Oftentimes we’re contacted by a potential client who’s really jazzed about starting a new campaign. In fact they are so pumped they’ve read all they can about search optimization and marketing, social media, viral content, digg, etc and they really want to get the ball rolling. Awesome! You get them signed up and everyone’s ready to roll. The site audit begins and their site is put through the checklist. Done! You report back with what you’ve found and their response is…”so what does this mean exactly?” Or, “we like what you’ve found but we LIKE the way our text looks as images”, or “what do you mean we can’t copy the text from all of our newspaper mentions and place them on our blog?”

Sigh…

This post is being written to help explain search engine optimization services, search engine marketing services, and the implemented tactics and strategies that go with them so we can hopefully put some of these reactions to bed. I want to help educate and make everyone’s lives a little easier. So here are a list of non-Wikipedia sites that have great glossaries on terms pertaining to search engine optimization, marketing, tactics, and general jargon. I did consider writing out these definitions here but why rehash what so many others have done so well. My favorite finds were:

SEOBook
Aaron continues to successfully build his mini-empire and I was not surprised to find this amazingly thorough glossary attached to his domain. He just about covers everything here. Quite a task and accomplishment.

SEMPO
SEMPO has a great glossary in their learning center. This one is a little more concise in terms of tech talk.

SEOmoz
Who doesn’t love these guys right? They have a page from their YOUmoz section that has a nice write-up of SEO jargon provided by David LaFerney

Webmaster World
Here is a nice user contributed list of various terms. The date range on the posts here is from July 2007 – August 2007 so it may be a little outdated. As you could imagine the total definition list isn’t really organized/alphabetized so you may have to browser search your sought phrase.

Besides Wikipedia these were the four best resources I could find. If you know of any others please submit them in the comments below.

Now let’s have a little fun. Let’s see how each glossary defines a certain term. How about social media?

SEOBook
Define: Social Media

“Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.”

SEMPO
Define: Social Media

“Sites where users actively participate to determine what is popular.”

SEOmoz
Define: Social Media

“Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.”

Webmaster World
Social Media not defined

I think I like David LaFerney’s from YOUmoz the best.

This post is an ode to Matt McGee’s post How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes. I found myself using this as a quick reference from time to time when first published. It was a great write-up that was very useful to many people. I always wanted to expand on this a bit and have the search community add to it so here’s my new and updated checklist for your review. If there’s anything I missed please add it in the comments below.

Contents
SEO Checklist
A: Homepage
B: Site
C: External

SEO Checklist
A1: Homepage - www.domain.com
1. Check for redirects and canonicalization issues
2. Choose http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com
3. Redirect domain.com/(index|main).(html|htm|php|cfm|asp) to domain.com

Apache redirects and editing .htaccess files:
domain.com to www.domain.com
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

www.domain.com/index.php to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

A2: Homepage – Navigation
1. Check for image, drop downs, javascript, image maps vs text navigation. Text is the best option.

A3: Homepage – Content
1. How much text is present? The more the better.
2. Check for keyword density in homepage content
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
3. Check for use of H2 tags and bold fonts (light/appropriate use is good on keywords)
4. There should be a sitemap present
5. Do a select all (ctrl + A) to find potentially hidden text
6. Check to see how search engines will view your site with SEO Browser. Make sure everything is crawlable.

B1: Site – Meta Tags
1. Check Title tags. Are they using keywords and are formatted correctly?

Brand authority formatting:
Brand Name or Domain | Keyword, Keyword & Keyword

Non brand authority formatting
Keyword, Keyword & Keyword | Brand Name or Domain

2. Check Descriptions for keywords and composition. Make sure the description gets to the point and speaks to the purpose/content on its respective page in the first couple sentences.

3. Make sure the keyword tag contains around 5 – 10 keywords. No more or less is really necessary.

4. Make sure there are no duplicate meta tags anywhere, site wide.

B2: Site – URL Formatting
1. Check url formatting. Dynamic URLs are bad. URLs that are too long will be truncated in Google SERPs.
2. URLs should contain keywords separated by hyphens.
3. Hyphens are more preferable than underscores
4. Keywords in URLs should match the content contained within the page they are leading to.

B3: Analytics
1. Make sure you have some sort of analytics installed. It doesn’t have to be Google analytics but do remember that every page within the site should contain the analytic tracking code.

B4: Site – Links
1. Links should contain keywords
2. Links should contain titles utilizing keywords
3. Anchor text, link keywords, link title, and page being linked to should be relevant to one another.
4. Site linking structure should be cyclical. There should be no dangling pages.
5. Use Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links

B5: Site – nofollows (advanced)
1. nofollow TOS, Privacy Policy, or other pages that don’t contribute to your site’s ranking.
2. If you know how to link funnel correctly this should be done. I haven’t written anything on this yet but you can consult Slightly Shady SEO or Andy Beard

B6: Site – Robots.txt
1. Check for robots.txt file. Does one exist?
2. See what’s being blocked and what’s not.
3. Make sure it’s written correctly (consult Sebastian’s Pamphlets for best advice)

B7: Site – Duplicate Content
1. Make sure there is no duplicate content within your site
2. Make sure there is no duplicate content on other domains. You can use CopyScape to check for dupe content.

B8: Site – PDF files
1. Does this site contain PDF files? If so these can be optimized with new titles, keywords, and comments. Use Adobe Acrobat Professional to edit PDFs.

B9: Site – Images
1. Images can have ALT tags. Make sure to utilize these appropriately with keywords. When implemented, your site may gain traffic from image search engines like Google Image Search.

C1: External – Indexation
1. Perform a site:domain.com search on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Compare what’s being indexed and what isn’t.
*Install FireFox Extension Search Status by Craig Raw
You’ll be able to easily perform this operative plus many other functions with the Search Status plugin.

C2: External – Backlinks
1. Perform a backlink count with the Search Status plugin.
2. You may also want to install Joost de Valk’s backlink checker plugin for FireFox to check the anchor text of your Backlinks within Yahoo Site Explorer or Google’s Webmaster tools.

So that’s about all I can think of for the time being. If I forgot anything please submit your additions to this checklist in the comments below.

Submitting press releases is a small part of an overall SEO campaign. Usually beneficial, especially if you opt for some of the paid services from more popular sites like PRWeb.com or PR.com. If you’re generating new, unique, and original content, you’ll want credit for it in one of two ways. You can either post it to your blog or post it through the press release and article networks but not both. I used to think both was ok as long you posted the content to your site first and allowed it to be indexed and then syndicated it throughout the PR and article sites. I was wrong. Duplicate content and authority enter into this indexing equation. Even if you post the content to your site first and allow it to be indexed, not only will Google display and give credit to the site with the most authority but it will also deindex your site’s URL that the content is on.

Here is a timeline of content generation, publication, and syndication:

1. Generated press release
2. Posted to corporate blog
3. Release is now indexed in Google
4. Submitted press release to 4 free press release sites (Backlinks included)
5. Press release sites have been indexed for content
6. The Release’s original URL on the corporate blog has been deindexed
7. Overall site rankings dropped for two keyword phrases found in the title of the release

This obviously stinks but all may not be lost here. There are Backlinks that are contained within the content of the release on the PR sites. These have not been processed yet by Google so I’m not sure if the presence of these will hurt or help. So even though we’ve been hurt content-wise we may still gain rank from the anchor text in the links. I’ll have to return with an update on this.

To spread the word and get indexed for your content, post to your site or the press release sites but never both. Where and when you post first doesn’t seem to matter.

I have an industrial manufacturing client that had has over 200 pdf’s on their site and each file was lacking any information other than the file name. Since each pdf is a mechanical drawing of the products they sell, they potentially had the ability to rank higher for these products just by adding the product name to the title tag of each pdf. When you optimize a pdf there are a number of different fields where you can enter information. In Adobe Acrobat, got to file > properties to open the editable fields. You’ll see Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords. In this case I simply added titles to all 200+ pdfs. The results have been amazing. We are now ranking higher for virtually every product in the client catalogue.

If you missed it, there was a great article over at Search Engine land about optimizing pdfs.

There are hundreds if not thousands of sites out there that will allow you post content. Some have been around longer than others and are sometimes more established which can potentially provide you with a louder voice when spreading the word. This Guide will help you get the most for your link building efforts and hopefully show you how to avoid spammy pitfalls while implementing your campaigns.

Definition
There are sites that are strictly for bookmarking, meaning that the text fields simply require the URL, Title, Description, and Tags, i.e. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Bluedot.us, Simpy, etc. However there are other sites that fall under social news (Reddit, Digg, Shoutwire), Social clipping (ClipClip.org, Clipmarks), How to Guides, Directories, List sites, and tons of niche sites that fall under these categories. So how do we make sense of all this noise so that we can most effectively leverage them? First we have to save, then organize.

Organization & Categorization
Different folks have different ways of organizing their campaigning efforts. For me, I use FireFox and store all my useful search marketing links as such:

You can see the large amount of subcategories that I have under link building. The most used categories are the Bookmarking (General) and Social News (General) but you can see that these verticals branch out to other niche sites like Social News (Shopping) and Social News (Tech). It’s important to make sure that the content you are submitting is relevant to the site you’re submitting to. If we submit content about baby products to the tech site we’ll obviously get zero attention and probably some angry readers. Additionally, this won’t help you build a presence within these sites. Since most of these sites have a social or sharing aspect to them, you’ll want to aim towards building a trusted profile. You’ll want to be seen as someone who is contributing to the site’s intent and not just peddling your wares.

Accounts & IP Addresses
It’s best practice to open an account in every site with the same username, password, and email address. This keeps things simple and you won’t be running around trying to remember the unique password you created for dogmeetscat.com. Also remember that most of these sites record your IP address and associate it with the username and password that you’ve created. If you create three accounts with three separate gmail addresses for dogmeetscat.com, they might know that these three accounts are coming from one IP and are most likely being used to spam the system. Don’t be surprised if you’re IP address gets banned if you’re doing this.

*If you have to be a dick you could use open wi-fi networks to create accounts. This way you can have 3 accounts for dogmeetscat.com and have a unique IP address for each account.

Fields: URL, Title, Description, and Tags
When bookmarking your content, be sure to change the Title and Description of your post for each site that you post to. This prevents the bookmarking sites from ranking for the content you’re trying to get your URL to rank for. It will also look less spammy, because there’s no way that 10 different people will submit the same URL with the same description. Maybe the same title but entering the same title and description for every site you post to will obviously indicate that a single person was submitting the same content to multiple sites.

Use common sense and practice these same methods (non-duplicitous) when submitting content to social news, directories, list sites, how to guides, wikis, etc. Oftentimes you won’t be able to add anchor text with your keyword phrase to these locations. If you can, great! If not, the next best thing is to make sure that the keyword(s) that you’re trying to rank for are contained within the URL of the content to be submitted.

How to expedite the bookmarking process
There are a few services out there that can help you post quicker by basically populating the javascript bookmarklet links of the bookmarking sites with your content and then displaying the posting link for your quick posting pleasure. Here are a known few:

http://socialposter.com/
Good but it’s slightly buggy when it processes the content for submission. It sometimes adds symbols to the information or removes commas. It also directs you towards using the same Title and Description for each post. User interface is pretty bland but it does a good job at speeding up a tedious process.

Alexa: 46, 261
Compete: 97,436
Yahoo! Backlinks: 6,658

http://www.onlywire.com/
Another mass bookmarking application. This one records your account information. However these guys seem rather shady because in their TOS they claim they have the right to add their own affiliate links into a user’s bookmarks.

Alexa: 5,122
Compete: 39,477
Yahoo! Backlinks: 51,294

http://www.addthis.com/
AddThis is a widget that blog users can add to the bottom of their posts. When you click on it, you can choose from a list of 34 different bookmarking sites to post to. This is not a web app, simply a widget.

Alexa: 3,206
Compete: 2,067
Yahoo! Backlinks: 3,199,868

We here at Squareoak would love to hear more information about this topic. If you have anything to add or know of other web applications that perform similar functions, we’d love to hear it.

Happy Bookmarking!

I have a couple clients that have very old domain names. One is from 1998 the other is 1999. Now these domains aren’t “old” per se just old relative to the internet.

It’s amazing how easy it is to optimize for these sites. Since they’ve been around for so long, small, simple changes in the title tag and description can make a world of difference. When optimizing for the site created in 1998, I did some keyword research and made some changes to the title tags, descriptions, alt tags, and link text. In less than 24 hours their highly targeted and competitive keywords jumped in ranking or were freshly indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN collectively.

This particular client also has a boat load of pdf files on their site that are numerically named and are lacking titles, descriptions, and keywords. I can’t wait to see what happens after I optimize those.

*To optimize a pdf file, simply open the pdf in Acrobat Professional, go to file > properties and you’ll see where you’ll be able to edit all the necessary information. Changing the file name itself to reflect what is contained within the document is good practice too.