SEO Blog - SEO for Php Link Directory and Webmasters

Lately, I have been reading a lot of good case studies from MarketingSherpa.com. It is a very good site for marketing information and even you have been in the online business for over years, I am sure you would still found very good information there. If you subscribe to their newsletter, you would periodically get very good case studies for free. If you have time (make sure you have), read it through and ponder it over whether you can apply the ideas you have learned. Here is the case study I read today to share with each of you:

Source: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30170 (link will expire after Oct 24th)

HALLENGE
Columbia Sportswear Company’s Web site wasn’t turning traffic into enough qualified leads for their eretail partners. Site visitors and newsletter recipients simply weren’t getting enough targeted information or ample reason to click through.

“There wasn’t any sense of communicated understanding about the activities our consumers take part in,” says Daria Colner, Internet Marketing Manager. “I definitely believed that we needed to connect on a deeper level. We wanted to let people who are into hunting know that we understand their world. It had to be more than just, ‘Oh, here’s a jacket …’ Overall, we had to see if these could make us more of a resource to anyone who has a love for an activity.”

Colner and her team wondered if they could build this connection by focusing more on their customers’ psychographics — their interests, attitudes and opinions. They wanted the Web site and emails to reflect the activities-driven nature of their products and audience.

CAMPAIGN
Over the summer, Colner and her team tested an initiative to add this psychographic depth to their Web site and newsletters. Here are the four steps they took:

-> Step #1. Track leads through site

Colner had to solve one problem first: Site data only showed how much traffic they pushed to their eretail partners, not the click paths to conversions. They wanted to track more-qualified leads through the site.

Before kicking off the testing, the team formulated an equation that took the prices of the products that visitors to clicked on just before hitting the “Where to Buy” button. That served as a benchmark.

With the benchmark established, they could compare the “before” and “after” prospective dollar values of the clicks once new data started to roll in. In the test, Colner wanted to see if they could produce a boost in clicks on where to buy bigger-ticket items, such as gear and high-end shoes, while seeing fewer clicks on smaller-ticket apparel.

-> Step #2. Target customers’ interests

Creating more of an emotional attachment between the brand and consumers made up the core of their test. They knew they had to find specialized groupings that captured the essence of their audience.

After examining months of site activity, Colner learned that their customers identified with six activities-based categories:
o Hunting
o Fishing
o Camping
o Family
o Snow sports
o Water sports

-> Step #3. Build specialty shops on the site

After identifying the categories, they reflected the activities on the Web site with the creation of three specialty Gear Shops: Hunting, Performance Fishing, Trail/Travel. Each shop was designed to give the viewer more detailed product information and to encourage them to continue onto their eretail partners to complete a purchase.

Here’s a synopsis of each shop:

- Performance Fishing: This shop was named more precisely because Colner knew that the majority of customers in this product niche were fly fishers. Key here was the creation of a link and separate page for a different fly fisher featured every month. The copy focused on Q&A tidbits about the fly fishers’ accomplishments and gear, including a question about their favorite piece of Columbia Sportswear apparel.

- Hunting: They used a general category name to appeal to a variety of wild game hunters, but the copy was more targeted. For instance, here is one headline for the section: “Layers Make it Easy to Swap and Shoot.”

- Trail/Travel: Colner essentially dedicated the copy in this section to hikers. But since they offer items like shoes that have a range of outdoor use, they gave it a more-general name to attract more shoppers.

In addition, each Gear Shop featured several product photos and information, such as fabric variations and different sizes. And the “Where to Buy” buttons allowed Gear Shop visitors to go to eretailers in one click.

-> Step #4. Customize the newsletter

Columbia’s enewsletter was then tweaked to focus on the same outdoor activities. Signing up people was the first priority.

Colner emailed an invitation message, “One Size Does Not Fit All,” with the following subject line: “Introducing our new custom e-newsletter.” Viewers who clicked were able to pre-select from the six options that would determine what products they would see promoted through email.

Also, Colner placed the category pre-selects next to the email sign-up slot above the fold on the left-hand side of the homepage. In the end, for example, a “water sports” subscriber received customized information and product offers, like one for the Aquatooth Shoe, at the bottom of newsletter. The top of each email featured an item offered to the entire subscriber list.
RESULTS
Without question, creating the activities-based categories, the three specialty shops and the reworked enewsletter has definitely driven leads the way Colner wanted. “Those customers have already done their research and have taken the extra step to getting to the product on the eretail page. To us, it’s been similar to taking someone by the hand off the street, bringing them into a store and showing them the Columbia product on the shelf.”

On the psychographic level, customers are making an emotional connection to Columbia, Colner says.

Just as important, using the referral-clicks equation established at the onset with the benchmark, Colner has seen the new features drive up the prospective dollar value of their referrals to eretailers. Specifically, the items people were browsing before hitting the “Where to Buy” button had an average of 44.4% more dollar value in terms of pricing.

The total number of clicks from the product pages across the site also has risen a healthy 7.8%. For the Gear Shops, in particular, traffic has been palpable in the few weeks they have been up. “We have gotten more hits on the fishing page alone the first month than any non-product page we’ve ever had. Because of the encouraging performances, we are adding a Sports Gear Shop in November.”

In addition, 12% of the brand’s subscriber base has signed up for the custom emails, and Colner says that number “grows significantly daily.” Clickthroughs for the personalized newsletter also are 19.7% higher among those who made the pre-selects, while the same people are opening 40.6% more of the time.

“We feel that the newsletter and Gear Shops are working hand-in-hand in terms of making our brand stronger in identifying and speaking to a particular enthusiast by activity.”

How much time you devote each week for link building? What actually matters is not how much time you spent on link building but the quality of the links you acquired. We often would see websites with a “link”, “resources” or “partners” page. Doesn’t matter what they call these kind of pages, they are essentially all “link” pages. Would you go ahead and trade link with them based on the instruction? The answer is no unless you have plenty of time.

If you have limited time, then you probably want to focuse on hosted content and article submission. Hosted content, which is often called pre-sell content, makes your site looks very good. What you do is that you write a professional article and hosted on some other sites. Usually, these sites related to the topcality of your site and is an authority in the field. Since you are paying for the space, you can use links back to your site. This would make your site very attractive.

Second, you would go for article submissions. Write an article with the intention to help users solving problems. At the end of the article, include a link back to your site/product, communicate to your users how exactly your product/service would help them solving the problem. Again, this is very useful and it is a great way to acquire nature links. I personally recommend ezinearticles.com. This is a very good place to submit your articles. You can take a look at my article - get indexed by google in 48 hours. At the end of the article, i linked back to this seo blog if readers want more information.

Google’s share reaches a new high of $600 on Monday due to investor’s confidence that the search leader will capitalize on new areas of the media industry. Other than being the leader in the search engine market, Google has entered into other areas where it expects to capitalize in the near future. For example, Google acquired Youtube in hope of taking the lead in the online video distribution network.

Measured by market capitalization, Google currently ranks the 11th on the S&P 500 index. We could expect better performance in the future seeing its footprint in areas like web search market, online video, radio, print and web applications.

In the latest search engine report, Yahoo counts for about 22.1% of the market share and thus, it is certainly a market webmaster should not ignore. While optimizing your site for Google, if you can have your site ranked well on Yahoo as well, it will be a big boon to your bottom line. Again, you will see that the following elements are commonly mentioned when it is related to SEO does not matter what search engines we talk about. What you need to pay attention to is the details in each of the factor:

Title tag: Make your title short, probably no more than 5/6 words.  (for google, you may want it to be more descriptive)

Meta description: Use about 2 sentences and describe what your site is about. Include your key phrases at least once in your sentence, but should be no more than 3 times

Meta keywords: This may not be useful if you optimize your site for Google. However, meta keywords still matters for Yahoo.  However, do not repeat any certain words more than 3 times.  Based on my experience, 3-5 keywords is optimal for Yahoo

Keywords in URL: No more explanation needed here. Make your URL SEO friendly.

Prominence: Use heading 1 and heading 2 on your page. In your paragraph, make your keywords bold or italic so that it stands out from other parts. In this way, you are telling the search engine that these certain keywords are more important.

alt text: Use alt text for your images. On one side, it helps the visitors if they block the image. On the other side, you are optimizing your image and there is a chance that the image from your sire may get ranked if someone searches the images

Site Explorer: Create an account on Yahoo and submit a sitemap to Yahoo just like what you would do for Google, this would help Yahoo better index your site.  You can also use Yahoo ping service to notify Yahoo whenever your web page is updated.

Released yesterday, the long-waited google presentation finally goes live even though it is still a beta. It is available in your Google Doc. You can find it when you click on the news tab. There are a number of features included in this beta version:

• You can create and keep the presentation online, which can be accessed any time with a computer. It is much easier to access and manage than a presentation kept in your hard drive.
• You can send a email invitation to your co-workers for them to view, edit and manage.
• Edit together online and in real time
• Chat with other viewers for suggestions and comments
• Import existing presentation for quick start

Once you have your website ready, the first thing you want to do is to submit to search engines like Google and Yahoo and pray that your site can quickly be updated by them. However, if you submit your site using the regular google submission form, it can still takes weeks until Google visits your site. There are certainly ways you can have your site quickly indexed by Google.
1. Get a link from an existing and authoritative site

If you can obtain a backlink from an existing site (the older the domain, the better it is) and the site is an authority in Google’s eye, then you can expect your site get indexed by Google wihtin 48 hours. Well, an easy way to get such a link is to join a forum and make some posts with your signature attached. Just be careful do not spam the forum. You should reply to thread with the intention of helping other members solving problems.
2. Create an external blog

Google loves blog with updated topics. Do not create a blog under your own domain since your domain is not trusted yet. Create a blog with blogger.com and write a couple of blog posts with links back to yoru site. Again, you can expect your site get indexed by Google within 48 hours.  (I created this blog for my SEO friendly directory. It is not for quick index purpose though)

3. Get as many links as possible
If somehow you can not get a link from a site with high pagerank and you are not in favor of developing a blog, then what you can do is to focus on the quantity of the links. Get as many links from existing websites as possible. For example, you can submit your site to directories, implement reciprocal or 3-way link exchanges. But we do suggest you focus on the previous two strategies, this strategy should be the last thing to consider since Google has been devaluing these link strategies.

Well, I am sure this is not a good news for directories owners and personally, I am not happy with it either. Google just started manually penalizing web directoreis by removing the sites from search results. Some big names such as Alive, Aviva, Big Web Links, Directory Dump are all affected and when you search for their trade mark names, they are completed out of the search results.  It is still not clear whether Google will devalue the directory listings.

I am just glad that since my SEO Friendly Directory is still new, Google probably won’t notice it. But certainly I have to be careful. What I need to do is to add more quality content to my visitors who are mainly seeking for techniques and new strategies of search engine optimization.

Blog is a great way to share your experience and insights with other Internet users. For a person, you share your viewpoints, your life experience with others. For a business, blog is a great way to introduce what is “cool” about your business. Whenever your business offers coupons, discounts and have promotions, announce it on your blog. People who subscribed to your blog via RSS feeds will get notified immediately. In terms of SEO, blog is a great way to refresh your content and if you content is great, there is a good chance that you will get some “nature links”. This is why I created the SEO blog in my directory. Here, I’d like to talk about some good blogging practices for SEO:

• Update your blog regularly and keep it fresh
• Make sure the topics of your blog are properly categorized so that your topics are grouped into meaningful phrases on the homepage such as “SEO Resources, Directory News & Reviews”
• Fully utilize other services such as Feedburner, Technorati and other popular social bookmarking services.
• Submit your blog to blog directories.
• Make sure each individual blog post has proper title and a SEO friendly URL.

The 301 and 302 codes are the HTTP status codes used for redirection. These codes indicate that another request must be made in order to fulfill the HTTP request — the content is located elsewhere. When a web page replies with either of these codes, it does not return any HTML content, but includes an additional Location: HTTP header that indicates another URL where the content is found.

301

The 301 status code indicates that a resource has been permanently moved to the new location specified by the Location: header that follows. It indicates that the old URL is obsolete and should replace any references to the old URL with the indicated URL.

When loading the page in a web browser, the response will be automatically redirected to the new location specified by the Location header. After the redirection, the back button in your browser won’t reference the initially requested page, as a result of the old page being permanently redirected.

The 301 status code also indicates to search engines that link equity from the previous URL should be credited to the new one. In theory, the new page will inherit the rankings of the original page. In practice, however, it may take some time for this to occur. It would be wise not to frivolously change URLs regardless, if this is a concern.

302

The 302 status code is a bit ambiguous in meaning. It indicates that a resource is “temporarily” moved. The old URL is not obsolete at all, and clients will not cache the result unless indicated explicitly by a Cache-Control or Expires header. To confuse things even further, 302 is also used for some paid advertising links, but that is not the usage discussed here. The big problem with the 302 status code is that its meaning for search engines depends on its context. In practice, it is worth dividing them into internal temporary redirects, that is, from a page on domain A to another page on domain A, and external temporary redirects, from a page on domain A to a page on domain B. Browsers always abide by the definitions for interpreting a 302 redirect — both internal and external.
However, today, most search engines only use it for an internal 302. For an internal 302 redirect, then, search engines will not cache the result of the redirect, and continue to list domain A in the SERPs. This is consistent with the definition. External 302 redirects are more of a problem. Matt Cutts of Google states that more than 99% of the time, Google will list the result with the destination result, that is, domain B, instead of domain A. This is against the standard, and Google behaves like this to mitigate a vulnerability called “302 hijacking.”

I just read the article about “factors determining a quality web directory” from Alive Web directory, and I have to rush here to write something about factors determining how much should you pay for a featured listing? In general, the higher quality of the web directory, the more you need to pay for a featured listing. Well, apparently a lot of directories owners can not fairly determine how much they should charge for a featured listing. So if you have enough time, search for directories that are undervalued and avoid directories that are over valued. There is no single factor determine how much a featured listing worth, but certainly the following list should give you an idea of how much roughly you should pay:

• The age of the directory - You probably all familiar with the term “Sandbox”. That’s right, if your site is new, who knows if you are serious about your site or you are just playing around? Thus, the newer the site, the less authority the site has. Take a look at how long has the directory been online. I would say when you pay over $10, make sure the site is at least 1 year old.

• Indexed pages with aging factors - Look at how many pages are indexed by Google and consider the age of the site at the same time. But don’t just look at the indexed page blindly. For example, if a site has been online for 1 year and have 1000 pages indexed and another site has only been around for 4 months and have 800 pages indexed already. I would say there is a good chance that latter is “cooler” than the first one.

• The number and quality of backlinks: Look a both the number of backlinks and quality of the backlink at the same time and remember, quality is more important than quantity. This is also a good chance for evaluating the potential of the directory. If the site has yet had a decent page rank but somehow has a lot of quality backlinks, then go ahead and pay for featured listing. Webmasters tend to set the price based on the pagerank, so the price is likely to be undervalued when the PR is low.

• How unique is each page: When I say how unique the page is. I mean look at the title of each page, the url of the page. Does the directory has some sort of paragraphs explaining the topics?

• What extras does the site provide for featured listing: 1. The featured listing should be placed above all the free ones 2. It is better if featured listing has special formating such as borders and different background colors. 3. It is better if featured listing gives you the chance to list your inner pages. This is very important for your inner page optimization. 4. Features such as reviews, comments and social bookmarking options provided on your featured details page.

• The function of the directory itself: If a web directory is soly a “directory” with only listings, then it won’t adds that much value to your site. It will be a bonus if the site has other features such as blog and forum so that there are always good content being added to the site which keeps the site itself fresh and it is likely that these types of directories will receive much more traffic than a normal directory without any additional features.