I think now though we’re seeing a stable and global PR update as I’ve seen pretty much all my sites change across the board, and the movement seems reasonable this time.

In case you hadn’t already noticed, EggRage has once again grown in strength and has this time moved up from its previous PR4 to its new PR5!

PS. Happy New Year!

Image by husin.sani

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Here’s The Story

When Chris Garrett, David Naylor, and several other bloggers all published a post a couple of weeks ago about all going on a driving experience and all linking to the driving centre - I (thought I) smelled a rat. I saved the link to my drafts on this very blog, and yesterday I got around to posting my thoughts on the matter - which can be seen on the original post linked to above.

If you read the comments on that post, you’ll see that I got some very heated responses - which incidentally, I was completely expecting, but certainly not to that extent.

Arguments continued on, and it seemed that everyone was missing my only point - which was that I felt that Chris was promoting the driving centre purely to help one of his own clients rather than to deliver the concise informative content which he usually does.

This ended up going so far that I managed to rile up one of Dave’s team enough for him to post a response on Dave’s blog which expressed a little bit of anger towards me.

Now at this point I got completely bored of what I fondly refer to as ‘keyboard wars’ and managed to get Dave himself on the phone - and I’m glad that I did!

Dave is one of the most down to earth, friendly guys that I’ve spoken to in a long while and a half hour later we were completely on the same page and I don’t mind saying that I was wrong. I won’t go into all the details because it’s not worth it but the bloggers in question weren’t writing because they were being paid to or because they were doing it in exchange for a day on the track. It was, as they said, a case of 6 friends being invited to an event and having a really great time.

I got it wrong - and its surprising how quickly things get confused on the internet that are so quickly resolved on the phone.

So - I apologise to all 5 bloggers whom I wrongfully accused (particularly Chris) and I hope that you guys saw at least where I was coming from even if I did get it wrong.

Finally - Dan if you want to give me a call or drop me line to clear things up - Dave has my details

No related posts.

***This post contains incorrect information and some matters which were later resolved here***

Who Is Chris Garrett?

Well for the 3 or so people reading this who don’t know who Chris Garrett is, read on - everyone else can skip down to the next subheading. Chris Garrett was born on the 29th of July in 1974, and is currently a prolific blogger and internet marketing consultant. He’s had some great success creating and selling a number of websites, as well as developing some well known firefox plugins, and writing a couple of books on ASP.NET (which explains a lot right off the bat). More recently he has become even more well known for co-authoring ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income with fellow blogger Darren Rowse.

The Background Info

I’ve always been a follower of Chris’ writings on the web, and I’ve enjoyed his contributions into my feed reader each day as well as following his well written advice in the ProBlogger book itself, so I should stress that I by no means have some sort of underlying grudge or dislike towards him, I’m just telling it like it is.

One of Chris’ first successes (or so I understand) was a site called Performancing, aside from having a ridiculous name, the site is essentially a Chris Garrett version of Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger.net, except that Chris Charges cold hard cash if you want any help from him - whereas Darren rarely charges his users for anything.

Today, Chris remains the CEO of Performancing Ads - the segment of Performancing which deals solely with what I fondly refer to as ‘blog spam’. Publishers can sign up to this program to spam their own sites with other peoples products, and advertisers can sign up to have their products spammed across all the publishers’ various blogs. It’s like the circle of life, but spam.. so the circle of spam.

Performancing is a Banner Ad network, and not what I originally understood it to be.

The Story

Maybe I’m naiive, and maybe I simply never realised it before - but I subscribed to Chris Garrett’s blog because he offered great advice and an interesting insight into the internet marketing industry, and I’d never noticed a hint of him trying to promote other websites or products because he was being paid to do it.

That was until the 17th of November 2008, when he posted a blog titled, ‘Why Internet Marketing Is Like Driving Supercars‘.

Now, before I go on, let’s be clear on something: Internet Marketing is nothing like driving supercars. I know that, and Chris definitely knows that, so why would he title his latest post such an obscure article? Well, the answer becomes clear when you look at the content.

6th Gear Driving Experiences had invited a bunch of online geeks, Al Carlton, Dave Naylor, Kieron Donoghue, Patrick Altoft and me, for a day of thrashing supercars around a race circuit.

The first part is blatent link spam, and the second part (assortment of 4 links) just confirms that this is Chris using his own network to promote a client. All of the other people above have posted identical blogs about supercars, and used identical link text. Some of them also all have javascript tracking on the outbound links to 6th Gear, to track ‘campaign performance’ perhaps?

Now, it took me all of 3.5 seconds to see through this cheap content so I posted a comment on the article asking why he was doing it, saying that as a regular reader I didn’t appreciate this type of spam. Naturally my comment was deleted within a few hours, because a good way of handling your audience, is to ignore them.

The Conclusion

So, how is it that Chris can charge $600+ for his ‘Authority Blogger’ courses, when he can’t even get his own blog right? He’s telling people to create ‘pillar content’ or whatever the hell his latest catchphrase is, yet his blog posts consist of: Blogging is like driving a supercar because:

Power of the setup - Is your site, marketing campaign or content holding you back or providing the power and momentum you need?

What does that even mean? That’s the vaguest link I’ve ever seen drawn between a Lambourghini.. and a blog.

The Result

I unsubscribed from his feed. I’m sure he doesn’t care, he has 10,000 other subscribers to keep him going… but if he carries on like this then I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t last long either. For me, he dropped from respected authority figure, to spam artist in a number of hours.

**FOLLOW UP**

***This post contains incorrect information and some matters which were later resolved here***

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How To Write Effective Meta Content For Large Websites

First of all, when I say ‘large websites’ I’m talking 250+ pages, at which point it really becomes difficult to manually go through and write niche meta content for every single page.  When I say ‘meta content’ I am of course referring to the title and meta description, though the now seldom-used meta keywords can still fit into it if you really want them to.

Setting Up The Base Framework

The amount of work involved in writing meta content for a large site is immense, and as such is takes a very long time to do (no matter which way you choose to go about it). But what happens with the rest of your site while you’re writing all this content? You certainly can’t just leave it sitting there with no page titles or descriptions, so you need to insert a placeholder or at least something to do the job while you get the really good stuff written.

Enter the ‘base meta framework’ (a generic term which I assure you I invented and doesn’t have any greater meaning).

The framework itself consists of a dynamic statement, in this case in PHP and one which I have used before in my how to: SEO a forum post. (In this case  the meta desciption field is used, but this can be applied to title/description/keywords easily enough)

<?php
if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
}
?>

This statement would sit directly inside your meta description tag, so something like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php //some dynamic statment here ?>” />

Confused? Here’s The Explanation

What the statement does is simple, but clever: In the first two lines it checks to see if a static description has been set (defined by the $StaticDesc variable), this would hypothetically be a field in your admin area which you could go through and fill out page by page to write an optimal description for each page. If this static description field has some content, it places it there ‘else’ it places a new statement in the meta description tag (defined in the second half of the php statement above).

The query draws a number of variables from the database to construct a meta description by itself which will be different for every product. For a page about wooden spoons, the above statement might produce something like this:

Wooden Spoons available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other Kitchen Accessory products and Christmas Kitchenware deals! Wooden Spoons from The Kitchen Accessory Store.

It isn’t perfect, and it certainly won’t be 100% gramatically correct for all pages - but it does do the job, and it does include relevant key phrases and related content, as well as sticking (roughly) to the meta description guideline of 150 characters.

Once you have this statement in place, you will effectively have a great starting point for however many thousand pages you have, with relatively little work.

Getting Advanced

Of course if you’re any good at PHP you’ll be able to customise this even further (PHP wizards correct me if I get this wrong), and do something like:

<?php
if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} elseif $CatId = 2 {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available on the phone, call us for special deals. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ beauty products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘  beauty deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
} elseif $CatId = 5 {
echo $ProductName . ‘ specialist woodword products + tools, and amazing ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
}
?>

This checks for two specific categories, which have specific meta description structures - otherwise it reverts to the default one which we defined earlier.

Now What?

Now you get your finest intern, or writer, or whoever to go through your admin area painstakingly inserting the optimal meta content to replace the dynamic stuff that’s already there. This is great because they can start with your most important (or best-selling) products, and then slowly work their way through.

Another added benefit is that as new products or pages are added to the site they will automatically have a full set of meta content generated for them without having to call in any outside help.

What Do You Think?

Have you done something similar or perhaps something more effective? Do you have a better way of constructing these dynamic statements? Tell me what you think and drop me a line in the comments!

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Well if you’re using Wordpress then you’re in luck!
Traditionally your new posts and pages won’t get indexed until Google next crawls your site, which for a small site isn’t that often. The larger and more popular the site, the more frequently Google crawls to check for updates and index new pages. So what you want to do, is get links to your new posts onto big frequently-crawled sites the moment they go live.

But How?

Well I’m not going to get too technical here because frankly that’s not what this blog is about and I’ll likely get way out of my depth, but in short what you want to do is ‘ping’ an update service. Which is to say that when you post a new entry you want wordpress to tell some big social networking/rss sites that you have a new post, and that they should take notice.

How To Do it

In your Wordpress administration interface navigate to

Settings > Writing > Scroll To The Bottom > Update Services

You should see a text box filled with the default http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ which is the only service that Wordpress pings by default.

Logically, for Google to find us quicker we want to update as many of these services as possible, so here’s a list of some more that we use here (that have worked very well).

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogupdate.org/ping/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.google.com
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

So How Fast Are We Talking?

The record so far? 10 minutes.

I’ve had a couple of new blog posts who’s title I’ve Googled 10 minutes after posting and they’ve popped right up at number 1.

The Benefit?

People find your site, and they find it fast! Particularly if you blog about current events or breaking news of any kind this is a must have! I blogged the day that iPhone was released in the UK and I got indexed so quickly that I was number 1 for ‘O2 iPhone UK’ for a couple of days.

Final Notes

Typically with these posts getting indexed so quickly you may rank very highly for competitive keywords, over time though (a week or two) you should expect these rankings to drop back down to a ‘normal level’ for your site. Clever Google.

So, what’s the quickest you’ve ever had a fresh blog post indexed? Have you used any other techniques that have worked well to speed up the process? Let me know in the comments below!

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I started seeing a couple of sites change toolbar-pr last night, so I ran some tests on others and found some PR changes that weren’t yet showing up in the toolbars. Thismorning however, it seems that the toolbars have now updated fully (as far as I can tell).

All good news at this end, you may have noticed that EggRage has gone from a PR3 up to a PR4 now - which is always nice to see, and all our associated sites have all gone to PR3 or higher.

So go and check your PageRank and let me know if you went up or down!

Image by husin.sani

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What The Hell Am I On About?

Well there’s more to SEO tracking than just you actual rankings (arguably). There’s link popularity (how many inbound links you have) and the construction of your code, as well as what directories you’re included in, DMoz for example. As well as those things you need to stay on top of exactly where your links are coming from, and whether or not anyone else is copying your content, which could (potentially) lead to a duplicate content issue.

Here’s What You Can Do

I’ve compiled a list of 5 ‘essential tools’ to help you stay on top of things such as the above.

Website Grader

In my opinion one of the number one best tools out there at the moment for diagnosing your site’s SEO effectiveness, websitegrader.com takes into account a great deal of factors including which directories your site is listed in, what it’s PageRank is, how many inbound links it has, what it’s traffic ranks are, and many many others in order to come up with a final score out of 100 for your site that generally proves to be pretty accurate in terms of how well your site is “SEO’d”.

Link Diagnosis

LinkDiagnosis.com is a tool which I have mentioned in the past, and for good reason too. I use this tool very regularly to analyse both the quantity and the quality of inbound links to my site(s). It produces a number of data charts and graphs that show the distribution of PageRank across your inbound links and gives various metrics and comparisons that can really help you asses which links are giving you the most benefit. In addition this is a great little tool for spying on where competitors are getting their links from.. and then stealing them ;)

Bad Neighborhood Link Checker

Another one which I’ve mentioned previously, this tool is (in a way) the opposite of Link Diagnosis. Rather than analysing your inbound links and which are helping you most, it analyses all your external links and flags potentially harmful sites that you’re linking to. It looks out for things like blog-spam (high keyphrase or link density) and use of adult or pharmaceutical phrases within the page copy. If you want to avoid a PageRank penalty this a good place to start. Remember, if a site get’s penalised and you link to it, then you could be too!

Marketleap

A real golden oldie, Marketleap has been around for years and still provides excellent essential data to its users. Marketleap gives you counts for both search engine saturation and link popularity, but the real winner for me is that it tracks your progress over time and produce and updated graph every time that you run a report so that you can actively track and record your number of inbound links and indexed pages over time.

CopyScape

This is the daddy when it comes to hunting down thieves. All you have to do at CopyScape is put in your URL (or any) and hit search, which enables the flux capacitor and a number of other highly secretive devices and sets into motion one of the greatest contraptions in the history of man. (not really)

CopyScape scans the web for other websites which contain your text, the search results are ordered in descending order by the number of identical words found on the page. This is both sneaky and brilliant because it doesnt just find direct rip offs, it also finds any people who have tried to copy your text and then edit it slightly. It’s tricky to explain, but give it a whirl and you’ll see what I mean in an instant.

But There’s More

So many more, but these are the most effective that I’ve found, and incidentally the ones which I use most often. What great SEO tools have you found recently? Any which should really have been included here? Drop me a line in the comments!

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So I’ve decided to do a multi-part case study, I’m going to start a new (very simple and un-pretty) website, and I’m going to document every change and piece of work that I carry out on it. Along with each post, I’m going to document benchmarks of where 10 keyphrases rank, and their movement, along with traffic statistics based on organic traffic. I think this will (maybe) be both fun and educational.

Let’s Get Started

The first thing to decide is what the site is going to be about, this was relatively simple (for once) as I didn’t need to think of something particularly catchy or memorable - it’s purely meant to appeal to search engines. So, I have a very sweet Staffordshire Bull Terrier who is what’s known as a ‘blue’ variety of the breed (basically grey, the Kennel Club just make up fancy names). Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers are generally quite rare and highly sought after, so at least it’s something that I can write some interesting content about.

Step 1 - Register a Domain Name

As mentioned, I have no interest in having a short and catchy domain, and I don’t need any company branding. So I’ve gone for a nice keyphrase-full domain, and picked up: http://www.BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk

Step 2 - Do Keyphrase Research

I usually use KeywordDiscovery for my keyphrase research, but recently I’ve also found that the Google Adwords keyphrase tool has actually also proven to be quite useful. I’m going to keep it simple and only collect keyphrase data for ’staffordshire bull terrier’ and ‘blue staffordshire bull terrier’ and their derivatives. So I’ll be working from a list of about 40 and narrowing it down to 10. (Usually I’m working from a final list of 10,000 to be narrowed down to about 400, true story).

Here are the KeywordDiscovery results for “staffordshire bull terriers”

and again for “staffordshire bull terrier”

Interestingly, VERY skewed numbers in favour of the singular form rather than the plural. Also higher search volumes than I anticipated, this could be harder than I first imagined (oops).

Step 3 - Produce a Final List of Key Phrases

So, based on the above lists, here are the 10 which I’m going to go for.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers

I’ve ordered them (as I always do) with the most searched key phrase at the top, and the least searched at the bottom. This works under the assumption that a key phrase which is searched for most in a month, will have the most competition for the top spot, and as such will be most difficult to rank for. The goal is to work your way up from the bottom of the list to the top.

Step 4 - Research The Competition

Obviously if I’m going to rank for any of these phrases then I need to know who I’m up against, so it’s time to google each one of the above key phrases and see what comes up.

Here are the results of the most common sites that appeared in the top 3

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier
• www.staffords.co.uk/
• www.staffybullterriers.com/
• www.sbtfun.com/
• www.k9puppy.co.uk/Puppies/StaffordshireBullTerrierforsale.aspx
• www.epupz.co.uk/search/puppies_for_sale.asp?area=all&st=1&breed=Staffordshire%20Bull%20Terrier
• www.bluestaffy.co.uk/

K9Puppy and ePupz (as you might expect) are puppy classified sites, they rank well for pretty much every dog breed name under the sun because they have high Page Rank, and frequently updating content.

Wikipedia is going to be a tough one to beat, but luckily it only showed up on one of the 10 key phrases’ search results, but there also several positive things that we can use this page for. (more to follow)

As for the rest, they’re staffy-fansites. They aren’t well designed, they don’t have any remarkable features (or PR) and the only thing that they really have going for them is domain-name age.

I’m confident that these competitors aren’t a major concern, the ones that I’m most worried about are the money-laundering god-foresaken puppy selling websites.

Step 5 - Play The Waiting Game

The most boring part of all. Wait for your domain registration to go through, then point the domain to the right nameservers, and wait again for it to propagate. If you’re like me and you get bored and frustrated then you might like to check out this tool, which tracks your domain’s progress and sends you an email once it’s finished propagating. (Which I think is rather cool)

Stay tuned for next time, when I’ll be putting together the index page and coding the html for it. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

So, do you think this is going to be a success? Or a dramatic failure? Let me know in the comments!

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But Do You Actually?

Case in point: My beloved and most beautiful partner (because she might read this) runs a small independent film review website, where she takes on Hollywood actors, tears them down, slaps them about a little, and gives her honest opinion on their performances and the films as a whole.

She hasn’t posted much, but what she has written has been good, solid content with general good use of keywords, which are in this case actors’ names, film titles, and directors, etc.

Today I was having a look at her site to see if there were any new reviews to read

I shall not lie to my readers

Today I was having a look at my inbound links and noticed a PR2 referral coming in from ForgottenFilm, I thought that was a little strange, and probably a mistake - so I went to the site to investigate further. But no, no mistake had taken place accoring to my trusty Firefox plugins.

So, I decided that she must have some how obtained a rather superb link somewhere and I was determined to help her get some more poach the link location and crowbar in some of my own sites.

First I ran a LinkDiagnosis on the site, and this is what I got:

This is what I like to call “fucking nothing”. Nada.

I found a couple of PR-Nothing forum links, and a couple of utterly useless PR0 links from an old crap wordpress.com blog that I’ve had for ages. To clarify, she has a total of 5 inbound links, none of them with any PageRank.

Thinking that this was strange I delved into Yahoo! Site Explorer

Once again, a nice healthy dose of NOTHING.

Same links, no page rank.

So friends, foes, and family alike  - after all our collective whinging about how PR is obtained, how is it that a site with no links and an alexa rank of near 15million is able to grab a PR2 after less than 6 months of existance?

I mean I’d love to start sprouting conspiracy theories to do with Google’s new quality rating system and say that because the writing on her blog is of such high quality, she has benefitted from it. But I don’t honestly think that’s the case.

So what is it?

I’m stumped on this one, so give me a kick in the comments and tell me whats going on.

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This is a good day for EggRage, and for a good reason - on July 13th of this year I posted an article about how to get into DMoz, to date it has been one of the most successful posts on this blog and has received more comments than any other article which I’ve written here.

Today, September 1st, 2008 - I logged into the Digital Designer Forum mentioned previously in my post about how to SEO a forum, to find that in a thread about submitting your site to DMoz, a new user named Eric-the-Bun had posted a rather lengthy reply to a thread linking to my original article about submitting your site to DMoz. His comments, weaved into my original post were as follows: (identified by block quotes)

How To: Submit Your Site To DMoz

Submitting a site to DMoz has long been known as one of the ”things to do” when it comes to SEO. Putting it into practice however, is something that’s often more easily said than done. People who get their sites accepted have long praised the DMoz editors, while those who have been denied entry through the pearly gates curse the editors as if they’ve done the earth some sinful injustice.

The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies).

Usually they are waiting to be reviewed (unless of course they are not really good or are sites that won’t be accepted.

Ok let’s look at the facts. About 5000 active editors and nearly 500,000 categories - however many editors only have privileges to edit in a few categories. A rule of thumb is that there are probably about 500 editors who can edit in all categories or widely enough to count(eg UK-wide). So 1 editor has a nominal 1000 categories - how quickly do you think they will get through them? Well it depends on the area and how many suggestions they get. UK/County/little_village probably gets zero a year whilst each shopping sub-category will get hundreds.

It can take from ten minutes to 2 weeks to review a site and editors are volunteers. This means when I come home from work, I see if I have the time and inclination to spare to do some editing. Generally I manage something most days most weeks - I think my average this year is adding 20 sites a week - I also spend as much time on maintenance (correcting errors, removing dead-links, moving misplaced sites, etc) and learning about things that I need to know to edit properly.

There is no short cut to get listed because either an editor is limited to a few categories and will list your site within a few months (yes there are people who join just to list their sites and don’t do much else) or they are trusted enough to gain wider permissions and are rather fanatical about preserving their trusted status.

Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

In general, the guidelines prevent this. Some categories are maintained better than others and are thus quicker to get into (geologically speaking). Different categories have different guidelines for acceptance and in some cases the expected category does not exist. A case in point is real estate where due to the huge amount of spam, extremely strict rules are applied.

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site,

Good advice - leave the http://www. off the site name else the search won’t find it. Note the search works on the RDF dump which is issued once a week (ish) so can be out of date.

it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into - and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

Good advice here and I’ll add some more.

Sort out the 1,2 or 3 places you are eligible for and suggest them in one go.

If you have an actual premises where people can expect to contact you (I think it is now the law for UK sites to list it) pick the correct locality in Regional and the best category e.g.
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/Worthing/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/

Then determine what your site is about - the topic - as you can also suggest your site to a category under its topic if the site has a wider audience than local (i.e. a site for a pub, a lplumber, a tailor, is likely only to be listed in regional).

Lets take web design as an example (for no apparant reason). You can check the categories in http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_ … velopment/ for web design companies and see where you may fit. Let us say you are a company that is basically a vehicle for a free-lancer who is also employed elsewhere. It might go in to
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Freelance/L/

Now if the site is UK based, another place to look is http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/Uni … velopment/ and
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/L/ might be an appropriate place.

Of course an editor placing the sites would be making his best guess at the appropriate place (they can’t be knowledgeable on all things) which is why the update url link is there.

For most sites the rule is to suggest once to location (if any) and once to topic (if eligible). UK sites are special as you can also suggest to a topical category under http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom if the site is eligible.

So you can suggest to 2 or 3 categories as described above if the site is eligible.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address - sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ - the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

If suggesting to Business, the title must be the company name no matter how irrelevant. Bear in mind if the category is (say) Web Designers, the type of sites within that category is already defined.
If suggesting elsewhere, the editors look for a meaningful combination of title and description. Using the website title is OK - the editor might not agree and may change it, but at least you have indicated your preference.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

“BlueShirt Clothing - Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.”

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

More or less spot on.

Descriptions will vary depending on the category. Editors read the title and description hoping it will tell them enough about the site before they enter it, so that we are confident it is in the right place and worth listing. Very few titles and descriptions survive intact.

First sentence should be who/what the site is about, second sentence what is on the site.

Remember it is not an advert, aim for dull.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Please make sure it is valid and, if using someone elses, let them know you suggested the site. If you are an SEO firm one of the worst things you can do is suggest a site with such an addresss. One SEO firm shotgun blasted an area of categories I looked after in such a way every couple of weeks. After getting a ‘?’ from the supposed suggestors, I worked out what was happening and emailed every site saying that if they had paid firm x for SEO ask for ther money back.

There are all sorts of myths about us liking/not liking suggestions from this or that type of firm/person. I personally look out for sites suggested by a number of seo and website firms because they make good suggestions. Others I look out for because they don’t. The only way I treat them differently is that for the first, I might ‘do another on before bed’ and for the second not.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site - what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included?

Check out http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/ - most of it is there.

The other place to look (albeit a bit painful) are the category descriptions. Start at the top of the section you think you belong to (eg Business) and the description will identify the sorts of sites that belong there and any vagaries the area might have. You can work downwards to see if there are any refinements but usually after a few levels down, you might find it more productive working upwards.

Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

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

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

And you were doing so well up til now
Please don’t. Your suggestion is there waiting for some editor to come along and review it (unless you suggested before the Great Crash of October 2006 when all the suggestions were lost, in which case suggest again). I’ve reviewed suggestions that were 5 years old and with the most appalling rubbish in the titles and description.

As an editor my role is to develop useful categories. To do that I need to look for suitable sites to add and can look anywhere I like - newspapers, vans, shop fronts, search engines, under the bridle of a yak in Nepal, etc. One of the places I can look is in the suggestion pool for the category. When an editor goes to develop a category, then, in most cases, all suggestons are gratefully received. Often a category will lie neglected for a long (geological) time and then have a burst of activity with all outstanding suggestions cleared.

In some categories the suggestion pool is a cesspit of spam, dread and loathing that few but the most hardy would venture into - well not quite. However in some places the ratio of good sites to poor Made for advertising sites is not very high and it is easier to find sites for yourself than relying on fishing in the pool.

This year I have listed ?600 sites of which less than 100 were suggested.

regards

PS in case your feel that DMOZ editors don’t appreciate what not getting listed means, I’d like to point out that I suggested my site to Yahoo back in 2005 and am still not listed, despite being no 1 for my keywords in most search engines, etc

And that concludes what I’ve found to be one of the most useful posts that I’ve ever come across on a forum, it may sound silly to some people but I’m honoured that Eric took all the time and effort to respond to my article in such detail and would like to thank him once again most sincerely for doing so.

For those of you who read the last article, now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth! So go out there, behave yourselves, and make your site worthy of inclusion on the Open Directory Project.

And as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

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The some clever cookie thought up things like dynamic meta descriptions

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ . $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName; ?>” />

Now the actual php there might not be perfect, I’m not a php wizard (yet) - but you get the idea. As such it’s now also possible to put in a blanket dynamic rule to cover all your bases on large sites, and then you can go back and overwrite any important products with static handwritten content.

<?php
if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName;
}
?>

Again, just to give you an idea - any php wizards reading please leave me a comment if any code amendments should be made!

A forum is one of the largest types of site in terms of pages that you can apply an SEO skin to, and a forum is also potentially an extremely valuable SEO resource because visitors build up hand written content for you every single day.

So Let’s Get Started

For specific examples I’m referring to phpBB3 - as that’s what I’m working with on the newly launched Digital Designer Forum pictured below.

The first and foremost concern for any forum is the url structure. By default all the forum applications that I know of are set to domain.com/forum.php?id=4 or similar - which obviously isn’t much benefit in terms of targetting keyphrases. Ideally we’d like to have domain.com/forum-title.htm and domain.com/thread-title.htm etc.

Setting Up URL Rewrites

Now, phpBB-SEO.com offer some really great tools to help you with this - the first one to have a look at (in the downloads section in the left hand navigation) is the Advanced phpBB SEO mod rewrite package, which you can download directly from the site, and contains a full set of instructions for modifying existing files, or, if you haven’t modified any of your phpBB3 files then you can simply overwrite your existing files with the premodified ones in the package.

This is a really really great module, once installed you get a whole new tab on your admin interface which allows you to control exactly how you want your url’s to be rewritten (though obviously mod rewrite needs to be enabled on your server, which it usually is by default). Once it’s all set up it will dynamically generate your .htaccess file which you can simply copy, paste, save, and upload. Though it’d be nice if they included a feature like wordpress where it updates itself as long as your .htaccess file is writeable.

Once that’s all done you should have nice clean URLs like domain.com/my-first-forum-f1.html the f1 on the end is the forum code and can’t be changed, it’s used as the ‘trigger’ to actually find the correct page!

But now we have a problem, domain.com/forum.php?id=1 and domain.com/my-first-forum-f1.html are both accessible….. duplicate content!

Setting Up 301 Redirects

Thankfully phpBB-seo.com being the clever cookies that they are, and very much up to scratch on their SEO Skillz have realised this problem - and provided a solution.

With a few more clicks (and a couple of code modifications of your existing forum files) you can install the phpBB SEO Zero Duplicate module, which will redirect all unrewritten URL’s to their appropriate rewritten counterparts. The module also recognises when forums/threads/posts have changed name/url and updates appropriately, though this is not something I’ve tested yet.

Sort Out Those Page Titles

I don’t think that I need to preach any further about how important page titles are, so let’s just get right to it: phpBB-SEO offer two ways of doing this, one is a dynamic meta content generator that puts together content based on the frequency of used words on the page to analyse what the page is about. This sounded a little too vague and inhuman to me so I opted for option B on Digital Designer Forum, which is the ‘Optimal Titles’ module.

Essentially all that it does is strip out all the useless stuff that phpBB puts in there by default; ‘view forum’ and ‘view thread’ being the most common culprites, it instead leaves you with clean (almost too clean) page titles that reflect the name of the forum/thread and will also add page numbers appropriately to cut down on duplicate titles.

One thing that this module doesn’t do is provide you with an adequate homepage title, though you can edit this yourself by doing a sitewide search for ‘Index Page’ which should bring up root/acp/common.php where the index page title is defined - just change it to whatever you like and you’re set.

Get A Working XML Sitemap and RSS Feeds

Having an XML sitemap that’s validated by Google Webmaster Tools is one of the best things that you can do for your site. The GYM Sitemaps module, again by phpBB-SEO.com, is very nice little badger that generates a valid XML sitemap for your forum AND keeps it fully updated with every new forum and thread that gets updated to your site.

This same module also adds a series of RSS feeds to the footer links of your site, so that your visitors can subscribe to a main feed or any of the corresponding individual forum feeds! - VERY handy.

In Conclusion

That’s pretty much it really, just keep doing the obvious, name all the forums relevant things and add the usual canonical URL issue resolution to the .htaccess file.

Any more tips for optimising phpBB3 or your own experiences - drop me a line in the comments!

If you liked this article then please help out this site and Vote for us as at Favelets - all you have to do is click on the link once and you’re done!

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The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies). Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site, it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into - and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address - sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ - the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

BlueShirt Clothing - Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!)

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site - what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included? Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

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

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

Please leave me a comment and tell me of your success or frustrations with DMoz!

If you liked this article then please help out this site and Vote for us as at Favelets - all you have to do is click on the link once and you’re done!

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You may be confused by this one, possibly even a little surprised and angry that the world has been lying to you for so long telling you that you need to ‘optimise for search engines’ when you don’t need to at all. The underlying aspect of search engines that we always forget is that, not only are they programmed to act like users, but they were also created, and are controlled, by users.

The similarities between elements that are important to search engines and elements that are important to users, are strikingly obvious.

Let’s take a look

• Titles and Meta Content
  • Search engines: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and rank it accordingly.
  • Users: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and decide whether or not to use it.
• Header Tags
  • Search engines: Use them to assess what the main bodies of text are about, and rank the page accordingly.
  • Users: Use them to quickly see what the main bodies of text are about.
• Anchor Text
  • Search engines: Use is to understand what the page that is being linked to is about, and rank that page according to its relevance to the anchor text, and the quality of the inbound links.
  • Users: Use it to understand what the page that is being linked to is about.
• Alt Attributes
  • Search engines: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing.
  • Users: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing. Particularly disabled users, and people who browse with images turned off.
• Page Copy
  • Search engines: Use this to establish which search queries this content is relevant to.
  • Users: Use this to establish if the content is relevant to what they are looking for.
• Strong Tags
  • Search engines: Use this to pick out important key phrases within the copy.
  • Users: Use this to scan the copy and pick out the most important words.

  I could go on all afternoon, but I won’t because I’m sure you get the general idea by now.

  So many people go crazy when trying to ‘SEO’ their sites, they think ‘right, here are some techniques to use, lets apply them to absolutely everything’. Which unsurprisingly, doesn’t work.

  Real SEO is User Optimisation because…

  Think about the techniques you’re using to rank higher, and now ask yourself this: Would a user appreciate it? If the answer is yes, then the chances are that a search engine will too.

  Here are a couple of examples

  You add 35 key phrases to your page copy, and but them all in strong tags.

  • Users say: I can’t read it, it looks terrible.
  • Search engines say: Its spam

  You use clear anchor text throughout your site that is relevant to the page which is being linked to.

  • Users say: This is really easy to navigate, I like it.
  • Search engines say: The anchor text is relevant to the page content.

  Again, I could go on, but I won’t. The jist of it is that if you’re pissing off your users with your ‘optimisation’ attempts, then you’re probably annoying the hell out of search engines too.

  Write your site, your code, and your content for your users. It doesn’t MATTER how many people find you in Google if your content is worthless to the visitors. Create your code and your content for users and you’ll see a nice correlation to your rankings too.

  SEO does not mean tricking search engines for ranks.

  Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank.

  SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank.

  More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow…

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So where do you start?

Well there are a number of ways that you can go about recovering, but most of them depend on how badly you’ve been affected.

If you’ve noticed a couple of pages drop positions then it may just be a general penalty. The first thing to do here is review your link strategy, do your best not to link to any sites more than 2 page ranks below you, and do not link to anything that is PR1 or lower. (The exception here is a PR of N/A as the site has not yet been through a PR update)

Once you’ve (hopefully) cleaned up your outbound links, you can apply for ‘reconsideration’ in your Google Webmaster Tools account in the form pictured below, whereby you promise to be a good boy/girl from now on.

If you’ve received a manual ban from Google, then it may be best to try the ditch ‘n dash method;

To do this you simply apply a 301 redirect from your site, to all your content on a new domain, this way you keep your PR and power, even your users - but your site is associated with a new domain and not affected by the ban. A word of warning though, if your site was manually banned, then it was for a reason… and Google will see straight through this old trick if you haven’t cleaned up your act!

What exactly is ‘cleaning up your act?’

Well, you’ve been penalised for a reason (intentional or otherwise) and you need to ensure that you not only resolve the initial issue, but also remove anything else on your site that is even slightly dubious.

Here are some points to get started with

• Key phrase saturation - check how many times you’re using key phrases throughout titles, descriptions, meta keywords, page copy, navigation, and baselinks. Too many = spam, and as you may have figured out, Google is not a fan of spam. You can use a keyword density checker to assess whether or not your site is overkill in the key phrase dept.
   
• Hidden elements - are you using css display:none on certain things? or matching any text to the background colour? (you have to be a really special kind of stupid to do that second one) Or maybe you think you’re being really clever by using javascript to mask certain elements of your site, or having different content served to bots vs users. You may think you’re tricking Google, but chances are that you’re really not. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, real SEO is not spam, and real SEO is not an attempt to trick search engines. So don’t do it!
   
• Inbound links - have you set up a massive network of sites (or social media platforms) that all link back to your site? If so, consider trimming that right down. Overkill on inbound links is the quickest (and most obvious) way to get yourself a penalty. Instead of trying to build thousand of backlinks yourself, write some decent content that people will WANT to link to.
   
• Outbound links - what sites are you linking to? If you’re linking to a site that has just received a PR penalty then it could well have filtered down to you. You need to be meticulous about only linking to high quality sites - as linking to a ‘questionable’ site can seriously damage your reputation amongst the Google spiders.
   
• Still confused? - If you still have no idea why this has happened and to your knowledge, your site is squeeky clean; review Google’s terms of use. They have some pretty detailed information as to what is and isn’t ok, and you should be able to get yourself going in the right direction.

And finally, if you’re still stuck - you’ve done everything you can think of and you still don’t know how to get out of this big hole that you’ve dug for yourself.. drop me a line in the comments and I’ll see if I can help.

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I’ve already talked previously about how Google page rank works and yes, this is based on linking. What I also said, (but probably not clearly enough) is that links do NOT equal positions. So many people think that in order to optimise their sites, they need to go out there an sign up to every social network imaginable and spam them to hell with links back to their site. Not only does this not help with search engines, but it hinders you with traffic, as you will become known for being ‘yet another spammer’ - causing people to ignore/block you altogether.

Having links will NOT get you positions, if you are already ranking for a key phrase based on other SEO elements, then yes PR may help you that extra little bit from Google’s point of view because you are considered to be an ‘important’ site, but again this cannot be achieved through spam links.

Where’s The Pitfall?

If you are doing the SEO, then the pitfall is that it will get you nowhere, you won’t see much benefit from it in the short run, and in the long run it may get you banned from certain sites, blacklisted, or even penalised by Google themselves depending on how extreme you get. If you are paying for the SEO, then the pitfall is that you are paying for a service that a 14yr old could accomplish, dropping links into random sites, and it still isn’t helping! Link building is NOT SEO.

What is Linkbuilding Then?

Linkbuilding is just that, building links. It should be named as no more or less than acquiring links from other sites, you should not charge or pay a premium for this service as there is no skill, knowledge, or qualification required!

But Then… What is SEO?

SEO is clean code, SEO is using the correct code, SEO is key phrase research, SEO is targeting your online marketing demographics through specific pages on your site, SEO is usability for both users AND search engines, SEO is coding and designing your website how it should have always been in the first place.

SEO does not mean tricking search engines having you rank highly.

Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank highly.

SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank highly.

More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow… here

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