Great name!

I was in Rome last week doing a speaking gig on practical marketing in a regulated market – Italy being the focus. The thing about regulated markets are that if you have a licence, you can do more or less as you wish, as long as you don’t sell to minors and do follow the local advertising standards authority guidelines for the respective country you are operating in. Of course in a regulated market, if you don;t have a licence, then its not so good….since there will be several barriers to your entering the territory, things like being unable to do traditional marketing without fear of censure from the authorities. Since I couldn’t really think of much around ‘special’ activities for licenced operators, I came up with a general presentation covering some of my favourite topics:

• SEO
• PPC
• Social
• Conversion

and I did a piece about how the market in Italy which is now becoming regulated, will become a feeding frenzy where the cost of acquisition will go up and up as operators burn through budget to gain prominence before the market settles down. My PPT:

and some pictures:

Morning Light in Rome

Mobile Phones

Serious

Audience

Uh!? Should my site have a theme?

Fortunately Google have been pretty good about giving you tools allowing you to tighten up your on site theming. So I thought I’d run through a few of these tools to maybe give you a little inspiration.

I’ve worked these as case studies since it will help you contextualise this better.

So lets say you want to get your site to rank better on the long tail i.e. not the core trophy phrases, but those 2nd level ones with 2 or 3 words in the phrase i.e. “RSS Widget Feed”

Step 1

Go to the Google keyword search tool (Either the Adwords one or this:  http://www.google.com/sktool/#)

And do a search for your root phrase across your chosen site. In this case I chose the apple site and the keyword “widget”. See an example here & Below.

Thats useful!

Keyword  - Webpage url
“hotel search widget” – http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/
world clock widget for – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/
create dashboard widget – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
rss dashboard widget – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
widget freeware – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/index_abc.html
dashboard widget that – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
rss widget dashboard – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
make dashboard widget – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/index6.html
dashboard widget rss – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
rss feed desktop widget – http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/
freeware widget – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
widget pour dashboard – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
minutes dashboard widget – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/index_abc.html

Now you have the pages Google thinks are relevant to your chosen keyword, in this case “widget” and the other variations of the phrase it thinks is most relevant to the word “widget”.

So its got: “hotel search widget” that refers to this URL:

http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/ (popout)

You have an initial line up of the 2nd tier phrases and their associated pages, now its a case of giving those pages even more internal prominence and diverting a whole load of nice relevant internal links to these pages.

Step 2

Point as many related pages to an appropriate single page to give it internal prominence.

Go to http://relatedlinks.googlelabs.com/ and follow the instructions (here is one I made earlier! )

Cool!

As you will see, you now have a list of other pages on the domain that Google thinks relates best to your phrase and that page.

Keyword here is: “hotel search widget”  and the page is: http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/ and the domain is apple.com

Now all you do is take those URL’s and link those into your root page that you want to have rank and now you have done a nice internal page rank reworking.

To take this further, you could take each of the pages from the 1st search for ‘widget’ and use those pages as your root  related page and link those into your initial page i.e. instead of having 10 links into your target page, you now have 100.

Step 3

It’s time to do some external link building!

This is a huge subject, but a good pointer is to use Google sets to help you come up with a nice mix of anchor text that is on topic. Essentially if you linkbuild and only use your core phrase i.e. “widget” then you are likely to not gain rankings because the engines can see its a manipulated link acquisition programme.

So the game is to have a natural mix of anchor text. This is where Google sets comes in so nicely because they tell you what associated phrases to use!

See example here for “Hotel + Search + Widget” and from that you have a huge list of words you can write content around!

http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=widget&q2=hotel&q3=search&q4=&q5=&btn=Large+Set

Nice mix of relevant words

I hope that was helpful.

I had read this great article by Andy Beal on Google suggestion and how you now need to account for it when you are doing keyword research.
So I thought I’d add a quick “how do keywords research extra”  too,  since I haven’t seen this anywhere else.

Step 1

My general view is that a site should have a root keyword theme. In other words this is a word or a few words from which the whole theme emanates. Forinstance, you might have a site for widgets. You do lots of variations of widgets, but at the root of the site is the word “widget”.  So that’s is the starting point for the journey.

Step 2
So you have your core phrase, in this case “widgets”. Next step is the Google keyword finder here.
Now you also have the other related phrases in order of volume.

Step 2.1
Google have a search based keyword tool that lets you add a site and a keyword you’re interested in i.e. your root phrase for a site and it gives you a list of phrases and the pages it thinks are best related to that given phrase. In this case I have used http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ because it ranks for KW “widget”.

See the keyword results here

From this I can get a feel for what words to optimise the various pages for on your site. Nice.

Search Keyword Tool

Step 3
With your core phrases,  in this case “widgets”,  go to a Google search page and type it in.
You will be given some suggestions:
widgetbox
widget software
widget logic
widget uk
widget locker
widget world
and so on
Now you have phrases around your core phrase that Google thinks relates to your search. This is good, since you now have other words to optimise for. (Assuming Google has got it right when they assume these are genuinely related searches)

Google Suggest

Step 4
So you have your root phrases, your associated phrases and now you are after broader set of phrases that Google associates with your root phrase ‘widget’:  here

Google sets give you the words it thinks associates with a given keyword or phrase. they get this data from the relative placement of one word against another i.e. widget+google or widget+Wordpress and so on.

This information is great when writing content that is on theme since Google’s algo sees these words as naturally associating. So in this case if I wrote a piece about “RSS” then in the algo’s interpretation#, this is a closely themed piece to “Widgets”.  In general I use this tool to help create variety but keep things on theme.

Google Sets

Roundup: Keyword research is an endless cycle, depending on how deep you want to go. In my experience its a case of being pragmatic and not trying to go to deep, other wise you will get swamped in complexity.

of all the tools, I think Google sets is the most interesting in that it helps you theme your content without overtly keyword stuffing.

the original post

This presentation goes into their business model in some detail, giving you a real sense of the range and cleverness behind what they do.

My insight for SEO? You need to think user benefit…Big G will get progressively better at NOT needing links as an indicator as they bring together data from multiple sources. In other words SEO as you know it will be redundant in a couple of years time.

I’ve been very interested in the whole human + connectivity, nature of the Internet and how it can be a great gatherer of collective application and a way for spreading ideas fast.

Te best book I know on collective consciousness and prediction outcome is probably the Wisdom of crowds. After about 1/2 way through the book, you get the main idea: People in a collective are very good at predicting outcome and being good judges.

This stuff is interesting and is written by Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams:
The Betfair Prof: “Question: How do you find a missing submarine? Answer: Ask the audience”
| Prediction Markets

On the theme of collective thinking, I work for a company called Betfair and we run a ‘stock exchange’ for individuals who bet either on the positive or negative outcome of a sports event. Betfair sits in the middle as a custodian (similar to escrow services) and takes a small commission.

OK, so you may ask – whats that to do with SEO ? well not a lot really, other than search engines are very good collectors of ‘zeitgeist’ (that’s a word for collective consciousness of the moment)

Google run such a service : http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends# And from this you can get a sense of the collective currents in human thinking. The yearly one is worth looking at

I don’t know what the outcome of this is, other than if you are picking up an an affiliate idea and you want to SEO for it, by understanding the collective ‘pick up’ on an idea you can get a handle on whether the project is a good bet.

The text:

SEO is complex!

(click on the image for the big version)

Its like baking a cake:

Complex way:

The easy way:

1. Take 4oz (about 100g) of butter, caster sugar, self raising flour and 2 eggs
2. Sieve the flour before adding to the mixture.
3. Whisk the butter and sugar together until the mixture is light and creamy,
4. Then beat the eggs together and
5. Add to the butter
6. And sugar mixture gradually with a little bit of the flour.
7. Fold in what remains of the flour
8. Then divide the mixture equally between two cake tins of about 6 inch diameter,
9. Then bake in the oven for about 20-25 minutes at a temperature of about 190?

The 7 easy steps to WordPress SEO happiness!

1. Use wordpress! And get the necessary plugins.
2. What have you got, that others want?
3. Who do you want on your site?
4. Structure your content so its easy for engines???
5. Get analytics, see where you are going.
6. Work consistently for at least 6 months.
7. Socialise and get links into your site.

Step 1. WordPress and Plugins.

• All in One SEO Pack Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Download now! Support | Version Hi Version 1.4.6.13 Updated 2008-7-17 Downloads 471,402 (the best place to start)
• Paginated Comments Paginated Comments is a WordPress Plugin ** developed with seo in mind ** that gives you the ability to break your comments into a number of s … Version 1.0.2 | Updated 2008-5-12 |Downloads 658 (if you get loads of comments)
• WP-PageNavi 2.31 : Pagination on index and archive pages. Instead of of one huge page, break it up with this plugin. Google typically only indexes the 1st 100KB of html, so break up your pages
• WWW redirect : make sure the engine only see one version of your site i.e. http://www.mysite.com (and not the http://mysite.com
• Permalinks (wordpress core) Make Your content human friendly. Use this in permalink: /%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.html (use a unique identifier so you can be picked up by Google news)
• Optimal Title Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ???separator??? to after the title rather than before.
• Categorisation of content. Don???t mark the same post under more than a single category if possible, so you don???t get too much duplicate content.
• Robots.txt Tell the engines where you want them to go
• Internal page redirections Manage error pages, or redirect search engines from old posts to new ones

Step 2. What???s on offer?

• Is your content useful or entertaining?
• Do you love writing it?
• Have you got a niche you are prominent in?
• Would you read your content?
• Will you keep going even if no one visits?

Step 3. Who do you want here?

• Is your site a PR device
• Do you want to make money from it?
• Is it just an ego thing?

Picture your reader and write for that person!

• A blog is a conversation, so write like you are directly speaking with that person. Visualise him or her.
• Remember, add in the words they would use to find you.

Step 4. Structure for Engines

Think like a librarian???

• Books need labelling correctly
• The correct title
• Other categorisation information
  • Duplication is annoying
  • Put the books in the right sections

Step 5. Google analytics
Get Google analytics and Google webmaster console

• Look out for these key performance indexes:
• Absolute unique visitors per month
• Returning Visitors / Visitor loyalty
• Time spent on site per user
• Pages viewed per user
• Number of keywords your site has been accessed by
• Which are your big traffic phrases
• Proportion of traffic from:
  • Engines (40-60%)
  • Direct (20%)
  • Referred from other sites (25%)

Step 6

It???s going to take time???

So I hope you love it.

Step 7. Get links

• Search engines love links.
• Rule of thumb: If the site is human managed and relevant, then its ok. (its why general directories are worthless to you)
• They look for signals that show is site is important = good relevant links
• Get commenting and contributing on relevant sites in your subject neighbourhood.
  Do the occasional link exchange
  Be remarkable, so people WANT to link to you.
  Put ???signposts??? up on relevant sites (links pages)

Further Reading

• SEO for wordpress??? the complete guide!
• www.seomoz.com Superb SEO education site
• Google Ranking factors 200+ SEO variables
• SEOdigger.com What keywords a site ranks for
• Google webmaster central blog
• Google keyword finder
• www.sepguy.com (my personal blog)

This doesnt mean Google human rank the index, it just means that the algo they use is augmented by humans . Occasionally of course a spam site is identified and blown out f the index, but generally G like to let the algo do the vast majority of sorting.

So what do these human reviewers look for ? Well now thanks to a very, very helpful person, the human reviewer document has been outed and I have uploaded a copy for you to read. Its 43 pages of SEO heaven!

Download it here (2mb)

Speed reading – tips and tutorials on speed reading HERE

For my own part I can get through a 350 page book in about 1 hour. I find the trick is to just let it subconsciously ‘soak in’ and as by magic I know what the book was about and I can recycle the ‘learnings’ from it

My OPML file for your RSS reader | My RSS list:

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

and here is an article from an online pr site which explains why these are useful for understand keyword competition.

http://www.stuntdubl.com

However I have done a little data manipulation of my own….the reason is because I use a programme called web ceo, which has a ‘ranking score’ formula which helps me get ‘clean metric’ for how one web site is doing against another for a standard set of keywords. In many cases this is not important, but when you are putting business cases together, or your trying to make things simple for decision makers, having a simple number makes thing far simpler.

the other point about this data is that ‘winner takes all’ – as you can see from this pie chart !

Formula adjustment for top 20 rankings – their importance is based on the percentage of click through per position – so if 1 = 100%, then No 2 = 28% because it only gets a 3rd of the traffic of No1.

Where I find this data extremely useful is when I’m building a business case, so I would use overture, pick my keywords, multiply them by 3.5 to get the complete UK search volume per month and then run these numbers through my percentages to work out how much traffic we can expect per position on the rankings.

Results in:
Total Searches: 9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

% of clicks
Click Rank1: 2,075,765 42.13%
Click Rank2: 586,100 11.90%
Click Rank3: 418,643 8.50%
Click Rank4: 298,532 6.06%
Click Rank5: 242,169 4.92%
Click Rank6: 199,541 4.05%
Click Rank7: 168,080 3.41%
Click Rank8: 148,489 3.01%
Click Rank9: 140,356 2.85%
Click Rank10: 147,551 2.99%

1st page: 4,425,226 89.82%
2nd page: 501,397 10.18%

Below is a pie chart showing relative amount of click through per position on a typical search engine rankings page

These themes originate from core keywords or keyword phrases which are promenent on the page or site. (this means a density of about 3% of keyword volume. The actual density isnt that important – the main thing is that these words are the primary words on the page. The importance of these words are highlighted by being in Alt tags, title tags and H1 tags and of course in the body content.

So when I was researching the ‘mechanics’ of search engines (page rank) I took some time out to watch a very interesting lecture fromJeff Dean, a google fellow (a worthy and important person from Google)

Apart from stuff about their information architecture, he gave a demonstration of the back end user interface of one of the modules they use in their ranking. You can clearly see that they have used ‘intelligent’ anlaysis to work out what words cluster with what so they can get a good idea as to the context of words and keyphrases. the better the contextual matching, generally the more relevant the search result.

You can see the movie HERE (images on the right are screengrabs from the movie)

So assuming you have got the idea, the next question is how to work out what those clusters might be.

Well, we are in luck, because there is a small search engine called Clusty and it appears to do the work for you !

Try it yourself: http://cloud.clusty.com/

As you can see its interesting – but is it any good ?

Well I have done a few small tests. My main methodology is to pick a search term i.e SEO and go into the top 6 sites in Google and using a tool called a keyword density cloud See HERE ( it shows the more important keywords in a larger font) just do a basic review of what keywords are prominent. This way you can get a pretty good idea as to what words associate with what.

So after doing this random set of tests it seems there is a high degree of correlation between Clusty and my method.

So in summary, here is a tool (clusty) which helps you build web pages around certain keywords, therefore taking search engine optimization to another level.

As a final pointer. When you have published a page, run it through the google adsense tester HERE – if the adverts follow the theme of the page, then you know how Google sees the theme of you your page.

Where do I go from here on this ? Well I need to understand the importance of NOT keyword stuffing, but instead build work out the best balance between traditional content hierarchy, i.e. meta tagging, H1 tagging and link structure and so on – and LSI where things like keyword stuffing doesn’t work.

I have seen people on forums moan about sites coming up on top of the rankings even though they hardly use keyword ‘X’ – this is LSI in action… the thing is to understand its behaviors and build accordingly.

The good news is that this patterns?is simply a reasonably close match to natural writing. But as a SEO guy, I need to understand this comprehensively so I can carefully organise a site properly….

reading on the subject:

Writing for Google http://www.seobook.com/archives/001668.shtml

Brief guide on how LSI works: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml

Full non mathematical explanation: http://www.seobook.com/lsi/cover_page.htm

A step by step tutorial on de-constructing piece of text to a search engine friendly level http://www.seobook.com/lsi/tutorial.htm

??http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/cover_page.htm??

My next push is to find a proper LSI tool which allows me to get more ‘predictive’ with this. In other words, I write and from that I get the most important keywords not only from a keywords density perspective, but als o from a LS|T perspective.

So if I write an article about pears, and the big associative word is fruit, then at what point does ‘friut’ become the ‘seen’ keyword on google !?

I will inform you when I find this particular thing !

http://www.miislita.com

They are academics who specialise in “Information Retrieval – Artificial Intelligence”. I have read a few of their papers and it has given me a more intuitive sense of how search engines function.

As you expect, we humans tend to anthromorphosize (we like to think machines etc have feelings) and with google there is a tendancy to think its got brains, when in fact its just a bunch of calculations giving the appearance of intelligence. This is why spmmers exist and do very well.

Anyway to conclude, this site helps get a better handle on the workings of google. A great suppliment to this, is this video presentation from google on symantec indexing:

seo-comment/word-clusters-and-seo-theme-2006100523.htm