MetaToast.com

What does air bed and bond have in common?

I wanted to blog about this as soon as I found it, but I really hate to spoil someone else’s well crafted scheme. Anyway the circumstances have changed for this particular niche so here it goes.

Google’s Adsense program has probably spawned more search engine spam than any other single creation in the history of the Internet. For a while the SERPs in almost any vertical were chock full of MFA sites that had little if any content other than Adsense ads or scraped excerpts from other sites. We’ve all seen this, and it’s been a real nuisance. Google seems to have taken effective steps to neutralize this particular technique and it’s really improved.

Once however I ran across a case where content consisting entirely of Adsense ads was extremely helpful, and actually led me straight to what I was looking for when the search engine results were not - and probably earned the spammer a decent income while it lasted.

I was shopping for a construction contractors bond (as in “licensed and bonded”) and really not having any luck with the search engines. This kind of bond is basically a third party guaranty that a contractor will do the contracted work within the terms of the contract agreement - kind of like a specialized insurance policy, but not exactly. Most government and commercial (EI most profitable) jobs require the contractor to supply a bond.

Anyway, the organic search engine results just didn’t contain what I was looking for at that time, so I clicked on an Adsense ad - something I don’t usually do. However, in this case I was taken to a whole page of Adsense ads that were all completely relevant to what I was looking for, and I ended up clicking on several of them and even bookmarked the MFA site.

Here’s what the Adsense Arbitrager knew that the bond vendors didn’t: Their potential customers call their product “bond”, “performance bond”, “construction bond”, or “bid bond” while the companies that sell the things call them “surety”. This terminology was so ingrained into the industry that they hardly used the term “bond” at all on their web sites, so they just simply didn’t show up in the search engines at the time. Once I realized that and started searching for “surety” I found tons of vendors who were in competition for my business.

I got two points of information from this experience:

1. It’s not spam if it’s what you’re looking for.
2. Know thy keywords - more to the point, know thy customer’s keywords.

It was also the most outstanding example of Adsense Arbitrage that I ever saw. But now when you search for “construction bond” those companies that were formerly sequestered behind “surety” pop right up.

So, what do Air Bed and Bond have in common?

I’ve notice the same kind of keyword disconnect on other sites as well like where the website uses the term air bed and miss out on traffic from searchers looking for airbed or air mattress, but the surety industry a year ago was really out of touch with what their customers were looking for.

photo credit: orngejuglr

In a recent post on SEOmoz “…Only the First Anchor Text Counts” Rand Fishkin relates an experiment and the conclusion that for a given web page only the first link pointing to another page counts toward Google pagerank. In other words you could have 50 links on your page all with different anchor text, all pointing to the same document, and it wouldn’t count any more than if there were only one - the first one that Googlebot finds on the page. All of the rest are just so much content text according to Rand.

As is often the case on SEOmoz the comments contained what I consider to be a real gem:

As I work on loads of small sites with 5 - 10 pages, I tried all sorts of bits and pieces - my mistake was to assume that the the anchor text in a top horizontal navigation count the most - this clears it up.

Say for example I am targeting “prostate cancer surgery” for one client - if I dont have a 100% relevant URL, then I make sure that the top horizontal navigation has a text link with those words linked to a page that has strong content centered around that phrase and the URL matches perfectly.

I tried this with a range of pages and it always worked.

Your post kind of clears up why.

Rishi Lakhani

There’s some degree of controversy among SEOs about which is a stronger link - one in the editorial content, or one in a global element such as the main navigation. So use your own judgement, because there are good logical arguments for both positions - and Google ain’t talking. However it’s usually going to be a lot easier to add a bunch of identical links to your site by incorporating it into a global element.

So here’s the light bulb that went off in my head: Want to give a page a boost? Craft your best relevant anchor text - exactly matching the URL and main key phrase of the target page - and put a link to it in a global element such as the top navigation found in Wordpress - Presentation>>Theme Editor>header.php. This should result in sending about as much link juice to the target page as your site is capable of.

This also means that you might want to take a good look at your global elements and make sure that you want to spread the joy to every thing that you have in there, and if you don’t then get to work adding nofollows (define) to some of it.

These strategies are sometimes called siloing or pagerank sculpting in SEO speak by the way. Here’s a timely article about pagerank sculpting and the controversy around it.
Needless to say you should get your on page elements and site wide structural SEO in order first .

Speaking of nofollowing - Joost deValk’s Robots Meta Plugin allows you to nofollow or noindex a page or post with one click from the WP editor page. This powerful plugin does much more than just that, and I highly recommend it if you want to control the flow of link juice through your site.

photo credit: Maproom Systems

I just had a random thought. What if I had an evil secret black hat seo plan to eventually sell toasters from Metatoast.com? It would go something like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Is your WordPress blog search friendly? Can your content be easily crawled and indexed, or are you sending the spiders away empty handed and confused by duplicate content and convoluted navigation? With a little work you can make your website SEO Friendly, get the rankings that you deserve, and improve usability for your readers.

This post is part three of a series on Wordpress Structural SEO. The other two are: On Page SEO for WordPress, and WordPress Optional Excerpt. I’ve tried not to rehash very much of the information contained in those two articles, so to get the full picture (my version of it anyway) you should check them out if you haven’t already.

There’s more to SEO than just using keywords in your copy and generating a site map - things like networking, link building, and leveraging social networks - things that happen outside of your site. That external SEO work is very important, but the structural SEO that you can do on your WordPress Blog prepare it for the attention that you hope to get from search engines. Structural SEO is kind of like getting ready for a date - you still have to go out there and interact, but if you aren’t properly groomed and dressed you’re unlikely to get lucky - unless of course you’re really hot.

Even though at first glance this looks like a lot of work, it’s really not, and much of it only has to be done one time, and not even all at once. When considered over the lifetime of your website the benefits from just a few hours work can be huge. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: milomingo

There’s a cycle for learners. You start out being new to a topic - it’s all new and interesting, and you quickly acquire a broad overview and become fairly knowledgeable. At about this point most people lose interest and move on to something else. A few spend a lot of time to learn a little bit more and become experts to some degree. The tiny few true practitioners become Doctors of Philosophy of the subject and work long and hard to make a contribution to the discipline. We could be talking about cellular Biologists, Blacksmiths or just about any other learned group of people. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s come to my attention since I wrote my post On Page SEO for WordPress that I left out a pretty important part of that recipe for blogging nirvana. On the WP post edit page there is a field labeled “Optional Excerpt” which I simply overlooked. Sorry about that, but I’m still learning myself. Read the rest of this entry »

… or quadruple, or quintuple - you get the idea.

Want more subscribers? More links? More reach? Of course you do. The answer is simple - make your material accessible to as many people as possible.

My previous post On Page SEO for WordPress has been fairly popular (for me anyway) receiving a few subscribers, links, comments, and pingbacks. Some of those pingbacks came from non - English blogs. I like to say thanks for those kinds of things, and when I dropped in on one of those sites the post seemed to be mostly a citation of my article, but the one comment - as near as I could tell - was saying something to the effect that it was too bad that the article was in another language. Read the rest of this entry »

Applying On Page SEO Factors to a WordPress blog is easy and can be somewhat automated once you take a few simple steps.

If you’re an old hand at SEO and WordPress then little if any of this is new to you. However if, like me, you’re still learning about one or both subjects, then a cheat sheet like this might help you get up to speed much more quickly than going out to aggregate all of this information yourself. I hope that a few people find it helpful even if it’s not new and original.

The 4 Factors
1) On Page Keyword Usage & Content Relevance
2) Link Juice
3) Incoming Anchor Text
4) Domain Authority

According to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz On Page SEO is one of the 4 factors that account for 90% of the search engine ranking equation. It’s the only one of the four that webmasters have complete control of.

Choose Your Keywords – You can’t optimize until you know what you’re optimizing for. Once you have your keyword / key phrase you need to put it on your page in all of the following places:

• In the Page URL – this is a two step process in WordPress:

1. In the administrative interface select Options>Permalinks, then select an option which includes the postname in the permalink structure. You may also want to include the category names in the Permalinks – and thus in the URLs – and propagate broad keywords via the categories.
2. When you write your post/page include your keyword/phrase in the title of the post. If for some reason you want the page URL to be different than the title then you can change the URL by modifying the “post slug” in the menu options on the right side of the write post page. Read the rest of this entry »

The availability of thousands of free themes is one of the most beautiful things about using WordPress as your Content Management System. Incredible as it may seem, you will probably never find a theme that is exactly what you want. Not to worry though, personalizing a theme to look and behave like you want is pretty easy to do.

Some reasons why you might want to hack your theme:

• Remove the developers Adsense code (that’s right, they do that sometimes)
• Include your Adsense code just where you want it
• Insert Google analytics code
• Remove unwanted items from your sidebar Read the rest of this entry »

Once again Lorelle VanFossen writing for the Blog Herald has inspired me to post. Thanks Lorelle. She says that saying your blog is a personal resource is somehow wrong. I think she misunderstands. Read the rest of this entry »