We all know the saying that content is king when it comes to SEO. The problem lies in updating that content when you’ve got a huge site. I remember trying to update some pages on one of my sites a few years back. I wish I could say that I remember it fondly. CMS applications have made this process a lot easier and that’s why many web developers, especially those running blogs, have turned to them. It much more convenient to make changes and this can help with fine tuning meta tags, title tags, alt tags, etc., which is a big part of SEO.

Anyone reading about CMS applications will undoubtedly come across the debate as to whether they are really useful when it comes to SEO. Most of this is actually centred on WordPress, which typically cannot handle very large sites and has plug-ins that can go either way when it comes to helping or hurting your SEO efforts. Personally, even though WordPress is undoubtedly the easiest CMS application to use, I’m backing Joomla. Why?

•    Joomla features include page caching for improved performance and the use of RSS feeds.
•    Joomla has a lot of plug-ins available which can increase the content of your site by linking to Wikipedia articles etc., thereby improving its importance in the eyes of the search engines.
•    Joomla gives webmasters more freedom in terms of the number of things they can do. It can even create URLs that are more easily read by search engines.
•    Joomla allows the insertion of custom code into its own, making it easy to integrate revenue programs such as Google AdSense or tracking code such as Google Analytics.

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Personally I’ve seen some Flash sites that have just been breathtaking. I think they can really add a touch of elegance to a site and they can even showcase a webmaster’s creativity. Still, I never advise my clients to use entire flash pages, or rather splash pages, as part of their sites. This is one of the basic SEO errors and should be well known by now, but some people still persist in wanting to include such elements.

So what’s the big deal about splash pages? Oh nothing really, just that for the most part they’re not recognized by search engines. I’d say that’s a big deal. What’s the point of having great content when it’s embedded in a Flash website and can’t be indexed? Not only are you going to be invisible to the search engines but also to potential customers. Even if visitors do make their way to a splash page, chances are they’ll leave just as quickly. Very few people have the time and patience to sit through a long, drawn out introduction. I know I don’t. Even if you include a ‘skip intro’ link, you’re still asking visitors to make one extra click to get to your site.

If you absolutely have to use Flash as part of your website, use it sparingly. This is best done as headers or within small areas of your content. Too many animations can be annoying and can also drastically increase the page’s loading time. Take my silly advice and rely on quality content to entice visitors, not flashy graphics.

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There’s so many SEO techniques out there that it’s hard to keep track of what works and what doesn’t work. Personally I think it depends on the site you’re trying to market. I’ve had sites which have seen a huge boost in traffic from social networking and others which have had to rely on article marketing. One mistake I’ve seen a lot of webmasters make throughout my career is getting caught up in the latest thing and forgetting all about the basics of SEO. Yes, you’ve got to keep up with the times but you can’t ignore the SEO foundation techniques either.

•    Title Tag: I loathe seeing a site with the exciting name of ‘untitled’. Remember that this is the first this search engines and visitors see.
•    Meta Tag: Proper meta-tags are a great way to include keywords, as long as you don’t go overboard.
•    Heading Tags: These tags help users and search engines to know where the key points are.
•    Alt Tags On Images: Not only does this provide an alternative if the image doesn’t load but it’s also a way to add extra text to your source code.
•    Title Attributes On Links: Again, this is another way to get those keywords in and to show that a link has relevance.
•    Sitemaps: Search engines use these to index your site.
•    Content: I visit sites because they’ve got some content that I’m interested in. Do it properly and you can get quite a few keywords in as well.

Well that’s my little diatribe on getting back to the basics. Feel free to add any little pointers that I might have overlooked.

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Since the brand update was released by Google there has been numerous SEOs asking “How they infact determine a brand”. There have been a huge amount of suggestions by various big name SEOs and other industry experts such as the following:

1) Looking at analytics data

2) Looking at offline activity

3) People searching for the brand domain

While all these may play a major part, I have been undecisive at why brands actually deserve to be ranking for highly competitive words if they are not making the effort until now. After checking and analysing most of the current results, it actually could be a great update for the search industry. The reason I say this is as follows.

For so long Google have been giving so much power to links and anchor text and although they still do, this brand update could in my opinion be introducing “brand citation” a lot more. Lets think of it this way,  to have a brand, you have to have a lot of buzz surrounding that thing. As an example lets take Ford who have recently got a major boost in all of their positions. How many citations of ford do you think there are around the whole internet? Would the majority of people actually talking about Ford link back to them? A high percentage would not, lets just say someone wrote a blog post or a news story such as the BBC and it read as follows.

“Ford have released a new model of the highly succesful Mondeo car, this new car is set to introduce a new era of driving”.

Now thinking about it a huge amount of sites would actually do something like this, then if on the other hand you had Mr Smiths car related site called mrsmithautos.com as an example, that has great content and a great structure but has actually gone out and got himself lots of great backlinks with perfect targetted anchor text, in Googles eyes this is a lot less natural then people actually talking about his site. And in most occasions Mr Smiths site will not have any REAL citations such as “mrsmithautos are releasing a new innovative approach to selling cars online”.

But with the ford sentence above, Google have the processing power to analyse and understand all the content around the Brand, so they know that in high probability that the person is talking about the Brand ford and the site gets a boost for the keywords around it. Again as Matt Cutts indicated the higher the PR and relevancy of the site referencing the brand name, the more power will be passed through.

Its the same if you look at another brand Autotrader, there are a huge amount of people that write personal blog posts such as “I just purchased a great second hand BMW for Autotrader, it only cost me £1000″. Just because that term is not linked why should Autotrader not get any benefits from it? We all know that with the rise in popularity of social media sites such as Twitter a vast amount of people are going to be citing brands.

In my opinion Google from what it seems could be actually analysing content and references a lot more, its the perfect solution ifyou have a brand people are going to talk about it in general sentence not just link to it and this is what Google may now well be analysing and it could be the reason as to why some of the results are slightly out of shape as they further tweak the algo to get this right.

Just my two cents, to create a brand you need to have something good to offer and great content so people discuss your site a lot more.

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There was this interesting post in YouMoz yesterday entitled “LinkBuilding:Mislead to Believe” where the author Tripti debunked 6 linkbuilding myths that has been an area for debate in the SEO world for the last few years.

Myth #1: Outbound Links can kill your rankings

There is this belief that outbound links can diminish your PR or rankings but this is not true according to Tripti. Linking to other websites will not kill your rankings if you do it to provide value to your readers. Just imagine if you become a good resource and link people to the places they like to go in the internet. Wouldn’t your website have more value? Even if some people think that the search engine algorithms is robotic, it is not. It still looks for quality websites who care for their visitors.

Myth #2: Reciprocal links won’t work

The issue here is not the act of reciprocal linking but how the reciprocal linking is done. When some people hear about reciprocal linking, they immediately assume that they should search for people with link pages. This is wrong. Search engines do penalized people who are engaging in this link focused activity. However, if one person saw his link on your website and decided to link back then there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes it is a reciprocal link but it is done all because the sites are related and they compliment each other. As you can see, search engines do not like it when you try to game their system. So it is best to do linking in the most natural way.

Myth #3: Link with a Higher Page Rank

People have always fussed about pagerank when in reality, they should be looking on the combination of page rank and outbound links. Tripti showed this in his example:

Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:

PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )

d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)

The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).

Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.

Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)

Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)

According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.

And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.

So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.

Myth #4: Link with a high PR website

Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page. You must learn to search high PR pages. This goes for the traditional linking methods of commenting and link building as well.

Myth #5: Permanent Link Building

Links are never permanent. You have to build it on a continuous basis and some webmasters tend to remove some links as time passes. It is therefore important to make your link building process continuous.

Myth #6: Paid Links are Unethical

In reality, there is really no difference between free and paid links except that the paid links are put in particular pages they like and it is paid. There is nothing unethical about it for they are not stepping over those who are securing free links.

It is a rather interesting read. For the whole article, visit YouMoz.

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A lot of people used to believe that the use of negative terms such as “cheap” will have a negative impact on a company’s products and services. However, with the post by Tom Crandall in iMedia Connection showed how this term is actually beneficial to SEO.

There are lots of instances. In an article in the same website published last year by Craig Macdonald cited how the phrase “cheap airfare” is worth around $8 in comScore. Another phrase is “cheap insurance” which gets around 673,000 queries per month according to Google Adwords. The phrase “cheap car” will also not lag behind with 1 million queries per month.

The good thing with incorporating the word “cheap” into your website is that it gets almost instant returns when integrated wisely with products and services. Tom Crandall provided an example.

As with hotels, competition for the keyword set “cheap rental car” is thick. As you can see on the below screenshot, the first ad displayed for this term, by aggregator CarRentals.com, offers daily rentals for seven major car rental brands as low as $8.98 a day. When I searched the company’s database for the cheapest advertised rates on its homepage, the touted deal turned out to be a sham.

For example, the company’s homepage boasts a daily rate of $7.43 at LAX from Feb. 28 to March 14. When I searched for the cheapest rate within the dates advertised, the lowest rate offered was $26 per day on a weekly rental through Deluxe Rent A Car. The same held true for every special offer I searched. Regardless, this bait-and-switch tactic may convert a fair amount of business for CarRentals.com because the customer is already on its website and just wants to book a reservation without further delay or frustration.

One brand that has no qualms about positioning itself for the “cheap car rental” niche is Fox Car Rental. Fox Car Rental uses its title tags, description tags, keyword tags, and homepage marketing copy to optimize for “cheap car rental,” “cheap car rentals,” and “cheap car rental rates.”

Here’s the Google search results page for “cheap car rental.”

Adjectives such as “affordable” and “low-cost” may be good for sales copies but nothing really beats “cheap”. Think about it. Will you go out of your way and use words such as “inexpensive” in your search for products and services. Definitely not. You will use the ordinary word “cheap”. Just take note of this user search behavior in mind and you will never go wrong.

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Yahoo Answers has been a very powerful marketing tool. What one needs to do to establish his expertise in a particular field is to simply find related questions and answer the questions while linking them to valuable areas of your website or blog. With this, one can expect that the person clicking through the link has an interest on the topic. He will not have asked the question or searched for it if he does not have an interest in it in the first place. This makes Yahoo answers not only effective but targeted as well.

Also, Yahoo Answers posts have a high tendency of showing up in the Google rankings. If one types a question in Google search, the results are almost always from Yahoo Answers. With Google, your link is not only getting a visit from the one who asked the question. You are also getting visits from dozens of people searching the same question in Google.

However, as one uses Yahoo Answers, he will find out that one of the hardest things to do is to find the questions to answer. You may have a lot of expertise in a particular field but you always have to sift through the results to find open questions which you can benefit from.

There are some old ways of getting some questions. One can browse through the categories in Yahoo Answers to find some related questions. Another way is to set up an RSS feed and sift the results. However, both can be a but painstaking. It also takes time which takes the fun away from using Yahoo Answers for easy marketing.

This is the reason why Yahoo Answers now implements the Suggested Questions feature. This means one does not need to go through the painstaking way of searching for related questions. He can now see related questions as they are suggested for him.

However, Yahoo noted that these questions will only pop up for people who have a decent amount of activity around a particular topic. It takes some time for the system to understand your interest so one has to tell it that “Hey! I’m an expert on this field so please give me some suggested questions.”

The key to using this feature is targeted answering. So Yahoo Answers services need to at least set up different accounts for different niches or only answer on a particular topic.

For those who don’t like the feature. Yahoo Answers allow you to turn it off. But what for when it helps you find the questions you need to establish your expertise?

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The world of SEO have always been a competition. It is a competition to get the most and best backlinks while it is also a race to the top of the search engine rankings. As time goes by, search engines get smarter and with this the competition gets fiercer. And with all this comes the most unfriendly competitors of all, the content scrapers.

A content scraper is simply a person who gets his content from another website. This can be done with RSS feeds, direct copy and pasting and even automated macros. The usual victims of these scrapers are those new websites with unique content. They simply copy the content and never link back leaving the poor low-ranked blog behind to suffer lower rankings.

Why does this happen? Well, we all know how smart our search engines have become right? They can now tell which is the more trustworthy source right? Wrong! Search engines are mere robots and they can only judge authority through different variables such as age and the number of pages indexed. So if someone copies the content of a lower ranked blog who hardly have visitors, then the other website will be indexed while the other one will be penalized. It is a sad reality but it happens and we have to accept it.

Some people have tried to counter these scrapers through different means. One way is to set the feeds to ’summary’ which will give the scraper less motivation to get the content because it will only be an excerpt. This will limit RSS scraping to some extent. However, some people who copy and paste content directly either manually or automatically can still get away with content scraping even with summary feeds.

Luckily, Ann Smarty of SEOtips have posted a very useful article entitled “Track and Get Links From Those Who Copy Your Content“. In here she discussed about a useful tool called Tracer which immediately puts a link back to the website whether the scraper likes it or not. Let us face it. No scraper would give attention to an email begging him to provide a link back to the original content. The only solution is to force him to link back. As Ann said, try Tracer on your content and once you copied it and paste it on Microsoft Word, you will see the link on where it comes from. Neat. On top of that Tracer is free. So anyone can avail it.

It is nice that tools such as these come up every once in a while. It may seem little but it is good news especially to all the new website publishers out there.

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We have been continuously tackling branding here at SEO tops. And we did for good reason. Even if we tried to deny it, branding is now evolving and may become the next ‘big thing’ in the upcoming years. We have seen Twitter expand and how brands have utilized social media for marketing. We have seen Google update its algorithm with the new focus on branding. We have also heard news from major networks that online television and radio advertising will take its toll in the next months. But what is branding anyway?

Branding is not the name nor is it the logo. It is the very essence of the company’s products and services. It stirs emotions, perceptions and impressions. It creates a perspective and triggers the imagination of its target audience. It is way more than having the right domain name or the right image. It is the shared meanings and associations people create with the brand.

As Martin Lindstrom, the author of “Buyology:The Truth and Lies about Why We Buy” said.

Effective branding leverages emotion, interaction, experience, desire, ritual, faith, and our senses (the more the better). The brain scan results from study after study showed that subjects’ brains reacted to strong brands the same way they react to emotional or even spiritual experiences.

So branding is so much more. It is not enough that you get your name out there. You must tell the people what your company stands for and how your products and services will affect their lives. Of course, since you are not perfect, you will not be able to please all. But if you instilled in their minds that you can please them, they will be convinced by that and believe it.

But what does branding have to do with search? As Lance Loveday said in his post in Search Engine Land entitled “Search:Too Boring for Branding“, search is just way too different from branding. He illustrated this through a commercial of Starburst which he saw on television.

It was easy to imagine being the funny-looking guy, chewing the candy yourself (touch), savoring the flavor (taste) and inhaling the aroma (smell) with your llama-esque nose.

But on search, everything is different. All one gets is this advertisement written in plain text. No emotions, no images. Although search have been proven by some people to contribute to the power of branding, it merely strengthens and does not establish the brand. The brand is only established after the click. As Lance Loveday puts it,

It’s what you do “after the click” that really counts

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