The Mind of SEO Masters

Blogging has become not only the number one marketing technique in 2010, but is the top SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactic and strategy as well. Blogging allows you the ability to create a long-term plan for gaining trust while establishing yourself as an expert in your subject niche. It also provides you with a method to build quick traffic and links creating instant attention to your site. There are quite a few ways to gain quick traction using SEO techniques and blogging is the best. But, you do not have to write blogs yourself. Try other techniques like:
• Blog Comments – Leave short, on-point, no-non sense comments that bring value to the discussion at hand. Forget crap like “That was a great post, Jull. So glad you helped me out.” Make your comments as worthwhile to read as the post.
• Guest Blogging is a great technique. You do not have to maintain your own. You can pitch your services to blogs already using guests and also approach popular sites convincing their owners to us you as a guest writer.
• Conduct Interviews with experts or get interviewed yourself. If you are a newbie, surf to the popular sites in your niche and instead of “commenting,” ask questions.
• Write Articles on your blog about other bloggers either describing them or perhaps creating a descriptive list of the top bloggers in your niche. This can go a long way toward creating lasting relationship in your niche supporting your fellow bloggers.

Matt Cutts – snippets
He starts on discussing about the title which is what the users will see to start with i.e. “Starbucks – homepage” for www.starbucks .com, Google experiments with different ways of showing the sites title and description how many dots wither there should be spacing at the front etc, but you do have a great deal of control over how your information (snippet) is displayed. Thinking about it I suppose a snippet is essentially and should be promoted like a synopsis of a book.

Matt then say that the title of the Starbucks site isn’t completely SEO friendly, it would be better if it read something like “Starbucks – coffee” or “Starbucks coffee – homepage” because more people are more likely to search for that. He then goes onto discuss the snippet in detail he quotes Starbucks snippet “Starbucks Coffee Company is the leading retailer, roaster and brand of speciality coffee…” this snippet comes from many different places, say for example if the URL is forbidden by robots.txt or the site is down and there is no way to access the description tag, in those instances it’s better to rely on the open directory project. So if Google wasn’t able to crawl the page it would get its information from there, but if there isn’t a robots.txt forbidding Google from crawling but there is no description tag, then Google sometimes takes a snippet from the content of the page, Google analyses the page and works out what would be the most relevant to the user i.e. the phone number and the name of the business and puts that in the business along with a few words either side which are also relevant. This is to give the user the idea of what the page is about so they can see if they want to visit the page. But in the case of Starbucks website the snippet is pulled from the description tag, Google recognises this meta description tag as the snippet to be relevant to your site and uses that to inform the users what your site is about, so you should experiment with different meta descriptions to see what gets you the highest traffic, does one description get more clicks, or a better conversion.

Google also recognises that if your site is a company then it pulls stock charts on your company for the user to view in a small ‘+’ icon, so you can see what their stock market statistics are like. Another addition is if you have an address on your page, Google will also recognise this and put this in a small part of your snippet with a “view a map of” button to see where your business is located. He then discusses a useful link to http://www.google.com/experimental which shows lots of interesting data on keywords and how they perform in Google. Matt then goes onto explain that whatever useful information that will help the user identify with your business Google will try to make that surface on the snippet. Also you may or may not have noticed that Google bolds the search term you search for for example on this video then “Starbucks” is in bold because thats the term that was searched for.

Below your description you have the URL of the site name which is pretty self explanatory then next to that the size of the site for example ‘12kb’ which stands for 12 kilobytes which is relatively small so Google lets you know how big the site is and you can judge how long it is going to take to load. Next to this you will see “Cached” So if the site is down or you are the webmaster and you accidently deleted it you can recover your site from the cached page. Another interesting note is that the Cached feature also shows when Google last crawled your page. Even if its within the last day it would say “3 hours ago” right down to the hour, that’s pretty impressive.

The next thing next to cached is “Similar Pages” this shows you pages that relate to Starbucks but are not Starbucks for example other coffee sites. Now after this there is something called site links, now this is done by Google’s algorithm not by hand, Google works out what the pages are about and is then selective on how to display the titles for these pages in its own sense. So this makes it easier for the user to find out the information they need about the site they are interested in. And finally at the bottom of the page if there are a lot of pages on Starbucks then the link “more results from www.starbucks .com” would appear then this can show all the other sites talking about Starbucks etc.

Would you like to begin employing marketing with articles enabling you to get visitors to your online business, but are uncertain exactly how to get it done correctly? If that’s the case, you will want to understand the solution to the actual question, how can you submit content articles correctly to help you obtain the optimum publicity for your posts?

There are several considerations you’ll want to make so that you can effectively publish articles to various directories. Understanding the most crucial things you can do may demonstrate exactly how simple it truly is to publish any of your own content articles to any kind of directory you need to.

To be able to correctly get those articles posted, here are the key things for you to do.

Compose top quality content articles - Whenever you will be article marketing to directories, the main thing you should do always is create excellent articles. Regardless how many directories you publish to, if the content is inadequately created, you won’t obtain any kind of traffic from them.

Research as well as select article directory sites purposefully – There are various article submission sites available nowadays and you’ve got to be able to remember to study them. Take a look at as many as possible and investigate them fully.

Make certain you’re only picking the best ones when publishing article content, being certain to compare them to many other directories so you do not waste submission time, if you have trouble in doing this then contact your local uk seo services company.

In this video blog Matt Cutts get asked what can SEO Experts do to help them in getting effective natural link building. He begins with an opening paragraph about how that great content equals great links, so you need great content to get those links. He then goes on to list 8 ways of getting good organic links, the list; First and foremost the worst which is Controversy for example shouting and moaning about things that annoy you and bug you will draw some attention initially but then that will phase out and people will pay less attention to you in the long run.
Matt then goes onto say that there are a lot of softer ways to do this that the latter, such as Humour or bringing something original and interesting to the table. Another way of getting links is to participate in the community, not your typical spamming forums and blogs mentality, but instead showing constructive and valued answers to questions and problems, this will surely be much more valuable, because you are helping people, and they will have more trust in you and are more likely to link you. He then goes back to his original paragraph in saying “but what is building great content?” you have to undertake Original Research I feel that what Matt is trying to say here is the ‘You reap what you sow’ analogy, the more work you put in the more benefits you get out.
Matt the talks about how Daniel Sullivan researched what type of mail gets chucked in your junk mail and why and then understanding how to get it into everybody’s inbox instead of their junk mail folder then blogging it and it grabbing everyone’s attention because it was informative, and the fact that the research and the content is original and powerful because no one else has done this in that way, instead of reiterating a blog and posting it slightly different taking it into account and presenting something completely new…. Visit us tomorrow for the second part of this discussion.

This week I will be reviewing and talking about SEO Expert Matt Cutt’s video blog on ‘Google’s SEO Report Card, SMX West, plus new features’. So to start off with Matt explains that at the end of the day the king of Search Engine Optimisation are incoming links, take for example a site like Google where all of its products rank highly even though they have no viable or concurrent content on them, they rank highly because of the amount of links you have on them and not so much the content that is there, if you have the ability to have many links then this is more powerful than content.
I feel that the majority of errors that were shown are mistakes that a lot of web developers without an awful lot of Search Engine Optimisation experience come in contact with, but they make sure they have correctly optimised there sites. I think that when incoming links are involved this is where the problems start.

I think we all fully understand that organic link building is the right way to go forward both tactically and morally. But the problem is how do we inform people about the service or product so they might link to us if we are not already ranked highly enough in the SERPS to be taken notice of, it’s a bit of a catch 22 no non organic/natural optimisation no incoming links but its ethically wrong to do it this way, but how else is it possible to become successful if everyone else is doing this.

Big companies with huge amounts of marketing money can simply purchase advertising anywhere and produce great content for YouTube to inform the world about their company, but this goes against natural SEO where every great idea will rank highly because it is a great idea.

I feel that with this video Matt Cutts has created some controversy reading across the comments on his blog, people feel that this video didn’t really explain how unless you are already ranked to get noticed on Google, but bearing this is mind I still feel that this video is very informative about current SEO techniques, It just seems that for the little man it is now becoming increasingly hard to get anywhere in the search engines.