If gaining a perfect optimization of your website for search engines is your goal, then WPSEO is the right choice for you. WPSEO has over 70 useful options that are available for optimizing your website for search engines. You can create powerful and automatic Meta tags and titles depending on the content. WPSEO also contains a step-by-step manual with explanations concerning relevant settings for WPSEO. WPSEO has features to help you create and optimize your search engines and it is Word Press 2.9.x ready. Word Press 2.9.x has a noun-filtering feature. It also creates canonical tag, has keyword highlighting posts, duplicate content avoidance, and you can manually add Meta tags.
Word Press 2.9.x also features an advantage comparison to other solutions, has screenshots of all WPSEO options and has a slideshow of steps on how to activate it.

The best asset of WPSEO is that it has a wide variety of functions that you won’t find anywhere else. WPSEO has an advance Word Press plug-in that has efficient and powerful codes and well-trained support. WPSEO has been running since March 2007 and has licenses that would suit your SEO perfectly. It supports via e-mail dependably and fast. WPSEO is minimalistic, simple, easy to use, and powerful.

However, Word Press does have its cons. Word Press has so many plug-ins that sometimes it can be a hassle to use it. There are too many plug-ins to tweak and so many details to be taken care of.
If it so happens that your Word Press automatically generates several URLs for a single post, you might also face several problems with it. Duplicate contents of a Word Press are often penalized and can be removed from the search index for several months, but WPSEO usually won’t fail you.

WPSEO has already become one of the best SEO word press in the market and it is still gaining momentum. It is no wonder that ratings for WPSEO continue to rise when you consider its features and the advantage of having an all-in-one SEO pack. WPSEO is included as one of the 15 most useful premium plug-ins, because it offers numerous features and assists the user in improving search engine rankings and search engine traffic. It has features related to page and post titles, Meta description and Meta keywords, duplicate content and performance management. It is clear that WPSEO is included in the most useful premium plug-ins because it is straightforward, user-friendly and has many features. It really makes your SEO easy to control, manage and organize.

WPSEO can turn a chaotic SEO plan into a well organized one. It is no wonder that WPSEO is continually rising in popularity. It seems that many users are choosing WPSEO for their search engine optimization. It is so affordable that a single-site license only costs $24.99 and a developer’s license is just $124.99. An individual can now afford quality WPSEO. Genuine search engine optimization depends on a genuine and trustworthy WPSEO. WPSEO offers a 10 day free trial for users to try out. This 10 day free trial makes sure that it proves to users the quality of WPSEO services. WPSEO has made it convenient for users to try their services and features to prove the quality and to strengthen the users’ trust. WPSEO will help to heighten both the single-site users and developer’s progress.

source from: seosoftware

The SEMToolBar is an attractive, easy-to-use toolbar that allows users access to statistics relating to online marketing campaigns. It provides users with powerful tools and information necessary for understanding and monitoring how sites of interest are seen by search engines and thus presented to search engine users. We have two versions available; one for Internet Explorer and one for Firefox. Download your FREE SEMToolBar here. For more information on the features and benefits of the SEMToolBar, please visit the SEMToolBar page.

source from: seotoolset

All the time we are trying to find out exactly what projects are you working the competition and how to achieve excellence. Here are different seo tools that can help you understand why some competitors are better positioned than you.

source from: 100seotips

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

There’s no shortage of posts and tutorials built around setting up a monitoring dashboard. Everyone has a favorite. Mine is from Marty Wientraub from Aim Clear (see How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard). There are new services that spring up every few months about monitoring like Scout Labs and Trackur, a lot of which are very good products. However in some cases those products are like driving a Ferrari to the supermarket to pick up a quart of milk: it’s just overkill and too much power for the job. Sometimes you just need a quick, easy solution for the task at hand. Here’s how I do it.

If you’re an account manager for a large firm, or "the guy" in a one man operation, you should always be on the lookout for tools that you can use to automate the low level and receptive work. Google Alerts is one of those tools. There are some smart ways you can get Google Alerts to work for you.

When you set up Google Alerts, if you choose the "email" delivery option and choose "once a day," you should know that the first alert will come about 24 hours later. It will repeat every day at about the same time. So if you want your alerts to come at 9 am every morning, set them up just before 9 am and you’re all set. The one problem with this is that, if you adjust an alert, the time resets to the last time you adjusted it. It would be nice if Google gave us the ability to specify a delivery time, but that’s not the case. If you choose "as it happens," you’ll get email alerts at random times during the day. There are some cases where you want this, and we’ll get into that below, but in most cases I recommend once per day.

The second thing you need to know is that Google recently changed the filtering methodology in an attempt to show/send fewer alerts. When you set up an alert, you can specify the maximum number of results, either 20 or 50. This setting also seems to correspond to how sensitive the filter is. Set it to 50 and you’ll get deeper, less trusted sites showing up; set it to 20 and the results will show only the more trusted results. The truth is you need both (again, we’ll get into that below). It would be nice if Google gave us the option to choose trusted/all results independent of the number, but that’s not the case.

Lastly I recommend setting up an alias email address specifically for Google Alerts. When you go on vacation or will be out of the office for a few days, you don’t want the emails piling up in your inbox. You might want them to forward to someone else or temporarily get deleted. In a perfect world you would have two aliases: one for the priority alerts, another for the standard ones. Again, more on that below.

Ok let’s get down to business. The following tactic is built upon one that was first talked about by Patrick Aloft a few years ago (see How to Use Google Alerts to Find Out if Your Site Gets Hacked). What we are trying to do is trap for certain conditions that we need to know about. I divide my alerts into two blocks: things I need to know about as soon as possible and things that I need to know about that aren’t time sensitive. These are the three Google Alerts I set up for every site I run and every client site I work on.

viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:wolf-howl.com

poker OR casino OR hold-em OR holdem site:wolf-howl.com

nude OR naked OR sex OR porn site:wolf-howl.com

When I set up these alerts I want to know ASAP when it happens, because it means someone has hacked the server, or some content was published or approved that probably shouldn’t have been. I also want all the results, whether trusted or not. I can deal with a few false positives, but not getting an alert I wanted would be bad. Recently, Rand linked to a post by Richard Baxter showing that spam keywords that were nofollowed in the comment section had an effect on rankings, so you want to watch out for this stuff. I split/grouped the terms to make it easy to maintain. You could use one big long query joined with "OR" statements, but you run the risk of things "breaking" much more easily. As a result, I like to keep it manageable and under 4 or 5 terms.

The next set of terms I set up only come once a day and don’t have to be as extensive, so I limit it to 20 results. Here are the terms I use:

wolf-howl.com {site:facebook.com OR site:digg.com OR site:delicious.com OR site:stumbleupon.com OR site:mixx.com OR site:reddit.com}

site: wolf-howl.com

wolf-howl.com site:twitter.com

Depending on the total number of alerts you’re getting, you can bulk them all together.  Adjusting the setup times or getting the alerts in batches throughout the day is up to you.

One last tip. In addition to using the "OR" phrase as in the examples above, you can also use negative phrases. Here’s an example of one that that I use for a vanity search for my name:

"michael gray" -dj -uk -football -police

There is a famous DJ who share my name and -dj eliminates most of his results. There is a UK soccer/football player who shares my name as well. Since I have a fairly common name it’s becoming more frequent that Google comes across arrest records from newspapers with people who share my name; the "-police" takes care of most of that. The way I figure, if I did get arrested, hopefully I’d know about it before Google does.

Michael Gray has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing. He has helped companies with internal search engine optimization strategies for both ecommerce and informational websites. He publishes controversial industry thoughts and observations on his blog at www.wolf-howl.com.

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In the past few weeks Facebook has been publicly criticized over privacy policies; however, when Google invades people’s privacy, the offenses don’t receive the same level of scrutiny or public outrage.

Unless you had all of your attention focused on the Lost season finale, it’s been impossible to not know about the problems Facebook has been having with privacy . It had gotten so bad that people created infographics showing the erosion of privacy over time and the byzantine settings to control your privacy. This caused some high profile people like Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte to delete their facebook profiles as a form of public protest. However, when Google is guilty of similar violations, those people (and the community as a whole) remain mute on the issue.

In recent weeks Google has been caught uncharacteristically with their pants down on more than one occasion. First they admitted they “accidentally” downloaded personal information. More recently, they were “forced” to admit they were geographically mapping all open wifi networks as part of the European street map program. I don’t know about you, but I think these are some pretty serious offenses.

But are Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte deleting their Google profiles or calling for any form of protest against Google?

So why does Google get to “slide by” while Facebook gets sacrificed on the altar? First off, Google has done an excellent job of perpetuating the “garage company startup” despite being a huge business and financial juggernaut. Don’t think for a second that the playful colors, funny logos, bean bag chairs, and lava lamps are by accident. It’s all intended to create that sense of being “googly.”

The second part is that Google creates a lot of good will by giving things away for free. It doesn’t matter that, by giving things for free, they destroy other businesses.  It’s almost as if people believe that, as long as long you get it for free, it’s all good. But free is a funny thing, and it motivates people in funny ways. People have been known to give away a lot of personal information to get things for free.  That tendency is something that a lot of startups depend on.

If the community isn’t going to protest, then it’s up to the government to step in. While the DOJ may want to go after Google, right now it’s not happening. Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist , but the spooks in the spy agencies have convinced the government that spying on its citizens is a good thing, and they might as well let someone else get their hands dirty doing it. And this isn’t a red state blue state debate: both Bush and Obama have extended the Patriot Act.

So what’s the next step? We each have to take a stand and educate our circle of friends and contacts about the clear and present danger that all of these companies put on our personal freedoms. Facebook, Google, or some other company–it doesn’t matter where the threat comes from. What’s important is that we see it for what it is and act accordingly. As Ben Franklin says “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.”

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Google is Scarier than Facebook on Privacy

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Conversion rate optmization – the practice of improving the quantity of visitors who take a desired action on your site – has been a hot topic this year. There’s both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without having read Robert Cialdini’s seminal work – Influence: Science & Practice.  I agree wholeheartedly with Guy Kawasaki’s assessment on the subject:

The problem is, not every marketer will read the book, and that leaves a lot of head-shaped holes in a lot of walls. Thus, this post is here to help do the next best thing – explain, through illustrations and descriptions, the broad concepts of persuasion. The book covers six major "weapons of influence." For each, I’m going to illustrate the concept then give tips (and some examples) on how you can apply them to marketing and conversion on the web.

#1 – Reciprocation

Hold open a door and you receive a "thank you" and a smile. Send a birthday present to a friend and you’re almost certain to get one in return. Pay for a co-worker’s coffee and she’ll pick up the next one. As Cialdini painstakinly details in the book, there is no culture on Earth without this unspoken, yet powerful rule of reciprocation.

The power of reciprocation relies on several conventions. The request must be "in-kind," which is to say, commensurate with the initial offering. The power is increased if the give-and-take happens in a short time frame. Reciprocity’s influence increases with closer relationships, too – it’s much harder to resist/refuse to reciprocate a favor to a friend who’s down the street than to an anonymous site on the web.

Leveraging reciprocity through web marketing:

• Give away free data and analysis through tools, but ask for permission to send an email marketing message in exchange
• Tweet or blog about a prominent person or business in a positive fashion, then email them asking if they’d help spread the message
• Email a site owner about a problem on their site and offer a solution/fix; they’ll often follow up by asking how they can return the favor
• Provide exemplary answers to questions posted in online forums with a signature or final note asking that if they found your answer valuable, to consider visiting your site and sharing it with friends
• Share great information on your blog and ask your readers to subscribe to your feed (see what I did there? Pretty meta, eh?)

#2 – Commitment & Consistency

As humans, we have an insatiable desire for consistency in our behavior. It’s why we abhor hypocrisy and embrace leaders, politicians and beliefs that "stick to their guns," sometimes to the point of foolishness. This consistency can be observed through the effectiveness of political tactics like push polling, wherein a paid "surveyer" will call numbers and ask voters whether they’d cast a ballot for "a man who refused to say the pledge of allegiance," thus getting a response and commitment verbally that will transfer into votes come election day after the follow-on ad campaign alludes to precisely that inaction from an opposition candidate.

A case study from the book illustrates this principle quite elegantly. Researchers on a New York City beach staged thefts to see if onlookers would risk personal harm to stop the "criminal." A research accomplice would listen to music on a blanket near their "test subjects" and after several minutes, stand up and stroll away, leaving a personal radio on the blanket. A "thief" would then approach, grab the radio, and attempt to hurry away with it. On average, only 4 in 20 bystanders would intervene.

However, when the experiment was changed slightly, the results altered dramatically. In this second scenario, before strolling away, the research accomplice would ask the test subject to "watch my things." Now, under the influence of consistency and commitment, 19 of 20 subjects became "virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away."

Commitment and consistency can’t happen without that initial action of a reponse or promise. Cialdini notes that this power increases tremendously if the agreement is written, rather than merely verbal. E.g. last week, you told us you wanted XYZ… Guess what? Here it is!

Leveraging commitment and consistency through web marketing:

• Asking users to answer online questions about their habits/preferences, then marketing to them based on the answers they’ve given
• Getting visitors to a site to sign an online pledge to take a certain action and then email/message them at a specified day/time (example – the "Quit Facebook Day" movement)
• Asking your users/members/fans to commit to taking an action if a certain event occurs (like a charity pledge for a marathon runner). For example, you could say that your startup is up for an award and if you win it, you’d like them to commit to emailing a friend about their service. If/when you do win, send members who commited an email requesting the action.
• Using a landing page / funnel process that asks a question where users must choose to define themself in a set number of ways, then crafting sales messaging that speaks to how your product/service is the right choice for people like them.

#3 – Social Proof

If you’re walking along a street and see a crowd gathered around watching something, it’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to go over and investigate yourself. If you’re at a party and everyone is drinking, the pressure to have a drink yourself rises dramatically. We all hate the horrifyingly over-the-top laugh tracks on TV sitcoms, but TV producers know that the social signal of laughter makes us laugh along, too.

This same phenomenon applies when we judge exceptionally important life decisions – who should we date or marry, where should we go to school, where should we work. The influence of our peers is a powerful influencer and one that can’t be overlooked in the sphere of marketing.

Social proof becomes more powerful when the numbers increase and when the action-takers become more relevant and, especially more like the target. In other words, if you’re selling games to rebelling teenagers, don’t show testimonials from middle-aged parents who loved it, show other teens.

Leveraging social proof in web marketing:

• Services like MyBlogLog that display the picture and username of recent visitors to the site
• Facebook-leveraging visit tracking software that shows recent friends of yours who’ve engaged with the site you’re visiting (even more relevant and social proofy)
• Testimonials on landing pages and in sales copy. Those that feature photos, have titles and full names and relate to the visitor work best
• Network-effect services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn touting their fast-growing and far-reaching memberships and usage

#4 – Liking

We’ve heard the phrase a thousand times – "People do business with people they know, like and trust." It turns out, there’s quite a bit of science to support this. Research confirms that things like physical attractiveness (we like good-looking people), familiarity (we trust people we know), similarity (we like people like us) and compliments (we like people who say nice things about us) all factor into to the principle of "liking."

It’s hard to argue with the power "liking" has on us as consumers. When Will Critchlow (whom I like a lot, despite constantly losing presentation-off battles to him) recommends that I read a book or try a service, it’s practically a guarantee I’ll do it (note to Will: please don’t abuse this power). Similarly, movie executives realize that asking Tom Hanks to go on the late-night circuit is a great way to drive viewership of a film, while sending Tom Cruise on a similar mission may have the opposite result.

Leveraging liking in web marketing:

• Start a blog, twitter account or email list and share your thoughts in a personable, personal and friendly way.
• Employ the power of celebrity, in microcosms. If Seth Godin wrote a blog post saying that SEOmoz was a valuable resource, that would likely drive many people who like Seth to take commensurate actions.
• Join in conversations on the web (on forums, in blog comments, on Twitter, via other social services) in ways that engender you positively to those community members. Follow up personally with community leaders and organizers to help spread the liking effect in a more scalable way.

#5 – Authority

A story from the book illustrates this principle so well, I couldn’t resist sharing:

Professors of pharmacy Michael Cohen and Neil Davis attribute much of the problem to the mindless deference given to the "boss" of a patient’s case: the attending physician. According to Cohen, "in case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription." Take, for example, the strange case of the "rectal earache" reported by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location "Right ear" on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read "place in R ear." Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.

Obviously, rectal treatment of an earache made no sense, but neither the patient nor the nurse questioned it. The important lesson of this story is that in many situations in which a legitimate authority has spoken, what would otherwise make sense is irrelevant. In these instances, we don’t consider the situation as a whole but attend and respond to only one aspect of it.

The power of authority can come from a variety of sources – clothes (think of the movie "Catch Me if You Can" in which Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a doctor or pilot simply through attire), titles and prefix/suffixes (Dr., Senator, President, C-level executive), and context (the famous Milgram study in which ordinary people commit horrifying acts simply because they are told to do so).

Authority only influences when the target believes in the power and authenticity of that authority. The stronger the authority association, the more powerful the impact, but not all authorities work on all people.  

Leveraging authority in web marketing:

• Has a well respected individual or organization endorsed your product/company? Make that a prominent feature when you request an action from your visitors.
• In a product or software service that provides information users rely upon, the product itself can influence actions by recommending them and showing the data to back it up.
• Experts in your field can make for great testimonials and endorsements. They need not be recognizable or even speak to social proof elements if they carry credentials and weight that will make your target audience respond.

#6 – Scarcity

Ever notice that some shops seem to be perpetually running "going out of business" sales? It’s no mistake – the power of potential loss is a remarkable influencer. The Rolling Stones’ "last ever" tour, the final can of Crystal Pepsi, the limited edition collectors keepsake (only 70 ever released!). All are examples of scarcity principles at work.

As Cialdini notes:

The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerful motivating properties. The ardor of an indifferent lover surges with the appearance of often for reasons of strategy, therefore, that romantic partners reveal (or invent) the attentions of a new admirer. Salespeople are taught to play the same game with indecisive customers. For example, a realtor who is trying to sell a house to a "fencesitting" prospect sometimes will call the prospect with news of another potential buyer who has seen the house, liked it, and is scheduled to return the following day to talk about terms. When wholly fabricated, the new bidder is commonly described as an outsider with plenty of money: "an out-of-state investor buying for tax purposes" and "a physician and his wife moving into town" are favorites. The tactic, called in some circles "goosing ‘em off the fence," can work devastatingly well. The thought of losing out to a rival frequently turns a buyer from hesitant to zealous.

Scarcity becomes more powerful when it’s clear that the resource is finite (houses are great for this reason) and when immediacy is added to the scarcity (as in the case of another buyer on the horizon). Auction sites like eBay combine the powers of these persuasion tactics with remarkable results.

Leveraging scarcity in web marketing:

• Offer a special version of your product for a limited time in limited quantities
• Feature messages like Expedia’s - "only 2 tickets left at this price" – or Zappos’ – "only 3 pairs left in this size" – next to results/products to help encourage timely conversion
• Create an incentive for the first X visitors who take an action; you’ll likely get many more
• Show the number of people viewing an item right on the product page (e.g. "6 others currently on this page") to help create excitement and a feeling of immediacy (particularly for one-of-a-kind or limited quantity products)

Individually, these are powerful instruments of persuasion. Together, they’re a marketing force to be reckoned with. Let’s try an experiment and see if I can effectively employ the six principles as they related to SEOmoz (please note, I’m not normally this self-promotional, and this is meant somewhat tongue-in-cheek):

1. This blog post is the result of many hours of studying, writing and illustrating. If it’s helped your business in some way, we hope you’ll say thanks by sharing it through tweets, links or an email to someone you think would appreciate the reference.
2. Are you the kind of SEO who bases their decisions on data or gut feeling? Close your eyes for a minute and think. If you said "data," I’d urge you to check out the new Keyword Difficulty tool. It will help make decisions about where and how to compete from a much more data driven perspective.
3. 2,426 search marketers on Facebook have become fans of SEOmoz. Won’t you join them?
4. Danny Dover is impossible not to like. Make Danny happy by following him on Twitter.
5. The Search & Social Awards named SEOmoz the best SEO Blog, top SEO community and favorite SEO tool suite this year.
6. This summer we’re launching a new software suite and SEOmoz PRO prices are going up to $100, $500 and $2,000 per month (respectively). There’s less than 60 days to get PRO at the current rates.

The next time you make a landing page or try to drive actions on the web, think about how you might leverage these principles of influence to improve your conversion rate.

As always, looking forward to your thoughts in the comments – I’d particularly love to see examples of the principles in action at on the web. It’s something I wanted to do when authoring this post, but simply ran out of time.

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For this post I’m going to review the SEO Automatic Plugin produced by Scott Hendison. Some of you may know some of Scott’s other work from Search Commander, Inc. and the WP Core Tweaks Plugin. For this post, we’re going to be looking at his latest creation SEO Automatic for Agencies.

The plugin is designed for agencies and SEO firms who run a lot of site audits and are looking to save time by getting a quick assessment of a website’s technical aspects and identifying any potential problems or issues. The plugin isn’t designed to replace a experienced SEO, but it does automate some of the grunt work. and make you more efficient and profitable. Here’s a video from Scott that talks about the product:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Once you install the plugin (which I have to say went off without hitch), you put a bit of code on page and you’re ready to start running reports. Put the URL in and you’ll get a report back within a minute. Here’s the actual report from my website. I’ve got two important issues: no H1 on my homepage, which is true and probably something I should fix, and no meta keywords. It also tells me I’ve got a some other issues worth noting, like missing alt tags, inline CSS, excesive number of links, page size, and so on. All in all, it’s a pretty useful report that compiled in much less time than it would have take to figure out the same information on my own.

You can use the report as a starting point for SEO audits. If you sell them yourself, you can white label the reports. There are a bunch of other uses for the SEO Automatic tool. Personally I like the idea of being able to run the report while talking to a potential client and getting a really quick idea of what’s going on during the conversation.

Another thing that makes this unique is that all of the ranking factor definitions, results, advice, links, and even the thresholds for determining high or low for links and file size are editable right from inside your WordPress admin. It’s not just a “white label” report–it’s actually your own advice.

This is a premium plugin that sells for $997; however, what you have to look at is how much time it is going to save you. If you can do a few hours worth of work in minute or two, that has value. If you’re able to do it for multiple clients over a year’s time, the tool will have more than paid for itself. There is also a monthly payment option of $89 per month. You can see all the pricing information here.

Is this tool for everyone? No. However, if you are a small- to mid-sized or even a large agency, having a tool like this could save a few hours for every client project you work on each year. In a consulting world, time is money, and the quicker you can get information, the better off you’re going to be. Find out more information on SEOAutomatic.com (http://www.seoautomatic.com/plugins/seo-automatic-for-agencies/).

The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

SEO Automatic Plugin Review

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Google keeps fighting on multiple fronts. Like boxing a glacier, over time they just wear the market down.

Google wants to turn Youtube watchers into mindless drones who are spared the expense of thought:

“If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder.
…
“We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. Davidson says.

They want Youtube to be like television, because the TV ad market is far larger than the web ad market, and they already own search. They are desperately searching for new markets for avenues to grow.

Google spent $106 million buying On2, and then open sourced their V8 video codec:

It’s the “first one is free” approach that a drug dealer uses, and it’s not a “free” play, it’s a “we are the new railroad” play. For one-tenth the amount they paid for that crappy old codec, they could have paid Firefox’s licensing fees in perpetuity, if being a sugar daddy is what they want. They don’t want it. This is a “in your face, Apple” play, and a monopoly play.

And in addition to owning Youtube, tons of dark fiber, and their video codec, Google announced their Google TV effort. The person who controls the set top box has the market data.

Mark Cuban highlights the gaming that will occur in manipulating the rankings

The success of Google TV will come down to one thing….PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV ? Like Google said, there are 4 billion TVs and growing and the US TV Ad market is $70 BILLION. There is a lot at stake if Google TV takes off. How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does.

but if Google is passively monitoring the network they are far better than a guide. It becomes easy for them to see when their recommendations were not relevant & adjust. And if a network screws them multiple times they can always provide a dampening factor in their rankings.

If successful their TV efforts can tear down the walls between different types of content:

Google will do what it does, and that’s insinuate itself between information and the user. And the fretting will be minimal.

As for the impact of Google TV, this has the potential to challenge the TV hegemony. By blurring the lines between TV and the Internet, Google TV has the potential to destroy classifications of content. No more “TV shows,” just “content.” No more “Web videos,” just “content.” And, once the distinctions are completely undermined, then direct distribution via the Internet becomes more viable. Google TV could replace Big TV as the aggregator, then it just becomes a matter of who offers the fattest pipes.

Once Google has the aggregate usage data they can use it any way they like. The concept applies to any market. Economies of scale advantages breed more economies of scale. Apple and Amazon want to have proprietary ebook formats? Fine. Google will assist publishers in creating the default common e-book format.

It is not just regular algorithm updates that can whack your traffic. A couple years out these additional content formats will be a big issue for many web publishers because if Google gets a significant sample size & market leverage in any of these parallel markets then some of these other content formats will start bleeding into the search results. And that (along with market competition) can quickly drive margins into negative territory for many publishing business models.

Sometimes, the page you’re trying to rank – the one that visitors will find relevant and useful to their query – isn’t the page the engines have chosen to place first. When this happens, it can be a frustrating experience trying to determine what course of action to take. In this blog post, I’ll walk through some of the root causes of this problem, as well as five potential solutions.

When the wrong page from your site appears prominently in the search results, it can spark a maddening conflict of emotion – yes, it’s great to be ranking well and capturing that traffic, but it sucks to be delivering a sub-optimal experience to searchers who visit, then leave unfulfilled. The first step should be identifying what’s causing this issue and to do that, you’ll need a process.

Below, I’ve listed some of the most common reasons we’ve seen for search engines to rank a less relevant page above a more relevant one.

1. Internal Anchor Text
   The most common issue we see when digging into these problems is the case of internal anchor text optimization gone awry. Many sites will have the keyword they’re targeting on the intended page linking to another URL (or several) on the site in a way that can mislead search engines. If you want to be sure that the URL yoursite.com/frogs ranks for the keyword "frogs," make sure that anchor text that says "frogs" points to that page. See this post on keyword cannibalization for more on this specific problem.
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2. External Link Bias
   The next most common issue we observe is the case of external links preferring a different page than you, the site owner or marketer, might. This often happens when an older page on your site has discussed a topic, but you’ve more recently produced an updated, more useful version. Unfortunately, links on the web tend to still reference the old URL. The anchor text of these links, the context they’re in and the reference to the old page may make it tough for a new page to overcome the prior’s rankings.
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3. Link Authority & Importance Metrics
   There are times when a page’s raw link metrics – high PageRank, large numbers of links and linking root domains – will simply overpower other relevance signals and cause it to rank well despite barely targeting (and sometimes barely mentioning) a keyword phrase. In these situations, it’s less about the sources of links, the anchor text or the relevance and more a case of powerful pages winning out through brute force. On Google, this happens less than it once did (at least in our experience), but can still occur in odd cases.
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4. On-Page Optimization
   In some cases, a webmaster/marketer may not realize that the on-page optimization of a URL for a particular keyword term/phrase is extremely similar to another. To differentiate and help ensure the right page ranks, it’s often wise to de-emphasize the target keyword on the undesirable page and target it more effectively (without venturing into keyword stuffing or spam) on the desired page. This post on keyword targeting can likely be of assistance.
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5. Improper Redirects
   We’ve seen the odd case where an old redirect has pointed a page that heavily targeted a keyword term/phrase (or had earned powerful links around that target) to the wrong URL. These can be very difficult to identify because the content of the 301′ing page no longer exists and it’s hard to know (unless you have the history) why the current page might be ranking despite no effort. If you’ve been through the other scenarios, it’s worth looking to see if 301 redirects from other URLs point to the page in question and running a re-pointing test to see if they could be causing the issue.
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6. Topic Modeling / Content Relevance Issues
   This is the toughest to identify and to explain, but that won’t stop us from trying Essentially, you can think of the search engines doing a number of things to determine the degree of relevancy of a page to a keyword. Determining topic areas and identifying related terms/phrases and concepts is almost certainly among these (we actually hope to have some proof of Google’s use of LDA, in particular, in the next few months to share on the blog). Seeing as this is likely the case, the engine may perceive that the page you’re trying to rank isn’t particularly "on-topic" for the target keyword while another page that appears less "targeted" from a purely SEO/keyphrase usage standpoint is more relevant.

Once you’ve gone through this list and determined which issues might be affecting your results, you’ll need to take action to address the problem. If it’s an on-page or content issue, it’s typically pretty easy to fix. However, if you run into external linking imbalances, you may need more dramatic action to solve the mistmatch and get the right page ranking.

Next, we’ll tackle some specific, somewhat advanced, tactics to help get the right page on top:

1. The 301 Redirect (or Rel Canonical) & Rebuild
   In stubborn cases or those where a newer page is replacing an old page, it may be wise to simply 301 redirect the new page to the old page (or the other way around) and choose the best-converting/performing content for the page that stays. I generally like the strategy of maintaining the older, ranking URL and redirecting the newer one simply because the metrics for that old page may be very powerful and a 301 does cause some loss of link juice (according to the folks at Google). However, if the URL string itself isn’t appropriate, it can make sense to instead 301 to the new page instead.

   Be aware that if you’re planning to use rel=canonical rather than a 301 (which is perfectly acceptable), you should first ensure that the content is exactly the same on both pages. Trying to maintain two different version of a page with one canonicalizing to another isn’t specifically against the engines’ guidelines, but it’s also not entirely white hat (and it may not work, since the engines do some checking to determine content matches before counting rel=canonical sometimes).
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2. The Content Rewrite
   If you need to maintain the old page and have a suspicion that content focus, topic modeling or on-page optimization may be to blame, a strategy of re-authoring the page from scratch and focusing on both relevance and user experience may be a wise path. It’s relatively easy to test and while it will suck away time from other projects, it may be helpful to give the page more focused, relevant, useful and conversion-inducing material.
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3. The Link Juice Funnel
   If you’re fairly certain that raw link metrics like PageRank or link quantities are to blame for the issue, you might want to try funnelling some additional internal links to the target page (and possibly away from the currently ranking page). You can use a tool like Open Site Explorer to identify the most important/well-linked-to pages on your site and modify/add links to them to help channel juice into the target page and boost its rankings/prominence.
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4. The Content Swap
   If you strongly suspect that the content of the pages rather than the link profiles may be responsible and want to test, this is the strategy to use. Just swap the on-page and meta data (titles, meta description, etc) between the two pages and see how/if it impacts rankings for the keyword. Just be prepared to potentially lose traffic during the test period (this nearly always happens, but sometimes is worth it to confirm your hypothesis). If the less-well-ranked page rises with the new content while the better-ranked page falls, you’re likely onto something.
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5. The Kill ‘Em with External Links
   If you can muster a brute force, external link growth strategy, either through widgets/badges, content licensing, a viral campaign to get attention to your page or just a group of friends with websites who want to help you out, go for it. We’ve often seen this precise strategy lift one page over another and while it can be a lot of work, it’s also pretty effective.

While this set of recommendations may not always fix the issue, it can almost always help identify the root cause(s) and give you a framework in which to proceed. If you’ve got other suggestions, I look forward to hearing about them in the comments!

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Hi there Mozzers! My name is Sam Crocker and I work for Distilled. This is my first post here at SEOmoz and I am looking forward to your feedback!

Background

My mother used to scold me for misusing my toys, playing with my food and for having a bit too much energy. She was well within her rights, as I was a bit of a handful, but at the moment one particular phrase really sticks out in my mind

“Is that what that was made for Sam? Use it the right way, please.”

Whether I was riding down the stairs in a sleeping bag, having sword fights with paper towel tubes with my sister, or using my skateboard as a street luge- I’ve always been big on using things for purposes other than their intended design. It should be no surprise that I do the same with some of the fancy and powerful tools upon which we have become quite dependent in the SEO world. Much like when I was little, it seems like by using things the “wrong way” there’s scope to have a bit more fun and to discover some new and different ways of accomplishing the same goals.

Me As a Little Guy. Snow Scraper = Renegade Fighting Stick?

I spoke about my most recent adventures in using things the wrong way at SMX Advanced London. I don’t think too many people who came to the keyphrase research session expecting to hear about how a scraper like Mozenda could be used to save all sorts of time and effort and generate new keyphrase ideas. You may want to have a quick read through that before watching the screencast.*

It’s also important to point out that Mozenda is best used as a discover tool in the instance I provide here. If this method were a perfect solution to keyword research you could very easily build a tool that does it better. The beauty of Mozenda, however, is that it can be just about any tool you want. If you need to generate brand new content around a subject area you know nothing about, you can use it to explore tags on delicious or another social media platform.

Given a great deal of interest in this technique that I received from attendees at the presentation and in the twittersphere I decided it was worth providing a full walkthrough to cover some of the nuances I wasn’t able to cover in a 12 minute presentation and to share with the folks who weren’t able to attend the conference.

 *It’s worth noting that for the sake of consistency I used the same Google Suggest tool in the video as I used for my initial research and discussed at SMX London. Since then Rob Milard built his own keyphrase expander tool based on this work and it is considerably more versatile than the original tool (you can search Google.com or Google.co.uk and export the file as a CSV). The output of this version isn’t in XML and provides the “search volume” data missing from the first tool. So congratulations and a BIG thank you to Rob from me and the search community in general!

Next Steps

The above screencast is an introduction of a technique we have been experimenting with to broaden the keyphrases targeted on a site (particularly, it can be used to increase the number of longtail keyphrases and provide insights into terminology you may not be targeting in your current list of keyphrases). This can be particularly useful if you work for an agency dealing with clients from a number of different sectors. For the sake of demonstration I have only input 7 terms into the Google Suggest tool in an effort to pull out a workable dataset for the screencast and for my presentation but Mozenda is a pretty powerful tool, so there’s really nothing stopping you from using more keyphrases. As a matter of courtesy, however, I would suggest setting up some delays when running any large scraping task to prevent overwhelming servers or hogging bandwidth. For more information on this, please have a read through Rich Baxter’s latest piece on indexation.

One of the questions I was asked (by a number of people) was “what next?” As in: “what on earth am I going to do with these extra 10,000 keyphrases?” And although this presentation was intended as a proof of concept, I don’t want anyone to think we are trying to keep anything secret here so here are a few ideas about what you might consider doing next.

Option 1: Ask For Help!

For the people who find themselves thinking “I’m not really sure what to do with this data” I would suggest enlisting the help of a numbers guy or gal (Excel Wizards or other nerdy warriors). Odds are if you find looking at this sort of data daunting, you’re going to need their help making sense of the numbers later anyways.

Option 2: Outsource

The second option, for those of who know exactly what you want to do with this data, but don’t have the time to go through it all, I strongly suggest enlisting the help of cheap labour. Either find yourself an intern or make use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turks to find someone who can accomplish just what you need. The nice thing about services like this is that it’s a 24/7 workforce and you can get a feel for how helpful someone will be fairly quickly and painlessly.

Option 3: Jump Right In

Finally, the third option for those of you with some Excel skillz and a bit of time. There will definitely still be some manual work to be done and some weeding through for terms that are not at all relevant, the suggestions where you usually say aloud “no, Google I did NOT mean…” will clearly need to go.

The best use of this data will be the general themes or "common words" that you can quite easily sort through or filter for using Excel and that you may have been to oblivious to prior to starting.

 Feel Free to Sing Along if You Know The Words! (image via: Kottke)

Step 1: Remove all duplicates. In this example there were no duplicates created though I can only assume that with 10,000 keyphrases run through the tool there will be some duplicate output.

Step 2: Remove URL suggestions. I know we like to think otherwise, but if the user was searching for “gleeepisodes.net” they probably aren’t interested in TV listings from your site. It would also be a fairly cheeky move to try to optimise a page about someone else’s website.

Step 3: Remember your target audience. If you only operate in the UK “Glee schedule Canada” and “Glee schedule Fox” can probably be eliminated as well. Now would be a good time to eliminate any truly irrelevant entries as well (e.g. “Gleevec” – although some of your viewers may have leukemia this probably is not what most visitors to your site are looking for).

Step 4: With the remaining terms and phrases run them through the usual sense checking routines. This is a good time to check global/local search volume for these terms and look at some of the competitiveness metrics as well. Search volume will probably be quite high for most of these terms (at least enough for Google to think someone might be looking for them regularly), though competitiveness probably will be too, so choose wisely.

Identifying the patterns at this stage will be essential to the value of the research you are conducting. You can try to filter for common phrases or suggestions at this stage and if, as in this example you realise "rumors" is a relevant term you’ve not targeted anywhere on the site, it is high time you consider adding content targeting this area for all of the television shows on the site.

Last Step: Come up with a sensible strategy to attack all this new content. Look at these terms as jumping off points for new content, new blog posts, and new ways of talking about this and other related products/services/subjects on the site.

Conclusions

A lot can be learned through this sort of exercise. In addition to finding some new high volume search terms, it may help you identify trends in search for which you have not been competing and have implications across the whole site rather than on one page. For example, maybe you didn’t think about “spoilers” or “rumors.” For a site dedicated to television programmes this sort of terminology will likely be valuable for a number of other shows as well!

The moral of the story? If you build it they will come.

Sometimes it is worth developing your own tool to make use of existing technology. Whilst I still feel Mozenda is the right tool for the job for handling larger datasets, the tool Rob built is a perfect example of both how a little creativity and building on other’s ideas can lead to benefit for everyone. Rob’s tool effectively rendered my Mozenda workaround unnecessary for most small to medium sites, and that’s awesome.

Image via: Motivated Photos

A final word of warning: I’m not suggesting that you replace all other keyphrase research with this idea. This technique is best utilised either during creation of a site about an area you know very little about (it’s rare, but it happens), or when you’ve run out of ideas and tried some of the more conventional approaches. It’s all about thinking outside of the box and trying new things to save you time. Onpage optimisation, linkbuilding and more traditional keyphrase research needs to be done but sometimes the best results come from trying something a bit experimental and using things for purposes other than that which they were designed.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns feel free to shame me publicly either in the below section or on Twitter.

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