Pedro Sttau

I got an email today asking me why I don’t write more about Social Networking, to which I replied “that whilst I have some knowledge on the subject, I am very far from being a specialist in the matter.”

I received a prompt and very curious reply: “why don’t you write about it anyway? Writing can be learning process you know…”

Now I am not disputing the fact that during the process of writing one inevitably acquires a lot of information on whatever subject he/she is writing about, even more so when the subject is on a particular field that we are not 100% comfortable.

My slight quarrel with this argument is not so much on what people write about, but how they do it. I have no problem whatsoever in reading an article on a subject written by someone who is not a specialist on that area, provided he does not place himself on a position of expertise.

It just seems to me that with the proliferation of the Social Networks and the massification of Blogging we have an excess of self deliberated experts everywhere.

All you need to do is make a query about any particular subject on Wikipedia, and congrats, you have graduated!

The constant necessity for fresh unique content hasn’t helped at all, making the quality of the content secondary. This is more noticeable to me (for obvious reasons) in the Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization arena, where I have read unbelievably patronizing articles written by people who haven’t got a clue on what they are talking about.

The information in most of these articles is useless, just a regurgitation of basic principles that bring nothing new and add no value whatsoever to the reader.

Of course that in order to have value an article/post does not need to be innovative nor does it need to add anything in particular to a topic, provided that it does not self proclaim that it will.

It’s all about the intention of the article that can be controlled by the tone and construction of the article.

Most of the content that I post is not innovative at all, yet I do not proclaim that it is.
There are undoubtedly exceptions, where it can be useful to write or explain something that has been talked about before in a different way, perhaps simplifying the main point of the article, but this is rarely done with a “sales pitch” tone to the writing.

Hopefully you didn’t make the mistake of hardcoding a lot of work into the Wordpress code, so Wordpress’s upgrade process is very clean and straight forward.

1. Backup, backup and backup

Before you upload anything to your server, make sure you make a full backup of your files and database. If your server hosts Cpanel, all you need to do is go to the backups section of the software and click on download full website backup.

Make sure the backup download went through correctly. I would even recommend making redundant backups of the database, just in case.

2. Download the latest Wordpress version

Now that your current wordpress version is safe, let’s download the latest version of Wordpress.

3. Check of compatibility issues

It’s also important to make sure tat all your current plugins are compatible with the new version of the software, so it would be advisable to login to your admin area, go to your plugins area and take note all of the installed plugins.

Now go to the provider of the plugins and find out if they are compatible with the latest version of Wordpress. Download the updated version of the plugins if needed and available.

Unfortunately the Plugin Compatibility page is outdated, but if you are installing a version prior to 2.8 it will still be of use to you.

4. Overwrite the correct files

By correct files I mean every single file and folder except the wp-content folder, that’s where you hold all of your current themes and templates. It is not necessary to update this folder.

5. Update your SQL structure

Now login to your Wordpress admin panel, and you will see a message telling you that you need to upgrade your database. This might seem a little but intrusive, but don’t worry, whatever happens you can always roll back to your current database. (you didn’t forget to backup, did you? )

The direct path to the upgrade file is: wp-admin/upgrade.php (in case you have wordpress installed in your rout of course)

The update is automatic, and it shouldn’t interfere in any way with your current system settings.

That’s it! Your done, your Wordpress is up-to-date.

The more I listen to John Chow the more respect him. I don’t quite identify myself with his business model, but he is simply fantastic at what he does.

This Video really digs deep into the business strategy applied to Johnchow.com and how the blog is on its way to making half a million dollars per year.

As many of you might have guessed, it’s not through advertising that the revenue is build, but through a highly automated backend system that trades in a CPA (cost per acquisition) and Pay per lead system.

My Blog Business Model from John Chow on Vimeo.

Thanks to this website I found a handy script for those of you that absolutely find it absurd that there are still people using IE6 and older versions of the crappy browser.

One the questions that I keep getting from colleagues who aren’t involved in the Search Engine Optimization arena is how many keywords should they to optimize their website for.

First of all, Web Pages are optimized, not websites. A web site is usually constituted by several web pages that can rank for various terms that have a life of their own.

As you might be aware of, the number of times a specific word is found on a page plays an important role on how that page will rank for with that particular term. However Google has several mechanisms in place that prevent content publishers from abusing the factor. This is where the Keyword Density factor comes in.

An optimal keyword density is a good balance between a specific word and the rest of the content published on a web page. Clustering a page with a keyword will have an adverse affect on how that page ranks for that keyword on Google, as the page will be identified as spam.

Another aspect that should be taken into the account is the less time = ROI.
The less time you spend optimizing your website for good results the better your return of investment is. This is one of the things that I have noted to blog about in the future that I think most SEO specialists tend to forget.

The fact that you achieved the ranks you proposed yourself to achieve isn’t necessarily a victory. Always ask yourself, how much time did this action take from me?

Choosing your keywords carefully is always the best way to go.

Keyword Research

Find your market’s niches

Web Market investors always tend to go for the keywords that they would search for, remember that internet user behaviour is completely different from the regular consumer.

You will be surprised at the queries that your potential clients are doing. In this industry never assume that you know something without testing it out.

Tools for Research

Although meant to be used for PPC campaigns, the Google Keyword tool provides you with the Google Search Volume information for any particular term that you search for that can be used in your Organic keyword selection. It’s a great tool to find good niches within your market based on the search volume data provided by Google.

Another useful tool that can aid you in your Keyword selection process is Google trends. It gives you a pretty good idea of how a certain search term does in terms of search volume, with the extra bonus is spreading this through out the year. This is extremely important as it allows you to program your investment during the year. Ideally, you should change the keywords you invest in depending on how well they do thought certain periods.

On-site Keyword Optimization

Placing the Keywords in the Meta tags, does it matter?

No, at least not for Google, but it doesn’t hurt! How Google treats the Keyword Meta Tag is still not very clear, but what we do know is that as far as relevancy is concerned, they don’t matter. It is also a possibility that Google looks for repetition of keywords in the Meta Tag to look for spammers, so take this into account when building your keyword Meta Tag.

Keyword Density

The Keyword density factor is one of the most disregarded and at the same time abused elements of Google’s algorithm. To put it very blatantly, Keyword density refers to the percentage of a given keyword within a specific web page’s content.

Through a Search Engine’s perspective, it means that repetition means relevancy.

Getting inbound links to benefit specific keywords within web pages

Although the purpose of this post is to provide a few tips on how to chose and where to place your keywords, without really focusing on link building, here are a few tips to optimize your optimized Keywords:

Let’s suppose that you have a web page that talks about Coffee Mugs, and let’s suppose that it is an interesting niche, and that you have an affiliate campaign set and ready to go for this particular branch of products.

If your website is about Coffee Mugs, or if you have more related internal links pointing
So how should I proceed to market that webpage.

1. Make sure the keyword density is right within the page

2. Try and place the keyword in the title of the webpage in the first position of the title tag (it does matter). Ex. Coffee Mugs – Mysite

3. Place the Keyword in a Header tag. If it is an article the ideal structure would be; placing the Keyword in the Title of the article wrapped around h1 tags and in the short description of the article wrapped around header 2 tags.

4. Get properly anchored inbound links from websites related to Coffe Muggs. Google is all about contextualization. If your Web Page is getting links from Web Pages that are in context to what your page is talking about, the importance of that page will logically increase. (Even better if those contextual inbounds have are authoritative).

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Choosing-Keywords-Help/Choosing-and-Researching-Keywords/

So things are heating up!

I have been getting a couple of emails of people asking me why the hell do I watch the show, the answer is simple, it’s fun, and it’s entertaining!

I think the pace is really picking up and the producers are showing real versatility, listening to feedback and changing/improving the show accordingly. Something that I forgot to mention in my last post, is that the new sketch “share something in 60 seconds” is really nice, and Jonathan is doing such a great job presenting it, he is by far the best communicator in the show as far as I am concerned.

As expected Episode 3 focuses a lot more on what the teams are doing and not so much on the “how’s”. I don’t really think any of us were expecting technicalities from this show, so it’s nice to see the producers keeping it simple.

Although quite expected to those of us who have experience with affiliate marketing, one of the main things that we have seen so far is that even if you have a lot of experience and connections, making money overnight is very hard. We will be seeing the revenue consistently increase as the days pass and as the “marketers” processes settle, but I can’t help it but feel that the results will always be rather “factitious” since the team leaders are relying on their connections to get the revenue. I understand that connections are a huge part Affiliate Marketing and business in general, but I was looking forward to see a “stock” event rather then to find out who has a better machine under the hood.

On this episode we saw Shoemoney’s team seriously underachieving, while Ken Mcarthur’s team continues to dominate. It’s very early in the game to make performance evaluations, so right now I’m content to sit back and enjoy the Shoe.

As some of you know, I completely changed the URL structure of this blog. I only got away with it because the this is a relatively recent blog and I don’t have that many inbound to specific posts yet.

For those of you who have well established Blogs/websites, and don’t have a lot of technical knowledge, or are not familiar with the Apache Mod_rewrite this might come in handy.

Principle nº 1: Don’t move posts unless it’s absolutely necessary.

If you have you have no choice, I suggest you go for a simple Mod_rewrite redirect that will do a clean redirect to the new location of the old post.

Simple .HTACCESS redirect:

1. Obtain all of the old Urls
2. Open your notepad and add the following line of code
Redirect 301 /old.php http://www.yoursite.com/newurl.php
3. Save the file and name it: .htaccess
4. Upload it to your server.

Redirection Rewriting a Rule

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ newurl.php

So I’ve been reading all about SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin’s supposed vendetta against Web directories. In all fairness I hardly believe he has anything against Directory owners at all. He is merely expressing a point of view that is valid in many ways.

To kick this off, let me just briefly state where I stand on this. I believe that whilst the sale of links through a Web Directory platform is not a very good business model, it is undeniable that they bring value to their clients, even if Rand states otherwise.

Every SEO in the process of Link building submits his client’s websites to directories. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or in denial. There could be cases where this step simply isn’t needed because the SEO holds control over a Network of websites that provide him enough “link power” to discard the directory submissions process; this might be the case for Randy.

A Web Directory, as product to the end user is simply worthless. Keep in mind that the owners of the websites that are listed in the directories are not the end user, or better yet, they shouldn’t be.

Why is it not valuable? To be put it very blatantly, because no one will use it to search for content.

Also, in a Webmaster perspective, I serious doubt that directories generate enough traffic in quantity and quality in the regular category listings to represent a good ROI .

Web Directories have one single purpose, to pass link weight to the websites listed in the various categories.

I have seen some very surprising reactions by directory owners who seem to be taking this rather personally. I’m guessing that the most extreme reactions are coming from owners of small directories, because the ones who have been around long enough know that they have nothing to worry about.

My final take on this, is that of course that certain directories will have a good impact on your SERPS, just select the most contextual directories for your business, and the ones that are authoritative, even if they are generic.

One of the things I love about this industry is that every day you discover people who are willing to test things out, that don’t simply take things as they are. Kuddos to them!

Shaun Anderson tried to figure out how Google would treat and index a title with 50 terms inside the tag. The results were very surprising to say the least.

Hobo SEO UK : “You can put 50 words in your title tag, we’ll read it”

Just the other day I was recalling the infamous David Pasternak affair with a friend of mine that pretty much agrees with his points of view.

In every industry there are fundamental basic procedures that are easy to follow and that don’t necessarily require a lot of technical know-how in order to get them done.

SEO isn’t an exception to this. If you implement a couple of simple steps in your line of development, you will be alright, but you won’t do well.

However, you must not forget that we are dealing within an industry that is in constant movement, reacting to every social, economic and financial change. Like no other media, what is today isn’t necessarily and most likely what is tomorrow.

So what is this 5% of grey matter that I am referring to?

This is where the professionals gain the real leverage. 5% refers to information acquired by extensive testing or privileged sources that help you gain a substantial advantage over your competitors.

Now, anyone who states that SEO is a one time process that can be integrated in a line of work has never optimized a site in his life.

SEO is an ongoing process. There is no way around this.

If you are running a any type of website, your content will have to be constantly analyzed and subject to change in order to adapt to the Search Engine criteria’s that will give it more exposure.

Your content order of importance will also necessarily change over time, and even the keywords that you are investing in might change taking into consideration that the market/search trends are constantly changing.

Inbound links. Do you really think that the high ranking commercial websites have not undergone precise aggressive link building campaigns? Of course they have! And like every other component on SEO, it is an ongoing process.

The value of links change, some of them are eliminated, others simply loose their weight and value, and all of this will have a direct impact on how well you will do.

So if you’re not an SEO professional, do you have time to keep up with the pace and run your business on the side? And do you want to?

Give that one a thought.

SEO is all about following a couple of simple procedures, but above everything else, it’s about following your innate common sense.

The purpose of this post is not to tell you what you should be doing, but rather what you definitely should avoid doing.

1. Too many links in a short time

This is a very common mistake that even the most experienced SEOs seem make.
If you are marketing a new domain, and don’t want it to get sandboxed, and believe me you DON’T, do not get too aggressive with your link building efforts. Keep your inbounds under 20 per month.

2. Do NOT attempt to hide keywords using CSS

Google has automated ways of detecting this. Don’t do it, you will get caught and your site will get wiped out. It’s as simple as that.

3. Don’t buy links in the wrong places

The politically correct advice would be “don’t buy links, period”. But in the real World, everyone buys links, and anyone who will tell you otherwise is in denial.

At present, and despite claims otherwise, Google will not penalize your website for buying links, at worse it will neutralize the inbound that they suspect has been purchased.

I have never heard of Yahoo inbounds being “zeroed”, nor have I heard of Aviva Directory links having a negative impact on a site, and guess what, in one way or the other they are both link brokers, and Google knows about it.

Therefore, try and limit your investment to safe reputable directories/websites.

4. Don’t gather too many reciprocal links

A reciprocal link does not necessarily hold less value then a one way link, but too many reciprocal links might trigger a spam alert that could neutralize all your reciprocals.
So it’s ok to have a couple of them, especially if they are in context with the content of your website, just don’t over do it.

5. Keyword density, there is a limit

Having the proper keyword text density is a very important factor. By density I am referring to the ratio of keywords or key phrases to the total number of words on a page. I have seen evidence that a ratio above 5% will have a negative impact.

6. Don’t publish too many outbound links in a single page

Especially if the links are not relevant to your website’s content. This can be detrimental as not only will it affect your ability to pass PR juice to the site’s your linking too, as it will also affect the way the content is perceived by the bots.

7. Don’t spam the Header Tags

Header tags are interpreted by the Major search engines as indicators of the order of importance of the content. Abusing this concept will not help you at all, as it will trigger a spam alert.

I strongly believe that the content ratio within header tags is a factor that is analysed by the SE’s, either there is literally character count, which would mean for example, that a if you have too much text within a h1 tag, that specific content would be homogenised and wouldn’t benefit from being placed within a header at all, or it would simply be marked as spam.

Either way, it’s not a good idea to try and alter your content structure just to gain an advantage that in the end isn’t going to happen.

8. Duplicate content

Let’s face it; even though they have come a long way, the crawl process used by the SEs is still very much rudimentary in certain aspects, and good intentions don’t really seem to count. Sometimes you are duplicating your content without really intending too, and without knowing it.

Duplicate content within the same domain is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Be careful with your print versions pages, duplicate articles allocated to multiple categories, etc…

9. Too many inbounds from the same IP

I’m not even talking about Inbound Networks (which is naturally also an issue). But try to keep a track of your campaign inbound links, noting the IP address of each domain that is linking to you and do your best not to get too many links from the same Class C IP range.

10. Title Keyword stuffing

Let’s use our common sense here again, if the content in the title of the pages is extremely relevant to the SEs, abusing this element will carry the same degree of exposure. Stuffing your Titles with keywords is not the way to go.

In most countries, with the exception of Colombia, governments combat drug traffic by going after the source of the problem. They do this because it is quite simply the most logical and efficient thing to do. By cutting the supply chain you consequently create a market imbalance that although doesn’t solve the issue; it is highly effective in reducing the intensity of the problem.

If the offer is more scarce, the product price will naturally inflate, and will make it less accessible to buy. Doesn’t take away the need, but it makes it a lot harder buy the product itself. Additionally, the existing consumer base will not just go away, it’s just not that simple. Once an addict, always an addict, and as soon as Google realizes this better for all of us.

So what they are obviously looking into is the sites that are selling the links, hoping to impact the way the market is perceived by consumers who aren’t already in them.

As for us link junkies, I’m guessing at worse we will see many of our inbound links neutralized, but that is pretty much the worse case scenario.

Using the Narcotic analogy, marginalizing Webmasters that buy links like criminals is the same thing as marginalizing narcotic consumers, it won’t solve the problem, it will just help create more and more.

So the only way Google can fight this is by killing the supply chain, and I believe that it is exactly what they are doing, regardless of all of the Fire-works stating that they are after the buyers.


read more | digg story

Two weeks ago I talked about a post on WebStraction’s blog about the new Yahoo Class Directive.

The blog has a very interesting insight about how content should be dealt with by the SE’s. On a recent post webstractions reinforced the idea that the Bots should be told what constitutes content within a webpage. By doing so we are assuming by default that webpages don’t have content, but in reality, isn’t the primary purpose of a webpage to provide content?

I don’t necessarily agree with this concept.
So as far as I’m concerned, it makes a lot more sense to filter out what we don’t want indexed then the opposite,

On a more technical aspect Webstractions proposes the usage of the robots tag with new elements present and defined in an attribute within the tag. Very interesting read.

WebStractions Selective Page Indexing Directives

Just read a great post by webstractions that I would like to share with you guys.

He comes up with a very interesting concept that seems to provide much more logical approach to the new indexing filtering method that Yahoo is deploying.

WebStractions presented several alternatives. One of them is the creation of a new tag such has that I presume would wrap around the content that you wish not to get indexed.

However, the most interesting idea was the usage of the old REL attribute (Relation) to dictate the purpose and origin of a given content. Could agree more with WebStractions, if it’s not original content, it quite simply shouldn’t be indexed as if it were.

I still that Yahoo is leading the way, and it’s much better having this tool then nothing to work with, using a CSS class to filter our content is a rather dubious decision., would certainly be very interested to know the reasons behind this choice.

WebStractions Yahoo’s Robots-NoContent Another shade of NoFollow