Meet Google+, Facebook's Newly Born Competition

So the news is out, Google has finally announced their social answer to Facebook, the Google+ Project. From profiles, to pics, to group video chat, to Circles and beyond, Google seems to really have outdone itself. We know that Google+ is not yet open to the public, but to a select few testing it out, so for now we will have to sit tight with the information they’ve given us. To makes things easier, I’m going to send a few links your way on some posts and articles on the topic, mostly because I’d rather give credit to the original sources of the news then rewriting the same stuff just like 100′s of other SEO Blogs.

Here’s Google’s official blog post on the subject
Here’s Tech Crunch’s post
And finally Mashable’s post

This is less of a blog post and more of an update. What I’d like most is if you all can comment and answer this question: Do you think Facebook has finally met it’s match or will Facebook always be the number one social network? And how will Google+ change SEO?

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SEO Tools - Ways To Make Your Life Easier

Alright, let’s just imagine that you’re website is all set & finished (even though it truly will never be), and you are ready to start optimizing your website outside of the website itself (i.e. through link building techniques). Before you do anything, become well prepared to the various websites you will come across such as your competitors and possible linking opportunities. The way to do this my friends is in the art of choosing your select SEO tools & kits. There are hundreds out there, but today I will try to cover the basics into a little detail, but this is mostly to get you aware of the things you MUST analyze, plan, and implement in your SEO campaign.

First thing you should do to get started is to download a few toolbars if you don’t already have them – the Google Toolbar and the Alexa Toolbar. The Google Toolbar, which I expect most have, has one specific gadget that you need to know about – the PageRank checker. Once you install Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com) go to your options and activate the PageRank checker tool, and this will give you a green bar indicating the PageRank of a page. You also want to check out the Alexa Toolbar, which once installed will give you an indication of how much traffic a particular site gets. If your Alexa Ranking is 100,000, then that means you are the one hundred thousandth most visited website in the world (data isn’t 100% accurate, but it gives you a decent estimate). Other toolbars I recommend getting include the Compete.com toolbar, the yahoo toolbar (toolbar.yahoo.com), the Bing toolbar (toolbar.bing.com), and one I mention a little bit later (of course, you don’t have to get all of them, but I will tell you at the end which ones I found to be most useful).

Luckily for us, many SEO websites know the meaning of “linkbait” – useful web content that encourages users to link to it. This is the case with two sites I like in particular – SEOmoz.org and SEObook.com. Starting off with SEOmoz.org, this is a site that gives out a few free tools that can be advantageous to anyone not wanting to give up a penny. You can use their Open Site Explorer tool (opensiteexplorer.org) which will analyze backlinks to a particular page. They also have a Rank Tracker (up to 5 keywords checked per day) and a toolbar of their own. The other site, SEObook.com, also offers a superb package of free tools. By registering for an account (asks for only Email and a Username), in about a minute they provide you with a link to a page to download 3 free tools – A full, complete Rank checker that goes right into your browser (although there has been debate on how accurate it is), their own SEO toolbar which gives many statistics of pages and domains (including Page Rank and Yahoo Page Links), and finally their SEO for Firefox tool, which generates a list of info under each search result in Google and Yahoo! Searches. Personally I like SEObook.com’s tools better, but they have one downside – they only work with Mozilla Firefox, so if you don’t already have it, you have to download it (it’s free, easy, and quick). If you don’t want to download Firefox, I suggest sticking with the rank tracker on SEOmoz.org.

If you have room in the budget to go out and spend money on some SEO tools to help you and your campaign (which I highly recommend), make sure you know which ones you want and what you’re paying for. Currently, my website has accounts with a few different SEO tools – SheerSEO, HubSpot and GetClicky. SheerSEO includes many helpful tools & gadgets such as PageRank of every page on your site, different directories you’ve submitted to, and tracking of your different backlinks (we like it because it’s cheaper than most SEO Services). HubSpot is a much more widely used tool, which helps you track different keywords used in Twitter Posts, LinkedIn Posts, etc. as well as Keyword Difficulty, Tracking, and help with Social Media. GetClicky offers full, complete site analytics of your visitors and how they get there. Also as mentioned above, SEOmoz.org and SEObook.com are both sites that offer different tools that should be given some consideration when determining which tools you want to pay for. Personally I’m a fan of SEObook.com’s free set of tools, and a big fan of the services provided by HubSpot, but you should look into as many of these SEO services as they can appeal differently to different website owners.

Congratulations! If you start using these tools, you are getting closer to the lens that the search engines look through to analyze your site. By looking at the behind the scenes stuff, you can see what matters and what doesn’t by comparing your site to your competitor’s.

I like to leave my readers with a little something extra, and today I’m going to give an honorable mention to a tool known as Link Checker, an add-on install for Mozilla Firefox. It might be old, but it packs quite a punch – when installed, you can right click and choose “Check Page Links”, and in seconds it will start highlighting every link on your page: green links mean they are a fully functional link, yellow is a forwarded, forbidden link, gray is a skipped link (such as email links), and finally red means it is a broken link. How can I make use of this? Well, if you want to, you can check different pages on your site for broken links, but what I use it for is much more sophisticated (sorry, I brag a lot). Using this tool on the fly allows me to check Resource & Links pages on various websites (such as college ones) to check for broken links. I then inform the webmaster of them, and suggest my website to be the replacement link for it. If I can get my website to offer the same information as the broken link was supposed to, I end up getting a high success rate of webmasters willing to insert my link on their page. It might be time consuming to find these pages, but it sure pays off!

Remember that these are just a few of the ones I use, and again there are numerous ones out there that I have heard of being effective. This is more of a post to give you a head start into the search & find process.

Which SEO Tools do you find work the best for you? Comment and start the conversation.

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Is The Yahoo Directory Worth It?

If you are new to SEO, and have recently found some of the top directories, you have come across the Yahoo! Directory. For those more experienced, you know that there has been some debate over whether this directory is worth the payment of $299/year. Everyone wants to know, is it worth it?


Yes and no. I say this because there is always two sides of any argument, and in this case there is reason to or not to pay this based on your situation. The Yahoo! Directory is provides one of the best links any website can obtain, large or small, because of the trust of the link. You can gain a fair amount of traffic from the link as well, but is it worth the $299/year? I would say no only if you don’t have the budget to fit it in. If your budget is $450/year, spending two thirds of it on one listing is probably not worth it. Small websites are at a disadvantage for this website because of this. But at the same time this could be the best $299 you can spend if you are a larger website with a bigger budget. My website has the budget, and we take full advantage of this listing. Google likes to see trustworthy links, and you cant get much more trustworthy than a like from Yahoo!

Now some may ask would you rather have a listing in Yahoo! Directory or Business.com? My guess is if you can get a listing on Business.com that’s only a click or two away from the home page with a relatively low amount of other listings on the same page, than I would go with that listing. But for most, this might not be the case. You can’t go wrong with either, as they are both fantastic links that can gain trust from Google and a fair amount of traffic. Now, don’t feel obligated to be in them – there are other link building techniques that can prove just as worthy of your time and money, but I can guarantee you these directories are as safe a bet as you will find.

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Google Plus One (For Manipulation Purposes Only)

It’s been on the news, it’s been widely debated, and in the social world, it’s one of the hottest topics on the web. The bonuses of Google employees depend on it, webmasters are scrambling to get it featured on their site, and its experimental features are still being determined. Without a doubt it’s too early to make any clear determination on its success rate, but if you honestly think Google’s Plus One (+1) can equal the Facebook Like button (or any social button for that matter), you are poorly mistaken.

Why can’t this button compete? First of all, it’s a social feature in a nonsocial environment. Google is a search engine dedicated to help any and all internet users find what they are looking for, and they do a pretty damn good job at it. Most people who use Google honestly don’t have a Gmail account, which is the closest way to making their search results personal. But for those who have a Gmail account, usually they are only connected to other people through email, and maybe 10 to 20% of them take it to the next step and explore all of Google’s tools and features. So, we can decide that this is not a social environment to connect to friends and colleagues through, yet Google is attempting to implement a highly social feature. The reason the Facebook Like button is so widely renown is because it was born in a social environment, in which friends are connected and personal information is shared in a very casual environment, almost never work related. This is what made the button so popular, and this explains why the Google +1 doesn’t stand a chance.

It’s been two months now since the announcement, a sufficient time to see at least some progress of this new feature, yet the numbers aren’t showing it. Google itself only recently broke 4,000 +1’s, and the largest number I have seen of any website is Mashable at just above 5,000. From the top 10,000 most visited websites only 2.5% of them feature the +1 button,  and only 1.55% of the top 100,000 feature it (Source).

Ever since the announcement stating the button will influence search rankings, I have decided that the only use of the button so far is for manipulation purposes. Although I have no numbers to back me up, I feel as if the only times this button is being put to use is by SEOs and those of the same interest – in boosting their site in the SERPs. If you are one of these people, I would say keep chugging and taking advantage of this, because it seems Google will be stubborn in making sure this is a success. Trust me, I get why they are doing this, it makes since – the only real opponent they have in the future is social search engines, which Facebook could launch at any time they please. I just don’t like how Google jumped from one end of the spectrum to the other without thinking of the consequences. They should have taken smaller steps to make Google more social, and then release the button in order for it to have any of the quality search effects it was made for.

Do you think Google Plus One (+1) is going to be a failure? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, I want to hear what my readers have to say.

UPDATE: I posted this a few days before Google+ was announced. Don’t I look like such an idiot? Well, I at least feel like one…

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Top 5 SEO Blogs

Obviously, the blog you are reading is not world renown (yet!). SEO Blogs seem to be very popular, as there are thousands of them. I have done my fair share of reading different blogs, and have found some of them to be useful (to the experienced SEO junkie). Although they cover some complex topics, they prove to be worthy competition. I have contemplated making a short list because of the fact that they are competition, but I have made a pledge to serve my visitors with an unbiased point of view in finding the best SEO information, whether it be on this blog full time, or split up between here and other web sources. So, here is my top 5 list of SEO blogs:

1. Search Engine Land
2. SEO Book
3. SEOmoz
4. Matt Cutts
5. Blue Hat SEO

I have read Search Engine Land’s blog to find out that they offer some intriguing information on SEO with up to a few posts a day, but their only downside is you have to pay to read more than the five most recent blog posts (crazy, right?). I am a fan of SEO Book and their blog as they have provided me with a few lists of link building ideas. SEOmoz has always provided credible information on breaking down some of the daily SEO challenges. Matt Cutts works for Google so he is one of the most credible & trusted SEO Bloggers there is. Lastly is Blue Hat SEO, one of my favorite reads on some of the most intriguing unique perspectives in SEO, but I only put them at 5 because the blog has not been updated on a frequent basis in quite some time (Only 1 post in 2011), but nonetheless I am a big fan. I would also give an honorable mention to Search Engine Watch & Search Engine Journal.

Now that you’ve seen some of the top blogs, I’d like to hear from my readers. What things can I do to improve my blog?

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Teach Me How To Comment Post

Google is becoming ever stingier on certain ways to build links (i.e. their new policies on article syndication) so ways to get quality anchor text links to help you rank in the search engines are becoming fewer and fewer. One of the top link building techniques is comment posting on articles, blogs, and any type of posts you can find that allow user comments. By typing in no more than 20 words and by inserting an anchor text link, this can be an easy and quick way to build links. There is one downside – the links are nofollow, so they don’t transfer link juice. Therefore the purpose in building these links is for Google to recognize them and help you rank higher for those phrases or keywords you linked.

Most people make the mistake of having an automated system for this. If Google finds you doing this, it can hurt your rankings, and might even result in dropping your listings in their search results. Although there will always be some that get away with this, it’s not worth it.

To get started you might want to use Google to find different Blogs to comment on, so start by searching the category of website you are, and then adding the word “blog” or “post” or “article”. For example, if you are an HR Outsourcing company you would want to find a Human Resources or Small Business Blog, so by searching “Human Resources Blog”, you will get a results page, and go from there. You might want to even type in something like “Top Human Resources Blogs”, and if you are lucky, you can find a list of the most visited, used, and optimized blogs in that niche. Another way to find posts or blogs to comment on is by using various SEO tools such as HubSpot. HubSpot will allow you to type in certain keywords you want to find in blogs and posts, and by typing them in they will search the web and give you the latest twitter posts, comment posts, LinkedIn posts, etc. with that keyword or phrase in it. So if I want to rank higher in the search term HR Outsourcing, I might type in HR Outsourcing on that tool to use it to find people talking about HR Outsourcing, so then I come in, leave a comment with an anchor text link, and after doing this many times you will see results in the Search Engines. Another great way is to look for your competitor’s top backlinks and in many cases there are some blog posts or articles they are commenting on, so by finding these you can leave a comment here with your link.

Next is posting a comment. We all know that doing this many times can make us want to create comment templates on a text based tool such as Notepad that you can copy and paste. Be careful with this, because Google will see this and might think that this is an automated comment posting system. Therefore, understand the main topic of each post by looking at other comments or by just the title, then talk about that and how great a post it is, and finally leave an anchor text link anywhere you can. In a lot of posts I have found that you can insert your website, and it links the name you are posting under (i.e. if I said my name was Anthony and I put my website as http://www.AnthonysWebsite.com, the name Anthony would be linked to my website). Obviously the better a comment you leave that is informational to readers, the more people that you would get a “thumbs up” from or a “like” from (different websites have different ways to rank how high the comment is on the page). Consider this as you are tempted to leave five word comments.

Note that you will come across a lot of people saying that adding links to your comments is a way to get it deleted for being spam, and this is very true, so proceed with caution when you think about dropping anchor text links into your comments. A lot of top posts, blogs, etc. you will come across might give you this problem, so here are two ways around this:

• If possible, make the term you are targeting your name (because that’s what is being linked)
• If the link in your name is being linked to a profile page, use your real name and make sure that your profile page is optimized in any way possible (all sites are different)

You can still build links with using your name to be linked, and this is totally fine for the sole purpose of link building. This will help with the Trust factor that is nearly immeasurable but nonetheless exists.
Comment posting takes time, and results don’t come over night, so have patience, and make sure when you comment you have something to contribute that makes the comment worthwhile to read, and has a much better chance to being accepted as a comment on blog sites that have the option of rejecting the comments.

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The Truth About Content Farms

Before I started my blog, I decided to get a head start on different topics to cover, ones that can really educate my viewers in ways that other sites can’t. I found one topic that was relatively uncovered in a lot of SEO websites – unique content websites, such as Associatedcontent.com, suite101.com, hubpages.com, etc. I decided to get a head start and write this post, and it seemed to be pretty well rounded and an article that people would reference in the future. But as many of you know, Google made a major change within the last month, and by the time I found out about it, I had made the finishing touches on this article. The article was about whether or not to use these sites, but as many of you now know, these are considered content farms.

Many people have been tossing around the term “content farm” like it was taught to them in early childhood, despite the fact that a moderate amount of people on the web just don’t know exactly what a content farm really is. A content farm is a website such as the ones below that crank out very large numbers of articles a day (some up to 4,000) of low quality content written by freelancers almost solely for search engine rankings (freelancers are writers who sell their content writing services without long-term commitments).

In a nutshell, Google cracked down on these sites for their low quality content, and even the higher quality content on their site took a big hit too. The update hit roughly 16% of search queries, causing some sites that depend heavily on these content farms to lose major amounts of traffic. The content farms above aren’t only the ones that will be affected by these new changes; they also include article directories, which will affect article marketers in the not too distant future. One immediate effect on the article directories have caused the top ones to make their links nofollow: they no longer carry precious link juice back to your site. Even though some changes were made, article submission is still one of the top link building techniques.
For those wondering which exact websites are considered “content farms”, take a look:

• Associatedcontent.com
• Suite101.com
• Hubpages.com
• Buzzle.com
• Demandstudios.com
• Seed.com
• Triond.com
• Ezinearticles.com
• Findarticles.com
• Articlesbase.com
• Wisegeek.com
• Answers.com
• Yourdictionary.com
• Brothersoft.com
• Howtodothings.com
• Entrepreneur.com
• Manta.com
• Examiner.com
• Slideshare.net
• About.com

(These are the most well-known ones, there were over 100 sites considered “content farms” by Google that were hit hard).

If you have been considering using some of these sites to get potential links by adding content to them, think again – with these new updates, these sites will slowly lose SERP authority, and won’t have the same power they’ve had in the past.

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