Free SEO tools are always popular. Just like Aaron who manages an array of free SEo tools on this domain, there are new guys coming up as well.

When Aaron is dabbling between Keyword analysis tools and meta tag descriptions, which are basic old school seo, there’s this brand new link analysis tool that’s come up. In fact, there could be better and powerful tools around, but this one is packaged well. Take a look here.

What it does.

- It checks for a sites total number of backlinks.
- Also checks the total unique anchor texts and
- Total text
- The pages in your site sorted by Google Juice strength.
- A chart showing the types of links (follow, nofollow etc)

- Most popular anchor texts in your incoming links.

The backlinks are arranged by their Page Rank, the Anchor text used, the number of incoming links to that site , whether the site is good or not and the strength of the link.

I’m not really sure how the last two metrics work. “Link strength” and “Linktype”. Probably link strength checks whether the link is a weak one like the one placed in a sidebar with no contextual text around it or not.

Anyhow it’s a really poerful tool with lot of data assorted in to one single digestible capsule form. The only problem is that it may take a while to crawl and assort your links especially if you have many incoming links. But it’s worth the wait.

Thanks Praveen.

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But why?

Indexing frequency can be explained as the count or the number of times Google or the other search engines, visit your website to index your content.

And, the higher the frequency, the better you chances for a better rank or your importance in the SERPs.

Can’t believe? Neither did I, once upon a time.

Well, do you know that the best and the top blogs on the internet gets the best indexing frequencies? That is the content published on them gets indexed quicker that anyone else and gets more importance on the SERPs. Examples are TechCrunch.com and Problogger.net.

Content published on TechCrunch and Problogger gets indexed in minutes. The closest we have measured is like around 8 minutes or so. Yeah that’s right, when a content is published on Problogger, it is very likely that the next moment it is on the SERP’s.

At DailySEOblog, I’ve seen content indexed in 30 minutes or so, which is good.

Now the point here is that, if you are writing the same content as the above blogs, like for say example a movie review or so, it is highly likely that even if you have better content, TechCrunch like blogs are likely to get higher on the SERPs.

So they clearly have an edge of having the crawlers index them faster.

Now, how can you get this edge? How can you make crawlers index your content quicker as well?

Several factors.

1. Rapidly changing content.

2. A good sitemap structure.

3. Good pinging tools.

4. Good meta tags that tell the crawlers to visit more often.

5. Easy navigation structure.

Well, so many other factors as well. But these are the best of them I’d say.

Essentially, if you have rapidly changing content, that is made available to the crawlers through a well maintained and updated sitemap, that itself should take care of the problem.

For maintaining the sitemap, of course you’d be using the AllinOne SEO plugin right? That’s a good one.

Also, make sure that you have a regularity in posting. If the crawlers find that your content is being updated on a regular basis, like daily or  hourly, then they will set their crawl frequency(if not manipulated by META tags) to hourly or daily basis, however it is followed on your site.

This is exactly the same reason why blogs have an edge over static websites. It is easy for crawlers to find a pattern in your posts and hence they find it easy to follow the pattern.

You can find more information about this concept over here and here.

What is a landing page?

When a visitor or a crawler first access your URL, the first page/file that is seen/served to the visitor/crawler is called the landing page. (No, we are not going to talk SEM here at all. In SEM landing page is one where the visitor is first “brought” to.)

Generally, the landing page is often an HTML or a static page in used websites. Earlier when there was no definition of what a landing page was, there were many versions of landing pages. Some websites used animations, some used funnel marketing techniques, some greeted people with funny and interesting welcome messages, some people used disclaimers and some even used redirection pages.

So all of that was used in the olden days. Come web 2.0, Google and the search engine optimization gurus, landing page optimization has gained importance as never before and it has helped the user in one way because many of the landing pages are now standardized.

These days web designers are aware of the importance a landing page and know how it would help them in beating competition on the serps.

Now, there are two types of landing pages. They’re based on your purpose. A marketeer who wants to market his product in a one page funnel system, is talking about a landing page that will help him convert a potential interested person to a client/customer. You might have seen such pages for E-books and other product marketing pages.

In such pages, the intention of the ,marketeer is to make you convince to buy the product asap, driving you to take an action (often that target) through a carefully drafted copy. Well, for this kind of landing pages, you’d need a good copyrighter and some cash. You don’t really need SEO the way other sites do.

So please make clear that we are not talking about one page, funnel system marketing page that gives you the “Ultimate secret what every SEO hides from you” strategy here, but purely SE optimizing your normal landing pages.

How important is a landing page and it’s optimization?

OK, so we have all sorts of CMS’s today. So a landing page optimization would make sense for a static page guy who is trying to market an ebook but how does it help a wordpress or Joomla guy?

Let’s talk about static webpages first.

A landing page is “supposed” to contain more vital information about what the site is/what the product is than any other page on the website.
Scanning a landing page will be the surest way to find out what product you are selling and who you are. Hence, search engines, give a decent weightage to them.

How to design an effective landing page?

Designing a layout that will help the crawler to pick up only the vital information we need it to, is the key in landing page optimization. In static webpages (HTML or other), it is easy to design a layout as we want it since you have all the flexibilities. So what are the things that you should keep in mind.

- First things first.
As a thumbrule, place the most vital information about the product/service in a very recognizeable format in an evident manner on the landing page. This applies for both search engines and humans.
Place them before any thing else in the BODY tag. Let the most important one appear first and others follow.

- Give the most importance to the most important.
Use H1 tags to highlight the main content on the page. Also use STRONG tag to highlight the cream of your content.

- Follow a SEO friendly layout. Place the content to be crawled in the first block and not in the last one.

- Use the space wisely, instead of large image headings you might want to use a much crawlable textual content that describes the product/service.

- Keep a clean and thin code. Use standardized code structure to minimize the erros and invalid entries. Follow a strict code that validates to ensure that the page collects the value factor.

- Use a spider simulator to test simulate the page and make sure that the content is ready for the crawlers in a palatable format.

- Get maximum incoming links to the first landing page with it’s file name (like www.yourname.com/index.html) with the appropriate anchor text you need.

- Maintain a healthy keyword ratio on the landing page.

- Use a nice footer text to make sure you’ve lost nothing.

Having said all this, it is easy for anyone to just overdo things and get the whole thing screwed. So here are somethings that you should take care of.

Things to keep in mind.

Flash / Ajax

Use no flash/ajax on the landing page please. It is only good for the user and not the search engines. If at all you are keen on using such content, make sure you leave room for textual content and let it appear first with more importance than the flash. It can be pushed to a side.

Frames

No frames please. Frames are so old stuff, people have many numerous ways to get over frames but produce the same effect of calling different frames to a single page. So never use frames because they simply dissolve your SEO quotient. If you are keen on frames use a two frame model where the frames are split into two and you should select one over the other for SEO and deply the tactis there. It wouldn’t give you the same result as of using a single page, but yes, it is not very far.

Popups

Many might already know this, as AdSense doesn’t allow it. It has less effect on SEo but yes, on the whole if you look at the quality factor there is a grey shade for using the popup. So keep away from them on the landing apge.

Don’t dump links

OK so you have your homepage, so why don’t I dump all the category pages and other links that I have on the landing page. After all, it can’t escape the users eyes. true - but more than the UA side, too many links on the homepage dissolves your SEO quotient. Keep them toa minimum. Use only the link that will take you to the most important pages on the site. And use the proper anchor text there, let it be keywords combined with categories so that you hit two birds in one shot.

Javascript

Oh! Did i not mention javascript? You knew it anyway! Never use them.(If possible, on the inside pages too.)

How about in Wordpress/ Joomla?

In wordpress, you should do pretty much all the basic SEO that you do, and also take special attention to ward off duplicate content. Ex:- Archives, Featured post etc

Tips and tricks

• Use a map or street address in the homepage. It will help you to get featured on the SERPS with your location. This is not a guarantee and mostly works only for US clients. But if you have decent traffic and the map/address placed well on the landing page, you’ll get some extra space on the SERPs with your location etc.
• Use all the H1..H2..H3 tags to categorize your text content into most important(H1)..less important (H2)..etc.
• Use a three column layout. Enough said.
• Avoid content duplication.

Today let’s review this theme from Headset Options, which is supposed to be a SEO friendly, AdSense ready wordpress theme.

Like all other AdSense ready themes, this one too focuses on text and space compatibility for AdSense. The main reasons for it’s compatibility for AdSense is that the text of the articles are in type and size similar to that of AdSense text ads. It is spaced in such a away that if an AdSense ad is placed amidst the post, it would sit in perfect camouflage in the article.

When you place the AdSense code, just make sure that the title links of the ads have the same colour as the links in the theme, and that’s light blue (#6699CC).

How SEO friendly is this Wordpress theme?

Considering the SEO factors that decide how it forms an SEO friendly theme, what stands out is the fact that it has a SEO friendly layout . If you take a look at the screenshot you’ll see that the layout of the theme is designed in such a way that the crawlers will have no trouble finding out what is the content on the site.

The titles of the posts are included in the H1 tags, and there is the proper use of other HTML tags as well making it standards compliant.

During crawling, the site layout is designed in such a way that, the heading is crawled first, then the pages, then the content with proper markup, and then the sidebar content. This in fact is a good strategy to deliver the content by importance to the search engines. Many other wordpress themes, which claim to be SEO friendly, miss this very basic feature.

One factor however, that I find missing is the <strong> attribute. If the strong attribute was CSS styled to not stand out bolded from the text, readers will not find it awkward, when you <strong> out the keywords. As of now, when you manually “strong” out the keywords, they stand apart as bolded text, so there is a limit to using keywords.

The same problem goes with the heading and titles. Wish the strong attribute was also included with the titles. It looks very plain and flimsy as of now. But this is something you can easily add by tweaking with the CSS styling.

But overall, it’s a very light weight, search engine friendly theme, that is put on steroids when using AdSense text ads. It’s so seo friendly that the only problem I see with it is that it misses the frills to impress the human eye. But if you want a theme to use for your website that is focused on making money from AdSense, targeting the search engine traffic, giving less importance to the human eye, then this is the theme for you.

Rating scores
AdSense compatibility - 8/10
Search Engine Friendliness - 8/10

Download the wordpress theme here .

I’ve heard this question over and over again from many friends. How do I control the appearance of my site info on Google SERPS. Many think that it is not possible to, but in fact it is very simple, provided you understand how Google sees it. Matt Cutts recently posted a video on this. So let’s take a deeper look at it.

1. The Page Title
In the above figure, marked 1 is the page title. As you may have guessed already the page title is the data that is pulled from your title information in the head section of your page.This is the data given in the <title></title> tags.

2. The description or the text seen right below the title (Snippets)
This information (numbered 2 in the figure) is normally seen as a text in around 25 words. This information is taken from three sources.
(i) The meta description <meta name=”description” content”what you want to appear beneath the page title in SERPS”>

(ii)The DMOZ open directory - If the site is listed in DMOZ, the description is picked from there.
(iii)When the information is not available from the above two places, google searches for contextual content from your sites copy and picks up relevant information from either a single paragraph or one or more sentences from all over the page.
One thing to note here is the it is approximately 160 characters long, so if you would like to write an attractive meta description that would prove as an ad-copy and more visitors would be prompted to click on your URL. Make it attractive as well as relevant.

3.URL
Of course, this is taken from the sites web url. It also takes into consideration your preference settings in the webmasters account. If you had preferred it as http://yourdomain without the www, it would show that way in the SERPs.This is the page Google will take you to when clicked.

4.Page size
Just next to the URL there is a tiny text showing the file size of the document you will be directed to when clicked.

5.Cache
Right next to the page size,a blue link is shown that will take you to the cached version of the website. The cached version is simply the copy of the webpage google saved when it last visited your website. If it had visited your site last week, then you’ll have the page from last week.

6.Similar pages
This link will take you to other similar pages to the one that is listed above.

7.Note this
This link will help you to use the Google notebook tool. You can save off the current link for reference later on the notebook. Just a quick one for noting down things.

8. Plus box and Stock info
If the website or the comany is listed at the stock exchange, google will display it’s shortcode, and if you click on it a small menu will be displayed showing the graph of how the company did at the stock exchange for the last few months.

9.Sitelinks
The site links are very interesting. Many people wonder why only a few sites(popular ones) have the site links shown while others does not. I know for a fact that Google does not take money from webmasters for displaying it. Because the company that I’m working for right now has sitelinks but we did not pay Google to show it, it happened automatically. I’ve discussed about sitelinks here, you may want to check out.

10.More results
This link will take you to more pages from the site. In the example, it will show the next few inside pages from the starbucks website, apart form the ones those are shown in the sitelinks.

Bonus

A few things worth mentioning here. Google sometimes shows maps of the office location etc of the company in it’s search results. This is triggered when the companies physical address is given in a very evident place in the page. Again like the sitelinks this is triggered only for  websites with great traffic and user interaction.

Sometimes, near the cache link Google will show when they crawled the website last. Ex: 12 hours earlier. This happens only for fresh results. I believe there is a threshold value for the time so any searches made within that time will be shown the freshness of the Google crawl.

So that basically rounds up the basic anatomy of a Google search result and how we can SEO details on our website to control how the information appears on Google SERPs. Hope you enjoyed it.

Maneesh asks me a question.

My permalink structure is
“/index.php/%year%/%postname%/”
I was wondering if this would have a bearing on my seo efforts.. my site is
indexed with about 5 pages of links on google now..

This question may be of interest to other bloggers(Wordpress guys) too.

Tweaking your permalink structure is the first step to make your wordpress blog SEO friendly. Read how to do it here.  

To answer Maneesh - I see that 10 pages are indexed on Google at the moment from your site. I hope you have only 10 posts on your blog, if you have more, then there’s something wrong, since they are not indexed on Google.

Well, let me clarify something first. There are two issues here.

One - Indexing the number of pages on Google.

Two- Your permalink structure.

Answer to Indexing your pages on Google.

This has very little to do with your permalink structure. All you have to do is create a sitemap and submit it to google. You can find the instructions here.
Within a few days (according to your crawl frequency) all of your pages will be indexed on Google.

Answer to permalink structure.

Your pages appear to be in “almost” SEO friendly nature. The problem I see here is the index.php extension. You should get rid of it.

Go to your dashboard > Options > Permalinks

Select the “Custom” radio button and change the structure to this.

/%category%/%postname%/

or

/%year%/%day%/%postname%/

That should be it.

Bonus tip

If you’d like to submit a sitemap to Google, every time your content changes(new posts) just add this plugin(All in one SEO) and submit the sitemap to Google on Webmasters tool. This should take care of your indexing problems in the future.

Google has announced officially that it has now tweaked it’s settings that if you have more content updates, the crawlers will absorb your data more frequently.

The quicker the content update, the quicker the crawling. This is with respect to the data from your verified blog in the Google Webmaster’s dashboard.
I’m assuming that this might have some effect on the data collected by the Google search bot too. Anyways, the more the content update, the better - Thumbrule!

Let’s talk today about good and bad menus first. Good menus are those that are SEO friendly, bad ones are those that are not. Simple logic.

When dealing with clients, one thing that’s common to all, is about the use of fancy javascript navigation menus, that troubles me most. If you use one, please refrain from using it. If you are a blogger, there is very little chance that you are using one. But the JS enabled menus are mostly found in portfolio like pages.

A few words about portfolio pages. They are a gold mine for onsite optimization, there would be many wrongs. They are all frills and no stuff. They are stupid. They make lot of noise.

Many a times, they have this animated JS enabled menus that are not crawlable by bots. Big mistake and out subject of talk today.

Crawlers by default, avoid anything that’s Javascript enabled and Ajax. This is one fallback of modern crawlers, even the google one. They haven’t deviced a technology that will help them crawl the contents of JS enabled elements on a webpage and AJAX. They had a problem with Flash, but it is almost rectified now.

• Javascript/AJAX powered navigation menus may look cool and attractive to the eyes, but avoid them whereever possible. Instead use CSS and you could create almost similar spectacular and eye-catching menus.
• Don’t use images for making menu images, instead try CSS, it’s cleaner, quick and easy to manage.
• If it’s completely necessary, keep the JS menus, but submit the linking pages to google.
• Avoid sound effects please, it’s so 90’s!
• Use text to link to pages in the navigation menus if possible.
• Place the navigation menus wither on the top, or the left hand table, or at a place where crawlers won’t miss it.
• Don’t embed them in frames - big mistake!

So the idea is that Navigation menus should be simnple, crawlable, easy to navigate and thus serving the purpose. Let them not be too fancy, complex and JS enabled. It defeats the purpose.

You can find excellent resources on making CSS Navigation menus here
CSS Tutorials on Navigation menus CSS Menu help High quality CSS Menus

Yahoo has a different set of metrics and priorities when calculating your rank on the SERPs. Most of the times, they are similar to Google’s metrics like the number of incoming links, title page content etc. For obvious reasons, duplicate content has been a bottle neck both for Google and Yahoo (others as well). And both the search engines are in the process of rolling out new tools everyday to beat the phenomenon of content duplication.

Yahoo is the one who has come up with a brand new tool today - Dynamic URL rewriting. According to Yahoo!,

The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

And the benefits of this feature as explained by Yahoo!

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

I’m an admirer of Yahoo! for it’s fresh and innovative approaches to improve their tools. This one sure looks promising. Get the full story on the Yahoo search blog.

With the advent of Wordpress and other arrays of blogging softwares, poor old forums have lost their charm. 3 years earlier, PhpBB was the most used software in forums, almost every webmaster had a forum about something. It was an instant hit since it’s launch because of it’s folksonomical nature, but in a more un refined way as compared to the latest softwares.

One major reason why a forum failed is because of it’s non SEO friendly nature.

• Forums did not have SEO friendly urls
• They did not allow bots to crawl the inner pages
• They had SEO un friendly titles
• Forums in general did not look at SE’s with importance at all, so they did not leave any room for tweaks as well.

With all these problems in front of us, let’s see how we can make the forums (PhpBB mainly) SEO friendly?

• Optimizing the page titles
  Page titles are a crucial factor for search engine optimization. Crawlers pick up the titles from every page and it’s important to give maximum information in this area in a non-spammy way. Here’s how you do it by some quick edits.

  - Edit file ‘templates/subSilver(or your template)/overall_header.tpl’

  Replace -

<title>{SITENAME} :: {PAGE_TITLE}</title>

with

<title>{PAGE_TITLE}</title>

or

<title>{PAGE_TITLE} :: {SITENAME}</title>

Edit Viewtopic.PHP

Replace -

$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title;  with
$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title;

• Tweaking the robots.txt file to allow better Search Engine indexing.
  Robots.txt can be used to control what pages is available to search engine robots and what pages are not. Generally on PhpBB, there are lot of sub directories that are allowed to crawl by default. But actually this is not required. We only need to allow certain folders and files to be crawled - so that only the necessary information is available to the crawler.

  Including the below code in to your robots.txt will disallow all the unwanted folders from being crawled by search engines.
  This way only the necessary information (those in the posts) are available for crawlers and the junk is filtered out.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /db/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /privmsg.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /search.php 
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /common.php
Disallow: /config.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /viewonline.php
Disallow: /groupcp.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /memberlist.php
Disallow: /modcp.php
Disallow: /posting.php

• Plugins to help create sitemaps for PhpBB
  Here are some cool plugins/mods for PhpBB that will help you create SEO friendly urls and even sitemaps that will help you get more pages indexed on Google. Here goes -

1. Google, MSN and Yahoo sitemap generator mod for PhpBB - This mod will create a Google SitemapIndex and auto generated Google Sitemaps for phpBB
2. Google Puller - This hack creates pages with 500 links to posts on your community. The words are taken from actual posts on your community (from the search_word table) and they link to the post that contains that word.
   The aim of the hack is to help search engines like Google or MSN to index your pages.

Part 2 of this post will follow with more methods on how to optimize your forum software for more search engines.