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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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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When it comes to choosing your site URL you’d better make the right choice because it definitely has a significant effect not only one your website SEO but also on user-friendliness.

To make things clear right off the bat let me state that you should use STATIC URLS.

Static URLs have clear advantages over dynamic URLs but before I point out the differences let me make it clear that Google can crawl both URLs even though they also do recommend the use of static URLs.

So why are static URLs preferable over dynamic URLs? Because according to a post in SEOmoz static URLS have the following advantages:

• Higher click-through rates in the SERPs, emails, web pages, etc.
• Higher keyword prominence and relevancy
• Easier to copy, paste and share on or offline
• Easy to remember and thus, usable in branding and offline media
• Creates an accurate expectation from users of what they’re about to see on the page
• Can be made to contain good anchor text to help the page rank higher when linked-to directly in URL format
• All 4 of the major search engines (and plenty of minor engines) generally handle static URLs more easily than dynamic ones, particularly if there are multiple parameters

Note though that according to Google if you already use a dynamic URL it is best to leave it alone since re-writing it just to make it look like a static URL can lead to more problems. As their search quality team said, “If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static…However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good.”

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Last month I wrote a post on pagerank sculpting (See “Pagerank Sculpting: Not Worth Your Time”) after reading Matt Cutts’ explanation on why there are other things you should focus on. One of the most common ways pagerank sculpting is done is to use the “no follow” tag. Because of this, the use of “no follow” tags is less important. Furthermore, in a recent post by Eric Enge of Search Engine Watch he explained why the use of “no follow” tags can, not only be of no help, but actually even harmful in terms of link juice.

In Eric Enge’s post, “Should You Still Use Nofollow?”, he explained that the link juice that is supposed to go to links with “no follow” tags are not split between the remaining links with out the tag but are discarded. This means that it lessens the overall value that a page passes. Due to this, and the fact that pagerank sculpting is a waste of time, it seems that the “no follow” tag’s days are over for SEOs. However, note that you should still remember to use the “no follow” tag for paid links (See my post “Google Says Use No Follow for Paid Posts or Else…”). It pays to preserve the value of your links but not at the expense of being tagged by Google as a violator of their paid links guidelines.

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Pagerank sculpting, which as defined by Matt Cutts is simply trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using different methods such as the “nofollow” tag, is still plausible, however, in his post “PageRank Sculpting” he tells us why he doesn’t think you should bother doing it. Here’s an excerpt of his post on pagerank sculpting.

I wouldn’t recommend it [pagerank sculpting], because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

So when is pagerank sculpting useful? According to Matt Cutts it is useful to use the “nofollow” tag for some pages such as links to a shopping cart or links to log-in pages but only “because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines.” Other than that it would pay more if you spent your time optimizing your site in other ways.

Again make sure you make the best use of your time by giving attention to your site architecture and to your site’s actual content. Make sure that users find the info they need just a few clicks away from the main page and make sure that all pages you want indexed are crawlable.

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Every single link counts. That’s my motto when it comes to link building. While it is true that some links pass more value than other in my opinion you still shouldn’t overlook opportunities to get a backlink, whether it’s just one or a couple or a whole load of links. This is also true whether the page rank of the linking page is zero or ten. A link is still a link.

However, when link building remember that while links always count it can count AGAINST you. We all know what I mean by this – those links that associate you to black hat methods that will get you penalized by the great Google and the other search engines. A clear example of such links is links that you got from link farms. Make sure you do not sabotage your efforts by joining link farms. Getting backlinks by paying websites to link to your page(s) is also a big no-no IF you do this to get link juice passed on to you. You can only solicit paid links if you make sure that those links don’t get to pass value to your pagerank. So I guess in SEO terms there’s absolutely no point in doing this. However if your motive is to simply generate traffic to your site or create awareness then there is no problem. Just make sure you specifically ask webmasters of the sites with paid links to your site to use the “no follow” tag.

Again, remember every link counts so make sure the back links you get count in the way you want them to.

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