EzSEO Newsletter # 133
August 13, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 133
Andy Williams
“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”
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This week:
1. Getting into DMOZ
2. 301 Redirect for moving pages as well as sites
3. Fr.ee Firewalls
4. Rules when getting content written for you
5. Other News
Hi again.
After the last two newsletters being interrupted by my daughter, I decided to get up early this morning (06:20) to get it completed before she wakes up. I bet many people want an online business so that they don’t have to get up this early, but I am a morning person, and love the quiet darkness of the early morning.
Later today we are off up Mount Teide for a barbecue with friends. If I remember, I’ll post some pictures next week. We have fantastic bbq facilities here on Tenerife, with designated bbq zones – the local authorities even provide the wood.
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1. Getting into DMOZ
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DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project (ODP) as it is also known, is one of the most important directories to get listed in, yet it is also one of the most difficult.
A link from DMOZ can increase traffic to your site through visitors from the directory, and because of the authoritative link you’ll receive from your listing.
So why is it so difficult to get accepted?
Well, DMOZ is edited by humans. Submission is free, but only the very best pages will get accepted (and even some of these will be rejected).
If you go and browse the categories related to your own sites, look for those categories with very few entries. If you find some categories like this, look at the listings and visit the pages listed. Can you think of a topic that is not covered by the listed pages in this niche? If yes, then write an informative article on that topic, post it on your site, and submit it to that category.
Many editors are looking out for good quality articles that complement what they already have in their category. However, if the information found at the URLs you submit are similar to information found in existing listings, don’t expect to be accepted. Editors want something new.
Now, I hinted at a very important point above. Don’t just consider submitting the homepage of your sites. Select and submit URLs from your site that fill a gap in the information found at DMOZ, and submit those. Make sure you follow the guidelines, and make sure your web page has been spell & grammar checked. Make sure it offers valuable information, and make sure its info not found in your intended category already.
When you submit, make sure you have no spelling or grammatical errors in the submission form itself.
Following this advice should increase your chances of getting into the directory.
A couple of points worth noting:
* If your site sells stuff, submit it to one of the shopping categories.
* Some categories don’t have editors. If you want an easy way into DMOZ, why not apply to become an editor yourself? Its not easy to be accepted as an editor, but it is certainly worth the effort.
There is a forum sponsored and moderated by the ODP project editors over at:
http://resource-zone.com/forum/
Its well worth looking at if you want to learn more about DMOZ, and how to get listed. You’ll also probably be a little shocked by some of the posts from irate webmasters.
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2. 301 Redirect for moving pages as well as sites
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Earlier this year I moved my site from its old hyphenated location at ez-search-engine-optimization.com to the more SE friendly ezseonews.com.
You can read the saga on my blog starting at issue #113.
(Scroll to the bottom of the page, and read 113 first, then work your way up the page).
The reason I used a 301 redirect (permanent redirect) was to inform the search engines that I had permanently moved my domain, so that existing links to the old domain would be redirected to the new one. This theoretically should mean that my PR is conserved.
Well, was it?
Not quite. My old hyphenated domain had a PR of 4/5. It wobbled between 4 and 5 over the last year of its life, indicating to me that it was a high 4/low 5 PR.
The new site is currently a PR 4 (http://ezseonews.com), but when the redirect was first implemented, the site went to a PR3 on the first update, so it appears there was some dampening down of the PR during the redirect.
The current PR 4 is a result of more article submissions pushing the PR up. However, despite the initial PR loss, many of my web pages on the new domain went straight back to their high rankings (as revealed in the earlier newsletter series), meaning there was no “Google Sandbox”.
One benefit I did get from this move is that Yahoo decided to index more of my site. The old domain only ever had one or two pages indexed (the homepage and the blog homepage), whereas now, if you search Yahoo for site:ezseonews.com you’ll find many more pages listed (202 pages here in Spain). This increase in Yahoo traffic was unexpected, but very welcome.
Now, the 301 redirect is a versatile “tool”. One of the ways you can use it is to move individual pages of your site to new locations.
The big problem with moving a page, or changing its name is that any incoming links will no longer be factored into the rankings of the new page. Also, if the page was well established, visitor bookmarks (as well as search engine spiders) will lead to a page not found error. Obviously these things are not good news.
If you want to move a web page to a new sub-directory, or just change the filename, you should use a 301 redirect.
It will depend on your server type – Unix or Microsoft as to the details of implementing the 301 redirect.
Unix servers:
Edit the .htaccess file found in the root folder of your site (check with your host if you don’t have one) to include the redirect:
Redirect 301 [old page] [new page]
Just edit the above and replace [old page] with the old page name (include directory information if it is not in the root folder), and [new page] with the full URL to the new page.
Just repeat for each page you want to move.
If you are using a Microsoft server, I suggest you contact your host for information on moving pages as I don’t have experience with these servers.
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3. Fr.ee Firewalls
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Although Microsoft provides a basic firewall with Windows, it does have some limitations. It is also probably hack-enemy #1, and being targeted by more hackers than any other firewall. For these and a number of other reasons, many people often prefer to use a third party firewall.
(Incidentally, if you don’t know what a firewall is, you should go and search Google for more information. Basically a firewall is software that stops unauthorized access to your computer, and unauthorised transmissions from your computer to the internet).
I have been looking for a while now for a good fr.ee firewall, and had almost given up hope, until someone posted a question on my SEO Website Builder User forum asking for recommendations. After several suggestions, and some testing, we found two clear winners.
If you are looking for a good firewall, these are our recommendations:
This one is fairly easy to use, though you need to save your profile periodically so that you don’t constantly get asked for permission to allow the same applications over and over again when you start your computer. After you save your profile the first time, Jetico will ask you every time you close your computer if you want to save the profile (if your profile has changed).
The other strong recommendation is:
You will need to know a little about the hardware in your computer to properly configure this one (like which PC hardware is used for connecting to the Internet), but it looks like a quality product, and several SEO WSB users like it a lot.
I’d be interested to hear if you have any other fr.ee firewall suggestions. I have tried a number of products, but other than the two above, they all caused problems on my machine, e.g. not compatible with my Avast Antivirus software, or slowed my machine down too much.
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4. Rules when getting content written for you
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As your internet business grows, you need to start looking for ways to out-source some of the daily tasks you perform.
One of the first things many people will consider is getting other people to write articles for them.
I have heard a number of horror stories of people buying articles through elance or rentacoders where the content has all been copied from other sites on the internet. Even small scale copying of the odd paragraph here and there is unacceptable. It is therefore very important to check all bought content using a site like Copyscape. You will need to upload your articles to your site before you can check them, but it is an essential task.
Whenever I have paid for content to be written for me (articles and an eBook), I have used this company.
The good thing about this company is that they check all of the content their writers create at Copyscape, so you don’t have to. They may not be the cheapest, or the fastest, but that extra security against plagiarism is well worth the extra time and money.
They will also obey your keyword rules at no extra charge.
If you use a tool like my own Content Publisher, you can request that they include the article header information, so that your articles can be quickly and effortlessly imported, ready for publishing to your site with Title, Meta Tags and filename all correct and not requiring edits.
So what rules do you ask for when getting content created for you?
I have read some very convoluted keyword rules in my time, and some are still taught in current Affiliate Training Manuals. However, my own rules are not so much keyword based, as theme-based.
Here they are:
I provide my writers with a title, a primary phrase, and around 10 – 20 highly related phrases. I’ll then use Keyword Results Analyzer to give me the individual words that are most often used in searches for this topic (theme words).
So, my author has four pieces of information.
1. A title
2. A primary phrase
3. 10 – 20 related phrases
4. Theme words.
We’ll look at an example in a moment, but let me tell you the instructions I give them to accompany the above.
1. Write naturally for humans visitors, not the search engines.
2. DO NOT write a sentence for the sake of including a keyword or phrase. Only write sentences because they are essential to the article.
The above two points are the most important.
3. Include the primary phrases once in the filename, the title of the page, and the opening header (which is the title I wrote, so they don’t have to do anything here).
4. Sprinkle the theme words throughout the article, using the related phrase they came from if you want, but don’t force anything. Every paragraph should have theme words in them (this happens naturally if you are writing about a topic anyway).
OK, an example taken from the BBQ niche you get in the demo version of KRA (http://keywordresearchlab.com):
KRA identified a sub-niche of “Jenn air grills”. If I found a merchant with an affiliate program selling Jenn Air grills, I’d write an article on them (or get one written), using “Jenn Air grills” as my primary phrase.
Using KRA to filter the phrases related to this term, and limiting my selection to the most popular searches, I’d come up with the following list of related phrases:
jenn air grills
jenn air grill
jenn-air outdoor grill
jenn air gas grill
jenn air gas grills
jenn-air natural gas grill
jenn-air outdoor grills
bbq grills jennaire
jenn air gas grill parts
jenn air outdoor grill
jenn air grill cover
jenn air outdoor gas grill cover
jennair barb b q grill accessories
jenn air outdoor grills
jenn and air and grill and cover
jenn air cooktop with grill and griddle
KRA also gives me the unique words that make up these phrases (my theme words):
accessories
air*
barb
bbq
cooktop
cover
gas
griddle
grill*
grills*
jenn*
jennair
jenn-air
jennaire
natural
outdoor
parts
Quite often I’ll ask my author to pay special attention to the theme words that make up the primary phrase (mark them with an asterisk). They’ll be instructed to include these more often than the other theme words.
If my author is uncertain about a theme word, or how to use it, they can refer back to the related phrases to see how it was used in the search.
e.g.
If the author did not know how to use the word “cover”, they could see form my related phrases that it appears in these phrase:
jenn air outdoor gas grill cover
jenn and air and grill and cover
jenn air grill cover
..and use one of these complete phrases in the article instead of the theme word (with the exception of phrase 2 which doesn’t make grammatical sense).
So, the author doesn’t have to concentrate on densities, or paragraph placement of words. They only need to write naturally with one eye on my list of theme words. There are no hard and fast rules to follow, so no footprint that the search engines can pick up on.
As for the length of the article?
I’ll tell them to make it as long or as short as it takes to include all of the relevant information. Some will end up 100 words, others 700. That is great, as it looks very natural (which it is) to the search engines.
Whatever rules you give your authors, make sure that the content you get back is interesting, unique and well-written without appearing as if keywords have been stuffed into it. Quality is everything.
Just before I leave this topic, one subscriber asked me about phrases that don’t make grammatical sense. e.g. in the above list:
“jenn and air and grill and cover”
does not make sense.
I would advise using ONLY grammatically correct phrases. You can add/remove small words like “it”, “the”, “and” etc, and add punctuation to make it correct.
The above phrase should be re-written to “jenn air grill cover”.
The way pages are themed means that your page can rank for grammatically incorrect phrases as well as the ones it is “optimized” for.
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5. Other News
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There are still a few copies of the July Blueprint available. I wont go into details here, so if you are interested, you can read the specifics here. Just click the link top right to July 2006.
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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Visit the subscriber Bonus page for free reports and other subscriber-only offers:
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at webmaster[REMOVE]@ezseonews.com. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That’s extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2006 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
This newsletter disclaims all responsibility for the advertising copy or the product advertised. You cannot rely on the fact that the newsletter has examined the product or recommends or endorses the product, unless it clearly says that it has, when you make your decision whether or not to purchase the product or interact with the advertiser. You are advised to do your own investigation before buying. Additionally, this newsletter may accept articles that we do not write or investigate the accuracy of and for which we may receive direct or indirect benefit or compensation. We specifically disclaim any responsibility for the content of such copy.
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