Your Competition Works for Google

Still think you can fool Google with your unnatural links? I'm talking about link exchanges, link farms, hidden links, and now even paid links.
Google's Matt Cutts recently wrote about Google's plan to catch you. You and I know it as vigilantism.
Prior to the Google era search engines were mediocre at best, looking at on page factors only which could easily be manipulated and spammed. These factors included metadata (especially the keyphrase tag) and the number of times a search term appeared on a page.

Those days are long gone. With the advent of Google, the concept of link popularity became tantamount to the determination of the relevance of a page to a specific search query. But what is Google looking for when it comes to links?

The answer is natural, one way, inbound links from trusted sites to unique, original, useful, informative, or educational content, with the anchor text of the link containing keyphrases relevant to your site.. The answer may also be found in what they do not want: link farms, link exchanges, hidden links and paid links. And guess who they have watching you? Your enemy.

Cutts wrote in his blog this week the following:

"I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you'll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

As far as the details, it can be pretty short. Something like "Example.com is selling links; here’s a page on example.com that demonstrates that" or "www.shadyseo.com is buying links. You can see the paid links on www.example.com/path/page.html" is all you need to mention. That will be enough for Google to start testing out some new techniques we’ve got — thanks!"

Whoa! Google is now asking your competition to report you if you buy or sell links. Interesting, isn't it, when Google's massively popular AdWords program is all about paid links. Conspiracy theorists will tell you that Google is trying to take over and control all paid advertising on the Internet, worldwide. But I digress. The point is that Google is asking your competition to report you if you buy or sell links. Period.

So what to do? Create the kind of links that Google wants. There is only one way to do this, and that is through the regular creation of unique content. Here is what you do:

1) Set up a blog (blogger.com is owned by Google and a great one to use as they crawl all of their blogs regularly)
2) Post content in the form of articles
3) Syndicate those articles through article distribution sites (do a search for "article distribution" to find these sites), use your keyphrases within anchor text links back to your site (these links are usually included in an about the author section, but can be in the article body as well)
4) Get active in social bookmarking and social media optimization, sites such as digg, furl, and del.icio.us to name a few.

Those four simple steps are all it takes to conduct an effective link building campaign that won't get you into trouble.

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks SEO, one of the top 15 search engine optimization firms in the world. For more information, please visit www.arteworks.biz.

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Top Factors Affecting Positive Search Engine Rankings

The jury of search engine experts over at SEOMoz has weighed in, and here are the top factors affecting search engine placement, according to them, with my comments.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag - I have said for many years that if I had a gun to my head, and could do only one thing to a web page to optimize it, my choice would be the title tag. Put your keyphrases in your title tag, and remember to optimize each page individually (i.e. don't overstuff your title tag, and have different title tags for each page that reflect the content of that particular page - otherwise, you may suffer from a duplicative content exclusion and find yourself in the supplemental results).

2. Keyword Use in Body Text - Duh. If your keyword or keyphrase isn't mentioned at least once in the body text of the web page, then it does not seem your page is very relevant to that keyphrase, now does it? But don't get all caught up in the keyphrase density myth - there is no magic number of times it should appear. Make sense to readers, and it will make sense to the search engines.

3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis) - Google is smarter than you give them credit for, and just stuffing a keyphrase into a completely unrelated page won't do you much, if any good. Your page should be on a topic which is semantically related to the keyphrase which you are targeting in your title tag.

4. Keyword Use in H1 Tag - Oh, for years the naysayers have been telling me that H1 tag keyphrase use meant nothing and that I was an idiot for thinking otherwise. Well the verdict is in and this is the fourth most important factor according to the SEOMoz article. At this point, therefore, we have learned to put your keyphrase in your title tag, include it in your body text, which body text is topically or semantically related to the keyphrase, and head up the body text with an H1 containing the keyphrase.

5. Keyword Use in Domain Name - This is one that I disagree with. I have seen absolutely no evidence of this at all. Do a simple search on the internet for most any search term, and chances are the top results do not have the search query in the domain name. I believe this may have minor importance, but don't go and change your domain because of it. Seriously, you have much more to lose (such as age of domain, inbound linkage, site reputation, etc.) I regularly see clients at the top of Google with domain names containing nothing near the relevant search terms.

6. Keyword Use in Page URL - This is what I have called "descriptive file naming" for a number of years. I believe it is of some importance, again, however, is more of a factor when setting up a new domain than would be for an existing domain with high pagerank and inbound linkage. Changing your internal url's for the sole purpose of meeting this criterion again is very risky, for the same reasons mentioned above.

7. Keyword Use in H2, H3, H... Tags - Well if it works for H1, why not for H2 et al.?

8. Keyword Use in ALT Attributes and Image Titles - SEOMoz incorrectly calls them an ALT tag, but it is not a tag, the ALT is an attribute of the IMG tag. Semantics aside, I believe this to be highly important, I would have ranked this above the URL and domain name items. Experience has shown me that image optimization (image file name, alt attribute, and title) is a wonderful way to make a page more relevant to a desired search query.

9. Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags - I always use this method, as well as keyword use within the EM (italics) tag. I believe this to be a moderately important factor as it helps emphasize to Google what your page is about, and what you consider important. Definitely on my short list of things to do for "on page" search engine optimization.

10. Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag - Again, one of my "big 4" for on page optimization. The "big 4" being: title tag, meta description, h1, and image ALT attributes. (I don't include body text in my big 4 as I believe that is self evident). Definitely important, and again, each page should have custom title and meta description tags.

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