Nothing new here; what I’m talking about are footer links. You’ve seen them I’m sure of it. Visit a few sites and scroll all the way to the bottom and look for something like

Website Design by AwesomeInternetCompany.com

Likely, you’re already implementing them on the sites you service or build for your clients (with their approval, I hope). But let’s take a look at how you can better make use of those links to rank for search terms you’re targeting.

I also want to look at the debate from a few views (of course with my opinion in there) and explore a few warnings/caveats.

The Debate

we are going to start with the debate because it’s important to understand where people usually stand with this.

The Don’t Do It Crowd

Some pros think that you shouldn’t even do it. Not many, but they are out there. And their reasoning isn’t invalid.

Those guys/gals say that you are placing links on the footers (a place that is justifiably believed to be discounted by Google), which will turn into sitewide links (really known to be discounted by Google), on sites that aren’t likely to be relevant (that plumber’s site you built isn’t really related to website design).

These are all great points, but I think there’s a way to handle it appropriately.

The Do It Too Much Crowd

There is another set of companies/pros that swear by footer links, so much that it is a major part of their link-building campaign. Their reasoning is that it’s a great way to rank for some of the terms you’re having problems with, or build up from scratch.

They usually argue that with enough of the right anchor text, they will rank. Regardless of what Google says (they say this doesn’t work too well), it really does work. But there’s a risk involved, so I think it’s important to handle it with a little more delicacy.

The Me Crowd

Finally, there’s the ‘me’ crowd. We are right in the middle, and because I fall into the ‘me’ crowd, I inherently feel that it’s the most appropriate method of using footer links to gain rankings. I’ll show you how in a bit, but let’s move into the caveates and warnings.

Caveats and Warnings

Before we look at implementing a footer link-building campaign, let’s talk about a few things of which you need to by mindful.

Discounted Links

Without going into technical search engine workings details, it is widely known that sitewide/footer links are largely discounted by Google. After years of watching this stuff, it’s known that links in the footer are usually reserved for exactly what we are putting there, and don’t constitute giving too much credit. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

This also falls into the “template algorithm” which is basically Google’s way of saying:

See this set of stuff in the sidebar of this site? That’s the exact same on every single page. It must be a part of the site’s overall template, and not the ‘meaty content’ part. We should sorta move that to the side for a bit and concentrate on discerning the meaty content part.

Too Much

Another issue you should be wary of is the amount of “SEO anchor text” links you’re getting. This is a tricky topic right now because we see a lot of Google saying stuff like:

Hey, every single link to your site has these set of awesome keywords for the anchor text. This is obviously done on purpose due to your link-building efforts. We can’t just give you tons of link credit for it.

So the thought is that if you have nothing but links with SEO anchor text, then you’ll actually be optimizing your way out of rankings. It doesn’t look natural.

That being said, take a look at your competition, and run a few link scans (I suggest OpenSiteExplorer). If you’re competition is pretty tough, you’re likely to see a lot of “garbage” links to them, all with SEO anchor text. And they rank. Hmmm…

I also see cases where the footer links look something like:

Website Design and SEO and Social Media Monitoring by ShadyInternetCompany.com

Yeah, so don’t do that.

If you’re interested in seeing how we SEOs complain about this stuff (and understand a little more about what the problem is) check the post by Will Reynolds called How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO.

The thing is, you’ll want to be as conservative as you can with this. I think a mass of SEO anchors will make you rank, but these aren’t stable rankings. Guys like me can take those away within a single contract for a client.

Too Soon

Depending on your situation, you’ll also want to be careful with the number of new links that point to your site in a short amount of time. If you grow by thousands of links overnight (and you aren’t a news site that just broke an incredible story) Google is going to wonder about your methods. Let’s try to fly under the radar.

Let’s Get to the Good Stuff

Ok, warnings and such out of the way, let’s talk about how you should be working those footer links. We will work our way up from scratch.

Usually, this is what I see:

Website Designed by CoolWebCompany.com

That link goes to Cool Web Company’s homepage. This will get you bunches of links from all those clients that you service, and those links will gain value over time (as the site ages, and as your client gets links to their site thus adding that value to your site).

But we should be making a better use of that opportunity to gain links with anchors that we need in order to rank.

So check this one out:

Website Design by Cool Web Company

2 things to note here. First, you can see that we made the “website design” part the link. This tells Google that the linked-to site is about website design. Simple enough. But we did one more thing here as well.

We also changed the domain name mentioned in the footer to the actual company name. The reasoning here is a bit much for just this blog post, but we are basically trying to tie in the association with that link to the actual company name; which is in turn found through our other marketing efforts. It’s a little nit-picky, but every point counts.

That “website design” link will not go to our home page, rather it will go to the page on our site that talks about our website design services, thus improving the rankings for that page (which is what we want).

It will also help to prevent spreading of keyword focus. Having the “website design” link point to the homepage will make it tricky for Google to decide which page should rank; the homepage, or the page that has the title, description and content optimized for the term “website design.”

Seriously, that’s it. Simple enough. But wait, there’s more!

Let’s talk about a few different scenarios to help understand how we should handle this.

Remember that we don’t want our links to grow too quickly.

If you have a few hundred clients from the last several years, and haven’t been placing links to your site on theirs, you might be working on this for a while. You don’t want to shove all those links at once. Instead, make a plan to do so over the next 3 – 6 months. You might feel like you’re only adding one link to one website, but it’s a sitewide link that will appear on all of the pages of a site. Ecommerce clients are especially inflated websites.

If you’re a bit small time (like maybe under 50 clients) you could probably get away with updating this in a shorter period.

Remember that we want our links to look natural.

If you have a few hundred clients from the last several years, and you have been placing links to just your homepage you’ll still want to plan a strategy to implement better anchors; but again you’ll want to do so over a length of time.

Also, you’ll want to mix the anchors up. Not only to get the value passed to certain pages, but also to look as natural as you can.

Consider the following footer links I would place on a client’s website (assuming I offered these services).

Website Design by SEO Factor

SEO Services by SEO Factor

Internet Marketing by SEO Factor

Each of those would go to their respective pages with those super-awesome links. But, I want to make things look natural to Google, so I would also throw a few of these out there.

SEO by SEO Factor (to the homepage, and a little more vague/natural)

Powered by SEO Factor (again to the homepage, with a vague "powered by").

Why? Because we want to keep from bombing Google with those anchors. Again, you’ll probably rank rather well, rather quickly for those terms if you stick to SEO anchors, but again those aren’t stable rankings. Take it nice and slow and reap the benefits for a much longer period of time.

I’ve heard that a ratio of 7:3, non-targetted to targetted is best. I hate to give numbers for this sort of thing (like keyword density or duplicate content issues) but I like that one. It’s pretty safe, and if you have a lot of clients on which to place these links, that 3 part is still going to be pretty big.

On that, you’ll also want to be careful not to cannibalize your keywords. By that I mean, don’t accidently get anchors to a page that would be a better fit to a different page.

Bonus Tip – Remove them

If you’re reading this you likely fall into 1 of 2 types of people.

1. This is pretty new to you, and you are super happy and greatful for the information I just bestowed upon you. To you I say “you’re welcome, and thanks for the kind words.”

2. You knew all about this stuff, and you’re wondering why I made you waste your time reading such a blog post. To that I say “you made it this far before you realized that?” But I also say “here’s a situation in which I’ve had to reverse this method” so you get something out of all this meandering.

Completely Remove Them

This was such a weird situation, but there was one time that I had a large client remove all of the footer links in one action. It was a drastic suggestion (and scary as hell), but 3 months of endlessly pouring over data and implementing solutions that simply didn’t work (and a few nights in which I cried myself to sleep) spawned the idea and I told them to pull the trigger. Remove all the footer links from all their clients’ sites.

We aren’t talking a few sites. We are literally talking a few thousand. Most were really small sites, but 10 page websites multiplied by that many clients…you get the idea.

2 days later I was cussed quite a bit. But I’m patient, I know how this stuff goes. One week later they sent me an unexpected bonus. A big one.

Obviously rankings dropped even more than they had previously (causing them to call on me in the first place). I almost never suggest making such big changes like that. But it was just one of those. A few more days and not only did rankings come back, we were suddenly sitting pretty on some amazing keywords.

We ended up rebuilding footer links somewhere around 4 – 5 months later, but a lot more slowly, and with more attention.

Recap

1. These links don’t mean the world, as they are discounted by Google…

2. …At least they are supposed to be, but it’s not always the case

3. Try to match SEO anchor texts to links that point to specific pages…

4. …But remember to mix it up a bit and make it “look natural.”

5. Take your time and build those anchors slowly; make a plan…

6. …But again these aren’t the greatest links in the world, setup a plan, implement, move on. Don’t waste time, just get it going.

Bonus 7. Don’t let this be the only way in which you get links to your site. They aren’t from relevant websites (usually). This should be a small part of your link-building efforts.

And there you have it. But hey, one more thing. This stuff can get tricky and you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot (unless you’re trying to go home for the day, then link all your clients to a porn site).

Either way, if you have any questions get with your SEO. He or she should be able to help you get a plan in place. If you don’t have one, (get ready for a shameless solicitation) I advise on this stuff, and much more when I perform one of my SEO audits.

Oh, alright. I’m also a pretty nice dude, so feel free to contact me if you have a quick question. I can usually help out a bit.

So when I use a tool that helps me on both fronts; well…I gotta share it.

The tool I speak of is the SEO task management application called “My SEO Tool.”

From their site you can read:

My SEO tool was formed in late 2009 by Joe Kindness & Blake Acheson… we sensed a need for a tool that simplified the search engine optimization process.

Touted as a tool that “instructs you on how to optimize your website, one step at a time” I find it to be a lot more than that; offering me a solution to quickly setup ranking reports, and allow easy access to pertinent campaign information at a glance for my clients.

Let’s talk details.

The Overview

Track Rankings

If you’ve used a lot of rank-checking software, you know what a pain it can be to setup schedules, download and edit the reports, put them into an easily read format and then send them off to a client. If you have a handful of clients with just a few keyword, no big deal. Get a bunch of clients with hundreds of keywords, things get tricky.

As soon as you create the campaign you’ll setup your keywords. My SEO Tool will check the rankings and display them in your front page. I hurried 10 search terms to track, and the information was populated (accurately I might add) in about 10 minutes.

Cool tip:

If you click on one of the keywords for which you have rankings, My SEO Tool will show you which of your pages ranks, along with a cool bit of tips on key SEO metrics.

And don’t forget to check/uncheck a few of these boxes to get a glance at a few more details on your report.

Analytics

A few simple steps, and My SEO Tool will interface with your Google Analytics account:

Again, you have quick access to information, and can drill down a bit with some of the options on the right. And again, a pretty cool quick glance part of the software.

Backlinks

Ok, so the first “weak” spot I found. I checked the backlinks on a site with which I am intimately familiar. My SEO Tool only found a portion of the links I know of (and I know to be of high quality). The thing is, it’s hard to get a good amount of link information on a site from an external source (Google doesn’t like to share). And for being just one click to check this stuff (I have tools that require hours of pouring-over to understand the link landscape), this is yet again another great “at a glance” look.

The super cool part though, is that you can monitor the results from your link-building efforts. Add links to your monitor, check a few boxes and bam, My SEO Tool will keep track of that stuff for you. Pretty handy.

Social Monitoring

Continuing with the ease-of-use theme, My SEO Tool has a page for your social information. Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are all here; as well as your updates/mentions/likes. You can even post a message straight from your dashboard.

PPC

Ok, so I don’t like messing with PPC stuff (it’s like cheating), but there’s a page for that as well. I’m gonna take a blind bet here and say it’s probably pretty cool. I would love to here if anyone has experience with it though.

SEO Task Management

Another cool feature of My SEO Tools is the task lists that can be created and managed for your clients. Right off the bat you’re given 2 categories of tasks (Directory Listings and Social), which are populated with a few common steps most SEOs would take for a new client. You can add categories and tasks to the system, allowing you easy access to your “initial setup” steps.

The Rundown

Ok, so let’s talk the nitty gritty.

The Good

Right off the bat you can tell that ease-of-use was important to the developers. From the moment you login, you know what you’re looking at, and can easily find what you’re looking for. Pretty cool.

But I like it for a totally different reason.

You see, I’m an SEO. I don’t need easy. I need vast amounts of extremely detailed information. The more, and more detailed the better. But my clients don’t want to see that stuff. They want quick answers to what are usually easy questions.

My SEO Tool is simply the perfect solution for providing your clients with a login to access their SEO reports. The great thing is, you can manage what parts of the white-labeled (your logo, your domain if you desire, etc.) reports they can see. Not doing social media work for the client? Sweet, just uncheck a box and they won’t even know those reports exist.

If you’ve worked in this business for any length of time, you know what a huge savings in time it can be to alleviate calls regarding simple ranking or traffic inquiries.

As a freelance it’s a huge savings; but it will grow exponentially if you run an agency with many clients. Customer service is expensive. And being able to offer a simple way for your clients to check on things is worth quite a bit.

I’m also blown away at the price. I wasn’t expecting a lot considering the amount of money I pay for some other SEO tools; and was pleasantly surprised. Super easy to use, super easy to understand.

The Bad

Again, I stress how cool this app is. But there are a few points you should know.

1. This isn’t your be-all solution for SEO reporting. Internally I simply need too much data, and need to be able to manage and pair that data up with other sources of data. For example, for a lot of my higher-end clients, I need some pretty extensive link data that My SEO Tool isn’t able to provide.
2. Speaking of link data, I again refer you to my comment on the links it found. It’s difficult to hold this against them, being that this data is hard to get that info. But it is important to know that.
3. The task management is pretty cool, but it doesn’t solve your project/time management needs. Because of my client type, internal processes and need to analyze detailed information about the profitability of my projects, I still need to refer to my internal project management system.

It Would Be Cool If…

Given the price point, I’m amazed that this tool is what it is, so at this point im just picking/fantasizing.

Let’s see…

Instead of simply removing access to areas you don’t want your client to see, it would be pretty awesome if you could instead customize a message to the client. For example, if you aren’t providing social media services to a client, you could leave the tab there, and if the client were to click on it they would get a message written by you. Something like:

It looks like you aren’t taking advantage of your social media monitoring services. You can read more about them here (link to your SMM services page).

That would be a pretty sweet upsell feature.

This is Perfect for

If you’re like me, you’re in a weird middle spot that requires a little bit more on the internal/analysis side of things. So for me it’s perfect for solving my need to allow clients to see top-level metrics on their site’s progress.

If you’re a larger agency (like more than 50 clients) then My SEO Tool is going to save you a ton of time answering the inquiries that can simply be accessed by your client. A one-time walkthrough with your client should keep them from sending you emails for this stuff. One login, access to many points of data. Can’t beat that.

If you only work with super small businessses, then this may very well be able to also replace you project management software, as well as most other SEO software you’re likely using.

It’s also perfect for anyone who needs a simple solution at an awesome price. If that sounds cheesey, consider that there isn’t a single affiliate link in this post and they haven’t paid me for this post. It really is that cool.

So that’s it. If you have any experience with My SEO Tool, I would love to hear about it. Let me know what you think.

Using StumpleUpon’s Paid Discovery, you can not only show your appreciation to the blogger by promoting the post that links to your site, sending them traffic; but you can also increase the value that you get from that link.

If you’ve ever used Paid Discover to promote your content, you know that you can get a lot of traffic in a short amount of time for a very low amount of money. Sure, the bounce rates are high, but you can also get a decent amount of links and increased exposure through the Thumbs up you will get from some of the visitors.

Today I’m going to show you how to use Paid Discovery to increase the value that you’re getting from your current inbound links, as well as provide you a great opportunity to start a relationship with bloggers that have already linked to your content.

Link to Link to Link

When someone links to your site, it improves your rankings because you are getting a “vote” from that website, and receiving some of the value from the links that point to their site. So, the more sites that link to that site, the better the link is. Like This:

• • Site A gets a link from Site B.
  • Site C links to site B.
  • Site A gets a little of the link value passed originally from Site C.

So if Site A can find a way to increase the links pointing to Site B, then they will in turn receive some of the benefit. Using Wiep’s method, you can attempt to do just that by sending StumbleUpon traffic their way. Sure, it’ll cost you a few bucks, but I think the benefits outweigh that.

Increasing the Value of an Aged Link

Using this strategy, you are increasing the value of a site that has been linking to yours all along, and it’s no secret that aged links have a greater positive impact on your rankings, than new ones (being that the links are equal otherwise).

Increasing Your Reach

Often times the audience of the blogger that linked to you is a little different that yours. And by promoting the content they produced, you are opening the door to that audience as well.

Blogger Relations

Once you’ve gotten a few Stumbles their way, why not send the blogger an email:

Hey, just wanted to let you know we noticed that you linked to us in your post (insert post here), and that we really appreciate the sentiment. As a token, we included that post in our StumbleUpon budget today. This will send you a little traffic from Stumblers, and hopefully result in a few additional links.

Again, thanks for the link.

You could go on about how you would like to guest blog for them, or some other manner in which you could begin a mutually beneficial relationship. But the biggest thing you could get out of this is returning the favor someone that did you an online solid.

What You’re Looking For

To get the most out of this strategy, you’ll want to find the links to your site that are going to have the greatest impact by becoming stronger. Look for sites that not only link to you, but also send a little traffic to your site.

The best are the kind of blogs that see a good amount of visitor engagement (comments, discussions, etc.).

But honestly, you don’t even have to be terribly picky about the site you’re doing this for as long as it’s a decent link/site. The costs for clicks in Paid Discovery can be as low as $.05 per. So, throwing $20 said blogger’s way will get them 400 hits, not including the number of residual hits they will get from natural Stumbles.

Continued Link Building

If you’ve got a lot of bloggers that link to you, you can scale this strategy by setting aside a monthly budget and keep a group of blogs forever in the mix. One could see rather nice returns after doing this for a few months.

Remember to consistently analyze the returns you are getting though. If you feel like you’ve gotten all you can from promoting a particular piece, replace them with a new one. This could also help you to decide whether you want to promote a large number of blogs with small amounts of money each, or a handful of bloggers with more traffic.

Why You May Need a New Domain Name

The reasons for your new domain name can vary, ranging from the need to correct file names to create SEO friendly URLs to the need to establish your online identity as a part of your re-branding efforts. Here are a few examples of situations we’ve come across:

You manage a hotel that was once part of a chaing (Best Western, Marriott, etc.). But now, you’re no longer a part of that chain becoming an independent property. If you old domain was something like city-best-western.com or city-bw.com, then you may feel the need to change the domain name. This is especially the case if you’ve walked away from the chain to pursue a new strategy that involves re-branding yourself.

There have been a few cases where we’ve had to redirect sites due to the purchase or merging of companies. Once the parent company has established its ownership, it’s time to bring the online presence into the fold.

We work with a lot of small businesses that have recently moved from a home-made or dated website to something a little more professional. Often times this means they moved to WordPress (or would like to so as to start blogging) or another CMS that creates pages with file names that are not similar to those of the old site.

Whatever the reason may be (as long as you’re not jumping to a new domain name for SEO reasons) you’ll need to take a few steps to make the redirect go as smoothly as possible.

Gather Website Information

First things first, we need to make sure we completlely understand the site(s) in question. It helps to create a spreadsheet containing information on all of the pages of the site with at least:

• The navigation title of each page
• The URL to each page
• The content of the pages
• The meta information on each page

Depending on the scope of your redirect, you may need to note additional or less information.

It’s also a good idea to notate the structure of the site, understanding the hierarchy of pages and sub pages. If you’ve got a particularly large site, then doing this by hand will be a pain. Instead, you can use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool to get an exportable list of most of that information.

While you’re taking notes, log into your traffic analyzer of choice and try to familiarize yourself with the amount of traffic your site receives, where it comes from and where it goes to. This one step will serve several purposes:

• After the redirect is complete, you’ll want to know if your traffic is moving up or down, and you’ll want to notice as quickly as possible
• Understanding what pages of your site get the most traffic, and from where will help you plan your redirects appropriately.
• After all this is done, you’ll want to update as many inbound links to your site as you can, and the best links are the ones that drive traffic to your site.
• If you’ve been tracking any rankings progress get an updated report for that as well. This way you can keep an eye out for any sudden drops.

Planning

Once you’ve gathered as much information as you can (it’s never too much), then it’s time to start planning your redirects. If you’re simply moving your site from one domain to another, then your planning will be minimal, but if you’re doing this to a site or sites with pages that number in the hundreds or thousands, then get your pencil (mouse) and paper pad (spreadsheet application) ready.

If you’re acquiring a site as a part of a purchase then you’re probably going to redirecting the old site to only certain portions of the parent website. If you’re updating your site as a part of a redesign, you’ll want to map out the old structure and new structure of your site.

The Redirect

To learn a little more about the types of redirects you can check out a previous post on the subject. Suffice to say, the grand majority of your redirects are going to be of the 301 type. This basically tells Google and other search engines that the site has permanently moved to a new location and redirect visitors to the new site quickly.

Depending on the size of your site, you may want to move sections of your site at a time to make sure everything is working properly. We don’t run into situations where this must be done, normally being reserved for sites with hundreds or thousands of pages.

When you’re moving a website from one domain to another, you don’t want to simply redirect the whole website to the new domain name; rather redirect the pages to pages with similar content. This will help to minimize ranking/traffic dips as well as provide a smooth transition for your visitors.

Make sure you are constantly testing your redirects. If it’s a small site, you can easily check each page. If it’s larger, you can use the Screaming Fog tool again. It’s a good idea to manually check at least a few pages from each level of the site (including sub folders, categories, etc.). Check for any broken links or 404 errors.

After The Redirect

Once your redirects are in place and you’ve ensure that they are working properly, it’s time to keep a vigilant eye on the site’s health. Make sure you have all the proper tracking and reporting tools setup, and check your site’s performance daily for a few days.

It’s also a good idea to make sure both of the domains are setup in Google Webmaster Tools, with submitted sitemaps. This will help you catch crawl errors that Google may experience. You can also run the Screaming Frog tool to make sure you don’t have any broken links.

As for the search engine results pages, 301 redirects can take effect within a day, or over the period of a few weeks. Again, this depends on the size of the sites and the and how the old and new site currently rank, etc.

It’s important to know that redirects only transfer a portion of the link value through them. So, even if you minimize ranking losses as best as you can and implement your 301 redirects flawlessly, you may still see a few dips in rankings.

Give it a few weeks to make sure you haven’t seen any problems, then begin persuing as many of the best websites that link to you that you can. You’ll want to have them update their link to reflect the new domain name or page.

1. Brand is King

In the world of SEO, we always say “content is king.” But in the world of business, brand is king. Well, maybe not “king,” but it’s pretty important. And one of the ways in which you help to promote and protect your brand is through the use of your website, on your branded domain name.

If you’re marketing your business in any other fashion, you will undoubtedly get links to your site as a result (think: press releases, events, etc.); and if a recipient of your marketing efforts should decide to research your company online, they will likely search for (or “Google”) your company’s name, not a specific keyword.

Even if your site does rank at the top for the search, it’s placed in the same category as the others on the search engine’s results page (SERP). Instead, wouldn’t it be better to have a domain name that would allow searchers to easily identify your official site?

2. It’s not that big of an SEO deal

It’s really not that big of a deal to have your keywords in the domain name. We like to get them in there if we can do so without taking away from the integrity of the brand, but we don’t stress it. And we don’t stress it because it really isn’t that big of a determining factor. Sure, it will get a lot of sites to rank, but not usually out-ranking sites that focus more on the quality of their site and Internet marketing efforts.

It’s hard to believe that when you’re staring at some competitor with a spammed domain name out-ranking you. But let me set your mind at ease with a secret number.

100%. That’s the amount of clients we’ve had that faced some competitor out there with a spammy domain name. It’s almost guaranteed that there is someone out there, no matter the niche, that has decided to create a site to rank. And there’s another number too.

100%. That’s the average amount of times it didn’t matter in the end. Our clients still ranked, still received great traffic and they didn’t have to sacrifice their brand integrity.

I’m not bragging about our work (well, maybe a little); rather explaining that a quality campaign will out-perform rank-quick tactics. Besides, the sites that do that usually (but not always) implement other corner-cutting techniques that end up hurting their rankings.

3. It’s on the chopping block

Google is well aware that they are giving too much weight to domains with keywords in them. And they are aware that this is a weakness in their ranking results. And when Google identifies a weakness in their system, especially one that threatens the quality of their results they attack it.

Google’s own Matt Cutts recently posted a video on the subject, mentioning that they will be looking at that aspect of ranking determination:

How long it will be before we see a “fix” is anyone’s guess, but it’s coming.

4. It’s not worth losing gained ground

New sites can be a pain to rank. New site’s start at 0 inbound links, and what links you can get in a few months still have to age before they fully impact rankings. It’s simply not worth losing the links to your current site, the pages that are already indexed, and referrals you may have.

And if you’re argument is

“We can just redirect the old site to the new”

you have to remember that 301 redirects do not pass 100% of their value. Instead, it is degraded a little when passing through that redirect. Link-building is tricky enough as it is; only getting 80% of the returns that you could be getting is just plain silly.

What if I have to change my domain name for another reason?

There are cases in which you simply don’t have a choice but to get a new domain name. When that’s the case, you’ll want to stay tuned as we are writing a solution to that problem for release this week.

Please note that what we are talking about here is SEO friendly URLs (ways of writing your page URL structures to help with your overall SEO campaign) and not “search engine friendly URLs” (URLs that don’t contain too many query strings to as to cause problems with crawling/indexing). Though they often overlap, the search engines have gotten pretty savvy at crawling and indexing difficult to read URLs.

Instead, we are going to talk about a few pitfalls we see when people create their site’s structure and the manner in which the page URLs are created.

“Ugly” URLs

May as well talk about the URLs with query strings, etc. If you don’t know what that means, take a look at the following URL

http://seo-factor.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&category=M753n&style=gw3b

Usually you see stuff like this with eCommerce sites, but there are a lot of content-managed-systems (CMS) out there that produce ugly URLs like this for any of your pages. There was a time when this was a really big deal because search engines had a tough time crawling, categorizing and indexing pages like this, but that’s not often the case today. However, it’s still a hindrance to your SEO efforts, and can hold your site back from ranking for desired search terms.

Instead, using our fake “SEO Factor Shoe Store” as an example, we would want a URL a little closer to this:

http://seo-factor.com/mens-shoes/casual/black

The latter is much easier to read, and gives an indication to the content of the page before you even get to it (and that is what a search engine is looking at).

Underscores

We still see this type of URL structure quite a bit as well:

http://seo-factor.com/seo_friendly_urls.htm

This is obviously much easier to read, and will indeed give some sort of indication to the content of the page. But this can hinder your online marketing efforts in an indirect, but very real way.

You have to consider that underscores are not as common as dashes with regard to common grammatical knowledge, most online structures, etc. I know several people who aren’t completely sure how they would type an underscore if they had to.

If you were to share a page of your site verbally, or maybe via a notated-napkin, this may cause confusion when that person attempts to reach that page at a later date. If you’re thinking that this isn’t too big a deal, if that person were someone who may have otherwise linked to that page, you missed not only a visitor, but a ranking/traffic-boosting opportunity.

Besides that (which is genuinely more important) the last we heard Google still has issues considering the underscore a word separator. You can see a video on the topic by Matt Cutts. Please note that this video was published in February of 2009. That’s a long time ago in the world of the web. Either way, we simply don’t like here, and will fix them if we can.

[lightbox target="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k"]Matt Cutts – Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?[/lightbox]

Uppercase Letters

This is a bit of a tricky problem. Again with some content managed systems, URLs with uppercases are also a bad idea.

If I met you, and you asked for the location of my blog I would say to you:

It’s SEO dash Factor dot com forward slash blog.

And when you got home, you would type:

seo-factor.com/blog

But if the actual address was

seo-factor.com/Blog

Then you would be met with a 404 error. Ok, well not on this site (we took care of that specific one due to a problem during the site’s inception). And there are ways to handle this on the server side. But if you aren’t that savvy, and if you would rather spend your time more wisely, it’s probably best to stick with lower case letters for SEO friendly URLs.

Keyword-Stuffed URLs

Another problem we often see is the keyword-stuffed URLs. For this example, let’s use our fake SEO Factor Hotel. It’s in Jacksonville, FL. We are using a fake hotel for this example because you see this problem running rampant in the hotel SEO industry. I’m not too sure why, but it’s there. We will take a look at our “accommodations” page.

seo-factor-jacksonville-fl-hotel.com/jacksonville-hotel-accommodations.html

Seriously. Say that out loud. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Now try this on for size:

seo-factor.com/hotel-accommodations/

Much nicer, right?

The argument we usually get is that Google will (all other things being equal) give higher rankings to the site with keywords in their URL. This is true, but we have a few answers to that concern.

First, all other things are never equal. There are a large number of variables that go into ranking determination, and URLs with keywords isn’t nearly as important as other factors (and never worth the missed opportunity to brand yourself). We’ve been up against keyword-rich domains held by our clients’ competitors since the day we got into this crazy business, and we’ve always found ways to out rank them.

Second, Matt Cutts recently acknowledged the ranking trends for keyword-rich domains, and that they are giving a little attention to this issue.

You should check that video out, he goes into the subject with a bit of detail and insight.

Finally, it’s highly probable that Google knows exactly what it is you’re site is about by this time. If you’ve given any thought to SEO, (and sometimes if you haven’t) you’ve been sending signals to the search engines all along.

Consider our hotel again. There are going to be many sites that list our hotel with close proximity to the address or location information. The address is on our site, and we’ve created a Google Places page; again inserting the location address. Google knows where my fake hotel is, they don’t need me jamming my city and state down their pipes every chance I get. In fact, keyword stuffing may not always be a bannable offense, but it is an indicator as to the approach you are taking to promote your site. Do you really want that sort of attention on your site? I don’t.

File Extensions

We don’t hear this too often, but there is sometimes a question as to the most appropriate extension for file names. For example, should you use .html, .htm, .php, etc.? 99% of the time (and that’s leaving a single % margin just in case there’s some weird situation out there) it doesn’t matter. On this, just try to stay consistent so you don’t drive yourself crazy trying to remember what you were using for which page.

There is a thought that one is better for SEO than the others. This simply isn’t the case. In fact, if you use WordPress like we do, then you don’t get any extensions at all.

To Sum Up

To sum up the idea of SEO friendly URLs, consider the following:

• If it’s too difficult to share verbally, try to find an alternate solution
• If sharing verbally results in 404 errors more often than a completed visit, try to find an alternate solution
• Stick with hyphens (or “dashes”) as opposed to underscores to separate words
• Stick with lower-case letters
• Stuffing your URLs with keywords may help a little in regard to rankings, but you’re missing a lot of opportunity to brand your business, and the benefit isn’t worth it
• File types/extensions don’t really matter too much. Just try to stay consistent.

Now that we’ve identified some common issues, and defined SEO friendly URLs, we will be following up this week with a post on solving some of these problems, and showing you how to determine the best plan of action. Here’s a hint, we are going to be playing with 301 redirects to pages with better structure and SEO value. Come on. Doesn’t that sound like a good time?

For the most part, these issues arise when either the incorrect mindset is taken when approaching the optimization of your site (trying to trick the search engines or attempting a quick ranking strategy), or they are the result of following bad advice (by hiring the wrong SEO professional, or reading a bit of bad information on a blog somewhere).

Following is a list of those common issues, as well as some reasoning and common solutions.

1. Linking to the homepage

The situation is this. The keywords for each page have been identified, including those for the homepage. Through an internal linking effort, the home page is linked to using the desired keyword.

The idea is correct in that using the proper keywords to link to pages of your site is a common, beneficial SEO strategy, but the execution is where things drop off.

The homepage is most often going to be getting the majority of the inbound links from other websites. This happens because when people want to point visitors to your site, or when you issue a press release, the linker usually links to the homepage of their source.

Of course, there are exceptions. But that’s most often the case.

The idea is to use that “juice” your homepage is getting from links to increase flow (be it visitors or search engines) to specific pages.

For example, you would want to point visitors to your “Accommodations” page, so you would link to that page with the appropriate keyword.

This strategy goes wrong when other pages link to the homepage. In effect, you are transferring what juice a sub page has (mostly provided by the homepage itself), back to the homepage.

Solution

Simple enough. Remove internal links to the home page. We aren’t talking about navigation of footer navigation links. Just the ones within the content of your pages. That’ll ensure that the strongest page (the homepage) is providing flow to the sub-pages, and not wasting potential strength by going the other way.

2. Lack of Address on site

Often times I take on a client who’s address isn’t even on the site, or if it is, it’s on only the contact page.

The thing you have to remember about SEO is that every little bit of information you put on your site is going to be read by visitors and search engines. And when a search engine crawls a page on your site, you want to make sure they know exactly where your property is located.

It’s so important because the major search engines have local services (like Google Places) that rely on being able to associate a property with an address and your website. Being able to associate all this information on your site is a big plus.

Solution

Again an easy one. Try to get the address of your property on every page. There are detailed exceptions to this one. For example, a PMG or website built to showcase multiple properties will have to use a different strategy. But if your site caters to one property, it’s best to put your address on every page.

You can also go a step further by adding the hCard format to your address, accommodating the search and return function used by some search engines and online services.

3. Images instead of text

Another major problem I see is putting important information in the form of an image instead of “regular” text. I see this alot with the address, heading information and the phone number.

Remember, if something is written, but displayed in image form a search engine can not read it.

Solution

Where you have information that you need to show the search engines, use text instead of images. There are exceptions that I’ve come across (usually due to a desired page heading look), but those are extremely rare. Even in those cases, one should consider the use of Cufon instead of imagery.

Watch Out

One more thing to note on this one. You may get the advice that “it’s ok as long as you put the information in the alternate attribute (sometimes called the “alt tags”). While the search engines read that information and take it into consideration, it doesn’t even come close to comparing to the weight of the written word.

4. A lack of keyword focus

I could (and will) write a post explaining this topic in more detail. Suffice to say, the issue with a lack of keyword focus can be summed up like this.

For each of the pages of your site, you should be optimizing for a single set of like-keywords. For example, your “Accommodations” page will focus on “…accommodations…” terms, your location page will focus on location terms (like “things to do in…”). But if you try to include like terms on multiple pages, and optimize those pages following that trend, then you’ll cause problems when Google tries to determine which pages of which sites rank for which terms.

At best, only one of your pages will rank. At worst, you will have spread your focus too thinly and none of your pages rank for a given term.

Solution

Again, if you have someone that can make changes to your site, you may not need to hire someone else. Take a step back and consider the pages of your site, and the message you are trying to convey to your visitors. Group your like terms together and identify the pages that are focused on those.

When it comes to the details of actually optimizing, it’s probably best to find a professional. In the mean time, just make sure your site flows naturally and isn’t fighting itself for rankings.

5. Multiple Properties – One Website

This in itself is not a problem. Rather, the execution can (and most often does) hinder a site’s performance.

A lot of times I’ll see single sites with multiple addresses at the footer or on a single page to highlight each property. Basically, you’re trying to optimize and relate to multiple locations on a single page.

This is further compounded when the properties are in different cities.

Think about it like this. When optimizing and promoting a hotel’s website, a lot goes into ensuring that the content, meta tags, internal links and inbound links are focused in a manner that insinuates relevance to a search term or a few like-terms. And “orlando hotel” is a much different term than “valdosta hotel.”

This is pretty much the same idea as the “Lack of keyword focus” problem, but with the specific problem relating to location.

Solution

Every site is different, and each offers a different opportunity to focus on multiple properties. Usually, the best route is to opt for multiple websites. But, in many cases you can simply segment your site to focus on individual properties; each focusing on a single property’s accommodations and amenities as well as it’s location information.

Again, there are a ton of solutions for this issue. Talk to your SEO to see what they think.

6. Multiple Websites – Same Content

Usually, when the problem of multiple locations arises, we suggest different sites. But that can lead to a different problem itself.

Obviously, trying to create content for each hotel you manage/own can be difficult and it’s easy to fall into the idea of using the same content for each site; updating only the property name and address.

Now you run into an issue of duplicate content. Believe it or not, there are cases that make this a non-issue. But not many. Usually you will find that one of your properties seems to excel while the others lack the same progress online.

Generally speaking, duplicate content causes problems when a search engine must decide what sites to rank for a given search term. If there are multiple candidates with the same content, then it is in a search engines best interest to only rank one of them, leaving room for variety (so their users, the searchers have different sites from which to choose).

Solution

Decent copy is pretty easy to come by these days. You just have to make sure you are hiring someone with a little experience with hotels (SEO experience would be a plus).

Also, remember that each of your hotels are different; each with their prime selling points. You probably have a good enough grasp to write your own content (with editing as needed).

Every once in a while we hear

“I read that it only needs to be a difference of X%”

There aren’t any rules for this one. Instead, just try to approach each of your hotel websites differently and you’ll be fine.

7. Stuffed URLs

The situation comes from the idea that keywords in a domain name/URL will have a positive impact on rankings. While the statement itself is true, people often forget that the amount of impact is so small that it is far outweighed by the negative impact a messy domain name will have.

In fact, if you push it a little too much, your rankings can actually fall because of such tactics. But for now let’s look at a situation:

Take a look at the following URL from the “Accommodations” page of our fake hotel:

http://freshpaint-jacksonville-hotel.com/jacksonville-fl-accommodations.html

Now say that to someone. How does it sound? A little cumbersome to say, let alone trying to remember it.

Now consider the following:

http://freshpaint-inn.com/accommodations

A little easier to read/say/remember, yeah? Yeah.

It’s like this. Google knows exactly where your property is. You’ve optimized your content to show them, you’ve gotten listings on other sites to show them, you’ve placed your address on every page of your site to show them. If you try to shove your city to them in every URL you can, they may just swat it away. That, and now it’s impossible to tell someone about your site without running out of breathe.

Also consider this. Inbound links are a very important factor in your site’s rankings. You want to make your domain name and subsequent pages as easy to remember in case someone wants to link to your site for some reason. If they mis-spell it, then you don’t get the link.

Solution

Easy enough. Keep the page names simple, relevant and concise. That’s it. No need to get fancy.

For a little help on this, you can check a similar post we wrote on choosing your domain name.

8. Excessive Linking Out

This issue can usually be found on your “location” page (or one that is similar). It happens when a hotel wants to share places of interest in the area by linking to restaurants, tour guide sites, etc. Too many, and you can run into problems of sharing too much of your site’s value or strength.

There is a “no more than 100 links per page” rule that even Google uses as a guideline. But we think it best to be a bit more cautious. If you have a large number of links, but not enough to make Google drop your rankings, you are still giving away your valuable juice.

Solution

I’m not saying you shouldn’t link out to anyone. In fact, a policy like that will actually hurt you, as other sites will then refuse to link to you. Also, linking to other, relevant sites that may be of interest to your visitors will provide an added benefit to your site, and you can believe Google takes that into consideration.

Instead, try to be conservative with the sites to which you link, focusing only on the ones that will provide a real value to your visitors or add depth to your hotel’s site.

You can also institute a few “nofollow” attributes. But again, this may alienate you from the rest of the online world. Don’t want that, do we?

There You Have It

That pretty much wraps up the common obstacles I see. Generally, try to approach your website with the visitor in mind. Keep things simple and relevant and you should also reap some benefits of search rankings.

Also remember that every site is different. If you have a specific question about your site, you should ask your SEO what they think. You can also send me a quick question. I am happy to advise where I can.

We went back and forth for a while, and those old posts have since been deleted (along with so many of those old posts).

Using my tactic to use 404 errors to build links, I’m writing this post again, but from today’s perspective.

The Money, not bad

I know we only have until December 21, but this year started pretty nicely for me. I’ve been freelance for almost 2 years now, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m not rich mind you, but the famines are getting fewer and farer between the feasts.

Take a look at my SEO Audit services. Not exactly cheap, right? And these are very conservative fees. SEOs all over the place are justifiably charging way more than that. And they can do that because we can genuinely provide a substantial return on that investment.

So many options

I’m a freelance SEO, but you don’t have to do it all your own. You can work for an agency that offers SEO services as a product to their clients. Or you could land yourself an in-house gig. Those are generally the greatest jobs in the world. You get to work on one site, all day, every day. Sounds boring when I say it like that, but you get to do so many cool things to market that site when you can dedicate yourself. Again, those jobs usually command a good income.

Revenue generation

Once you’ve learned enough about SEO and get a little experience, you can use your craft for your personal projects. If you have a passion for something else, you can apply what you’ve learned during your SEO career to gain success online.

A lot of us write books/ebooks/blogs, but think about any business venture you are interested in, and consider how much online traffic would contribute to that venture’s success.

In Demand

Ok, so I’ve put in a lot of work to get here, but I actually turn work away on a regular basis. Sometimes because the client isn’t a good fit for me, sometimes because I’m simply too busy. I get job offers all the time, a constant flow of questions via email (most of which could be turned into clients were I to implement a sales pitch to my reply).

Future Proof

I’ve been hearing that “SEO is dead” or dying since I’ve been involved…in 2004-05. That’s 8 years, and I’m still here. The definition of SEO has changed quite a bit, and the strictest definition is dead, but the idea has and will always be the same; and it will always be needed by businesses…at least until the apocalypse. Then I’m gonna have to learn to light a fire with sticks or something.

Anyway, the idea is to generate revenue for businesses. I do this with SEO. The methods I used 8 years ago are no good, but the goals are the same, and the skills I have are needed to achieve those goals.

No matter what, businesses will always need people that can help them increase their revenue. I’m one of those people.

You learn a lot

Sure, you’ll learn how to make sites rank, and all that good stuff. But you also get to learn a lot about business and people.

I’ve had the pleasure of working for some of the largest brands in America, as well as some of the smallest ‘mom-and-pop’ stores in little towns; and I learn something new with every client. Some of this experience is applied to my freelance business internally, some is applied to future clients and some of this is applied to my life (I once provided services to a fitness instructor, so I learned a lot about my health).

What are you looking at?

And the single best reason to get into SEO is….you can look at whatever you want online under the guise of “research.”

A few years ago I have a team member who was scouring World of Warcraft forums when the Vice Pres. of the company walked over to ask him what he was doing (what with the obvious waste of company resources and all). Said team member replied that he was researching the manner in which these forums were promoting their sites so he could match the tactics on a similar client. He went into great detail as to the URL structure the forum on his screen used, and how many links they’ve gained from which type of efforts.

This was all BS of course, but after a few minutes of explaining tactics that were far above the bosses understanding, he walked away pleased at the SEO team’s detailed attention to online marketing trends.

There are plenty of other articles on what signifies a quality link (relevant website, high ranking pages, in-content links, etc.), but what a lot of people seem to throw in the mix is their disregard to attaining links on sites that place the “nofollow” tag on them.

If you are unfamiliar with nofollow, it’s basically a tag a webmaster can place on a link to direct a search engine away from following it.

This was originally designed for bloggers who wanted to control their comment spam from people/robots attempting to artificially increase inbound links to irrelevant, often illegible websites (think: Viagra and replica watches). The nofollow attribute eventually became a tool for SEOs to sculpt the link value flow on their own sites in an attempt to increase the value of each page while retaining the ability to link to other pages internally.

So, by placing a nofollow attribute on a link, you are keeping the “link juice” from spreading to other pages/sites. Being that inbound links have such a determining factor on your search engine rankings, it became something of a turnoff for link-builders.

But we don’t follow this same thought. If you think about it, links are supposed to provide more information on a topic, or point visitors to other sites that may be of use. If you set aside search engine rankings for a moment, and remember that the point is to increase traffic to your site, then there may be many sites out there from which a link would be of great value.

So don’t discount an opportunity to gain a link from a site simply because it would be “nofollowed.” Before Google came along and we realized how important links were to our rankings, this is how we gianed traffic anyway.

As long as the link is relevant and offers the searcher value in some way, we say get all the links you can. A qualified visitor from another website is just as important as that of a search engine.