EzSEO Newsletter # 118
April 9, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 118
Andy Williams ez SEO
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This week:
1. Google Ads Not Showing?
2. When will Duplicate Content Cause you Problems?
3. Keyword optimization concerns.
4. Other Stuff.
Hi again.
Don’t these weeks fly by? The summer will soon be upon us, and here in Tenerife, there is no better time of the year, with almost guaranteed sun every day for weeks/months. If it does rain, it conveniently does so at night ;o)
Anyway, enough of my problems, let’s get on…
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1. Google Ads Not Showing?
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This is something I have talked about before in this newsletter, but from the emails and forum posts I have been reading, I think a reminder is in order.
Here is a typical email:
“Hey Andy, my sister just checked my site from her house and said that none of my Google Adsense ads were showing up on the site. I see them just fine, so what is going on?”
Whether you know it or not, this issue affects every single one of you who has an affiliate site showing Google Adsense. More and more types of software that people install on their machines are capable of blocking not only Google Adsense ads, but also Commission Junction and other major network affiliate links.
I use a web browser called Maxathon Browser. I love its tabbed interface which works exactly the way I do. However, Maxathon Browser has an option called “Enable Web Ads Blocker”. This will block out your Google Adsense ads, plus other ads identified as “advertising”.
OK, so not many people use this browser, so maybe this is not a problem? Well, that’s where you are wrong! Many of the most popular firewalls and antivirus programs have ad blocking features built in, and in some cases these blockers are switched on by default. For those people visiting your site with these blockers installed, your ads are invisible.
This issue is not new. I remember a few years ago discussing this with concerned webmasters. There was no answer then, and I know of no answer now that can force your Adsense ads to show when these blockers are installed on your visitor’s computer.
What you can do is to make sure that at least your affiliate links are showing. The way I do this is to use a redirect in my .htacess file, so that the ad blockers never see the affiliate link. I did cover this in an earlier newsletter, so you can go and read “Managing affiliate links with the .htaccess file” from issue #74 if interested.
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2. When will Duplicate Content Cause you Problems?
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Let me ask you a question:
Q. If you pick up an article from an article directory and post it on your site, will your page/site be penalised?
From what I have read on forums and in emails recently, a lot of people think they will be penalised for using these articles. My own opinion on this is no, it wont get your page or site penalised.
The topic of duplicate content is often hotly debated on forums, and to be honest, I don’t know where all the misinformation is coming from. People use the term “duplicate content filter” without applying any common sense to the situation.
As with anything related to SEO, the internet provides you with a laboratory to test your theories.
Let me describe a couple of my tests.
1. One of my articles was published on my own site. Google indexed the article, and my site was the only place with that article. Searching for the title, I was the only site listed in Google. I then submitted that article to ezinearticles.com. I waited for Google to find it, and then searched for my title again. Guess what? EzineArticles.com was listed as #1 and my site as #2. Even though Google knew the article originated from my site and therefore ezinearticles had “copied” it. Google still ranked the ezinearticles duplicate ahead of mine. If there is a duplicate content filter then it certainly did not apply to ezinearticles in this instance.
Not convinced?
I wrote an article some time ago and submitted it to several article directories. The title of the article was:
“How to Choose Keywords to Theme Your Pages and Boost Your Traffic”
Go to Google and search for it. Put the title inside quotations so that you only find pages with that exact phrase in them.
I currently get over 17,000 results returned for that article. Look at each of the first 10 results. When I did it, all 10 were my article.
You can continue onto page 2 and check those results.
Surely if there was a duplicate content filter in place that penalised duplication of articles across web sites, we would not see this reprinting of my article across all these sites?
Incidentally, when I submitted that article, I used the resource box to link back to my Wordtracker Tutorial using the link text “Wordtracker Tutorial”. With the article being so widely taken up, my Wordtracker Tutorial went straight to #1 in Google for that search term. Today, I am #4, but only because those article links point to my old hyphenated domain which was moved recently to a newer unhyphenated one. It is the unhyphenated one that now ranks #4.
Incidentally, if you followed my domain move, you may remember that I moved it because my hyphenated domain fell out of the top rankings in Google for almost all of my terms. I pointed out a couple of examples where my rankings went from top 3 to no where.
One of those terms was cb accountant review. My old hyphenated domain had been #1, then dropped out of the top 100+.
Since implementing my 301 redirect, my rankings on the new site have gradually improved. You might like to look up “cb accountant review” in Google now. My new domain is once again #1 for that term.
This shows that the 301 redirect is doing its job, and also that there is no sandbox for this new site.
Not all of my rankings have returned, but I am happy with the progress so far. A hyphenated site that looked dead and buried has now been given a new lease of life by moving it to a non-hyphenated one.
OK, so back to the issue of duplicate content penalties.
Using articles from article directory sites will not get your page penalised for duplicate content.
Where duplicate content will hurt you, is when you republish the same article (or parts of an article) on your site, several times (even if you change the main keyword running through the article). This penalty may also cause you problems if you publish the same article across multiple sites that you own (yes, Google knows which sites belong to the same webmaster).
Advice: If you make every page on every one of your sites unique, the duplicate content filters are not going to cause you problems.
What does the future hold? Well, this article sent to me by a subscriber (thanks Rob) may give us an insight. It seems Microsoft are developing an algorithm to check for duplication of phrases within pages. The article also discusses other indicators of spam.
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3. Keyword optimization concerns
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I was reading through some articles that were submitted to my article site the other day. Some are really very good, but on the other hand, some were not.
Of the “bad” ones, the thing that struck me was how easy it was to pick out the main keyword the author was using when he/she wrote the article. Even after reading only the first paragraph, I could spot it, and my suspicions were confirmed as I continued down the article.
Articles written around a main (primary) keyword often read very badly. The author tries to insert the exact phrase over and over again, even when it is not grammatically correct to do so. The article sounds forced (because it is).
And my point is?
Well my point here is that if I can spot this type of keyword focused content, so can a search engine. Articles written in this way are written for the search engine, not the visitor, and are therefore going to be the type of article that the search engines want to remove from their database. Remember, the search engines want to serve up the most relevant content with the best information. They will assume (as I would) that any article written purely for the search engine is not going to be of interest to a visitor.
So, where does that leave us in terms of keyword research? Does this mean we should not target primary keyword phrases?
Keyword research, and manipulation of keywords going into an article has evolved in recent years.
When I first started out it was simple. Write content around one primary keyword and 2 or 3 secondary keywords. Insert the primary in the title, meta tags, H1 header tag, twice in each paragraph, H2 header etc etc. Insert the secondaries throughout the article.
Nowadays that optimization technique would be labelled as keyword stuffing by the search engines and ranked appropriately.
In fact, I would not recommend any technique that had hard and fast rules about where to insert keywords into a document. With rules, you leave footprints, and footprints are visible to the search engines.
This week I read a newly released “SEO tutorial” which offered exact methods of keyword placement involving inserting exact numbers of keywords into various parts of a page. Sure it helps a writer concentrate on the objective of the article having such firm rules, but don’t expect it to help your rankings. If you follow the same rules on all your content, all your content has the same footprint.
Obviously keywords are important since they will tell the search engines what a page is about. Don’t forget though that keywords in incoming link text is important (even more important than the keywords on a page) in the page ranking.
Keyword optimization must involve both on-page and off-page strategies.
Off page factors are relatively easy. Select several phrases you want to rank for, and get incoming links that include those phrases. Add more phrases into the inbound link text mix as time goes by.
On-page optimization appears a little trickier.
The way you should be thinking about writing content is not so much about focusing on individual keywords, but more on the overall theme of a page.
When people search for stuff at the search engines, they enter a wide range of phrases, even when searching for the same information. Your job is to find all of the variations of search terms used, and pick out those words that often appear in the set of searches. Using these common words in your content will ensure that your page is themed around the topic of your main keyword.
For example, if you were writing a web page about baby shower invitations, you would look for all phrases related to baby showers AND invitations.
Here is how I would do it.
1. Go to Wordtracker and do a compressed search for baby shower invitation (with “number of results” set to 500).
Wow, Wordtracker returns 500 results for this phrase. THat will give us plenty to work on.
2. Get Wordtracker to calculate the competition for you.
Using this method of keyword harvesting, Wordtracker will only find the competition for the first 100 words, but that is OK. These 100 will be the most common search phrases in the group, and those are the ones we are most interested in (since they are the phrases that are most often typed in, and therefore can be used to most strongly theme our page).
3. Email the results to yourself.
4. Import the keywords into your favourite “keyword manipulation” tool. I obviously use Keyword Results Analyzer (KRA).
Now, you need to find the words that are most often associated with your main phrase “baby shower invitation(s)” in the queries made at the search engines. This will tell you what words are highly related to your main phrase, and therefore should be used to theme your page.
5. Order your phrases by Count, with the highest count at the top. This will put the most common phrases at the top of your list.
The next step depends on how many “themeing words” you want.
6. Select the top 10 phrases. Here they are in my example:
baby shower invitations
baby shower footprint invitation
baby shower invitation
free printable baby shower invitations
baby shower invitation wording
free baby shower invitations
free baby shower invitation
baby shower invitation ideas
wording guide for baby shower invitations
abc girl baby shower invitations
All you now need to do is make a list of all unique keywords that appear in this list. They will be the words that are most often associated with baby shower invitations searches, and therefore the best ones to use to theme your page.
Fortunately KRA gives us this information in the reports:
Here are the themeing words:
abc
baby
footprint
free
girl
guide
ideas
invitation
invitations
printable
shower
wording
A web page that is written to include these words in the page, will inevitably be seen as a page on baby shower invitations by a search engine, since these words are most commonly found in baby shower invitation searches.
Add into the mix, one or two occurrences of the exact phrase “baby shower invitation” on the page, plus inbound links containing this and other related phrases, and you will have a page that should do well for a variety of baby shower invitation queries.
If you are writing a longer article, this last step can be changed to include the top 20, top 30 or more phrases.
Here are the unique themeing words to use if you use the top 20 phrases instead of the top 10 as shown above:
abc
baby
bear
cheap
create
footprint
free
girl
guide
ideas
invitation
invitations
pooh
print
printable
shower
teddy
unique
winnie
wording
This has added a few more themeing words into our arsenal:
bear
cheap
create
pooh
print
teddy
unique
winnie
This can also give us ideas on different related pages that we could write. Looking at the additional phrases, it might be worth a web page devoted entirely to Winnie the Pooh invitations.
Checking KRA, 5 of the 100 phrases we collected are related to Winnie the Pooh, but I am sure we could find even more at Wordtracker by searching for “pooh shower invitations”. Sure enough, there were another 17 phrases found related to this phrase. Here they are:
baby pooh baby shower invitations
cheap winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
classic pooh baby shower invitations
classic pooh shower invitations
classic pooh timeless memories baby shower invitations
classic winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
classic winnie the pooh shower invitations
free printable pooh baby shower invitations
free printable winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
free winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
pooh baby shower invitation
pooh baby shower invitations
pooh classic baby shower invitations
the pooh baby shower invitations
winnie the pooh baby shower invitation
winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
winnie the pooh shower invitations
And letting KRA do its work, here are the themeing words for a page on Winnie the Pooh baby shower invitations:
baby
cheap
classic
free
invitation
invitations
memories
pooh
printable
shower
timeless
winnie
As you have seen, selecting keywords for themeing pages is very easy to do, and just by making sure that these words are included in your page, you will be themeing your page and getting the on-page factors right, all without overly focusing on a primary keyword.
All you then need to do is work on off-page factors, getting incoming links with link text rich in a range of primary phrases and themeing words.
The tool of choice to help in this themeing is Keyword Results Analyzer.
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4. Other Stuff
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Wordtracker are going to be replacing the “Multiple Searches” section of their keyword research tool with a single, unified “Keyword Researcher”. If you have not yet tried it out, login to your Wordtracker account and give it a try. There are still a few issues to be ironed out, but I like where it is headed.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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