Gary Beal, a.k.a GaryTheScubaGuy has been doing SEO since he was a Super Affiliate in the Gaming Industry in the US. 6 Years ago he moved to the UK and was the first recognised Gaming SEO in Europe. Since then he has spoken at over 50 conferences,published dozens of articles in all of the Affiliate Magazines and is best known for his “Top 12 SEO Tips for 20__”. He has worked with most of the big players, but he gives his hands-on tactics away for free to Affiliates on forums like GPWA and SEOChat, and conferences like this one!
- Gary Beal currently lives in Malta - Malta
Гари Бил, так же известный как GaryTheScubaGuy занимается SEO с тех пор как он был Супер Аффилиэйт в Игровой Индустрии в Соединенных Штатах. 6 лет назад он переехал в Англию и стал первым признанным Игровым SEO в Европе. С тех пор он произносил речи на более чем 50-и конференциях, опубликовал десятки статей во всех журналах аффилиэйтов на форумах как GPWA, SEOChat и конференциях как эта.
Press top 12 seo tips for 2103 v3.1 - race conference - moscow russia 11-12 - Gary Beal Malta
1. Top 12 SEO Tips for 2013 – Russian Affiliate
Conference & Expo Moscow, Russia
Author – Gary R Beal
Page 1
2. Top 12 SEO Tips for 2013 Affiliates
Penguin 3.0 and the Google Disavow Tool were released recently and they have
impacted a huge number of websites to a certain extent.
Although the Panda update was targeting Affiliates, this update also contains certain
metrics that seem to be affecting 'Affiliate-type' websites like portal sites.
I have a lot of these and have seen a significant change, both good and bad.
I am writing this for other Affiliates in hopes that everyone, Affiliate or SEO, will
take at least one thing home with them that they didn't start with.
I work as an SEO and as an Affiliate – in both cases for major
casino, gambling and Bingo websites
This industry is considered to be one of the “Three P's”.
The “Three P's” are named this because they are the most difficult industries online.
They are Poker, Pills and Porn. I do Poker and other Gaming websites.
We do things in these industries that most do not do, or do not have to do.
So these tactics/methods are very aggressive, and very successful. The tools and the
shortcuts are meant to get the most value from the time you spend each day. I have
tried most of the tools out there so save your money and your time and write these
down. Or go the the website at the bottom of the slides for a list of links.
Some of the 50+ tools and websites I will talk about are used by many people for
many different reasons, and a lot of these are considered Black Hat methods. I do not
endorse the use of these tools in this way, but I will be showing you how it is done. I
believe you need to know what the competition is doing in order to compete.
What I will say is that I have what SEO's call “Sacrificial Lamb” websites that are
regularly used to test the limits of these tools and also Yandex/Google's red flag
limits. We want to find out what affects a website positively and negatively in the
search engine results.
So beware. Some of this information can negatively affect your website if used
improperly.
You need to know what you are up against in any market.
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3. The last thing I will tell you is that Google and Yandex are very similar in the way
that they operate.
In terms of organic SEO and Pay Per Click (Yandex.Direct/Google Adwords) both
companies share many similarities. Although certain things are different internally the
results are similar. Some of the tools each Search Engines provides are different, but
both can be useful (Then you have tools like Google Translate)
What are your Geographic Targets?
I spoke at a couple of conferences in Romania and other Eastern European countries
recently and what I found is that most Affiliates and companies, and companies with
Affiliates are only targeting their own country. Since Russia's 83 regions are similar
to the US's 50 states you may choose to just target a regional market. If this is you
there are many differences in Local, Regional and Worldwide SEO, but there are
many similarities as well.
The SEO tips I give are for a worldwide campaign but most tips are for Local Search
as well.
In some situations it is impossible to market outside of your own country for various
reasons. As an Affiliate though you have the unique opportunity to target a global
market if you are marketing the right product.
Take online gambling for instance. You can market all over the world. Many products
are this way. As an Affiliate you can sell services such as Canon or FedEX if you
want. Companies like Commission Junction and TradeDoubler even do some of the
work for you for a fee. Other Affiliate offers are direct from the company and you can
negotiate for higher commissions or get 'white label' websites that are not just the
usual Affiliate website that has banners and lists of other websites. An example would
be a Bingo Website where they play on your website instead of getting sent to another
website.
The only thing standing between you and success is choosing the right product for the
right demographic and geographic targets.
I wouldn't pick to market Bingo in the UK because the market is saturated. I would
market Bingo in the US and Canada. Most companies do not target the US so it
makes it a “soft market” or more simple to have success in. There are reasons for this
that I won't get into. The point I am making is you find the right product and the right
market and all you need to do is the right Search Engine Optimisation.
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4. How Do I Find The Right Market and Product?
I use Google News, Google Trends, Google Alerts and some type of RSS populated
desktop or automatic email program. I monitor the top 10 markets by “Twitter
Trending” and then I do keyword research (WordTracker or Google Keyword
Tool).
Google Trends identifies the top geographical markets, the top languages and cities
by keyword search history.
I know that Yandex has great tools for SEO. My target region is global so I use
Google's first, then Yandex if the Russian market is Top 10 for my website's product
or language. So most of what I say applies to Google.
As an Affiliate my next step is to compare the average commission against my
estimated PPC conversion cost – or what each sale cost me in advertising.
If these figures are positive then I have my new product.
I run PPC campaigns on the assumption that if I break even I did good. That is
because I get traffic to the site to test SEO and user navigation issues, I discover if the
market is profitable enough to stay involved in and I get valuable information on the
best keywords and landing pages to use on my website and in my SEO tactics.
So that's my big speech on becoming a successful Affiliate – Find the
right product and offer by using the right tools.
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5. Organic SEO
The next step is to rank organically. The information you have from the previous
information will be utilised here.
The first thing I do is find a domain. If I were in Russia and my target is the world I
need to consider a couple things;
• Do I buy a Russian domain – MyWebsite.ru
• Do I buy a .com?
• Do I find a domain that I can buy both?
• Do I get content in Russian or English? Both? Additional Languages?
• Where do I host the website?
These are all important questions. My answer is that I do them both. I will look at
the top 10 regions that are searching my products keyword. Then I want to see if
there are duplicate languages. If my top 3 countries are English speaking then I am in
a good position. If I can target 6-10 of the top 10 countries with just 2 or 3 languages
I am doing better.
This is because I can buy hosting in target countries for just a few Euros per month. If
I were to buy translation for 6-10 languages it would be expensive.
I should point out right now that it is very important you research all sources of
information very well. Take your time. There are a dozen tools to help you determine
a market for your product and you need to look at what sites you are up against and
what gets them top rankings. Tools like SEOMoz, SEO Powersuite, MajesticSEO,
LinkResearchTools, SearchMetrics, and Spyfu are all tools I have used, and still
use. You should look into each and see what is best for your need. Each will compare
verified SEO elements important to ranking. It will compare things like back links,
content and traffic statistics.
Search Engine Rankings
You need to set this up from the beginning while you are doing keyword research.
You need to have a start date or a 'Pre-SEO Report'. I use rank results as an Affiliate
and as the starting point for my SEO clients. Some may already rank so it is
important to establish a starting point. You need to know how what you are doing is
improving or harming your rankings.
I have used them all and still use 3 or 4 different tools for different reasons. The
primary tool I use for commercial level search rankings is a tool called Rank
Tracker. There is a link to it at PPC-Manager.blogspot.com. There is also a link to
OverPlay which you must use with Rank Tracker if you run rank results like I do.
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6. My typical work load is searching 1000's of terms on dozens of websites and it must
look like I am searching from that country. So Terms x Engines x Countries. The
problem is that most of the search engines will block you. Google does this with
captcha's. When you must identify a picture of skewed letters to verify you are
human. There are captcha tools you can pay for that will solve these, but its better to
be nice with the Search Engines.
Overplay
So I use OverPlay.
OverPlay masks my IP. It can make it appear as if I am searching from any country I
want. Its $8 a month and invaluable. (I even use it in Malta to Get NetFlix).
I recommend running this the first time on a massive keyword list. This should
include;
• Hollywood Terms (Bingo, Online Bingo, Free Bingo)
• Primary Keywords (Free Online Bingo)
• Secondary Terms (Play Free Online Bingo)
• Long-tail Terms (Play Free Online Bingo 90 Ball)
My first Pre-SEO Reports usually contains over 100 terms. This will take a lot of
time but you will reduce this number down to around 25 after the first time you run it.
I would also double the number that the program uses as its default settings to double,
or twice the numbers they recommend for human emulation.
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7. Note - Search only 5 terms at a time. Sort by date submitted. Select the next
five.Change OverPlay to a new location in your target country and start it again.
Repeat this until you are finished with the list. Save this in DropBox or a Cloud
because this is a very important document.
Okay. So far we have;
• Our domain
• Our keywords
• Our language and country targets
• Our Pre-SEO Report run and Rank Tracking setup
Now we will set up our campaigns
When I begin a campaign I use multiple tools. Some of these are paid and some are
free. I log in to each of these and bookmark each in a folder that is named for the
task. If I am doing market research I have a set of websites in one folder. When I start
my research I just right click on the folder and open all in tabs. If I am doing PPC I
have a folder with Adwords, MSN, Yahoo, AdBright, Adsense and a few others that
automatically open to my account. I use LastPass to auto-login to save time.
The Difference Between Yandex, Google.com and Google.ru regarding
Their Search Results
If you search for any English word or phrase on Yandex.ru, you will get results from
Russian sites ending in '.ru'. If you search on Google.com and have a Russian IP
address you will not get Russian results if you are searching in English.
Yandex looks at geographical regions based on your IP that you are searching from.
What happens if you search Russian terms on Yandex from a UK IP address?
What happens if I search Google.com from Spain in Russian?
There are many combinations in you what will see in these results.
These are areas that can be exploited by an Affiliate.
Subdomains – The Key to Blanket Coverage of Multiple Geotargets
and Languages
Rather than build multiple sites to target multiple language you can use your primary
domains to target any region and any language. This is definitely recommended if
you have an existing strong domain.
You can transfer the trust and authority from your main site to your subdomains by
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8. linking to them. The amount that they send the subdomains is not diluted or degraded
by having 10, 20 or even 30 subdomains.
A subdomain linked to from a PR5 domain will transfer a PR5
(Google Page Rank).
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10. Trust and Authority is also passed to subdomains
Transferred Trust and Authority Points
Creating subdomains is best left up to a webmaster of you can hire someone to do it
on Odesk. I use Odesk for many of my jobs. Otherwise there are many tutorials
available.
The most significant reason that you want to create subdomains is this: Google and
Yandex see subdomains as individual websites.
Here is an example from a search on Google.de for Bingo Games;
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11. Other important reasons subdomains are an excellent choice;
• You can set Geotargeting in Webmaster Central Tools to target regions
• Subdomains can be hosted separately in each target region/country
• Links are reciprocal (equal) benefits to both domains
• If your site is penalised you can use a 301 and restore rankings
• I hire translators for .005 per word on Odesk
Geotargeting & Regional Hosting
Next – The Website
I use TemplateMonster Wordpress CMS (Content Management System) for most of
my websites because most hosting companies have a 1-button install.
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12. I do mostly gaming and target globally so I use companies that offer a white label. In
years past you had to spend thousands to get a “Branded” website. In the gambling
industry it is very hard to get White Labels because of the way their odds and
gambling platforms function. They only offered Banners and Affiliate links.
I want to capture the user data to build an email list and I want the ability to test
different landing pages. Most affiliate programs rarely allow you that
privilege/benefit.
You have the option of buying a website and having it built, or building a 'Portal site'
which is a website with banners and comparisons. Commission Junction and
TradeDoubler are great for this type of website. Personally I prefer a white label site.
A white label is the best because you get to do anything you want with it, and you
keep the player until they deposit or buy something. I keep the emails and sell lists to
other websites. This is a good example of the aggregate value of this data that most
Affiliates give away to their Operators.
In the past White Label Websites were very expensive, and that is if they even offered
them. There are a few companies that see the value and are offering
discounted/reduced pricing on white labels.
For Casinos and Bingo I use Vista Gaming. You can see two of my sites at bingo-
bingo.co and microgaming.co.
The reason I like what they offer is that I control everything and I can even put other
banners and money generating applications like Adense and AdBright wherever I
want. I sell ad space to websites on some of my best ranking sites for thousands of
Euros*
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13. Now For The Juicy Bits – The Top 12 SEO Tips and Tools for Affiliates
in 2013
There are 3 primary items that are the base behind most successful websites;
1. Great end-user experience
- Attractive site (This is ugly (slide) this is not (slide)
- Easy to navigate (Silo Technique)
- Not over “busy”-TMI - (Ie. Google)
2. 1000+ pages of very good and related content
- Use Latent Semantics
- Teach content writers and Developers/Programmers basic SEO
- Link Internally
3. Quality and Relevant Back Links
- Back links from relevant sites that have relevant sites linking to it
- Deep back links – 70% of links go to internal pages
- Links from trusted & authority sites (PRWeb, MarketWire, etc.)
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14. Top 12 SEO Tips for 2013
Many of this years tips are based on CMS's or Content Management Systems. This is
because Google has been saying for years that “Content is King”, and now they are
proving it - so most of the tips and tools this year are targeting content and how to
optimise it. I'll assume you have nothing in place right now, but if you do have an
existing website a CMS can be added to it very easily, or for $10 at Odesk.
Instead of giving full access of the site to someone to post new pages you can create a
username and password to your CMS and they would log in just as if it were their
blog.
I pay $6 - $10 for a writer to create a 100% unique 550 word article using SEO
techniques that I give them instruction on how to create a proper document. When I
hire them I ask if they know Wordpress. If they do not I have a 3 step tutorial on
PPC-Manager.Blogspot.com.
I teach them how to set the tweaks in the plugins I have installed and they include;
1. SEO Ultimate
2. G+ Button
3. Google Author Tag
4. Facebook Like Button
5. Juggernaut Keywords
6. Tags, Title & Descriptions
7. An optimised Image
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15. 8. RSS feed
9. Automatic Canonicalisation
10. Optimisation for Social Networks – ALL THIS FOR $6-$10
I have 15 writers and 5 translators posting to 9 blogs for 600 Euros pcm.
Tip 1. Install an CMS Website
You can use Drupal, Magento, Wordpress or one of many CMS's. These are
beneficial because they have important SEO elements like title tags, URL rewrites
and many other SEO enhancements that work very well.
There are many other SEO plugins/widgets. Some includes RSS (multiple feed)
features, additional social network elements, more on-page SEO and navigational
options such as 301 redirects and canonicalisation.
Tip 2. Use Google's New rel=Author Tag and G+
The Google author tag is a new tag that Google has added to allow authors to claim
their hard work. In testing 70% to 80% of the top 10 rankings in dozens of search
result tests showed top 10 sites included the author link.
Google +
Google Plus Page URL will look like this :
•https://plus.google.com/ 109412257237874861202
rel+Author Tag
<a href="HTTPS://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202?
rel=author">Gary Beal</a>
Place the above in your post before the </HEAD>
Wordpress has many plug-ins for this as well;
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16. Tip 3. Use Juggernauts in WordPress
A Juggernaut change a word that is in text form into a link. You set the number of
links and how many pages in posts the link on.
This is what the Juggernauts look like;
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17. You have options to change specific keywords to links and you can select all
instances that it shows up or any number of link combinations.
I only change my target keyword to a link only once per post and only 2 or 3
keywords.
Note - Be very careful not to confuse the search engine robots by linking to the same
page with different anchor text. Also beware of sending the robot into an infinite
loop. The search robot will not get to the inner subdirectories if its spinning in a circle
until it times out and leaves your site.
Tip 4. Use Latent Semantics when creating your content.
Especially when you are targeting specific regions/countries.
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18. OK who wants to solve this for me?
Let's be honest, most of us will never run through formulas like this. If we
were going to do that I have a few theoretical Algorithm formulas that will
make your head spin.
Let X be a matrix where element (i,j) describes the occurrence of term I in document j (this can be, for example, the frequency). X will
look like this:
Now a row in this matrix will be a vector corresponding to a term, giving its relation to each document:
Likewise, a column in this matrix will be a vector corresponding to a document, giving its relation to each term:
Now the dot product between two term vectors gives the correlation between the terms over the documents. The matrix product XXT contains all these
dot products. Element (i,p) (which is equal to element (p,i)) contains the dot product ( ). Likewise, the matrix XTX contains the dot products
between all the document vectors, giving their correlation over the terms: .
Now assume that there exists a decomposition of X such that U and V are orthogonal matrices and Σ is a diagonal matrix. This is called a singular value
decomposition (SVD):
The matrix products giving us the term and document correlations then become
In simple words; LSA is the process of comparing documents to find relevant
keywords that normally surround the targeted keyword.
Example: You create an article based on the keyword Lory. This is a word they use in
the UK for truck. Latent Semantic Analysis would analyse the article and the
articles/websites that are linking to it and look for relative terms.
If the content surrounding the target term or the links from other documents or
websites, or both of these combined are referring to Cardinals, BlueJays and Mocking
birds the algorithm would tag this page as the English version of a bird because of
the related articles and LSA.
If the linking documents and links referenced Ford, Mercedes and Volvo, the
algorithm would tag the topic as being about trucks.
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19. The reason LSA is so important to use in your content as well as the anchor text in
your back links is because of LSI. These let Google figure out what to classify the
document as and what authority to give it, then it indexes the page accordingly.
If your entire site is about Lories you are doing well. Otherwise I would create a silo
if I expected to rank well for Lories.
When running campaigns that target multiple countries and languages this become
extremely important.The complexity of multiple languages, the algorithm's
consideration of regional and local slang terminology and surrounding content, and
also back links create an even more difficult task.
Now I am going to throw one more item in to this confusion.
Let's say you are in Australia, you speak English, and your target is the US and the
UK. Trucks are referred to as Ute's in Australia. Ute's are called Lories in the UK.
Lories are called trucks in the US.
We are trying to target truck buyers in 3 countries that call trucks different names.
What are your options? (For all of these options you need back links from relevant
sites and using relevant anchor text);
Option 1. Create an article that references each of them
Option 2. Create an individual post for each type of truck name (Truck, Lory, Ute)
Option 3. Create silo's for each type of truck
Option 4. Create subdomains for each, with geographical targeting, titles and
descriptions for the type of truck you are targeting.
My choice is number 4.
As I said earlier subdomains are considered stand-alone or completely separate
websites and will therefor have the best chance at ranking well. I also gain authority
points from Google.
TIP 5. Important elements in the Penguin 3.0 update**
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20. These ranking factors are tested by taking the top 100 websites that improved the
most and were negatively impacted – So the top 50 and the top 50 that were 'winners'
and the top 50 that were 'losers'. (Ie. Increases & Decreases in the SERP's)
This is no definitive and it only applies to this specific update. Google has on average
1 or 2 algorithm tweaks/adjustments every day. The significant ones like Panda,
Jagger. 65 Pack and the Freshness Update are well known to most SEO's but it is
impossible to known or identify them all. Every update has different targets.
It is important to keep in mind that if elements like Social Media, Hosting Countries
and Domain Age are not considered important in this update. This is because every
algorithm targets different parts of the overall Google Algorithm. These are the parts
that were found to be important NOW.
1. Medium Importance**
• Number of indexed pages (target 1000+ for your sites)
• Deep Link Ratio - (I keep it a 30/70 split. The 30% being my
homepage and my primary search term. I do not use my primary
search term in more than 20% of the anchor text pointing to my
website. I do include the keyword in related keyword string links.
Note – Link Brand keywords to home page 40% max.
• TitleRank and Power Trust – I use PRWeb and MarketWire for
press releases that are syndicated across hundreds of online news
sources that are considered trustworthy and authoritative. The title of
the article and the snippets (H1 and H2/H3 tags) include my target
keyword and they link back to a page that shares the same title,
description and links within my other pages that refer back to this
page. (hint – Pay $299 for a Yahoo Directory Listing. You'll never
find a link from a clean PR7 website that is trusted by Google 100%
for $25 per month)
1. High Importance**
• Link Velocity Trend – In the past building too many links too fast
was considered a bad thing to do. Based on the top 100 winners
and losers this is not true. The winners added nearly 400 links per
month on average while the losers lost links. Be very aggressive
on links between now and the next major update. (hint – Site-wide
links on Authority websites are golden. If you are in competition
with any big players/websites you must set a proper budget aside
for these types of links. I identify these high-value sites by
analysing my competitors back links and their Trust Authority. I
spend 20-40% of a budget on these links). Be sure they are on
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21. related sites, they use Brand as keywords (if you have a brand) and
link half of these links to the front page and the rest to internal
links.
• Domain Popularity – I call this the Links^3 or “Links to Links to
Links”. Who links to the sites that link to you? Are they relevant?
This is a perfect case for back link evaluation and getting anchor
text changed. You can also run Page Strength reports on your site
and find the strongest pages for the keywords in the back link that
you have from big and well established websites.
• Winners had TWICE the average number of links from
very big (and established) websites.
• This is about the time I start doing press releases and
looking for guest posts to do or good links I can buy.
• Domain Popularity is;
▪ Traffic to the site
▪ Link to Links to the site
▪ Top results for KW titles
Note – Regarding link buying; I do most of mine through Teliad LinkAdage or
Intellilinks or some place I can measure the strength of a link. It is important
to note that the number of outgoing links dilutes/degrades the value of your
link so I look for under 10 outbound links maximum and I also make sure the
other outbound links on the page are pointing to related pages and not
unrelated websites.
TIP 6. Use Google's Disavow Tool
Plan a full week to do back link analysis. Proper back link analysis of your website
and your competitors website will take this long. It is a good investment.
Google has released the Disavow Tool which allows website owners to report bad
links and get them ignored by Google. This is great for many websites in Gambling
and competitive industries because in the past 'Google Bowling' has hurt many
websites.
'Google Bowling' is when your competitor points a bunch of bad links at you.
Buying 0 value links with 'porn', 'viagra, or other related negative terms through
companies like TextLinkAds and TextLinks.com for $1 is a known method. Buying
programs like HREFER, Market Samurai or SENuke and setting them up to target
your competitor with nasty links could not be prevented by Google and we have been
asking for this type of tool for years. The only other option was to identify the back
link, block the IP and notify Google and hope they read the email or act on it and
ignore these links. That doesn't happen.
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22. TIP 7. Limit ads
When Panda was releases rumours circulated that too mamny advertisements could
hurt your rankings. We did some testing at that time and found that some of our
rankings had fallen on high-ad content websites.. The same testing done recently on
the Penguin 3.0 update and the results showed no impact of too many advertisements
on a website.
It also didn't show that running Adsense or spending money on Adwords had any
affect at all. Not negative or positive. I prefer the safe route and I am selective on
what banners I place and where I place them. I never place them on the front page
unless the offer from the advertiser is exceptional.
I am different than many people when displaying banners, selling links and Adsense
or AdBrite types of advertisements. If I receive a certain amount of traffic I know
who to talk to that will pay for the real estate (placement on my site) and what they
the traffic is worth to them. This type of advertisement is acceptable to me.
I just do not like advertising. Users don't like them either. And I really haven't made
enough money from them to justify taking the chance of drawing attention, or worse,
a penalty.
TIP 8. NoFollow All Outbound Affiliate Links
(Most CMS programs have a NoFollow Tool as a plug-in/widget option)
• PR Funnelling – my testing shows it still works in some cases
• Cancel a funnel by using a NoFollow tag
• Check banner and link codes for hidden links. Remove it or add a
NoFollow
• Outbound links to trusted sites build authority (DoFollow)
• Max outbound links per page = 15
• NoFollow useless index/front page links: About Us, Terms &
Conditions, Payment, Log In, etc
TIP 9. Create Multiple File Types
Search isn't just written content on your website as it was in the past. Videos, PDF
Files/White Papers, Images, Articles/Press Release and Social Media make up 40% of
the traffic to a website with a healthy profile. I use Camtasia for videos, Jing for
Images, Adobe Pro 7.0 – 10 for PDF's, and Marketwire and PRWeb for articles and
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23. Press Releases. (hint; The links in PDF files are live links) (*Note -Don't forget to
create a new sitemap and manually submit through Google.
TIP 9. Use Breadcrumbs – breadcrumbs>are>these>things
Use breadcrumbs that follow your 'KW Silo' and your site navigation. This helps the
end-user as well as the robots. Wordpress ha a widget made to create silos. This also
helps in tracking your silos after time goes bay and you have added many pages.
TIP 10. Install Automated XML Sitemap Creator
You should be adding content every day so you need a sitemap generated every day.
You are targeting “fresh” markets and hot trending events to identify product or
services. These pages need Indexed ASAP. (Pingdom)
Each post has many SEO elements and links, both internal and external. Wordpress,
Magento, Drupal and most CMS's have built in sitemap generators.
If you do not have access to a built-in program you can use InSpyder.
All of the above options will crawl and create the sitemap, upload it using FTP to
your site, and the ping it so it is found.
TIP 11. Do a Health Check on Your Site
Run a comprehensive site analysis on the same day of every month. This MUST
become a habit.Even if you are the only person with access you may still need
updates for widgets, the CMS or something else. If there are multiple people in the
site admin it is common to find broken links and duplicated pages.
I have seen websites with 6 versions of a homepage because they switched platforms
and were testing. Google saw these as duplicate content and did not index the
intended page. `the correct one was de-indexed and did not show in the SERP's.
The Health Check includes;
1. Run Screaming Frog crawler
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24. Easy to Identify duplicate titles, kw's and descriptions. Will show
canonicalisation, all errors and image properties, and displays them in a spread
sheet format. Allows you to identify problems very quickly.
2. Check your back links are still in place
LinkAssistant, MajesticSEO, Webmaster Central, etc.). Also check there are no
back links going to a 404 or a bad URL. Add the page or do a 301 redirect.
Also check for bad links to send to Google to Disavow.
3. Run competitor monitor tools
Programs like SEO Spyglass, SEOMoz, LinkResearchTools, Majestic SEO,
TweetDeck, HootSuite, Ahrefs, and many other free and for sale programs. All
of these are great programs. You need to evaluate them to see which is best for
you. I use a combination of most of them.
I run rank reports and if I see any significant change in a competitors rankings
and then I will go to other tools to try and identify what they did.
If you did the competitor analysis I mentioned earlier you will have their rank results
as a base to compare fresh rankings. This is the starting point when analysing the
competition. From this point I start looking at historical back link comparisons, I
compare on-page SEO elements and I also search for anything off-site such as
promotions or press releases. Google Alerts is the tool I use for every topic or subject
I am tracking.
TIP 12. Twelve Bonus SEO Tips
Twelve (12) Quick ON-Site General SEO Tips
1. Put KW in the page title
2. Put KW In the 1st paragraph of content
3. Use KW's as internal links that point back to the page from other pages
4. Avoid using single words as navigation.
5. Use KW's as files names and directories accessed by the website
6. Use KW 's as alt image tags (hint – Use Pinterest.com for a SERP
boost!)
7. Use KW's header tags (H1-H5)
8. Use bold, italics and superscript/subscript kw phrases – but not exact
9. Always use images that have kw file name, kw alt tag and description.
An put a link to any other page.
10.Use your KW's as the base of your LSA. I do this on a piece of paper or
an excel spread sheet. This is very important.
11.Add social media plugins like Facebook, G+, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr,
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