EzSEO Newsletter # 108
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EzSEO Newsletter # 108
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. VEO Report Updated
2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part XX
3. Other Stuff
Hi again.
I hope you had a good week. I have had my first week without a cold or flu since October last year. My wife and daughter have both been sick this week, so that is quite some achievement, as I always seem the first to come down with these bugs. About 10 days ago, I started using something called “First Defence” from Vicks. Its a nasal spray that is supposed to stop colds before they develop. It could of course be coincidence, but so far, I am happy.
I suspect we will be having a bad week or two very soon - the children at my daughter’s nursery have been coming down with chicken pox, so if anyone has advice for me on chicken pox, please let me know.
OK, let’s get on with the newsletter.
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1. VEO Report Updated
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A few weeks ago (issues #104 & #105 which you can read on the blog if you want) I told you about a great little report by Colin McDougall called the VEO Report.
Colin has been working hard on updates to the report, which include more information on:
* Viral Marketing Tactics to build inbound links.
* A different way to view article distribution - link partners - purchasing
* links…how to use these effectively.
* stuff about “branding” when marketing a site.
* Ideas for building natural inbound links.
* Plus more information, including screenshots, of how Colin builds his sites.
If you bought it in the past, make sure you get the latest upgrade.
For those who haven’t heard of it, The VEO Report (VEO = Visitor Enhanced Optimization) describes how to build websites that wont get banned or penalised by the search engines. The reason I like it so much is that it follows my own strategies very closely, and the advice given in the report is top notch. Colin has had in-depth conversations with Matt Cutts (a Google Engineer), and these conversations were what inspired Colin to write the report. Incidentally, Matt gave Colin permission to put snippets of these conversations into the book, so, to my way of thinking, that is an endorsement from him that the VEO Report does have it right.
The VEO Report is one that I predict will cause quite a stir in the SEO community this year.
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2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part XX
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If you have been following this course so far, you will have:
a) identified your niche and checked for profitability
b) carried out your keyword research at Wordtracker.
c) sent yourself your keyword research from Wordtracker.
d) selected several phrases to use as main page keywords.
e) selected suitable phrases to be used for article pages.
f) learnt how to theme pages. You should use this information to begin collecting themed keywords for your planned pages.
g) seen how main pages differ from article pages, and understood how these differences dictate how the pages are created.
h) seen how selling differs from pre-selling, and learnt one way to sketch out a blueprint of your pre-selling content.
i) looked at a top selling sales page, and dissected out the various pre-selling techniques highlighted by the “pre-selling blueprint questions”.
j) looked at two models for building main sales pages.
k) looked at how to write articles, and learnt a simple “Value Test” you can use to decide if your article is good enough.
l) Found a suitable web host, domain name and web editor.
m) Looked at links, and understand that some links will server you better than others.
n) Seen how Page Rank can be passed onto other pages, and also that the Google toolbar is not accurate.
o) Seen that links in to a page are a vote for that page, and that the link text used on incoming links, gives your page some reputation for that term. The more incoming links with that term, the higher the reputation.
p) Seen how tracking your visitors can give you a lot of useful information, and chosen a stats script for your own site (if your host does not provide one).
q) Seen how to create a useful links page that can act as a resource for your visitors, and looked at one way to automate this page.
r) Seen that putting Adsense ads on all pages is not usually the best strategy for maximum profits.
s) Seen how owning your own products can be fun, as well as help avoid the thin affiliate label. Most of all, it can be very lucrative.
If you missed any of these newsletters, you can read them online at my ezSEO Newsletter blog.
This mini course begins in issue #89 and continues to the latest post in the blog.
Today I want to look at how you should be linking all the different pages of your site together.
There are basically two types of text links you can use on your site to link pages together. One is the “standard” HTML link you are already familiar with, and the other is something called a dynamic link.
The Standard link can be seen and followed by visitors and search engine spiders. Dynamic links can be seen and followed by visitors, but they are not followed by spiders.
What this means is that:
* search engines spiders will not find pages that you link to dynamically,
* Page Rank is not passed onto the pages you link to using dynamic links.
* Pages that are only linked to dynamically will not be found in the search engine results.
So, to summarise, dynamic links hide certain pages from the search engines, but not from your visitors.
Why is this useful? Well, look back when we discussed Page Rank.
Imagine a PR6 page with three standard links on it.
Link 1 is a link to a sales page on your site.
Link 2 is a link to your disclaimer
Link 3 is a link to your privacy page
How much PR does your sales page end up with?
Well, the linking page sends a proportion of its PR6 to three pages, so each will end up with around a PR2 boost.
What use is this PR2 on a disclaimer or privacy page?
Answer, none whatsoever. In fact it is a huge waste.
OK, imagine the same webpage with three links, but instead of standard links, lets make the links to the disclaimer and privacy pages dynamic.
Now how much PR has the sales page now got?
Well, the PR of the linking page is no longer shared between the three pages. It is only directed down standard text links, so the full PR 6 is passed onto the sales page (actually it is a little less than this as there is a dampening factor involved, but you get the point).
The moral of this story is that you need to think about linking. Don’t link to unimportant pages using standard links, use dynamic instead.
In 2005, Google, MSN and Yahoo all agreed on a form of dynamic linking that they would respect. It was introduced so that blog authors could prevent blog link spam (where spammers post comments just to get a link back to their site). By forcing blog comments to use dynamic linking, blog spammers received no benefit from their efforts.
The form of dynamic linking that the search engines agreed to uses the “no follow” tag, and it is very easy to use.
You just insert
rel = “nofollow”
into your link HTML.
This will make the link dynamic, and search engines will ignore the link, and not pass PR onto the page referenced in the link.
If I give a code example here, then it is liekly to get garbled when I send the newsletter out (as all links are encrypted, allowing me to see how many people click each link). So, to read more, and to see exactly what these nofollow links look like, read this article at search engine watch.
As you can see, dynamic linking is very easy to do, and used properly, it can prevent PR being sent to unimportant pages on your site like disclaimer, privacy etc.
OK, with that covered, lets consider the bigger picture of linking your pages together.
On your homepage, you should have a link to a comprehensive sitemap (one of the bonus reports for subscribers shows how to build a sitemap that the search engines love).
SIDE NOTE: I often get asked whether we should all be building “Google Sitemaps”, and I even get emails saying that they have been told these are essential. Well, just to dispel that myth, Google Sitemaps are not essential to getting your site spidered (and spidered regularly) by Google. Often the people who tell you they are, want to sell you a tool to create them. Good old fashioned sitemaps are just as effective, and I even believe that Google Sitemaps could get you into trouble, but that is another story for another day, so dont email me asking for details ;o). I’ll spill the beans when I am ready.
The link to the sitemap should obviously be a standard link, as we want the search engines to find it, and all the pages it links to.
Also on your homepage, you should consider links to a disclaimer and privacy statement, if necessary. These obviously should be linked to dynamically.
You might want an “About Us”, and “Contact us” link pointing to relevant pages. These I would suggest are linked to dynamically as well, since they are not there for the search engines, and don’t need to rank well.
If you add lots of articles to your site (we will look at this in more detail next week), it is advisable to have a link to an article sitemap or directory. This link should be a standard link so that all articles are found. I also like to add links to newly added articles on my homepage (in a “New Articles” section), to ensure they get spidered and indexed quickly. As I add new articles to a site, this section is always kept up to date with the latest articles published.
You should also have a link to a “Links Partner” page from your homepage. This makes it easier to get link partners to agree to a link, since they can see that the links page will get PR and traffic from your homepage. Use a standard link. Don’t even consider using a dynamic link, because when you get caught, you will never regain your reputation.
The only other links on your homepage are likely to be links to important sales pages on your site - the “m0ney-makers”.
I usually keep most of these in a side menu, and update them using server side includes (SSI). If you don’t know how to use SSI, you should learn (a gift I am giving you next week will include a primer on SSI).
It is also good practise to include links to important pages from within the body of your text. This type of natural linking is expected by the search engines.
One thing to avoid is linking to other sites from your homepage using standard links. If you want to point your visitors in the direction of another site, I recommend you do it dynamically (with the exception of link partner links on your links page).
That is a summary of the linking from your homepage (I hope I have not forgotten anything).
The next stage is to think about linking from the other pages of your site. Since incoming links to a page are so important to a page ranking, this is very important. The problem here, is that as your site grows, it is very difficult to get enough links to each page.
If you have followed this course so far, each page on your site will have links back to the homepage, which is good. However, each page of your site will eventually have PR, and should therefore be used to do some work. Use links on all pages of your site to link to the important pages of your site. This is easily done by using a menu (similar, if not the same as the one on your homepage) on all pages. As your site grows, links to each important page increases, and so will its ranking (this is one of the reasons adding lots of content to a site is a good thing - it helps important pages on your site rank better).
If you have followed this linking guide so far, then there is one problem. That is your article pages. How many links will each article have pointing at them?
The answer is only one - the one from the article map.
This is not enough to get an article to rank well, so I like to use my article pages to link to other, related articles. If each article had links to five other related articles, then each article will quickly build up incoming links, and that in turn will help each article rank better.
The other thing I like to do is to get incoming links to my important article pages, and even the article map. This boosts the PR on the article pages, and since my articles are cross-linked (which is OK when the cross-linking is on a single site), all articles ultimately benefit. An easy way to do this, is to link to articles on your site from within the articles you submit to directories. If the article directory does not accept internal article links, then use the resource box for this purpose.
The simple rule I follow is this:
If I want a page to rank better, I get links to it (or add more links to it from within the site). That is nothing new, but many webmasters forget about their articles, and wonder why those articles don’t rank so well.
Next week, we will look at the best ways to add articles to your site, and look at a great tool that automatically deals with interlinking these articles, and much more.
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3. Other Stuff
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*Google Earth*
Yesterday, I re-downloaded Google Earth. Last time I looked at it, it was fairly restrictive in where you could visit. However, it has improved a lot. I zoomed in on my parents house in the UK, and could see my dads 4×4 parked in the driveway. I then turned my attention to Tenerife, and my house. Zooming in, I saw that two trees we chopped down a few weeks ago, are still there in the satellite pictures, indicating the pictures are months old, but wow. What a cool tool. Google have added information on businesses and lots more. If you want a cool tool to play around with when you are bored, try this one - Google Earth.
*KRA Update imminent*
If you own KRA, you are about to get a major update (you will be notified via email when it has been officially released). New stuff includes:
* improved filtering options
* improved Niche within a Niche feature that finds two and three word niche phrases instead of basing niches on single words,
* import data in formats other than the Wordtracker email.
I have the beta on my PC and am testing it. If any owners want to test it, please email me with your Order Number. If you cannot find that, then I need the email address you used to purchase. Without this information, I will be unable to send you download details.
For anyone considering purchasing KRA, now is a good time, as you will get the upgrade for fr.ee. When the beta is released, I expect a price rise to reflect the new functionality:
*Next week - a gift*
I have been going through my “Battle for the Top 10″ eBook updating it. This SEO Guide has been unavailable for some time as it needed updating. Well, it is almost updated, and ready for release. Instead of charging for it, I have decided to give it away to ezSEO subscribers. Tune in next week for your copy.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.
Have a great week!
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