SEOmoz recently launched a new link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool called Open Site Explorer. While I find the tool to be useful there is nothing really revolutionary about the tool. However, I do like using the tool compared to what I’ve been using before simply because of the clear presentation of results, which makes for a good quick check.

To be honest I haven’t really twiddled much with the Open Site Explorer so there’s likely hidden gems I haven’t found. To remedy my lack of knowledge on the other possible uses I will be attending the FREE Webinar SEOmoz is giving Thursday. There will be actually 2 webinars to be held on Wednesday, January 27th at 2:00PM (PST), and Thursday, January 28th at 10:00AM (PST). To join the Open Site Explorer webinar register here.  I am not sure if there’s still a slot for the Wednesday webinar but just a few minutes ago I registered for the Thursday webinar and got in. I suggest you join to learn the ins and outs without having to even strain a bit figuring out what you can possibly do. In my experience webinars like these where half the time is spent in Q&A can yield gems in terms of tips from the experts.

If you’re booked for both schedules or just didn’t get a slot you can view the webinar later in SEOmoz’s webinars page.

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When it comes to getting incoming links, let alone actual conversions, you should not leave any stone unturned. Take nothing for granted. This is why I’m passing on info from “drummerboy9000” of SEOmoz. In his post, which was good enough to get “promoted” from YOUmoz to SEOmoz’s main blog, he recommended spending some time answering relevant questions on Yahoo! Answers.

Drummerboy9000 (Sorry I don’t know his real name) backed up his recommendation by comparing the conversion rate for his PPC campaign versus Yahoo! Answers, with results that wasn’t too favorable for Yahoo! Answers. His results are showed that his PPC campaign had a total conversion rate of about 11.73% while his Yahoo! Answers links conversion rate was 5.52%. However he then went further by comparing the COST PER CONVERSION (see figure below).

As you can see Yahoo! Answers is actually more cost effective. I don’t suggest that you go ahead and exchange your PPC campaign and concentrate your efforts on Yahoo! Answers because remember you still have to factor in the actual number of traffic driven to you by both methods for the percentages to matter. What I’m driving at isn’t that you shouldn’t miss out on the cost-effective conversion traffic that Yahoo! Answers can give.

So if you have time in your hands get to answering people’s questions. Just remember to give relevant answers and leave a link only when they really will get useful info from your site. Get spammy and you can expect conversion rates to be much lower than the ones drummerboy9000 gave.

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Early this month Google announced a new user agent for the robots.txt file to direct the Google News bot on what to do. The new user agent, Googlebot-News, is used just the same way you use the Googlebot agent. To make things clear though here are some of the examples given by Google on the use of the new user agent.

Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

According to Google “The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.” Note that you can do this for any specific page.

Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

In this case since Googlebot is disallowed and there is no specific instruction on what to do with Google News, the news bot will play it safe and simply not crawl the page.

Happy New Year!

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Got any questions on SEO? Who better to answer them than Matt Cutts?

If you have questions that need answering head on to the Google Moderator Video Questions Page that Matt Cutts created early this month and submit it there.

Note though that Moderator screens questions and won’t accept your question if it is already too similar to another question submitted. If this happens just vote for the question similar to yours and cross your fingers that others will find the question relevant as well making it popular enough for Matt Cutts to take notice. Matt Cutts will also answer questions he finds interesting; whether popular or not and SEO-related or not.

Matt Cutts will be answering questions via video. It would make sense if he lumps together similar questions in one video, though for sure he’ll need to record multiple videos. Don’t know either if he’ll be mentioning the “questioner” but am sure everyone pretty much wants to be name-dropped by Matt Cutts in his video.

So far top ranking questions are:

“Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?” ~ Mani, Delhi

“Are stats from Analytics (bounce rate, time on site) a factor in a page’s or domain’s ranking?” ~ A, San Francisco

“Organic Link Building, according to me is one of the most difficult tasks for SEO’s of SME’s. Can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?” ~ Pulkit Agrawal, Ahmedabad, India

So far no non-SEO related on the top voted questions. Do submit them though because Matt Cutts seems to genuinely like getting a break from talking about purely SEO stuff.

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Want to be indexed faster by the MSNBot? The best thing to do is to simply follow their guidelines listed here. I have summarized the guidelines below for your quick reference. Note also that these guidelines will help you get indexed not just on Bing but will also affect your SEO on other search engines so pay attention!

Technical Guidelines:

1. Validate your code for W3C compliance using the W3C markup validation service.
2. Remove/fix broken links.
3. Use redirect when you move to a new URL. Indicate whether the move is a temporary or permanent one.
4. Make sure MSNbot is not expressly disallowed from crawling your pages.
5. Use Robots.txt to specify which pages on your site should or should not be crawled.
6. Use simple static URLs.
7. Watch out for malware and address the problem soon as you detect one.

Content Guidelines:

1. Provide valuable content for your target audience.
2. Use keywords in the text.
3. Limit page content to 1 topic per page.
4. Limit page size to an average of 150 KB for pages without images.
5. All pages should have at least one incoming static link.
6. Add a sitemap.
7. Make sure all pages in your website is at most 3 clicks away from your default webpage.

Discouraged Techniques/Practices:

1. Keyword stuffing – includes stuffing ALT tags.
2. Using hidden text or links.
3. Using/joining link farms.

As you can see the tips here echo Google’s guidelines. This only means that the basics apply for all search engines and that it would be smart to listen to the advice of any one of the search engines.

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Google has confirmed that the PageRank distribution feature has been removed from the Webmasters Tool. According to Susan Moskwa of Google they removed the feature because they realized that offering such a feature and giving webmaster all over the world advice not to sweat over the pagerank is contradictory. In her answer to a question in Websmaster Central she said, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

The funny thing is that here at even here at Smartpagerank we know that using pagerank as a metric to assess your website or blog’s actual SERPs ranking in Google is no longer smart. What to do? Just look at your actual ranking in search engine results pages and try to work your way to the first page and then to the top results.

Here’s sound advice on what to do from Steve of StraightUpSearch.

So then what should PageRank be used for?
Well, why don’t we start with what it should NOT be used for. PageRank should not be an indicator of SEO success. In fact, if I were a site owner that was paying an outside vendor to improve my organic visibility, I would care less about PageRank. Instead, I’d be focused on whether or not my underlying objectives were being hit, either relative to traffic (branding), site conversions, sales, ROI, etc., and that they were being achieved through best practices.

Remember STOP obsessing about pagerank and focus on metrics that really reflect whether you are on the way to achieving your goals.

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Robots.txt files can be used to block bots (the most common use) and at the same time specific which files can be crawled. To do this you should use the Allow directive. See example below.

Allow: /private/public.doc
Disallow: /private/

According to Bing if “there is some logical confusion and both Allow and Disallow directives apply to a URL, the Allow directive takes precedent.”

Other things you can or should do with your robots.txt file include:

Wildcards – Wildcards can be used in a variety of ways in robots.txt files such as :

• Blocking bots from accessing all URLs that contain a specific directory name;
• Blocking bots from accessing all URLs that end with a specific string regardless of the directory where it is found; and
• Blocking bots from accessing all URLs that contain a specific line anywhere in their URL string.

All the above can be done using the “*”character, which is used to represent characters appended to the strong of a URL. To filter by file extension the character “$”must be used.

XML Sitemaps – Make sure to add a reference to your sitemap at the end of your robots.txt file to make it easy for bots to make its way through your site. To reference a sitemap use the following syntax:

Sitemap: http://www.your-url.com/sitemap.xml

File format – Make sure to save your robots.txt file in a standard file format such as ASCII or UTF-8.

Validate at Bing’s Webmaster Central – They have an online robots.txt validation tool. If you are not a member then join or at least use other online validation tools.

Source: Prevent a bot from getting “lost in space” (SEM 101)

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Last post I gave a few tips on how to rank well in Google and Bing’s image search. Here are some more tips straight from Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye. According to Maile Ohye when inserting images in your web pages you should:

1. Use large sized images with good aspect ratio – Just in case you don’t know what an aspect ratio is, it is the width of an image divided by its height. The aspect ratio of an image is important because if you use images with unequal aspect ratios Google will prefer to display “better images” as an insert on the web as well as news search results. Using images with standard aspect ratios will affect not only your standing in Image Search but also in Google Web.

2. Use descriptive captions and alt text – I have mentioned this before so I don’t really need to expound on this matter but I just want to reiterate the need to use KEYWORDS in the captions and alt text.

3. Keep the image near the title/heading – If you are using several images in one page keep each image close to the paragraphs/text body it is related to.

4. Keep the images inline and use non-clickable version

5. Use jpeg format – Apparently Google prefers the jpeg format over other formats (e.g. PNG, BMP). I still haven’t figured out why but since they have expressly stated this fact then it is better to just obey.

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Image Search is becoming more and more important with search engines realizing that users are using image searches with greater frequency. Maybe one of the reasons for this is the fact that users can process search results with images 30% faster than results with plain text (at least Microsoft says so).

With this in it is very important that you also think of how well your images rank. According to WebProNews some of the things you can do to rank in Google’s image search include:

*Adding images to your Google Local Business profile;
*Enabling Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account;
*Adding images to local business citation source; and.
*Adding images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

On the other hand if your focus is ranking in Bing’s image search they say that you should:

*Name image files appropriately – For improved relevance, make sure that the file name describes the image appropriately.
*Alternative image text (alt text) matters – For increased optimization, make sure photos are properly described with alternative text tags, and ensure that test within any images is also
*Watch frame breaking – Sites that attempt to break frames make it more difficult for the image to display correctly within search.  Make sure you’re testing your site against the search engines.

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Google has Page Rank and Bing has its Page Score.

So just what is Page Score all about? According to Bing’s Webmaster Center Help the Page Score:

Provides a measurement of how authoritative Bing views your webpage to be, with five green boxes being the highest rating and five empty boxes being the lowest. This is based on many of the same factors Bing uses to determine static rank, but isn’t directly comparable.

Just in case the static rank part adds to the confusion static rank is defined by Bing as:

A query-independent ranking of a webpage by a search engine. The static rank of a webpage provides a general indicator to the overall quality of the webpage.

So basically the Page Score, like the Page Rank, is something useful to keep an eye on but not something you should obsess about because in the end it is still your site’s actual rank in SERPs that matter more. As Brett Yount, Program Manager of Bing Webmaster Center, said, “Note that this [page] score is only relevant to your site and does not track well in our index.”

To know your page site’s page score just sign up at Bing’s Webmaster Center, add your site, and check out the site’s status on Summary Tool. Other things you’ll be able to see using the summary tool would be the last time your site was crawled, the site’s domain score, indexed pages, blocked pages, etc.

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