Google Penguin

Penguin update went live on April 24, 2012.  Google's aim with this release is to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using non-White-hat SEO techniques.

Rather than write a lengthy article on the subject, check out this one instead on Search Engine Watch. It goes in some detail about the Penguin update.

Creating Good Quality Pages

How To Get Pages To Rank

The following rules apply for upping your chances to have good ranking pages:

• It goes without saying that to rank high you should always strive to write high quality unique content.

• The page should have the keyword in the title and the URL.

• The keyword should be in the first and last paragraph and the one in the first paragraph should be in bold.

• Keyword density around 1 – 2%

• LSI keywords, try and use between 5 – 10 LSI terms in your posts. For more information on LSI check out my other post LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing.

• Add the LSI keywords as part of your tags.

LSI Latent Semantic Indexing

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and its a way for a search engine to determine what a web page contains without specifically matching the actual term being searched.  A web page about Fitness  will likely have related words such as Exercise or Health on it.

In effect by placing additional weight on related words in a webpage's content, LSI will lower the value of a page that only matches a specific term and doesn't contain other related terms.

One easy way to do a LSI search is to use the ~ symbol when searching in Google.  Using the above term "~Fitness" resulted in seeing words bolded such as "Exercise", "Health" and so on.

The best way to optimize a website for Latent Semantic Indexing is to create what are known as silos. The top level page would pertain to a particular keyword or phrase and then linking pages would fall under it with relating keywords of the same theme.

Here is a good tool for finding LSI related words
http://lsikeywords.com/

There are a few websites out there that allow you to understand your competition and who is linking to them.  This is often referred to as backlink information. 

Backlinks are hyperlinks on other website or blogs that point to your website. Search Engines like Google use backlink data as part of their equation for ranking websites and pages. 

http://www.Ahrefs.com
http://www.SEOSpyglass
http://www.Majesticseo.com

Want to make sure that search engines know about your website and will start crawling it.  Pinging it through the free services below is one way to achieve this.

Here are 3 pinging services that are free and can help your Blog or website get noticed quicker.

• http://pingomatic.com/
• http://www.pingoat.com
• http://www.pingler.com

Finding Your Competition In Google - Competing Pages

Have you ever wondered how to find the number of competing pages for a particular keyword or phrase.  The answer is really quite simple, yet might not seem as obvious as you think.

When you do a search in Google for a given phrase or keyword, for example "Medicine Ball Workouts" Google will return a list of results and a line above them that will look something like "About 1,290,000 results (0.31 seconds)"

In this example it means that there are roughly 1,290,000 pages that have those keywords somewhere on the page.

If you refine your search, this time by adding double quote (“) symbols around your keyword or phrase ..  you will notice a significant reduction in results returned.

To reduce this amount even further you can perform an advanced search and change the "terms appearing" dropdown to "In The Title Of The Page" or "In The URL Of The Page"

Google Trends, Search Volume Index

The term Search Volume Index is a pretty tricky term and I am not exactly sure I have a full handle on it.  

Google Trends (Another Google Product) analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results – our Search Volume Index graph.

Here is a great article that discusses the Google Trends platform.

WordPress Sitemaps

For Wordpress you need 4 different links to submit to Google Webmaster Tools.

• Your Domain/post-sitemap.xml 
• Your Domain/page-sitemap.xml 
• Your Domain/category-sitemap.xml 
• Your Domain/post_tag-sitemap.xml

SEO Tips, Webmaster Tools

There are essentially 3 different tools out there for the 3 main search engines Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Central.  I would suggest signing up for each service, that way it will allow you to submit websites and sitemaps directly to those search engines.

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to upload your sitemap or sitemaps depending on how many sites you manage.  This is a pretty cool feature, allowing you to know for centain that Google has your sitemap.

Yahoo Site Explorer also allows you to upload site feeds and website links.

Bing Webmaster Central.  Microsoft has jumped on board with Bing Webmaster Central.  I think they have a long way to go to catch up to Google and Yahoo though.  I wasn't that impressed.

Automating Your Blogger Feed

Now that you have a new Blog using Google Blogger, it is time to multiply your efforts by submitting your blog entries to Facebook, Twitter and Digg.

By taking these few steps, you will be multiplying your efforts and getting the word out.

The first thing you will need is your blogger sitemap.  The sitemap will be used when creating the automated feeds.

The following links will walk you through the process
Auto Digg your Blogger Posts
Auto Post to Facebook and Twitter using Dlvr.it