post – this can help improve ranking in image searches;

myBB Forum SEO

I am sure you’ve tried it! I know I have, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbour’s cat has, at some point in one of its 9 lives, even attempted it. Yes, folks, what I am talking about is starting an Internet forum. There are almost as many Internet forums as there are Internet users, but despite this apparent glut of competitors, how can you improve your site’s SE profile and try to gain an edge over your competitors in terms of SEO?

I have used vBulletin, SMF, phpbb, punbb and mybb in the past and after significant use of each, I have decided to standardize my forum building efforts on myBB. To me, it is straightforward and intuitive to manage and customize, has a reasonable range of, and support for, plug-ins and themes, and the free support community always do their best to help out (even if in a markedly high school-ish way at times.)

So I want to talk a little about ways in which we can improve onsite SEO for myBB forums.

There are several useful plug-ins that help with myBB SEO. The first, and most obvious, is the Google SEO mod which incorporates suggestions from Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The mod requires a little effort to get working flawlessly, but all credit to the author for including several SEO features in to a single mod. This plug-in will enable keyword-rich search-engine friendly URLs, dynamic XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, dynamic META tags generation, automatic 301 redirects for broken URLS and a few smaller tweaks.

In order to avoid PR leakage (and to deter forum spammers), it is a good idea to install an additional plug-in that appends the rel=nofollow attribute to all in post links.

Similar to the above, any extraneous links included in your myBB templates should be amended to rel=nofollow links. Again, this will help prevent PR leakage. You can also use a robots.txt file to prevent search engine spiders unnecessarily visiting and subsequently indexing pages that should not appear in the index – these may include your login page, standard help files, member list and more.

Signatures are always of some concern to forum owners. I tend to tackle this by introducing a clear statement about when signatures are allowed. I use a plug-in to disable signature by default. In order to qualify for a  standard signature, a user must make 10 good posts. The standard signature has rel=nofollow appended to all outbound links. When a user has made 25 or more good posts, I remove the rel=nofollow restriction on his/her signature links. Employing this method has allowed me to gain and retain good PR and ranking on many inner pages. There are several signature related plug-ins for myBB. The one I use at the moment is available at myBB Central.

Here, I have tried to provide a broad overview of some of the ways in which to raise the SEO profile of a myBB forum. I will make additional posts on this topic, delving in to more detail on each of the broad points mentioned above.

Long Tail Keywords and Traffic Generation

For many, particularly new site owners in popular niches, being able to compete for chosen keywords or keyphrases is not easily attainable. SEO and search engine ranking is such a dynamic activity that we can never say never, but it remains unlikely for a new site to achieve solid ranking for non-trivial keywords.

New sites, along with many older sites, must compete for keywords that in isolation are trivial and offer a mere trickle in terms of traffic. However, the cumulative traffic from many of these single trivial keyword searches frequently exceeds the traffic from one or more popular keywords. These abundant, but less popular keywords, are frequently referred to as long tail keywords.

Targetting the long tail is niche specific. By their very nature, some niches will have a shorter long-tail than others. Detailed knowledge of trends in your niche, along with a good keyword research tool are your best weapons when developing a strategy to target the long-tail.

Targetting the long tail is also a long-term strategy that should be built up over time. One method I use to good effect in niches that have a shorter long-tail I call the bifurcation method. Here, I begin with an established competing keyword and write and article or two directly about this keyword. Then I think of two closely related keywords and do the same. For each of these two second level keywords I do the same and on and on until I have a multi-layered diagram of keywords and phrases. This way I build a binary tree of relevant keywords I can easily traverse and interlink and have on paper a good conceptual framework for my activities.

Forum owners well aware of the power of the long tail. A quick scan at the statistics of a forum I own indicates 250 trivial keywords each with one or two search-engine referrals for the month of April; this equates to about 500 unique visitors. Likewise for the same month, the principal keyphrase for the forum (which has about 64 K global searches per month) for which this forum ranks on the first page offered up 128 search-engine referrals. This indicates the power of the long-tail.