GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 12 - April 2010

com/Super_Audi_R8_Black_2010.html. The closer themore competitive keyword landing pages are to the root folder, the easier itwill be for them togainadditional rankingfactor,pagerankandpagestrength toexpressthecontentonthatpage. Content Volume – Ensure you have enough content todominate a competi- tive keyword. Trying to rank for a key- wordwithmillions of competing pages with a little or no content is a waste of time. You will need topical relevance, which means articles, posts and pages all internally linked and consolidated within a clear silo to create the proper on-page signals for that keyword. Shoot for aminimum of 300words that inte- grate LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) or associatedkeywords and typical key- word phrases. You can find these using Google’s keyword suggestion tool or betteryet look for theboldedprintwith- in the snippets when utilizing Google’s beta LSA search query by typing a tilde (~) justbeforeyourkeyword ina search onGoogle.Alsouse thesekeywordsand keyword phrases in internal back links andexternal anchor text links. Contextual Links – Link contextu- ally within related documents to se- lect preferred landing pages through virtual theming. If you are on a page aboutpoker rooms, andhaveakeyword phrase such as “free poker rooms,” link the keyword phrase to the free poker room page. Do this for every keyword/ kw phrase (just once per page if it ap- pearsmore than that) andyouhave just addedavirtual theme toyourkeywords. This means that each page can now work together collectively to support the parent theme (which is the main/ root keyword itself). 10 Social Bookmarking – I have included Social Bookmarks (SBMs) in many of the last few Top Tips pieces I have written because it just made sense that it would only be a matter of time beforeGoogle and the rest of the SEs startedplacingmoreweight on them in the overall organic algorithms they use. A few reasonswhy I believe this is that they are methodically devaluing links; they need some type of mass vot- ing system thatworksmuch likeback link valuation; andmostof thesocialnetworks areprogressivelymonitoring theway their 4. 5. services are used – or in other words po- licingmember accountsandpatrolling for spamaccounts.Oh, andGoogleBuzz. We did some testing two years ago and I made the results public on SEOChat. In short, a member said that he had a com- petitor who had two of the top 10 listings for “Poker” in theNetherlands.Thismeant he was getting bumped out of the top ten – or front page of results – andwas won- deringhow toeliminate thisdual listing.So we took a noncompetitor site that ranked below his competitor and above him and used software calledOnlywire that posted toseveralSBMservices inoneclick.Were- visitedtheexperiment in lessthan24hours andnot onlyhad it bumped the secondary listing that his competitor held, but it also gainedhiman extra position. So what does this mean in the big pic- ture?Anyone in theonlinepoker industry knows that one position gained in the top 10 results canbehuge. This is primarily becausewhen you are in the top 3 results on Google you are syn- dicated across other big sites like AOL, Netscape and iWon, to name a few, but even the jump from #6 to #7 adds 1.5% CTR. 1.5% of a few million searches is pretty significant. Do the math and see what this small move with very little ef- fort would make to your bottom line by increasingyourposition. One that Ihavebeenmessingaroundwith that seems to havemore or less perfected this technique is Ping.fm. It added a few other viral services to the mix, such as GTalk,TwitterandLinkedIn, and isaone- click tool aswell. 11 Other Killer Apps I use –Over the years I have isolated several programs and utilities that saveus amassiveamount of time. I’ll list them here, along with what they do andhowweuse them; GoogleAlerts –ThismonitorsGoogle’s databases and will notify you when content appears that contain the kw/ kw phrase that you are looking for.We use this tomeasure the effectiveness of pressreleases,monitor thecompetition, identifynew“buzz” incertain industries (primarily gaming), client reputation 1. managementandcertaincontent. It can loaddirectly intoyour iGoogledesktop. Google Trends – This is a tool that shows graphs identifying the traffic trendsover time, from the last fewyears to the last fewweeks, and allows you to see a snapshot of practically any indus- try. It’s great for researching your next product offering. Google Insights–This isasupercharged versionofTrends. Itmonitors theactual search queries globally. So if you want- ed to see which city, county, country or region had the most activity for a par- ticular search term, this tool does that – andmore! It can add delimiters such as time frames, and will also compare regions, compare related keywords and anymixof theabove3 filters.Then itwill graph themall for youaswell for a clear look.Oneofmy favoriteaccessories that GoogleInsightshas is that itwillmonitor thesector for relatedkeywords thathave significantly increased search volume. They call themBreakout Terms and you canhave thesedelivered toyour iGoogle desktopaswell. Ican’t tellyouhowhelp- ful this iswhen you are in ahighly com- petitive field trying to findniche or long tail terms to target and get the jump on thebigguys.Onceweidentifytheseterms we then create pages for them and add them toa silo. So for instance if “Million Dollar Bingo Game” is a breakout term beingsearchedenough todrawa“Break- out Term” notification from Insights, we’llbuildapage for itusingall thesteps mentioned above, add it to a relevant silo, bleed PR to it using no follows, and suddenly we are ranking very well. f HOTTIP –Wealsouse theupgrad- ed version of Domain Tools in much the sameway.Wemonitor for our kw (e.g., Casinos). Any time a domain is purchasedwith that kw in itwe get an email. When we see that all the TLDs (Top Level Domains like .com, .net and .org)areallpurchasedat thesame time, we know some VC out there is paying to buy them up in expectation of a fu- ture site launch. Posh Bingo is a great recent example. We received email notification from Domain Tools, put an Alert on the term, and then watched Insights for a breakout alert. (We monitored the URL as well for launch.) 2. 3. 43 12 Top Secret SEO Tips