Purple Squirrl

SEO still focussed on text

In the video below, Google’s Search Evangelst Adam Lasnik explains that if you are going to post images and video, text is still needed to help search engines find your page. He says that using Flash as example is good for “engaging users but still focus on text as the primary mechanism for communicating”.

The objective of course is that you need to be found. Just like I’ve done here with this video, if I were to have just embed the video with a good post title the search engines would find it more difficult to find it .When you’re trying to make money online you need to be found via natural search. If you don’t use text then you haven’t really prepared your content properly from an SEO perspective.

SEO - Update on Metrics

As SEO matures it’s interesting to see that the value and sort of metrics is also changing. Stephan Spencer over at Marketing Profs writes an article about some of the metrics now being tracked for SEO.

Here are the metrics Spencer mentions -

1) Brand-to-Nonbrand Ratio
2) Unique Pages
3) Page Yield
4) Keyword Yield
5) Visitors per Keyword
6) Index-to-Crawl Ratio
7) Engine Yield

Numbers are interesting, they can certainly tell a story but only if sliced & diced the right way do they tell the accurate story.

Perfomics Details the 4 Pillars of Natural Search

The folks over at Performics have posted four articles explaining the 4 main things any website owner needs to be concerned about when optimizing their site to be found on Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine. If you are looking at moving the needle with SEO then take some time to study these articles.

The 4 Pillars of Natural Search

Pillar Number 1: Indexation
Pillar Number 2: Content Optimization
Pillar Number 3: Link-Building
Pillar Number 4: Distribution

Their posts are clearly meant as an primer since they do not delve into any of the tools required to do any of the research necessary. In the coming months I will be posting more info on what I’ve done with this blog regarding SEO and what tools I use. I’ll also post what Wordpress plugins are good to have for SEO.

SEO Cannot Solve Banned Domains

It’s amazing that everybody seems to think that SEO is the answer to a website’s traffic problems. They think well if the site was optimized then traffic would go through the roof. Well, there be other problems. One of the biggest issues is the health of the domain name. If the search engines stop indexing because they view the domain as spam then all the SEO you do will not help the marketing.

Practical Ecommerce have a great article about checking the health of your domain before you purchase it. If the domain was previously owned then it’s important to research how it was used. If it was used as spam then there are good chances that the big search engines (ie. Google, Yahoo!, MSN) will have banned it. No amount of SEO will get it listed.

Here are some tips from the Practical Ecommerce article:

1. Check out the domain name’s previous incarnations (if any) at Archive.org.
2. Learn more about the kind of sneaky or malicious practices that would cause a site to become penalized by looking at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
3. If you’re purchasing an existing domain, use any one of a number of PageRank lookup tools, like this one at Blogflux. Look at the current site’s PageRank. If it’s an old site with a zero PageRank, something must be wrong.
4. For an existing domain name, check to see who currently owns it by using the WHOIS Search at Infoservemedia.com. Then check the ownership against the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) at Spamhaus.org. There are 115 known spam operations on the list.