One of the most important factors in off-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is backlinks. A backlink is simply a link from another website, to your website. Search engines see links as “votes”, so the more links, and quality, relevant links at that –  you have pointing to your site, the better. All else being equal, if you can get better backlinks than your competitors, you can outrank them. Given its importance to SEO, it’s frustrating that there isn’t one solidly reliable (free) tool with which to do backlink research. Backlink research can help you :

• Find out what your website’s link profile is looking like, and what progress you’ve made
• Do some competitive analysis in your niche – how well are competitors’ sites performing
• Assess how much better you have to do in order to outrank your competitors.

There are several different tools available, some free and some requiring a paid subscription. You will probably need to consult a couple of sources to get a well-rounded concept of any site’s link profile.

Here’s three of my current favorite, free,  tools for this:

Blekko.com

You have to set up a free account, but it’s worth the couple of minutes that will take. Blekko provides quite a bit of helpful data on websites’ SEO profiles, including information on inbound links, crawl stats and more.

BackLinkWatch.com

This is quite an awesome tool for listing backlinks to a site. It will also indicated if a link is ‘nofollow’ and provide the anchor text for each link.

OpenSite Explorer.org

This tool is run by the mighty SEOmoz. As such, over time, the amount of info you can get for free has significantly decreased as they try and push their paid memberships. Still, when used in conjunction with other tools, it can still help flesh out your research.

Do you have any fave  SEO tools? Share in the comments!

Header image :: “The Right Tool” 

Step-By-Step Search Engine Optimization For Your Blog/Website

Thursday July 14th, 7:30pm – 9:30pm, $40

@ Blankspaces

5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea)
Los Angeles,
CA 90036
free parking is available – see Blankspaces website for details.

You’ve set up your website, now what? How will anyone find you? How will you attract the targeted traffic you need for your business? Search engines are one of the most powerful sources of traffic if you know the basic principles. This class will teach you the fundamentals of search engine optimization so that you can develop a thriving and effective business website or blog.

This class is designed for those with little or no understanding of search engine optimization, or anyone who is not getting the results they expect from their SEO.  The examples will skew toward self-hosted WordPress users in terms of implementation, but the principles and techniques apply to all types of sites.

We will cover the fundamental step-by-step process to improving your website’s rankings:

• What keywords should you target and how to do the research
• How to find out which keywords you can rank for and which are too competitive
• How to optimize your content for find-ability and relevance.
• How search engines see your site and what keeps them coming back.
• How  Google determines how relevant your site is. Make sure you’re sending the right signals!
• Why SEO goes beyond just installing a plugin
• No blog is an island- why links are important
• How new changes by Google can change the game – and your strategy
• Essential resources for further learning

All participants will also receive a pdf covering all the info from the class.

* Please note this class is not WordPress-specific. The principles of SEO apply to all websites no matter what platform they are built on.

Some kind words from clients and previous workshop attendees:

“You Rock!!!! Thank you, so much, for everything! You made me “get” the web, which is not that easy:) I am SO excited about starting my own website. You are SO informative and have such a great way about you.”
– Turon

“Lucy is hands-down one of the best teachers I have ever had and I’ve had quite a few. Her communication skills are clear, which made my learning process faster and easier. Two words – Lucy ROCKS!”
– Stephany Alexander – Author, Internet Entrepreneur and Relationship Expert

Google describes it as:

a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.

For now it seems more relevant for large sites that have multiple authors, rather than for individual blogs. In the case of a multi-author site, when an author posts a piece of content, they can use the “rel=author” atrribute in a link that points to their author page on the same site, which gives Google a way of understanding that multiple pieces of content are by the same author. Additionally from that author page, the “rel=me” markup can be used in links to other sites that belong to the author such as their personal site, social profiles, etc. What this does is allow Google to better understand how this author is connected to their other content on the web, and eventually Google will  have an understanding of that author’s online influence.  So for individual bloggers, it could end up being a way network your guest posts for other sites and develop a whole new infrastructure that Google can process,  based around your name and authorship.

Mediapost describes these implications as follows:

This attribute allows authors to claim pieces of content as their own, so that Google can begin to identify and accrue additional social signals. This support is initially limited to a single domain, but will eventually allow guest bloggers/columnists to claim their work across multiple domains.

This is significant for a few reasons. The first is that this signals Google’s desire to further understand influential voices online. Many attendees referred to rel=author as “personal PageRank,” a nod to Google’s PageRank algorithm which identifies authority web pages based on backlink profiles. It appears that online authority will no longer be housed at the domain or page level; specific authors will now send relevancy and credibility signals that will be accounted for.

Overall this would seem to be another tool in Google’s waged war on content-scrapers, content farms and other producers of low quality content. I’m sure those unscrupulous types will find ways to game this, as they do everything else, but even in these initial stages, this does seem to have the potential to help authors identify themselves as the original owner of a piece of content, and thereby demonstrate to Google that the credit (ie. search engine ranking) belongs to them and not some lousy content scraper that stole your blog post!

Thoughts? Opinions? A potentially useful development? Or just another annoying way in that we bloggers have to worry about more code than we’d like?  Leave a comment!

** image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/keso/108805307/sizes/o/in/photostream/

It’s true that there can be many confusing intricacies to the science of Search Engine Optimization, but what’s also true is that most people get tripped up on the basics, before they even get to the complex stuff! In working with many entrepreneurial and small business clients, I’ve come to see a few common trends in the way that people look at SEO and why they are often not getting the results they want. Improvement typically begins with some fundamental shifts in the way you think about the process.

1)   Forget Sex, Specificity Sells!
Lack of clarity about your business offerings and target market will lead to lack of clarity in your search marketing efforts and you will either attract clients that aren’t a good fit, or you will have trouble converting your web traffic. Your search engine strategy should be based on a clear picture of who your ideal client is and exactly what you can do for them. Then make sure that you are effectively communicating that on your website.

2)   Are you in alignment?
Don’t try and target every keyword on every page – create specific pages or groups of pages for specific keyword groups. That typically means you’ll create specific pages for each service/product you provide. Make sure your pages are in alignment:  the main elements – title, url, content,headings etc  - should all reflect the target keyword for that page.

3)   The Way You Search May Not Be The Way Your Prospect Searches
There may be specific ‘insider’ terms related to your business which you know about and take for granted because you’re an expert. But a prospect may not yet know those words – how else may they be looking for your service? Doing your keyword research may reveal alternate and more popular ways that people think and search for your service/product, so be prepared to adapt your language where necessary. Listen to the words your current clients and leads use when talking about your business or service, and incorporate them into your keyword research.

4)   Quality Not Quantity – Conversions Are The Real Point
It’s not just about the amount of traffic that you get, but how qualified it is. There’s no point getting bucket loads of traffic if they don’t end up buying or taking the next step. You’ll build a more viable business based on very targeted traffic rather than trying to only get huge numbers. So make sure you’re targeting ‘long tail’ phrases that may have a smaller search volume but deliver very specific traffic.

5)   Don’t just think about how well your website performs, but how are your individual pages performing?
Your homepage is not always the most relevant or effective place that visitors can enter your site. By looking at your Google Analytics reports you will be able to see if visitors are landing at the most appropriate page for their search. If not, you may need to re-optimize some pages. Do your most popular pages have a clear call to action or next step?

6)   On-Site Optimization Is Only Half The Battle!
To really perform well in the search engines (especially if you have a lot of competition), you must get your content out there and build quality links back to it. There’s always something else you can be doing to find a new audience for your information such as networking with bloggers in your field and getting your content exposure on other websites.

What are your biggest challenges in making your website an effective business tool? Leave a comment below!

Practical Search Engine Optimization For Your Blog/Website

You’ve set up your blog, now what? How will anyone find you? How will you attract the targeted traffic you need for your business? Search engines are one of the most powerful sources of traffic if you know the basic principles. This class will teach you the fundamentals of search engine optimization so that you can develop a thriving and effective business website or blog.

This class is designed for those with little or no understanding of search engine optimization, or anyone who is not getting the results they expect from their SEO. The examples will skew toward self-hosted WordPress users in terms of implementation, but the principles and techniques apply to all types of sites.

Saturday April 9th, 1:30pm – 3:30pm, $40

@ Blankspaces
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea)
Los Angeles,
CA 90036

You will learn:

• How search engines see your site and what keeps them coming back.
• How to optimize your content for find-ability and relevance.
• How Google determines how relevant your site is. Make sure you’re sending the right signals!
• Why SEO goes beyond just installing a plugin
• No blog is an island- why links are important
• WordPress –specific settings and considerations
• What keywords should you target and how to do the research
• How to find out which keywords you can rank for and which are too competitive
• Essential resources for further learning

All participants will also receive a pdf covering all the info from the class.

Google Recipe View

If you’ve Google-d for a recipe lately you may have noticed a new feature Google has launched, which is a recipe-specific search – they call it Recipe View. It allows the user to search results specifically designated as recipes, and also to narrow searches by ingredients, prep time and even calorie count. You access it via the  “Recipes” option in the left menu bar on search pages.

What About Food Bloggers? Another Reason You’re Better Off With WordPress

It seems pretty useful for web searchers, but what does this mean for food bloggers?  Well in order for your recipes to show up in this special search, Google is looking for you to use special markup i.e. code, to designate your content to be recipes. It’s called a microformat, which is a specific set of code tags used to designated content as recipes, with special parameters such as prep time, ingredients, reviews and more. Click here to see all the gory details

Integrating this formatting into your website and blog posts  could actually be a serious drag depending on what blogging platform you use. Luckily, for self-hosted WordPress users, there is a plugin to help you with this. hRecipe gives you an easy to use interface in which to input your recipes with the correct markup. This should allow them to show up in Google recipe searches.  On the downside it will probably make the process of entering your recipes a little more laborious. The plugin is easy to use, but requires a couple more small steps to creating your post. I’m sure more plugins will crop up as word of this development spreads. If you’re using another blogging platform, such as Google’s own Blogger, I’m not too sure how you would conveniently go about using the recipe microformat, without being willing to code (and let’s face it, people use Blogger because they don’t want to deal with code). You might be a little screwed, to be quite honest.

The more I look at it, the more I think this new development seems quite unfriendly to the food blogging community, as evidenced by the fact that currently you’ll see that the recipe results are being dominated by heavyweights like Foodnetwork, AllRecipes etc.

So the question is, will it be worth the effort for food bloggers to try and get on board? Since the pool of blogs using the markup is currently probably pretty small, if you jump on it, I would think you can leverage this change to your benefit and gain extra traffic.

Impact on Google Search Results Pages

One thing I did notice, which is another reason in favor of using the recipe microformat, is that if you do a regular Google search (ie. not using the Recipes submenu) for food-related things, especially if you include the word ‘recipe’, you’ll start to see ‘blended’ search result pages which include listings pulled from Recipe View. In a few searches that I tried, the results utilizing the recipe microformat seemed to be given priority.  So this means that even if your blog post ranked highly for a particular recipe, that result could now be bumped down in the listings. See the screenshots below for a couple of examples I tried.  You can tell if a result is using the Recipe Microformat because you’ll see additional info such as prep or cook time, reviews, and possibly a thumbnail image. Traditional web listings just show the title and description of the blog post. From this point of view  it seems like it might be important to try and utilize this new markup. And if you are still using Blogger or another platform – this is yet another impetus to transition over to WordPress so you can utilize the plugin and take advantage of this development.

A regular Google search for ‘mango salad’: [click the images below to see the full size]

A regular Google search for ‘roast chicken’:

Are you planning on using the new recipe format? Seen any difference in traffic since this new development? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments.

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodthinkers/4301030794/sizes/l/

I recently wrote about the need for the website owner to take responsibility for  SEO and not rely 100% on a theme or a plugin. Themes and plugins do of course have some benefits if you understand what it is they do, and what they cannot do.

The benefit of themes and plugins

‘SEO-friendly’ themes and SEO plugins present your content in such a way that it is easy for search engines to understand, determine the relevancy of, and navigate. So if you’ve targeted your content for specific keywords, the search engine will have no doubt what that piece of content is all about. The content and keyword research is up to you. No theme or plugin alone can make your site rank highly if your content is not valuable and targeted. Also, this all relates to on-site SEO, but ranking is also determined by off-site factors such as incoming links from other websites. Themes and plugins cannot help you with these off-site factors.

One key point to understand is that any theme can be made ‘SEO-friendly.’ It helps to think of the features a theme comes pre-built with as conveniences, but if your theme doesn’t have them, that doesn’t mean you are have to necessarily find a new theme. You can tweak any theme to make it more SEO-friendly – there’s no inherent magic that a theme-maker provides – just convenience. So a well-written theme basically cuts down on the tweaking you need to do.

What makes a theme ‘SEO-convenient’?

• Clean code
  • This is a little challenging for the lay-person to determine. But one thing you can do is install the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox and Disable All Styles under the CSS menu. This will show you the bare bones content of your web page in a manner somewhat close to what a search engine will see. So if all the content of the page and the navigational elements are clearly visible, that’s good a starting point.
• Smart use of heading tags (H1, H2 etc)
  • Heading tags are a way to structure your content so that the search engine can see which are the most important headings. There should only be one H1 tag on a page to indicate the most important item. You can use sub-headings with H2 tags to break up your articles.
  • Generally speaking on your single post pages your H1 should be the title of your post, not the name of your site. On archive pages or your homepage, which has multiple post titles on it, they should be H2s. Other less relevant headings such as those found in the sidebar should be H4 or H5s.
  • To check the heading tags on a given page you can either go to View Source in your browser and search for H1, H2 etc. Or you could use the Firebug add-on for Firefox which will allow you to highlight an element on a webpage and look at its corresponding HTML.
  • Yoast has a much more thorough description of how Heading tags should be used.
  • Heading tags seem to be the one area I see the most mistakes made in themes that are otherwise well-written. Fortunately it’s easily corrected with a couple of CSS tweaks.

• Good navigation
  • A clear navigation helps the search engine and the human user easily find all the pages on your site. Any navigation can be enhanced with a ‘Breadcrumbs’ plugin.

• Reduction of duplicate content
  • Archive pages, category & tag pages and the homepage – basically any page that lists more than one post, shouldn’t be displaying the full text of all posts. It’s better to use an excerpt. On your homepage you can easily control that by using the “Read More” feature of the post editor. You can also tweak your theme code to make use of the ‘the_excerpt’ function.

How a Plugin helps

SEO plugins like All-In-One SEO Pack or Headspace allow you to configure various meta tags and other features without touching your code. Some themes may provide some of these features as well. They allow you to:

• Easily designate the meta tag information for your pages. eg
  • Arranging the title tags  of your posts/pages with post title first, then the name of your blog (the name of your blog is rarely the most important item on the page)
  • Creating the meta description tag – either by auto-generating (not usually recommended) or providing a field to allow you to manually craft a description for each post.
  • Help reduce duplicate content by excluding some pages, such as archive pages from search engines – this tends to funnel traffic to the specific post page, rather than a summary-style archive page  which is less useful.
  • Deal with canonical URL issues.

All In One SEO Pack does a good job right out of the box, so it’s particularly recommended for beginners. Headspace is a little more complicated to work with, but if you know what you are doing and want even more granular control, it’s a good solution.

So themes and plugins, when used correctly, put the window dressing on your content so that search engines can easily determine what is relevant at your website. The onus still lies with you to do your research and create great content in order to rank well in search engines.

**Header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tajc/2357148644/

In the WordPress community, especially amongst new users, a lot of emphasis seems to be placed on themes and plugins as crucial factors in SEO. Theme companies compete for bragging rights on whose is the most ‘SEO-friendly’ while website owners are frustrated that they are not getting the search engine traffic they expected despite having such-and-such theme and an SEO plugin.

The reality is that these things are helpful, but only if you have the right content.

Themes and plugins are like well-written directions to a party (your content).  They help your guests (search engine bots) find your site’s content, but whether or the not the party rocks depends on what they find when they arrive, and that responsibility lands squarely in your, the website owner’s, lap.

Even the most SEO-tweaked theme and fine-tuned plugin cannot make your site rank highly if your content is not relevant and targeted for your audience.

Cover the Basics:

• In WordPress, make sure you are NOT using the default permalink structure. Change it to a custom structure so you have words in your urls/permalinks. [link to post] This is one of the best SEO tweaks you can make and has nothing to do with a theme or a plugin!
• The most important places your keywords should appear are in the Page or Post title, the permalink and the body text.
• Also important are the alt text for images, and the titles of any media you include in a post such as images, pdfs etc
• Internal linking – linking one piece of content to another within your site, called internal linking, is a great SEO tool. For maximum effect, the text that links to another piece of content (anchor text) should contain relevant keywords for that piece of content. So if I might create a link to another post on my site that looks like this:
  Read about how to use the WordPress gallery shortcode
  In this sentence the anchor text is the phrase ‘WordPress gallery shortcode’ which is the most relevant phrase for the post I’m linking to.

Your content should be:

• Focused – It sounds ‘duh’-obvious to state this, but make sure your content actually reflects the keywords you want to rank for! This is a basic step in diagnosing your site’s SEO – it’s not enough to just have your keyphrase in your tagline for example, there must be tailored content on your site that addresses your keyphrases – if there’s not, you need to re-write your website’s copy, or create some blog posts.
• Specific – Each blog post or web page should be individually targeted for a specific keyphrase. Don’t try and target every keyword in every post.
• Relevant, Valuable, Human-friendly – Google’s pretty smart so you can’t fool their little bots with spammy content that’s stuffed with keywords but has no real value. So don’t do it, K? Just write useful content that you would want to read and that is of value and interest to your audience. Not only does Google like it, but it will also attract natural inbound links if people share it on social networks or link to it from their own blog posts. It’s a win-win!
• Comprehensive – Create multiple pages for a group of related keywords and link them together. Use a range of keyphrases around your target niche so that you strengthen your SEO from a long tail perspective as well as going for whatever the obvious ones are. In the beginning, unless your niche is very UN-competitive, you won’t rank right away for the obvious, one or two-word phrases  – you will have better luck with long-tail phrases – those are more specific phrases which are less competitive.

Remember that all these are just on-site factors – aspects of your site that are under your control.

Off-site factors such as backlinks (links from other sites to your content) are very important in search engine ranking, but you have less control over them which is why it’s important that you write great content that other bloggers and websites want to link to.

Overall, placing greater emphasis on the quality and clarity of your content will have a bigger impact on your organic search engine traffic than agonizing over picking the best theme.

Header courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dickstock/1270744025/

Anyway, Gary from Relevant Trafik has thankfully written a great piece on exactly why this guarantee is bogus. I’ll definitely be referring clients and business-owners to it!

Here’s one of my favorite parts since it comes straight from Google’s mouth:

Question from a user to one of the Google Engineers: Should I believe SEO agencies that promise to make my site rank first in Google in a few months and with a precise number of links?

Google’s response: No one can make that promise; therefore the short answer is no, you should not.

Adding alt text to images is important for 2 main reasons:

1)   Accessibility – visitors to your site that don’t see well and are having the page read to them need alt text to understand what the image is all about.

2)   SEO – the alt text is the only way a search engine knows what the image contains. It cannot ‘read’ an image by itself and relies on alt text. Additionally you can attract traffic from Google Image Search with well-optimized images.

By default in Blogger when you upload an image there is no alt text:

Here’s how you add it.

Go into Edit Post, then click on Edit HTML.
Look for the code that contains the info about the image – it will begin with <img :

Now simply add the following somewhere inside the img tag:
alt=”description of image”

Replace the words in quotes with something that describes your image – it can contain your keywords, but don’t be spammy about it.

Publish the post and voila, the alt text is available for search engines to see.