SEO Religion» General SEO Knowledge http://www.seoreligion.com A Blog of Benj Arriola Tue, 15 May 2012 06:17:36 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Here’s a quick way to find the right web host for your eCommerce site http://www.seoreligion.com/find-ecommerce-web-host.html http://www.seoreligion.com/find-ecommerce-web-host.html#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:34:40 +0000 AlmerViloria http://seo.seoreligion.com/?p=91 Read more

]]> Web hosting services are as varied as your business needs. One way that you can save up on the operational expenses of your eCommerce site is to find the web host that matches your business specifications. Before you decide on a web hosting services, shop around first and get the web host that best suits your needs.

Web Hosting Pal is an easy-to-use web host comparison tool that can help you get the most suitable Web Hosting you need. No matter what your budget is, Web Hosting Pal’s extensive catalog of web hosting services makes sure that you can make an informed choice on your new web host.

At Web Host Pal, you can evaluate web hosting services under $5 per month, and find out which of these web hosts are offering PHP and MySQL, Unix, Windows, and FrontPage.

Web Hosting Pal also has a section for business and eCommerce web hosts. If your website will be designed to sell products and receive orders, these web hosts will be up to specs for your business needs. For businesses with multiple websites, Web Hosting Pal will also help you consolidate your sites into one web host account. It is a money-saving system that can help you optimize your eCommerce sites.

Get the Web Hosting Pal advantage. Find out how Web Hosting Pal can help your online business.

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/find-ecommerce-web-host.html/feed 0 Remove DMOZ and Yahoo Directory Titles and Descriptions http://www.seoreligion.com/remove-dmoz-and-yahoo-directory-titles-and-descriptions.html http://www.seoreligion.com/remove-dmoz-and-yahoo-directory-titles-and-descriptions.html#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:26:30 +0000 Benj Arriola http://seo.seoreligion.com/remove-dmoz-and-yahoo-directory-titles-and-descriptions.html Read more

]]> This is already old news for the seasoned SEO professional but still new to many budding SEO noobs out there. The main reason I posted this was because of a thread I found on SEO Philippines’ Forum, where someone was asking why the title on the Google search results were still showing the old titles. And in fact, they were actually being pulled from DMOZ, (www.dmoz.org) also known as ODP or Open Directory Project. (Note: The page on this link is not the Open Directory Project)

Since Google, Yahoo and other search engines consider links from DMOZ and Yahoo Directory as highly trusted links and put some weight on them, sometimes Google, Yahoo or MSN (Live Search) may actually pull titles and descriptions from DMOZ or Yahoo Directory if ever the site exist in these directories.

Do not display DMOZ (ODP) Titles and Descriptions with NOODP Tag

If ever your website is displaying a title or description coming from DMOZ in the search results, you can tell the search engines to not display the data from DMOZ by using the NOODP tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP” />

Since this is a meta tag, this is place appropriately within the <head> tag.

Do not display Yahoo Directory Titles and Descriptions with NOYDIR Tag

If ever your website is displaying a title or description coming from the Yahoo Directory in the search results, you can tell the search engines to not display the data from Yahoo Directory by using the NOYDIR tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR” />

Link the NOODP tag, this is place within the <head> tag too.

Now since you do not like the titles and descriptions displayed, maybe it is also wise to try to get a hold of a DMOZ editor to update your title and description if needed but never expect immediate results since DMOZ is maintained fully by hand and by volunteers. Submissions and modifications can take a while. Yahoo changes might be updated faster since this is a paid service.

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/remove-dmoz-and-yahoo-directory-titles-and-descriptions.html/feed 0 Back to the basics: The robots.txt file http://www.seoreligion.com/what-is-a-robotstxt-file.html http://www.seoreligion.com/what-is-a-robotstxt-file.html#comments Sat, 10 Feb 2007 01:43:01 +0000 Benj Arriola http://seo.ituloy-angsulong.com/what-is-a-robotstxt-file.html Read more

]]> What is a robots.txt file?

Robots.txt is a text file that resides on the root URL of your website. In this file has all the rules of pages you wish to exclude in the search engine results. This file has specific instructions on what files or folders you wish to disallow robots (also called bots, crawlers, spiders) from going over your selected pages and getting them indexed.

Making your own robots.txt file is not difficult. You can make your own by simply placing all pages you wish to disallow search engine robots to index in a text file named robots.txt with content similar to the format below:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /path/

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /path/file.html

The asterisk (*) is a wildcard meaning you are telling all types of robots to follow the disallow rule below it. If you wish to exclude only a specific bot, you need to know the name. For instance to disallow only Google for crawling a certain page, you can do something like:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /path/file.html

If you decide to exclude a folder name without a file name, this will exclude all files within that folder. For example:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /path/

If you have the pages found on /path/file1.html and /path/file2.html, these will both be excluded in the search engine results.

A site without a robots.txt does not mean your site will not be indexed, but when search engines crawl your robots.txt and this forwards to an error 404 page, might cause some problems. And looking at it the other way, a site with robots.txt does not also help increase your ranking directly. It may be of help if you are not allowing search engines to crawl pages that are giving your site some duplicate content.

Now why should you disallow a page? Isn’t it nice to have search engines crawl all your pages? Well sometimes you may have your own reason why to exclude a page or pages in the search results. Some reasons can also be to avoid duplicate content. It’s really up to you what your reasons are. :)

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/what-is-a-robotstxt-file.html/feed 1 How to do Keyword Research http://www.seoreligion.com/how-to-do-keyword-research.html http://www.seoreligion.com/how-to-do-keyword-research.html#comments Sun, 28 Jan 2007 09:20:30 +0000 Benj Arriola http://seo.ituloy-angsulong.com/how-to-do-keyword-research.html Read more

]]> There are many ways to do Keyword Research but the fundamentals of how it is done is pretty much the same even if every SEO professional has their own way of doing it when looking at the very specific details. The methods discussed here may not be the best, but through SEO experimentation, this is what has worked best for me and my clients. For the purposes of discussion, when I refer to the word keyword, this may not necessarily referring to 1 word alone but to many keywords, or sometimes called a keyphrase. But if I refer to keyword alone, it may mean a group of words or a keyphrase.

The raw keyword list to start your keyword research

I simply list down the product or service I am optimizing for and come up with a good list of synonyms and related words for the keyword. Just to come up with a random keyword for example purposes, let’s say the client sells cars. I will come up with the synonyms:

  • Car
  • Auto
  • Automobile
  • Vehicle
  • Toyota (Brand)
  • Celica (Model)

And may also come up with related words like:

  • Drive

It will be up to you if you think the word is related or not. I am sure you can come up with a very long list, but don’t make it that long. It has to be something you think people may type in when searching to buy your car. You can add in more word that you think other people might add when searching for a product or service to buy.

  • Buy a car
  • Car buying
  • Car store
  • Automobile shop
  • Toyota dealer

If you are doing SEO to market a physical store, might as well add in the geographic location of your shop. For example purposes only, let’s say the car store is in a place called Gotham City, Metropolis. Then I will considered adding in these words in my keyword research. But if you are selling something small that is shipped online and you are targeting to sell nationwide or even internationally, you may opt not to pay much attention to adding the location in the keyword research.

Coming up with synonyms and related word, there are many tools you can use. Sometimes all these tools can be overwhelming just to come up with synonyms and related words. If you are on a tight budget, and want to use something for free, Google alone can help you with that. Do a related keyword search using the tilde ( ~ ) operator. Like search: ~cars or use the Adwords Keywords Tool.

Checking current search volume for your targeted keywords

After coming up with your raw keyword list, how often do you think these keywords are searched? What are the actual variations of these keywords that were searched by other people? You have several tools you can use to guide you in knowing these data. Here are a few of the tools available:

  • Adwords Keywords Tool – You can determine the highly searched keywords here and also keywords that companies are paying a lot for.
  • Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool – This will give you the number of searches for a keyword on Yahoo for the previous month. I will get the relevant keywords listed and the search number on overture and place them on another column of the spreadsheet.
  • Wordtracker – One advantage of Wordtracker over just relying on Overture is Overture cannot seem to see the difference between plural and singular words. Aside from that, the keyword order in Wordtracker does not seem to matter on many occasions. Like New Cars and Cars New will be the same on Overture, but not on Wordtracker. Wordtracker is not a free tool, but it is not that expensive either. They have a free trial and if ever you just need to use it for a small campaign, you can subscribe to the service for a single day and you can do so much research in 1 day.
  • Keyword Discovery – Now one major advantage to use Keyword Discovery over all of the above is the data they have up to 12 month of past data.

All this data, you can tabulate on a spreadsheet, having 1 column for each taking note of the search volume.
If you have a physical location, a store you are promoting, then this is where I try the keywords with the location in it. For our example, I would do: cars gotham metropolis.

All these tools are good but do not treat them like they are the absolute truth. Please note the following:

  • To get a good comparison of results, take note of the unit of time you have on the data. If it is per month or per year and keep units the same by doing some conversions.
  • Some keywords will be present in all Google, Overture, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Prioritize the keywords that appear in all of them and give less priority to those that are only in one of the keyword research tools.
  • Looking at all tools gives you the big picture, but the results of all the tools above can give you varied results. By experience, most of the time the highest result is on Overture, next is Wordtracker and the smallest values are on Keyword Discovery. Please note that all these depend on the sources. Overture is from Yahoo, Wordtracker is from Dogpile and Metacrawler. Keyword Discovery is from a large number of various engines. Also a common trend I see is for brand name search, the highest will appear on Overture, and my guess is it’s caused by the client themselves that keep searching for themselves.

Check how much competition do you have for your targeted keywords

Now that you have several keywords gathered using the tools above, how much competition do you have for every keyword? Searching for the keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN will give you a total number of search results. Now if you see 1,000,000 or more keywords, does that mean you are competing against 1,000,000 websites for the number 1 spot? These search engines are pretty powerful and do remember that they will search every website within their database where all occurrences of each keyword are on a webpage will be part of the results. So all the total results may be the number of websites you have to outrank but not every one may really be targeting the keywords you are targeting too. Now in all of the results listed, how many are actually from a competitor that is optimizing their website and how many are just there because their site has the words you were targeting?

Since part of SEO is placing keywords in the URL, like in domains, subdomains or folder names. In the title tags and in anchor text in internal links and external linking. You can pretty much search on these using several search commands like, intitle, inurl and inanchor. For our example, we can search:

intitle:”cars gotham metropolis”

Notice that I placed the keywords in quotes since most people search:

intitle:cars gotham metropolis

This will search for the keywords but it is only requiring the word cars in the title tag. Searching:

intitle:cars intitle:gotham intitle:metropolis

Will give you results that have all 3 words in the title tag. But having them in quotes, will look for the exact same phrase in the title tag. Thus you get to narrow down the results to really how many websites are trying to compete for your same keyword.

Which keywords do you target from your researched keyword list

Let’s say you have this situation: Keyword option 1 was searched 1,000 times the previous month but has 100,000 in competition actually targeting the same keywords. While keyword option 2 was searched less at 500 times a the previous month but has 900 in competition targeting the same keywords. Even if option 1 was searched more the previous month, it might be more wise to concentrate on option 2 since you have such a low amount of competition and getting higher in the SERPs will be a lot more easier.

For keyword optimization, you want the highly searched but low search competition. Many people observe this ratio in the KEI or Keyword Effective Index. This is basically the number of times a keyword is searched over the number of competition. If you wish to multiply this by 100 to get it in terms of a percent, you may do so. Everyone may have their own formula for it.

How I would personally do it is I start with keywords that were found in all these four: Google, Overture, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery as my priority keywords. I will give less priority for keywords that only appear in one or two of them. Add the times they were searched in all 4 and divided by the total competition on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

(Overture + Wordtracker + Keyword Discovery) / (Intitle results on Google, Yahoo and MSN) * 100 = KEI

Some SEO professionals may have a different KEI formula but there is really no correct formula. As long as you get a value where you can gauge what keywords are highly searched but with low competition. The highest KEI value will be the main keywords to target.

Now let’s say you got the top 50 keywords based on KEI, do you target all of them on all of your pages?

How many keywords to target per page

Several SEO’s may have different beliefs on this, but based on SEO experiment experience, I target only 2 to 3 keywords per page and focus on those alone. Then the rest of your keywords can be targeted on other pages of your website. Spread them out where you select the most appropriate page where they will be focused on. Targeting too many keywords on a single page just brings dilution of the true meaning of the page.

How long of a tail should a long tail be?

So what is this long tail? You hear it in SEO, you hear it in PPC, although they may not exactly be used in the exact same way. Here are the general stuff first:

  • The lesser the keywords, the more general it is, the more competition you have, that harder it is to rank high in the search engines. But these terms would also probably have a high searched volume.
  • The more keywords you have, the more specific the search term is, the lesser competition you will have, the easier it gets to rank higher in the search engines. This would probably have a lesser searched volume.

Now general known behavior about online buyers:

  • People that search general terms are usually people doing some research about a particular topic. Some may be buyers as well and as they get tons of results, they might narrow down their search by being more specific.
  • People that search specific multiple keyword terms really know what they are looking for or may have already narrowed down their search into something more specific to really find what they wanted to buy. Usually the specific term searcher has more potential to buy than the general term searcher.

Hitting two birds with one stone by using the long tail.

With a list of keywords gathered based on you research using the tools above, many keywords with high KEI could be targeted all at the same time in some cases. Let’s say in our case, we came up with these keywords:

  1. cars
  2. cars for sale
  3. car buying
  4. buying cars in gotham city
  5. buying cars
  6. cars for sale in gotham city metropolis
  7. car buying in gotham

In this case, we can target number 6, the long tail “cars for sale in gotham city metropolis” and at the same time you get to target number 1 and 2 as well since they are part of number 6. Number 7, “Car buying in gotham” will target number 1 and 3. Number 4 “Buying cars in gotham city” will target number 1 and 5.

To sum it all up, keyword research is:

  1. Coming up with your raw keyword list.
  2. Check the KEI using tools to check the past search volume over the number of competition.
  3. Get the long tails and group together with short general terms that can be targeted at the same time.
  4. Assign about 2 to 3 keywords to a single page to focus on and distribute among pages and give instructions to your SEO writer.

The rest of the SEO will be on writing content and building the site with the proper code which are all part of onpage SEO. When the whole site is launched, offpage SEO will follow.

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/how-to-do-keyword-research.html/feed 11 Yahoo and MSN opening it's doors to Sitemaps http://www.seoreligion.com/yahoo-and-msn-opening-its-doors-to-sitemaps.html http://www.seoreligion.com/yahoo-and-msn-opening-its-doors-to-sitemaps.html#comments Fri, 08 Dec 2006 05:00:55 +0000 Benj Arriola http://seo.ituloy-angsulong.com/yahoo-and-msn-opening-its-doors-to-sitemaps.html Read more

]]> If you have used Google’s webmaster tools and using sitemaps for site submissions and pretty much liked it, you will even like it more knowing that Yahoo and MSN are opening their doors to the same sitemap format. This sitemap protocol was announced to be adopted by Yahoo and MSN as well.

For more information about the Sitemaps Protocol, a search engine neutral website sitemaps.org will contain all details on the proper creation of the sitemap XML file.

Although this can be used for submissions for better crawling, having no sitemaps does not mean your website will not be crawled. It will just serve as a guide for faster crawling. And having a sitemap does not also mean higher search engine ranking. It just helps the search engines figure out your pages better than crawling every link on your page.

Are we going to see better site submission tools in the coming months from Yahoo and MSN/live for submitting sitemaps with some reporting just like Google’s webmaster tools?

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/yahoo-and-msn-opening-its-doors-to-sitemaps.html/feed 1 Is MSN/Live and Yahoo really faster in indexing than Google? http://www.seoreligion.com/is-msnlive-and-yahoo-really-faster-in-indexing-than-google.html http://www.seoreligion.com/is-msnlive-and-yahoo-really-faster-in-indexing-than-google.html#comments Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:21:14 +0000 Benj Arriola http://seo.ituloy-angsulong.com/is-msnlive-and-yahoo-really-faster-in-indexing-than-google.html Read more

]]> I know many people in the SEO world will agree that MSN indexes websites the fastest, next is Yahoo and last is Google. Right after you make a website that is totally brand new, with a brand new domain name that has never been online, and you do search engine submissions to Google, Yahoo and MSN, experience has showed us that MSN/Live will index your website in 1 to 2 days. Yahoo will follow afterwards, and last will be Google.

I remember reading Google’s FAQs on crawling during the times the Google sitemaps were not yet created. Google said they crawl the internet once a month. And when it crawls it does not guarantee that your website will be crawled. And I am not sure if this was in late 2004 or early 2005, where I still remember a press release of MSN claiming they crawl the sites faster than Google at a rate of every other day. True enough, yes they did, but Google was still king of relevant results.

Today, with the constant improvement of Google Sitemaps, search engine submission on Google has some added precision to it. Although MSN and Yahoo are indeed still faster in crawling you and indexing your websites, but Google no longer seems to be that far behind. With the Google sitemaps, you can be indexed by Google in less than a week, and a few days does not really matter.

So is  MSN/Live and Yahoo really faster in indexing than Google?

The answer here is when you are just adding a new website to all 3 at the same time, I believe MSN/Live is still faster, next is Yahoo and last is Google. But if we are talking about reindexing, I think the case is totally the other way around.

For several Ituloy AngSulong SEO contest entries, I have been checking the index pages and looking at the cache and taking note of the cache dates. Google seems to be faster and more up-to-date with changes on my website, but Yahoo and MSN seem to take a longer time to update their index. But I guess one reason why Google is faster in this area of reindexing is because of the automated Google sitemaps creation I have along with an automated ping sent to Google sitemaps, a feature Yahoo and MSN does not have.

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/is-msnlive-and-yahoo-really-faster-in-indexing-than-google.html/feed 6 MSN/Live API showing inconsistent results http://www.seoreligion.com/msnlive-api-showing-inconsistent-results.html http://www.seoreligion.com/msnlive-api-showing-inconsistent-results.html#comments Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:47:20 +0000 Benj Arriola http://seo.ituloy-angsulong.com/msnlive-api-showing-inconsistent-results.html Read more

]]> As reported by several SEO programmers on SEO Philippines, The MSN/Live API has been displaying results not similar to the actual results online. In fact they do not even look similar and are totally different.

Is this a sneak peek of what’s to come on MSN’s ranking results? Or is the API delayed and the actual results are the final results? Some people have decided to either read the MSN/Live RSS feeds or scrape the search results.

I wonder when will MSN/Live make things right?

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/msnlive-api-showing-inconsistent-results.html/feed 1 Certification? Needed? Is Anyone Qualified to Certify? http://www.seoreligion.com/certification-needed-is-anyone-qualified-to-certify.html http://www.seoreligion.com/certification-needed-is-anyone-qualified-to-certify.html#comments Mon, 06 Nov 2006 10:25:25 +0000 Benj Arriola http://seo.ituloy-angsulong.com/certification-needed-is-anyone-qualified-to-certify.html Read more

]]> This was an interesting topic brought about by Marc Macalua in the SEO Philippines mailing list, where he pointed out an article by Andy Beal David Temple on Marketing Pilgrim on Certifications for SEO/SEM. And I have also shared my experiences in talking about SEO/SEM education. As some of the members in the email group has shared, education may be important but in the SEO business, there are just too many trade secrets that some people are not willing to divulge. Thus how can this certification take place and who certifies the certifier? Which was a good point raised by Jonathan Casuncad of SEM-Pros.com. And he did also mention that certifications may be done for PPC campaigns since this is pretty straight forward with no hidden tactics but simply plain strategy that can be certified by the Search Engine companies themselves. One of the popular certification bodies, SEMPO does not certify you for passing a certain level of skill or knowledge, but simply certifies you that you have undergone the training. Although mentioned by Andy Beal David Temple, for him the only certification out there is Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSetâ„¢ since it is his tools, thus he can certify people in the proficiency of using his tool. And if this is the case, then WebCEO is also a valid certification for using their software as well. But one thing’s for sure, this certification may not necessarily mean someone has more knowledge or skills in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, and someone without any official training does not also mean they are inferior, but I agree that certification of whatever kind can sometimes be good enough proof to a prospective client, or prospective job in order to get the deal.

Related Posts
]]> http://www.seoreligion.com/certification-needed-is-anyone-qualified-to-certify.html/feed 8