Search Engine Optimization is the authoritative source of SEO advice and tools for the Gather community. SEO is the key to maximizing your content audience on Gather and generating the most Gather Points. While SEO is a deep and sometimes highly technical topic, following a few simple best practices is all it takes. Join SEO and share your advice and learning experiences. On SEO you'll find:
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Feel free to post your own advice and testimonials. Looking for help or have a question on SEO? Please post your question (please tag it as "question"!) to the group and our experts will be glad to answer your question.
November 25, 2009 09:18 AM EST
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rating: 10
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comments: 2
One of the questions members frequently ask the Support team is for tips on how to get more views to their content so they can earn more points. An easy way to do this is by checking to see what is being searched for on the major search engines and to pick a topic that interests you from the list of top searched trends to write about.
I’ve attached this morning's lists below, and I’ll be publishing this list daily to the Earn More Points and SEO groups. Feel free to check out these posts for ideas. If you write about one of the items on the hot trends list, and use the keywords that are being searched on, your content will be one of the items returned in the search engines and you’ll draw more viewers to your content.
Here are some guidelines on how to write content that will draw more viewers:
You need to choose the right keywords to be Search Engine Optimized. Use the keyword phrase at the beginning of your title and in the first sentence of your post.
To find the right keyword phrases check Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) or Bing (http://www.bing.com) to see what’s trending. You’ll often see popular TV shows, news items, sports events, lottery numbers, celebrity news and weather events.
Another way to get the keywords is to go to http://google.com and type in the name of the item you’re considering writing about, such as your favorite TV show or sports team. You’ll see some phrase search options appear under where you’re typing – any of those could be keywords to use so pick the one that applies best. I find this works best in IE.
http://www.bing.com has a trend list hat shows the top search terms for the day; and it includes over 100 trends. Here’s how you find it: go to http://www.bing.com, on the homepage click the More link, under ‘bing at a glance’ click xRank, then click on xTreme movers. Results will list in groups of 10 and you can see many options.
Here’s an example of a TV show title that works: “Weeds Episode 6 Season 5: A Modest Proposal (with translation) – Did you watch!?” (click here to read the post) This title works because it lists the show, the season and the episode number. This is most often the way that searchers on Google look for the show they’re searching
To be quickly picked up by the Search Engines you should publish to Gather’s News Essential (http://news.gather.com) and appear on the group’s homepage. To do that you need to use certain tags. Make sure when publishing to this group that you use at least one of the following tags: Top Stories, Commentary, Entertainment, International, National, Sports. You can also publish your content to another few groups that are relevant, but not more than 4 or 5 groups.
During publishing check the “share on Facebook and Twitter” options.
For more in depth instructions read Tom's series published to Earn More Points for ways to maximize your point earnings on Gather.
Below are lists of the top trends being searched on Google.com/trends as of 9:00am ET today. Is there anything here you’d like to write about? Give it a try and see how you do.
Hello: WOW! what can i say other than you did an excellent job on this post! i am not in the knowing of SEO however! i do know afew tricks on how to promote a blog & get traffic from pinging & . . .
One of the questions members frequently ask the Support team is for tips on how to get more views to their content so they can earn more points. An easy way to do this is by checking to see what is being searched for on the major search engines and to pick a topic that interests you from the list of top searched trends to write about.
I’ve attached this morning's lists below, and I’ll be publishing this list daily to the Earn More Points and SEO groups. Feel free to check out these posts for ideas. If you write about one of the items on the hot trends list, and use the keywords that are being searched on, your content will be one of the items returned in the search engines and you’ll draw more viewers to your content.
Here are some guidelines on how to write content that will draw more viewers:
You need to choose the right keywords to be Search Engine Optimized. Use the keyword phrase at the beginning of your title and in the first sentence of your post.
To find the right keyword phrases check Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) or Bing (http://www.bing.com) to see what’s trending. You’ll often see popular TV shows, news items, sports events, lottery numbers, celebrity news and weather events.
Another way to get the keywords is to go to http://google.com and type in the name of the item you’re considering writing about, such as your favorite TV show or sports team. You’ll see some phrase search options appear under where you’re typing – any of those could be keywords to use so pick the one that applies best. I find this works best in IE.
http://www.bing.com has a trend list hat shows the top search terms for the day; and it includes over 100 trends. Here’s how you find it: go to http://www.bing.com, on the homepage click the More link, under ‘bing at a glance’ click xRank, then click on xTreme movers. Results will list in groups of 10 and you can see many options.
Here’s an example of a TV show title that works: “Weeds Episode 6 Season 5: A Modest Proposal (with translation) – Did you watch!?” (click here to read the post) This title works because it lists the show, the season and the episode number. This is most often the way that searchers on Google look for the show they’re searching
To be quickly picked up by the Search Engines you should publish to Gather’s News Essential (http://news.gather.com) and appear on the group’s homepage. To do that you need to use certain tags. Make sure when publishing to this group that you use at least one of the following tags: Top Stories, Commentary, Entertainment, International, National, Sports. You can also publish your content to another few groups that are relevant, but not more than 4 or 5 groups.
During publishing check the “share on Facebook and Twitter” options.
For more in depth instructions read Tom's series published to Earn More Points for ways to maximize your point earnings on Gather.
Below are lists of the top trends being searched on Google.com/trends as of 10:00am ET today. Is there anything here you’d like to write about? Give it a try and see how you do.
November 16, 2009 10:31 AM EST
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rating: 10
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comments: 10
One of the questions members frequently ask the Support team is for tips on how to get more views to their content so they can earn more points. An easy way to do this is by checking to see what is being searched for on the major search engines and to pick a topic that interests you from the list of top searched trends to write about.
I’ve attached this morning's lists below, and I’ll be publishing this list daily to the Earn More Points and SEO groups. Feel free to check out these posts for ideas. If you write about one of the items on the hot trends list, and use the keywords that are being searched on, your content will be one of the items returned in the search engines and you’ll draw more viewers to your content.
Here are some guidelines on how to write content that will draw more viewers:
You need to choose the right keywords to be Search Engine Optimized. Use the keyword phrase at the beginning of your title and in the first sentence of your post.
To find the right keyword phrases check Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) or Bing (http://www.bing.com) to see what’s trending. You’ll often see popular TV shows, news items, sports events, lottery numbers, celebrity news and weather events.
Another way to get the keywords is to go to http://google.com and type in the name of the item you’re considering writing about, such as your favorite TV show or sports team. You’ll see some phrase search options appear under where you’re typing – any of those could be keywords to use so pick the one that applies best. I find this works best in IE.
http://www.bing.com has a trend list hat shows the top search terms for the day; and it includes over 100 trends. Here’s how you find it: go to http://www.bing.com, on the homepage click the More link, under ‘bing at a glance’ click xRank, then click on xTreme movers. Results will list in groups of 10 and you can see many options.
Here’s an example of a TV show title that works: “Weeds Episode 6 Season 5: A Modest Proposal (with translation) – Did you watch!?” (click here to read the post) This title works because it lists the show, the season and the episode number. This is most often the way that searchers on Google look for the show they’re searching
To be quickly picked up by the Search Engines you should publish to Gather’s News Essential (http://news.gather.com) and appear on the group’s homepage. To do that you need to use certain tags. Make sure when publishing to this group that you use at least one of the following tags: Top Stories, Commentary, Entertainment, International, National, Sports. You can also publish your content to another few groups that are relevant, but not more than 4 or 5 groups.
During publishing check the “share on Facebook and Twitter” options.
For more in depth instructions read Tom's series published to Earn More Points for ways to maximize your point earnings on Gather.
Below are lists of the top trends being searched on Google.com/trends and Bing.com as of 10:00am ET today. Is there anything here you’d like to write about? Give it a try and see how you do.
November 14, 2009 11:47 AM EST
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rating: 10
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comments: 9
One of the questions members frequently ask the Support team is for tips on how to get more views to their content so they can earn more points. An easy way to do this is by checking to see what is being searched for on the major search engines and to pick a topic that interests you from the list of top searched trends to write about.
I’ve attached this morning's lists below, and I’ll be publishing this list daily to the Earn More Points and SEO groups. Feel free to check out these posts for ideas. If you write about one of the items on the hot trends list, and use the keywords that are being searched on, your content will be one of the items returned in the search engines and you’ll draw more viewers to your content.
Here are some guidelines on how to write content that will draw more viewers:
You need to choose the right keywords to be Search Engine Optimized. Use the keyword phrase at the beginning of your title and in the first sentence of your post.
To find the right keyword phrases check Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) or Bing (http://www.bing.com) to see what’s trending. You’ll often see popular TV shows, news items, sports events, lottery numbers, celebrity news and weather events.
Another way to get the keywords is to go to http://google.com and type in the name of the item you’re considering writing about, such as your favorite TV show or sports team. You’ll see some phrase search options appear under where you’re typing – any of those could be keywords to use so pick the one that applies best. I find this works best in IE.
http://www.bing.com has a trend list hat shows the top search terms for the day; and it includes over 100 trends. Here’s how you find it: go to http://www.bing.com, on the homepage click the More link, under ‘bing at a glance’ click xRank, then click on xTreme movers. Results will list in groups of 10 and you can see many options.
Here’s an example of a TV show title that works: “Weeds Episode 6 Season 5: A Modest Proposal (with translation) – Did you watch!?” (click here to read the post) This title works because it lists the show, the season and the episode number. This is most often the way that searchers on Google look for the show they’re searching
To be quickly picked up by the Search Engines you should publish to Gather’s News Essential (http://news.gather.com) and appear on the group’s homepage. To do that you need to use certain tags. Make sure when publishing to this group that you use at least one of the following tags: Top Stories, Commentary, Entertainment, International, National, Sports. You can also publish your content to another few groups that are relevant, but not more than 4 or 5 groups.
During publishing check the “share on Facebook and Twitter” options.
For more in depth instructions read Tom's series published to Earn More Points for ways to maximize your point earnings on Gather.
Below are lists of the top trends being searched on Google.com/trends and Bing.com as of 11:00am ET today. Is there anything here you’d like to write about? Give it a try and see how you do.
Hi Jeanette, Thanks for stopping by my SEO post and giving it a try. When you clicked on the topic it may have already moved off of the list of trending topics. If that's the case then I recommend trying . . .
"Hello: WOW! what can i say other than you did an excellent job on this post! i am not in the knowing of SEO however! i do know afew tricks on how to promote a blog & get traffic from pinging & . . ." more
"I had to publish this list a few times this morning (trouble with the links). Sorry if you saw repeated notifications from me! If you think you might be interested in writing about one of the trends, click . . ." more
It has been a couple weeks since PubCon and yes, it's taken me this long to recuperate! Bare with me here as I reminisce about my favorite tidbits over the 3 days of sessions. PubCon does an amazing job of putting together a schedule that covers a multitude of tracks and topics. Which usually means that I often end up with a case of "session envy." You know, when you're sitting in a session and you start to see tweets about how great another session is. It doesn't even mean that the one you're in is bad, it's just that you want to be in two places at once.
Many people were live blogging the event and obviously there have been quite a few recaps of PubCon as well. I realize I'm a little late to the game. :) But, let's get to the good stuff! While there were many great speakers and presentations there were a couple that stood out to me. What I was looking for were answers to questions that we often get either through comments on the blog or through Q & A. With that said, these are my favorite take-aways from PubCon 2009.
Day 1 - How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?
This was a great session, full of valuable information. The biggest takeaway for me, came from Bruce Clay. He took the road of sticking to a very specific topic, image and video content and explained how to get them indexed.
Since these are topics that come up quite a bit in Q & A I was excited to get some specific information on interesting ways to index images and videos. Thanks to Virginia Nussey over at Bruce Clay sending me the actual presentation (woot!).
Case Study - Indexing Images
The first thing Bruce spoke about was a case study they did involving getting images with text indexed. Here are the steps they took:
Take a newspaper article
Scan it to create a jpg
Include that image into a PDF
Submit that PDF to Google
Search for info in the article as a PDF and the article is found.
So what happened? Well the PDF was indexed AND the text from the image was also indexed. Take a look at this SERP.
The result above seems to only come up when using some data centers but not all. :) Also, the search query contains text directly from the article which is an image in the PDF. It shows up in the title and meta description. Pretty sweet eh?
Obviously this isn't going to work for you in all cases, but it's an interesting way of getting images indexed and could be useful in a number of scenarios.
Case Study - Indexing Video
Next, Bruce went through another case study where they got a video indexed. Here are the steps they took.
Take a Video
Run it through our processor
Edit the text transcript and save with the image
When playing the video, search for words
Jump into the Video
You can see this most clearly at Google audio indexing in the Labs section. Do a search for "economy" then notice how it shows you where in the video the word "economy" is spoken. I can see this being the wave of the future. How awesome would it be to have your videos come up in a search for words that were spoken within the video. Yea, pretty cool.
What I really liked about this presentation was that the information was displayed as a case study. If you read SEOmoz often you know how much we like to test theories out and put them to action. And although indexing images and video in this way may not be new to everyone, it's new to some people and could be a great way to enhance your sites.
Day 2 - SEO/SEM Tools
This was seriously one of my favorite sessions. The speakers (including Rand) had a ton of great information but the one that really stood out to me was Jim Boykin of We Build Pages. He gave away some really great tips but the one I liked the most had to do with how to find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. Here are the steps to take:
check box for " Include other pages on my site linked from this URL"
When you get results, Change "Match Type" to "Exact Match"to see actual searches and volume for specific phrases.
Obviously not only does this help with checking out which keywords your competitors are focused on, but it can also help you make sure you're site is also focusing on the right keywords.
Day 3 - The Search Engine Smackdown
For me the third day was my favorite. I actually wanted to attend every session in the first slot. I ended up watching the first part of the Link Buying session and the second part of the site review with Matt Cutts. I have to admit also that I loved the fact that the PubCon team programmed Matt Cutts doing a site audit at the same time as the Link Buying session... pretty darn ingenious if you ask me! Rand posted information about the site review, so I wont go into detail but it was a great session.
Although I think the best part came after the session when Matt took to shaving Evan Fishkin's head due to a bet they made while at the SEOmoz Werewolf party earlier in the week. And although that alone was pretty great, I loved the fact that while Matt was shaving Evan's head, people were asking him questions and he was answering as if it were a regular Q & A. Here's a short clip of the shaving!
Ok, ok back to the Search Engine Smackdown. I should admit that I debated whether I should head back to the hotel after a long 3 days or go to the final session, and I'm glad I went! These are the topics I found most interesting... and yes they're all from Matt Cutts.
Sign in to Google and do a search. If there's relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called "Results from people in your social circle."
To see even more social content you can click the "Show options" link at the top of the results page and then click on the "Social" link.
What is your social circle? It's a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you're publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about social search.
I can see myself using this quite a bit. Most of my job is about "social searches" in general,so this one is right up my alley! It was a fun find for me.
Testing for Speed
As Rand mentioned in his post, Google representatives have mentioned several times that page load time is important and Matt himself said at this session that although they haven't used speed as a ranking factor in the past, that they're thinking about adding it in the future. He gave some resources on how to check the speed and ways to make it faster.
I'm sure if you follow me on Twitter you know quite well how I feel about Vegas. I really wish there was a good way to clone myself so I could attend multiple sessions at once. With up to 7 tracks going on at the same time, it's difficult to pick one. In the end PubCon was a hit, and it was great to meet many of our SEOmoz members and see some old friends. See you again next year!
Kate Morris, Dana Lookadoo, Amanda Stewart, Jen Lopez, Kristy Bolsinger, Lyndsay Walker, Joanna Lord, Manda Otto Thanks to Dana Lookadoo for all the great photos!
The long tail of search demand has been around since the dawn of web search and, since that time, search marketers have been attempting to tap into the powerful stream that high quantities of unique content can provide. I recently came across some great data from Hitwise (about 1 year old, but still highly relevant) showing off just how substantive the long tail can be. Bill Tancer's post - Sizing Up the Long Tail - gives some stats:
...the head and body together only account for 3.25% of all search traffic! In fact, the top terms don’t account for much traffic:
• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic
This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.
Top 10,000 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic
The truth is my research is still greatly understating the true size of the tail because:
• The Hitwise sample contains 10 million U.S. Internet users and a complete data set would uncover much larger portions of the long tail.
• The data set I used filtered out adult searches.
• I only looked at 3-months worth of data (which were some of the slower months for search engines).
To help put this in perspective, I made a few spiffy charts that can help to illustrate these points:
In this first chart, you can see a representation of Hitwise's data from the four chunks Bill broke down.
In this next representation, I'm showing the classic "long tail" style curve, but color-coded to help show the various areas of keyword demand. Note that you could conceptually say that the 9,000 of the top 10,000 terms should technically fit into the chunky middle. Bill classified them thusly in his post, but I tend to think that at those demand levels, we're still talking about "head" of the curve figures.
For both of these graphics, there's a large, high-res version available by clicking the chart. You can find lots, lots more on our Free Charts page :-)
I'm a big Google fan - my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I've even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I'm shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven't realized this.
You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page URL.
To see a much larger sampling of links to any verified site in Webmaster Tools:
On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
Under Your site on the web, click Links to your site.
Note: Not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal.
The short answer is that historically, we only had room for a very small percentage of backlinks because web search was the main part and we didn't have a ton of servers for link colon queries and so, we have doubled or increased the amount of backlinks that we show over time for link colon, but it is still a sub-sample. It's a relatively small percentage. And I think that that's a pretty good balance, because if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks for any website then spammers or competitors can use that to try to reverse engineer someone's rankings.
Google themselves is telling us not to pay too much attention to the link command, but that doesn't seem to be stopping folks. Let the myth busting commence.
Myth #1 - The Google Link Command Returns Accurate Numbers
Nope. Not even close. Google themselves say the numbers aren't accurate and that they're showing a small sub-sample. The numbers show this as well. Check your link counts with the Google link command vs. the number inside Google's Webmaster Tools (when you verify your account, you'll see them shown). Here's the stats for SEOmoz, for example:
Google's link command claims 1,590 links. Let's see what Webmaster Tools says:
Hmm... 381,403 seems slightly larger than 1,590. In fact, the link command is showing me 0.4% of what Webmaster Tools says exists. Running this analysis on another few domains that we have access to in Webmaster Tools, I saw numbers ranging from 0.1% to 4.4% (meaning there's not even any consistency between in the percentage of links from the two counts).
Myth #2 - The Google Link Command Returns Important Links
Tragically, a long time ago (pre-2004), Google did show only important links via the link: command, which created the myth that exists to this day. In fact, the links shown in the link: command have no particular importance or relevance. They are truly a random sample, including links that are nofollowed, links from pages that have had PageRank penalties applied to them as well as links that do pass link juice and value.
Myth #3 - The Google Link Command Returns Links in Some Kind of Order
No one in SEO has been able to show any ordering of any kind in the Google link: command's results. Important, well-known websites may be listed on page 2 or page 20 of the results, and it is likewise with spam, scrapers and low quality sites that Google's likely not counting. In Site Explorer and the web results, Yahoo! appears to do some type of ordering, tending to show more important links, pages and sites before less important ones (though not with great consistency). Unfortunately, many SEOs suspect that, should Microsoft's deal to power Yahoo! with Bing results go through, Yahoo! is unlikely to maintain their own web index (and thus, link, linkdomain and site explorer will be gone).
As exemplified above, Google appears to be very random indeed when showing link: results.
Myth #4 - The Google Link Command Returns a Numerically Representative Count of Links
This is possibly the myth that's most disturbing of all, primarily because so many operators in the SEO field belive it and track the link: command count as a reliable, useful metric. Nothing could be further from the truth - and here's some data to help back it up:
Root Domain
Google Link: # (external + internal?)
Yahoo! Linkdomain # (external only)
Linkscape Count (external only)
Yahoo.com
3,650
331,000,000
201,681,667
Recovery.gov
7,550
328,000
155,780
Facebook.com
165,000
567,000,000
116,748,934
Real.com
11,400
4,600,000
5,596,165
Adobe.com
51,200
124,000,000
78,550,468
Reddit.com
18,300
128,000,000
29,071,291
Twitter.com
224,000
515,000,000
132,528,763
Salon.com
12,300
3,420,000
1,535,342
SEOmoz.org
1,590
957,000
486,405
NYTimes.com
7,990
21,200,000
12,884,758
TurkeyDayRun.com
3
68
22
Ninme.com
539
42,000
3,149
Burgerking.com
942
106,000
23,761
Alaskaair.com
1,010
44,000
38,358
Smashingmagazine.com
8,730
1,130,000
592,054
Smithsonian.org
4,860
25,700
14,545
I collected the data above spur of the moment, so I won't try to claim great statistical integrity. However, looking at Google's link: command results, the best I can say is that Google has some relationship to the others within 1-2 orders of magnitude, though they may be directionally inaccurate much of the time as well. Just look at the NYTimes.com for example - Google claims they have 2/3rds the links that Salon.com has, yet Yahoo! and Linkscape agree that, in fact, NYTimes.com has 6X+ Salon.com's link total.
These are not numbers you want to hang your hat (or any crucial business decisions) on.
Myth #5 - The Google Link Command Tracks Accurately Over Time
Unfortunately, I don't have data points I can show, but our observations over time indicate that Google's link count in Webmaster Tools might rise, along with the Yahoo! and Linkscape link counts, yet the Google link: command will show lower numbers. The reverse is sometimes also the case. Without directional consistency, even when compared against their own counts, it's very hard to take the Google link: count seriously.
Myth #6 - The Google Link Command is Up to Date
Most SEOs & webmasters have noticed that the Google link: counts update infrequently, inconsistently and most often in correlation with toolbar PageRank updates (another data point I'll need to takcle in a future post). These updates from Google occur every 2-10 months with little warning about when they're coming or have happened. If you watch sites like closely, they'll report many of these as they occur.
The next time someone tells you their Google link: command numbers as a metric for SEO, competitive analysis or anything else, make sure they read this post. Google's not nearly as up-front with the information as they should be (honestly, removing the link command would save so much time and effort for poor site owners who get needlessly confused), but hopefully as a community, we can help build more awareness around this issue.
