More on .Edu Links and Their Value

In our last post, we talked about the value of .edu links for SEO.  After considering comments by Google’s Matt Cutts and the nature of most .edu links, we concluded that there is some substantial SEO power in obtaining inbound links from .edu domains.

Some new information seems to support that conclusion.  A blog post at Divine Write provides notes from the recent SMX Sydney convention.  One of the speakers, noted SEO voice Rand Fishkin, discussed .edu links.  The blogger, Glenn Murray, summarizes:

Trustworthiness of a website – Good ‘degree of separation’ diagram: To Google, a site that’s one link away from a trusted seed (such as Amazon or an edu) is 0.4% likely to be spam, two links away is 1%, three links is 14%. This is why links from seed sites are so important.

Rand’s breakdown of SEO signals:

• Trust/authority of domain = 35%
• On page & keyword = 30%
• Page level link metrics = 25%
• Usage data = 10%

Now, think about what that means in terms of the potential SEO value of .edu’s.  Why does Google use links to determine SERPs?  In essence, it’s because they interpret inbound links as votes of confidence regarding a sites quality and relevance to users.  How does Google dtermine what kind of weight to give those inbound links?  Obviously, the trustworthiness of the source must be a significant consideration.

What do these SMX Sydney notes tell us?  They tell us that Google has a darn good reason to trust inbound links from .edu’s.  

Are .edu links the Holy Grail of SEO?  Of course not.  They are, however, a powerful component to increasing your performance in the SERPs.  Inbound links from .edu’s are just the kind of link Google should be trusting.  Isn’t that the kind of link you want?

The Great Backlink that Isn’t…

It sounds like a great offer. You can get a nice PR5 link for well under market value.

Remember that whole “if it sounds too good to be true” thing? That might be the case here.

No, we’re not talking about people faking page rank. That’s a different story. In this case, we’re talking about dropped or repurposed domains.

Here’s what happens. Someone has a blog. They maintain it. It gets a gob of great backlinks. It’s PR soars. And then something occurs. The webmaster abandons the project. Why? There are variety of possibilities. It might have been a blog about a specific time-bound event that’s now passed. It might be because he or she couldn’t resist reaching into the black hat cookie jar and the displayed PR hasn’t caught up to reality yet. There could be any number of reasons.

Now, either the original owner or someone who bought the blog from him or her (or who picked it up after domain expiration) is offering you a link. The blog may still be in its original form or, as is often the case, the old content may have been stripped out and replaced with something else.

Obviously, that PR5 link isn’t worth a hoot if the links pointing to the site are now dead-ending because of page changes. You don’t want to invest anything in a site that’s found its way onto Google’s blacklist, either.

So, how can you check? Do a little homework. Run a backlink checker on the site and find out if its inbound links are still hooked up with actual content. Head over to the Wayback Machine and check things out. See if the site has been shedding pages or if anything else fishy has been going on. Ask to see some traffic numbers and look for recent declines. And use a little sense. If the domain name and the content seem like a very poor match you might be barking up a useless tree.

Sometimes a great backlink isn’t so great.

The Funny PPC Mistake that’s so Easy to Avoid

If you’re buying PPC advertising, you know that the process really revolves around your ability to research and bid upon the right keywords. PPC is keyword driven and having the right search terms can spell the difference between a great ROI and a complete waste of cash.

Often, PPC buyers will maintain a list of keywords in a spreadsheet. That makes perfect sense. It’s a great way to organize them and to manipulate them, as necessary. When the time comes to insert those keywords into the pay per click interface, it’s easy to quickly copy and paste them.

It might be too easy. There’s a fairly funny and fairly common PPC bidding error that results from that simple Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V on a keyword spreadsheet. PPC campaign managers have a nasty tendency of grabbing all of the content in the keyword column. Including the column header. That header usually consists of a single word: Keyword.

Look at the picture accompanying this post. That picture is taken from a screenshot resulting from a simple Google search for “keyword”. It appears as if someone handling the health insurance company’s pay per click campaign is bidding on the term “keyword”.

I doubt anyone at Assurant really believes that folks searching for “keyword” are prime insurance prospects, do you?

Others have noticed this blunder before. Bill Hartzer refers to it as “the funniest pay per click mistake”. He argues that it’s indicative of a lack of attention to detail and states that “a lack of attention to detail causes companies thousands of dollars every month.” The blunder won the #2 slot on Apple Pie & Custard’s “3 Silly Mistakes You Might be Making When Optimising Your PPC Campaign”.

The moral to the story? If you don’t want someone dredging up your bidding error and/or having a chuckle at your expense, check your keyword list from top to bottom.

Using H1 Tags for Effective SEO

While a great deal of SEO focus is applied to off-page efforts (getting those ever-important backlinks), it’s important to remember the “roots” of SEO–on-page optimization.  In that spirit, let’s look at H1 tags and how you can use them to make your pages more attractive to Google and the other search engines.

Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are part of HTML coding and they alert the search engine bots that what they’re reading is considered more important than the other content on the page.  The H1 tag sits atop of the tagging hierarchy and judicious use of the element can be an effective SEO tool.  Search engines tend to take notice of the words surrounding by the H1 tag.

SEOManagement provides some insight regarding H1s and search engines:

Search engines interpret header tags as indicators of relevancy. They perceive H1 and H2 tagged text as the most important part of the. That’s why header tags should be used wisely in order to reinforce the overall effectiveness of the content and contribute to higher search engine rankings. Too many H1 tags throughout the regular text body may have a negative impact on search engine rankings. H1 tag should contain the central keyword of the web page. If there are secondary keywords they can be given more weight with the help of a H2 tag.

The H1 tag should only be used once per page.  You’re not going to fool the search engines by wrapping every keyword on a page in the H1 wrapper–that will just dilute its effectiveness.  

Since you’re only using the H1 one time, it’s important to make a smart decision.   You don’t want to waste the H1 tag on something trivial like a date.  Ideally, you’re going to choose to use it for the page’s title text–and that text is going to accurately depict the rest of the page’s content while simultaneously using the keyword for which you’re trying to rank. 

Evaluate your pages in terms of tag use.  If you’re not making the most of your H tags, it might be time to crank up your HTML editor and to get to work!

Why You’re Bounce Rate Shouldn’t Keep You Up at Night

People have been questioning whether a relationship between bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who land on your site and return to the referrer after viewing only one page) and search engine rankings exist for some time now.  Despite past signals that Google employees considered bounce numbers too “noisy” to use effectively as part of the site rating process, rumors persist that the search engines are looking at bounce as one factor in the process.

A recent post by David Leonhardt, for instance, builds a case for why people might want to start looking at their bounce numbers if they’re interested in achieving optimal search engine performance.  Leonhardt concludes that high bounce rates will hurt a site’s SEO status:

Cheap sites that do a lot of link-building - bouncy SEO - counting on large volumes of traffic to offset poor conversion rates, will suffer - because the search engines will stop sending them that traffic. 

 It’s just a matter of time.  Or perhaps it has already started.

Leonhardt’s argument has a great deal of prima facie appeal.  It’s well-outlined and features some good reasoning.  However, the information we have from the folks at Google contradict his assessment.

Matt Cutts, the face of Google to those in the SEO blogosphere, recently said:

Without reading the article, I’ll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like “Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don’t you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?” I just don’t even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life.

That seems like compelling evidence that Google isn’t relying on bounce stats in any significant way when it comes to building its search engine results.  

Some people have been pointing to Avinash Kaushik’s (Google’s Analytics Evangelist) remarks on the topic as evidence that bounce may be playing a role in results.  However, if one really reads what Avinash is saying, it appears as though his answers are more about how Google Analytics defines “bounce” than it is about how Google’s algorithm uses the metric to determine rankings.

Adam Lasnick, one of the Google Search crew has also given us a pretty strong indication that there are more important things to worry about than bounce rates:

If you’re talking about bounce rates in the context of Google web search and webmaster-y issues, then we really don’t have specific guidance on bounces per se; rather, the key for webmasters is to make users happy so they find your site useful, bookmark your site, return to your site, recommend your site, link to your site, etc. Pretty much everything we write algorithmically re: web search is designed to maximize user happiness, so anything webmasters do to increase that is likely to improve their site’s presence in Google.

It is possible that bounce rates could influence search engine results, but it’s unlikely that they do so in any meaningful way.  Additionally, the people at Google are bright enough to realize that traditional bounce isn’t always a negative.  They understand the concept of blogs, for instance, that only display one post per page and that people may visit for only that story.  They know there are good one-page sites designed to accomplish particular goals.  They’re also bright enough to realize that all bounces aren’t created equally.  If they are examining bounce, you can bet their also evaluating the length of time that transpires between a visit’s start and the subsequent visitor departure.

The bottom line?  Don’t worry too much about bounce from the SEO perspective.  Obviously, lower bounce rates are preferable for multi-page sites for a host of very good reasons.  SEO, however, doesn’t necesarily seem to be among them.

 

SEO Hats

If you want to attract search engines and more online traffic, then don’t forget to watch out for those ‘black hat’ techniques and avoid them at all costs. Black hat SEO is not only unethical, it’s just plain poor judgment. Using a strategy that neglects to follow the rules for proper online etiquette, that leads the site visitor to a poor experience and great disappointment, and that goes against what is considered appropriate for online marketing, may be a way to quickly gain a visitor, but more quickly, lose a potential customer and everyone they talk to in their community.

The worst thing you can do is Read more

SEO Guidelines

Serious SEO takes consistent and persistent attention. You can’t simply create your website, sit back, and wait. You have to be active with what’s going on in the world of online marketing and new technology.

But there are some simple things you can do to make sure your website is ranking high enough in the SERPs. Read more

Organize for SEO

SEO requires that you create a website that is easy for the search engines to find AND to evaluate. Keep in mind that search engines don’t really know how to navigate and understand a website filled with lots of graphics, JavaScript links and menus, and tons of forms or questionnaires. They like to see lots of words - keyword rich, relevant, unique words!
Of course, a website just filled with words is boring and unappealing to your target audience. A balance of content that includes keyword rich articles and information, along with relevant graphics and design is important.Some tips to help you make your website “search friendly” include: Read more

Welcome Seasonal Shoppers

Have you ever noticed that the things people search for in November and December are quite different than other times of the year. But you have probably also noticed that the searches for November and December from year to year are somewhat similar. 

If you keep the ’seasonal’ search terms Read more

Optimize Landing Pages

The economic tide still hasn’t turned yet and people are tightening their belts even more when it comes to spending. Whether you’re managing an online or an offline business, you can attest to the fact that there has been a slow-down in sales of most products and services.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can save money by dicontinuing your pay per click strategies for your online business. At least not until you’ve evaluated your success with PPC. If you stop and evaluate what PPC is doing for your business, you may find Read more

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