Forum Search Engine Optimization Help: SEO News

The following post is part of a series on How to Silo Your Website. You should review, How to Silo Your Website the Masthead, How to Silo Your Website the Breadcrumb, How to Silo Your Website the Content. For this part, we’ll be taking a look at the sidebar.

You want to keep the sidebar content dynamic …IMHO the sidebar is the second most abused and misused part of a website (the footer is the most abused which we’ll talk about in a later article). The sidebar is so abused because people stick too much third party content, widgets, social blocks, and simply too many links. In the past year I have worked on 5 client sites with between 300-500 links in the sidebar. No, that’s not a typo. That’s over 300 links in just the sidebar.

My first bit of advice: do some click tracking to see what people are clicking on. I like to use crazyegg (full disclosure: they are an advertiser, but I used them before they became one) or similar service that actually tracks X/Y coordinates on a page. See what people are clicking on and remove the elements that people don’t use.

Next make sure links to your most popular pages/content/products are there. Resist the temptation to go overboard. 10 is a good number; 15 is as much as I would recommend. If you are in a shopping environment, links to the main departments or categories is also a good idea. If you use faceted navigation (ie product/category links that change based on where you are or your last click), be careful. If the links are straight with no URL parameters, you have nothing to worry about. If the links change and pass parameters you are better off using no-follow. This isn’t to conserve page rank: it’s to prevent creating an infinite site from a search engine perspective. Using the rel=canonical tag is a good back up, but bandaid solutions are no substitute for bad architecture. You never want to leave thinking or decision making to chance with an algo.

Remove links to your service pages (privacy, contact, tos, etc) unless you need them for visual aesthetic (to balance out the content section). In fact, you want to reduce and remove as many links as you possibly can. We aren’t trying to conserve link equity but to control where it goes. It’s a slight but subtle difference.

If you are selling advertising, have affiliate links, or other banner-type content, this is probably where it is. If it’s what pays the bills and keeps the site running, keep it; if doesn’t convert then remove it.

If you have the ability to add in featured content THAT CHANGES daily, weekly, or (at the bare minimum) monthly, then do it. Also if you can add in related content links that change on a per page basis, then do it. You want to keep the sidebar content dynamic, with static and non parametric url’s. Bonus points if you can change the order based on templates or randomization.

So what are the takeaways here:

• Reduce the number of links to a minimum.
• Remove non essential elements, especially third party content, based on user testing.
• Include links to related or featured content, especially if it changes.
• Looks for ways to change or randomize content.

Next in the series: How to Silo Your Website: The Footer
photo credit: Eyeshotpictures

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review. How To Silo Your Website:The Sidebar


Related posts:

• How To Silo Your Website: The Breadcrumb Trail In Part 1 we looked at How To Silo Your...
• How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead One of the more powerful tools an SEO can use...
• How to Silo Your Website: The Content The following is part of the series How To Silo...
• Putting a Content Based Website Together We’ve covered long term content and short term content, information...
• Website Informational Pages Now that I’ve covered long term content and short term...

Advertisers:

• Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
• CrazyEgg.com - Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.
• BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
• Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
• Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
• Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
• Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
• Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
• Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
• KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
• Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
• TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=XPu36570rwE:dqIx2KC3T3k:V_sGLiPBpWU</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=XPu36570rwE:dqIx2KC3T3k:wF9xT3WuBAs</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=dnMXMwOfBR0</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=XPu36570rwE:dqIx2KC3T3k:aKCwKftKxY0</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=7Q72WNTAKBA</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=XPu36570rwE:dqIx2KC3T3k:D7DqB2pKExk</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=XPu36570rwE:dqIx2KC3T3k:JEwB19i1-c4</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=yIl2AUoC8zA</img>http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Wolf-howl/~4/XPu36570rwE

View the full article

http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/brBADSjoLmgKN-6b1FwPlFtBMas/0/di</img>http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/brBADSjoLmgKN-6b1FwPlFtBMas/1/di</img>

Remember those cute iPhone 4 Ads ? Well, someone’s just come up with their spoofs. Need I say more ? Check them out.

1. Baby 2. Smile 3. Sugar Daddy You can watch the series here with Manacus TV

Join Dailybloggr Community on FacebookApple iPhone 4 Ad Spoofs hit the Internet (And they&rsquo;re damn funny) was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.



Related posts:

• An iPhone SEO App to check your Google ranks
• Gorgeous WordPress theme for iPhone Apps !
• The iPhone 4 v/s Android &ndash; Which is better ?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DailyDose4me?i=4LhIVqmIAiI:Vnk8FF-0i1U:V_sGLiPBpWU</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DailyDose4me?i=4LhIVqmIAiI:Vnk8FF-0i1U:gIN9vFwOqvQ</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DailyDose4me?i=4LhIVqmIAiI:Vnk8FF-0i1U:F7zBnMyn0Lo</img>

View the full article

A while ago I wrote my case study on how I listened to Google and failed. The post got a lot of attention from the SEO community. Many people wondered whether natural link building was really dead and what was the future of building natural links. I’ll try to answer some of those questions in this post. The statements below are a mix of my opinion/my personal observations.


1. Is There a Universal Definition of ‘Natural Link Building’?


There’s one thing I’ve learned from some of the reactions of my previous post: Not all people have the same definition of what natural link building is.

Put in simple terms, a natural link is a link you get from someone who found your page and decided (on his/her own volition and  without any direct influence from you) to link to it.

Why did the person decided to link to you? Some of the possible reasons include:

- Not necessarily for the content but because you’re an authority in that topic

- For the valuable/controversial/funny content

- Or maybe s/he had a good day and wanted to link to a bunch of random folks on the web

As you can see, there are many reasons why someone would link ‘naturally’ to you. Valuable content is only one reason.


2. Natural Link Building: The Past


In my previous post, I mentioned this article on 25 Free People Search Engines as a case study of a successful link bait. The article got 140k+ views from StumbleUpon and also a bunch of editorial links (check Yahoo and OpenSiteExplorer for more details). Lists were quite popular back in 2008-2009 and you could write anything that was somewhat interesting as a list and get popular on Digg/Stumbleupon/Delicious.

Some SEOs realized this opportunity and started creating a bunch of these types of posts (SeoMoz is a good example. Rand once talked about how they went crazy with list posts during that time). After a while, the effectiveness of list posts as a link bait method reduced drastically because many people realized how powerful they were and everybody started creating their “top x ways to ____” type of articles.

Twitter and Facebook weren’t very popular back then, so you got a lot more links from unique root domains rather than re-tweets or Facebook ‘likes’.

Then images became quite popular (people love pictures more than text–not surprising) and a bunch of web design blogs suddenly appeared with their “30+ Beautiful ____” showcase posts. Just type “beautiful site:stumbleupon.com” or “beautiful site:digg.com” if you want to see how popular they were. As with lists, ‘showcase’ posts are also dying slowly, but their popularity lasted long enough to give rise to a whole new category of web design blogs (which are more like gallery resources, honestly).

By the way, I am talking about the ‘rule’ here. There are always exceptions. Some amazing list posts still go popular occasionally (Cracked.com is very good in making creative list posts).


3. Natural Link Building: The Present


The number of people who tried to get their posts to go viral (by writing list posts and publishing images) increased dramatically and, at the same time, Twitter and Facebook REALLY took off. People that wanted to ‘share good stuff’ found these services easier to use for sharing than having a WordPress or Blogspot blog. The result? If you create linkbait and it goes popular, then you should expect a lot of re-tweets/stumble thumbs-ups/Facebook ‘likes’ but a very small number of links from different unique root domains. Do these links from Facebook/Twitter carry any special importance?

Matt Cutts once said in a YouTube video that they rate links from Facebook and Twitter just like any other link! Yay!

One recent lesson I’ve learned about ‘niche’ link building is that you can get viral in your niche community. Take SEO and this blog, for example. I’ve witnessed how different SEOs follow each other and, in case someone has something interesting to share, then other people in the industry re-tweet him and the chain goes on. This is not the case for every niche market unfortunately.


4. What’s the Future of Natural Link Building? Is it DEAD?!??!
Okay, 3 points here:

• Many people who link ‘naturally’ have switched to Twitter/Facebook (this is from my personal observations)
• Matt Cutts said Google treats Facebook/Twitter links the same as any other link
• Thus, if you want to build natural links, you need to appeal to a VERY SMALL number of people who still own sites and want to link to other resources (very, very tiny minority)

This is, of course, a very ineffective strategy, which is why, in my opinion, you have an increasing number of people who go and hunt for links (that are not natural of course). They can get some great links with great content but the result is re-tweets and so on which aren’t very important in Google eyes.

PLUS, according to some SEOs, people that own websites became stingy because of the ‘do follow’ paranoia of ‘leaking PR,’ so that could be a big factor as well.


5. What Does the Future Hold?


I am pretty sure Google will start treating Facebook shares/Twitter re-tweets as more than just 1 ordinary link from a same domain. These links will probably become more important for ranking in the SERPs.

The only problem here is spam. If Google starts giving greater importance to Facebook/Twitter, they know people will start spamming these platforms like crazy and new markets will emerge where people will sell re-tweets/Facebook shares depending on the profile ‘authority’.

I hope you found this post to be useful.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review. Natural Link Building: Past, Present and (Predicting) The Future


Related posts:

• No More Link Begging: 4 Engagement Methods for Content-Based Link Building Link begging is the practice of identifying link prospects, usually...
• Hare Brained Link Building Ideas for Link Monkeys I’m a big fan of outside of the box thinking...
• Review of WeBuildPages Link Building Services The following is a sponsored post. When I announced I...
• Link Building Secrets In case you haven’t seen it Stoney deGeyter over at...
• Creative Link Building Ideas There’s lots of talk on the net right now that...

Advertisers:

• Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
• CrazyEgg.com - Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.
• BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
• Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
• Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
• Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
• Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
• Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
• Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
• KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
• Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
• TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=QMHFX1gfIZg:-TJ7wFyrgxA:V_sGLiPBpWU</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=QMHFX1gfIZg:-TJ7wFyrgxA:wF9xT3WuBAs</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=dnMXMwOfBR0</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=QMHFX1gfIZg:-TJ7wFyrgxA:aKCwKftKxY0</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=7Q72WNTAKBA</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=QMHFX1gfIZg:-TJ7wFyrgxA:D7DqB2pKExk</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?i=QMHFX1gfIZg:-TJ7wFyrgxA:JEwB19i1-c4</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Wolf-howl?d=yIl2AUoC8zA</img>http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Wolf-howl/~4/QMHFX1gfIZg

View the full article