In today’s blog post at Search Engine Journal, Ann Smarty reveals results indicating that Google penalizes sites with over-optimized internal links.

Specifically, she examined the effect of linking to the Home page using keyword rich anchor text. These results are very instructive (thanks Ann!), and they make a lot of sense. Google is right to penalize sites with over-optimized internal links. Here’s why…

When a visitor first arrives at your site, one of the first things they’re gonna try and do is find the Home page. (Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability) And when they do, they’ll look for a link, menu or button that says “Home” (or they look for a logo at the top left of the page). They won’t look for a link that says, “Computer Spare Parts Home” or “SEO Copywriter Home” or “Red Tennis Shoes Home.”

So by optimizing links to your Home page, you’re certainly not improving usability. Your optimization is purely an SEO tactic with no visitor benefit. (Indeed, if you replace all straight “Home” links with optimized links, you’d be actively undermining usability.)

Why should this affect your ranking? Simple. Google wants quality, helpful sites in its SERPs. If you make your site less usable, that’s not gonna reflect well on Google, so it makes perfect sense that your ranking will drop as a result.

I hate to say it (well… err… no, actually, I don’t ;-)), but Ann’s results reinforce what good SEO copywriters have been saying for years: “never sacrifice readability for searchability.” It’s also what Google’s been saying all along.

And, although Ann’s results relate to Home page links only, the usability message (and maybe even the penalty) applies to all links. Don’t over-optimize them. Here’s just a few reasons why:

1. 79% of users scan; only 16% read word-by-word. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
2. People look for links when scanning a page. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
3. Concise copy is 58% more usable, and scannable copy is 47% more usable. (Nielsen: Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web). Over-optimizing links makes them both less concise and less scannable.
4. Low-literacy visitors don’t scan effectively. They tend to read word-for-word. And if the text gets to dense, they look for the next link, often skipping important info in the process. If that link is also dense, they’re more likely to skip it too, resulting in more info skipped. (Nielsen: Lower-Literacy Users)
5. The first two words of scannable items, like links, are vital, because they’re often all the visitor sees. They should be words that carry the most information. (Nielson: Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings, Writing Style for Print vs. Web and Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005) And that generally won’t be your keywords. In most cases, the visitor is already on a page related to your keywords. Starting a link with those same keywords really only tells visitors that the destination page is related to the current page. It doesn’t tell them anything notable about the destination page, so they can decide whether they want to read it. Knowing that it’s related to the current page isn’t enough.
6. People love clicking on links; it’s the Internet’s most used feature. (Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use) So you want to make it easy for them to do what they like, and to find what they’re looking for when they do it.

Maybe Google is already taking all of these usability issues into account, maybe it’s not. One thing’s certain though: your visitors sure are!

“Out him! Out him! Out him! People have a right to know!” Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? But if you think I’m talking about lifting the lid on the personal lives of the Neil Patrick Harrises and T. R. Knights of this world, think again.

I’m talking about exposing black-hat SEOs for the depraved, oiled-up, muscular, leather-clad, handle-bar-moustache-sporting, night-club-going evil-doers they truly are!

What’s that you say? I’m just jealous that they rank better than me, and I want them hung, drawn and quartered so I can have a bigger slice of the pie? Preposterous! People have a right to know, I tell you! (Did I already say that?)

OK, I know I’ve stretched the analogy a little too far, but you have to admit, black-hat ‘Outers’ do share a few things in common with your garden variety Outer of homosexuals. If you don’t believe me, show me one who didn’t Out a black-hat for his or her own benefit… (And yes, personal satisfaction counts as a benefit!)

But surprisingly enough, that’s not really what this post is about. (The headline got you reading, though, didn’t it?!) And it’s by no means a defense of black-hat SEOs. If they’re silly enough to back themselves against the world’s best math brains and algos, they deserve all they get. No, this post is really about what Aaron Wall neatly describes as “the arbitrary and uneven nature” of hand editing for black-hat tactics.

Put simply, when a site is Outed, it’s far more likely to be unjustly penalized. Search engine algorithms aren’t sensitive to public opinion – not directly, anyway. Google’s PR and legal teams, on the other hand, are. As soon as a site is Outed, you can be guaranteed there’ll be a lot of negative publicity surrounding it. I agree with Aaron that this publicity makes Google far more likely to err on the side of caution and penalize a site that might otherwise have been considered fine, rather than risk being publicly branded soft.

Imagine if it happened to you. Can you say with 100% certainty that you have never employed tactics that could possibly be construed (in a public de-construction) as black-hat? How would you prepare a defense when the public wants a scalp taken? Especially given the inherent muddiness of Google’s ‘rules’:

1. The rules are ambiguous – Google says, “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings” and “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”, which includes “Links intended to manipulate PageRank.” C’mon! Can they be any more ambiguous? Every SEO is into link building, and we’re all trying to increase rankings and manipulate PageRank. Does that mean we’re all black-hat? Google also advises us to avoid “Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging,” but it doesn’t say what constitutes ‘Excessive’.
2. The penalties for breaking the rules are unclear – I just did a quick search of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and couldn’t find any mention of specific penalties, much less an indication of what offence will result in which penalties. And I’ve been reading the Guidelines quite a bit recently. (I’ll qualify this by adding that it’s waaaaaaaayyyyyyy past my bed time!)
3. The penalties don’t distinguish between intentional and unintentional black-hat.
4. The penalties often impact people who were not responsible for the black-hat – Like the client of a black-hat SEO.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning black-hat. I’m just saying that they’ll eventually get what’s coming to them. They can’t stay a step ahead of the mathematicians forever. The system will get them in the end. More importantly, ‘offenders’ will treated a little more impartially by the system than they will be by the PR machine.

Now I’m going to bed!

EDIT: Check out Patricia Skinner’s Outing blog post for a slightly different perspective (still anti-Outing).

I read an interesting blog post today: Low value content is destroying your website.

The guts of the post: most pages of most websites are low value. People hardly ever visit them, and if they do stumble upon them, they tend not to return. Only a handful of pages are visited often. Furthermore, “… what I find… is that the search results are full of links to the press archive and other old, out-of date content. Some of the content is misleading and wrong, talking about, for example, a feature for a product that has long since been replaced.”

This post got me thinking (again!) about the implications of ‘low value content’ for search engine optimization (SEO). (No particularly new thoughts; perhaps I just needed to vent!)

As an SEO copywriter, I’m regularly asked to quote on high-volume SEO copy and SEO articles (for article PR / article marketing). By definition, there’s nothing wrong with these requests. High volume SEO copy and SEO articles can be of a very high quality. And they can be very helpful for SEO.

Unfortunately, however, the prospect’s budget usually indicates that the important part of their request is the ‘high-volume’ bit. They don’t really care how good the copy is, so long as it’s keyword rich, and there’s lots of it. They want it purely to boost their rankings.

I know this is slightly different from the low value content discussed in original post, but the end result is the same: it appears in the search results, and it’s read by prospective customers who immediately identify it as crap and infer a great deal about the company that published it.

This is particularly true of long-tail searches, because high volume, low level content tends to be optimized for quite specific keyword phrases. So when someone searches for something really specific, they’re likely to end up at a low level page. And what sort of customers Google very specific keyword phrases? Those who are ready to buy! Now, although there’s never a good time for a reader to think you’re a crap company, I couldn’t think of a worse time than when they’re ready to buy.

The moral to the story: don’t write crap! SEO copy isn’t some invisible force. It’s content that’s frequently read by prospective customers, often when they’re ready to buy. So crap content may – MAY – help your search ranking, but it’s only ever going to harm your conversion rate.

And the sub-moral (here comes the vent…): If you’re intent on having crap written, don’t ask me to quote on it. I never write this sort of stuff. When I write SEO copy and SEO articles – even high volume – I simply can’t write crap. It goes against the grain. I have to write meaningful, helpful copy, and this takes time. (Which means my prices are usually too high for clients who want volume only, anyway.)

End vent.

Happy writing!

When I first checked Twitter out, I didn’t get it. Like you, I’m always too busy. So I had one quick look, couldn’t see the immediate benefit, and (much to my own misfortune) I didn’t come back for months.

It wasn’t until I had the privilege of seeing Darren Rowse present at a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) conference, that the penny finally dropped. (Darren’s one of Australia’s leading bloggers, a title you don’t get without being very switched on, committed and genuine.)

The day after the conference, the moment I got into the office, I signed up to FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter (I was already a member of LinkedIn, FriendsReunited and LivingMemory). I didn’t think much of FaceBook and MySpace – and still don’t – but Twitter has been a revelation.

If you want your site to rank better in the search engines, you want more direct traffic, or you just want to engage better with customers and influencers, Twitter is a must. (In fact, 60% of Americans use Social Media, and 93% of them believe every company should have a Social Media presence. Cone)

But just in case you take one look at Twitter and say, “I don’t get it”, here’s a quick list of 10 tips for understanding it and making the most of it.

1. Twitter is like Instant Messaging Broadcasting – If you’re familiar with Instant Messaging through Windows Messenger, Skype or the dozens of other tools out there, you’ll be right at home with Twitter. It works in much the same way, except that your message (or ‘Tweet’) doesn’t go to just one person, it goes to everyone who has chosen to follow you. Oh, and you only have 140 characters per Tweet.
2. People Follow you if you talk about stuff that interests them – Although Twitter’s tagline and call to action is “What are you doing?”, it’s no longer really a forum for announcing what you had for lunch. The idea is to Tweet about the things that interest your Followers and, importantly, the people who you WANT to Follow you. If you’re a business marketer, your target Followers will be customers and influencers (people who influence your customers). So think about the things that they’ll find interesting.
3. The idea is to build up a community of Followers – Whatever your goal (search engine ranking, traffic or engagement), the means to that end is to become part of a relevant community. In the beginning, it’s mostly about you Following other people. But over time, as you Tweet more often and add more value, people will begin to Follow you. That’s when you start to develop a community all of your own – when you start to become a thought leader or influencer, yourself.
4. Find and Follow the right people – Search for relevant people. Pick a word that’s relevant to your industry, and search for it. The results will show you a list of recent Tweets related to that word, with the ‘Avatar’ (picture) of the Twitterer responsible for each, on the left. Click this pic to see the person’s bio and a list of all their Tweets. If they look relevant to you, Follow them. If not, come back to the search results, and check out the next result. Start out by Following as many thought leaders and influencers as you can – you’ll recognize them because they’ll have many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Followers. This is an incredibly effective way to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry. There’s a very good reason they have such a huge Following.
5. Tweet to add value to your Followers – Although you have a commercial agenda, everything you do on Twitter needs to serve your Followers. Discuss only what they’re interested in hearing, and only as often as they want to hear it. Some people Tweet dozens of times every day, others tweet only once or twice a week. Both are OK, so long as your Followers are OK with it. And if you find yourself scratching for something to say, ask yourself if there’s some relevant way you could help your Followers. Have you just read a really helpful article, or visited a really interesting website or blog? If so, Tweet it, and include a link. (There are tools for shortening links so they don’t consume too many of your 140 characters – if you use Twhirl (discussed below), there’s one in-built.) So long as it’s relevant, these sorts of Tweets will be well received. Eventually you’ll become a trusted member of the community; people will recognize you, and will look forward to your Tweets. You may even use Twitter (as many do) to announce your physical location, e.g. “I’m at such-and-such a bar, if anyone wants to catch up!”
6. Understand and observe local etiquette – Darren Rowse advises people to treat every Social Media tool like a foreign country. Learn the language, the customs, the etiquette. Perhaps even find a local guide. By doing this, you won’t unknowingly offend anyone or make a fool of yourself!
7. Know how to Tweet – To Tweet publicly (to all your Followers), just type your message and press Enter. To address a public Tweet to someone in particular, prefix your message with “@username”. (OBVIOUSLY, you have to replace “username” with their actual username!) If you want to send a private/direct message to someone, prefix your message with “d @username” (again substituting their actual username). If you receive a Direct Message, it’ll be flagged as such, so make sure you reply in the same way. You can even forward someone else’s message on to all of your own Followers. This is called a Re-tweet. The Twitter interface (and Twhirl, discussed below) has all of this functionality inbuilt.
8. Don’t expect too much – You won’t always get an answer to your Tweets. Some people Follow thousands of people, so your Tweets may not always catch their attention. And they may not always want to answer. Everyone uses Twitter differently.
9. Use Twhirl, not your Web browser – Using Twitter in a web browser becomes very difficult, distracting and inefficient. You’ll find yourself continually opening and closing your browser and visiting and revisiting Twitter.com. It’s much more efficient to use a desktop application like Twhirl. It works much like Messenger or Skype; it beeps when a new Tweet arrives and beeps differently when you get a Direct Message. It offers pretty much the same functionality as you’d get in your browser (e.g. you can Tweet, Direct Message and Re-tweet, as well as to mark certain Tweets as Favorites, and Follow and Unfollow people).
10. Follow Darren Rowse. You’ll find that much more helpful than anything I’ve said in this post! And if you think my Tweets might be useful to you, you can follow me to!

The above 10 tips are just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more helpful guides out there for using Twitter. Here’s a good one to start with.

In V2.0 of my SEO ebook (which is soon to be released), I discuss how you can use Twitter to improve your search engine ranking. If you want to be notified when V2.0 of my ebook is released, please email me at glenn at divinewrite.com or bookmark my ebook sales page.

Happy Tweeting!

Article marketing, article PR, article submission, article distribution… Whatever you want to call it, it’s a great way to generate backlinks. But are those backlinks really of any use? I decided to find out.

For quite a few years now, I’ve been using article PR as a link building method. For an SEO copywriter, it was an obvious choice. (Why didn’t I get more heavily into blogging? That’s a post for another day.) And for me, it really paid off. I wrote a host of good quality articles about SEO copywriting and general copywriting, and posted them to virtually every article directory I could find. It took ages, but I got a lot of links out of it and, subsequently, a very high ranking.

So backlinks in syndicated articles definitely USED to be counted. (Assuming you wrote really good quality articles, that is.)

Over the last year or two, though, a lot of people have been saying that Google now discounts backlinks in syndicated articles because of the duplicate content filter (e.g. see point 5 in this CopyBlogger post - 5 Link Building Strategies That Work). For the most part, I’ve discounted this criticism. Partly because articles have worked so well for me. And partly because much of the criticism targets those who engage in article spam. I’ve never done that, and I agree that article spam is a waste of everyone’s time.

However, I’m now doing a major overhaul of my seo ebook, and I’m up to the chapter on article marketing. So I decided to really look into the matter. I did a lot of research online and had some interesting discussions with two SEOs I really look up to, Rob Adelman from Top Rankings (Twitter @toprankings) and Mark Vozzo - ex-Fairfax search guru, now consulting to Microsoft (Twitter @markvozzo).

And the short answer is Yes! Backlinks in syndicated articles ARE still counted.

The long answer? The duplicate content filter affects merely what is shown in the SERPs. Say Google sees two versions of your article. It doesn’t want to list both in the SERPs, ‘cos it’s really after variety for searchers. So it decides which is the original, and lists that one in the SERPs. The other one misses out. But that doesn’t mean the other one is ignored. If it contains links to your site (i.e. in the byline), Google still follows those links and they still contribute to your ranking.

How do I know? Matt Cutts said so:

“if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank”

So, in fact, the duplicate content filter doesn’t have any impact on the value of backlinks from syndicated articles. It simply determines which version of the article appears in the SERPs. I’ve never cared much whether my articles appeared in the SERPs ‘cos I’ve written them primarily for the links, not the direct traffic. (That’s not to say I don’t care about the traffic. And in fact, new articles always bring me a lot of traffic. It’s just not always target market traffic.)

No, the real key to the value of backlinks in syndicated articles is still the site they appear on. If it’s a crap site, the links will be worth squat. If it’s a good site, they’ll be worth heaps. Sure, your articles will always appear on crap sites; you’re giving them away, after all! But who cares? Those links may not help much, but they certainly don’t hurt. More importantly, if you write great articles, they’ll appear on great sites, and that’s when you get some truly valuable backlinks.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that article pr is the best/only way to generate links. Far from it. For me, it’s been great, but I have to say, I don’t do it much these days. Distribution takes too long. Also, I don’t like having all of my eggs in one basket. These days, I’m focussing more on the combination of link baiting and social media (i.e. having great content on my site, and making sure the right people know about it).

Have a great day!

I’ve just upgraded FreeCopywriting.com. Here’s how it works:

1. You write some copy and submit it to FreeCopywriting.com
2. Google automatically displays ads whenever someone views that copy
3. Google pays a commission whenever someone clicks on one those ads
4. Half the time, that commission goes to me. The other half of the time, it goes to you (assuming you’ve told us your Google AdSense ID)

It’s the ultimate annuity income. You write and post your copy once, and you earn income from it indefinitely! It’s like selling the same piece of copy again and again.

Find out more…

One of the best ways to build the link popularity of your site (thereby increasing your search engine rank) is to check where your competitors’ links are coming from, and try to get links from those sites yourself. (You’ll be surprised where some of their links come from.)

Yes, it’s a simple idea, but when you actually try to do it, it takes time and you need to be organised. Below is a guide that’ll help you complete the task efficiently and effectively.

To check on the links of your competitors:

STEP 1) Go to Google and search for your target keyword.
STEP 2) Make a note of the top 5 competitors who appear (write down their domain name).
STEP 3) Return to Google and search for the first domain name in the list (i.e. type “www.competitorsdomainname.com” in the search field, including the quotes).
STEP 4) Google will display all the pages it can find that contain the string, www.competitorsdomainname.com. In most cases, these instances will be actual links to your competitor’s website. (TIP: If there are many results, bookmark the search results page as this process will take a long time – possibly months.)
STEP 5) Visit each page (TIP: Right click on the first result and select “Open in New Window”. By opening a separate window to see the page, you won’t lose your search results page.)
STEP 6) Try to think of a way to get a link to your website on the same page (TIP: Avoid sending them an email as webmaster receive a lot of SPAM and your email will likely go unnoticed. Try calling them instead.)
STEP 7) Repeat for each of your top 5 ranking competitors.

TIP: In the list of results, the sites which appear high up in the list of results are likely to have a higher Google PageRank (PR – see Glossary) than the sites which appear toward the end of the list. You should be more interested in obtaining links to sites with a high PR (assuming they’re also relevant).

Probably the most well known method of generating inbound links is to look for link partners. This is done in a variety of ways:

• ask customers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• ask suppliers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• look for relevant high ranking sites and ask them to link to you (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• buy SEO software which locates high ranking sites and automatically emails their owners asking them to link to you (possibly in return for a link to theirs)

In my opinion, though, link partners is one of the least effective method of increasing your search engine ranking because:

1. It’s normally done via email and, unfortunately, webmasters of high ranking sites receive many link partner requests each day (not to mention hundreds of other SPAM emails). They’re normally automated and irrelevant. As a result, most email-initiated link partner requests are deleted.
2. Most link partner requests are sent by webmasters of low PR sites to webmasters of high PR sites. Although the link would be very beneficial to the low PR site, it wouldn’t help the high PR site at all.
3. Even if you offer a reciprocal link (a link back to their website), most webmasters of high PR sites will not be interested because it’s extra work. What’s more, they won’t want to obscure the purpose of their site with hundreds of links (relevant or not, they don’t want to look like a directory to their customers).
4. Reciprocal links are of questionable value, unless the sites are closely related.

TIP: If you decide to manually look for link partners, one way of assessing a site’s importance is to look at their Google PageRank (PR). PR is how Google scores importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. Any site with a PR of 4 or above is generally considered a worthy link partner. By downloading the Google Toolbar, you can view the PR of any site you visit.

There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won’t be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate.

NOTE: Link generation is an ongoing (often tedious) task. You need to be dedicated and systematic. In other words, you need a strategy. Take a look through the link generation alternatives discussed below to see what suits you best. Then put your thinking cap on and get creative. It’s a new and very exciting field; there are undoubtedly many undiscovered ways to generate links. This chapter is just a starting point.

The six main ways to generate inbound links these days are:

1. Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories
2. Get your business partners to link to you
3. Swap links
4. Find out who links to your competitors
5. Article PR
6. Simply have great content on your site

Over the coming days, I’ll cover each of these methods in a little more detail. Today, I’ll address just the first.

Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories

The search engines regularly crawl these directories in search of new links, and they value these links quite highly (largely because the directories are human-edited).

Here’s how you add your site:

• DMOZ Open Directory Project – “…the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” DMOZ does not charge for submissions. NOTE: This is the same as the Google Directory.
• Yahoo Directory – Yahoo charges for submissions (last time I checked, the submission fee was USD$299).

Stay tuned for further details on the other link generation methods.

Sorry for my long delay in posting. For the first time in history, I had a long break over Christmas. Only fully back on board today. Now back to business…

What gives you a high ranking in the search engine? Well, assuming you’ve completed step one (i.e. you’ve optimized your website for your target keywords), there’s really only one thing left to do: Get lots of links pointing to your site.

Links are the single most important aspect of SEO. Generally speaking, the more links you have back to your site, the higher your ranking will be.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. There are links, and there are links. Before launching into a discussion about the best ways to generate links (I’ll address that issue in a post in the near future), let’s first discuss what kind of links you should be trying to generate.

When deciding whether to display your site in its search results, a search engine looks to see if you’re part of a credible network of related sites. This means that the ideal kind of links are those that:

• come from relevant sites (sites which use the same keywords);
• come from important sites (have a high ranking);
• include your keyword as part of the visible link text;
• include varying link text (not the same link text each time); and
• come from a page that links to few other sites.

When a search engine sees a link which satisfies most or all of these conditions, it says, “Hey, this site must be credible and important, because others in the same industry are pointing to it.”

So now that you know what kind of links you’re after, you just need to figure out how to get them. Stay tuned for more info on this…