anything you’ d normally do F irst, let’ s define authority: domain authority is the likelihood of a single domain to rank well. T he higher the rank the higher authority that site will have and vice a versa. H ere’ s how to do that: 1. L ink a cluster of pages by topic 2. Send more links to one particular page 3. Send domain-based ex ternal links to hero pages 4. Avoid cannibaliz ing keywords 5 . D rive ex ternal links to the hero page from relevant website 6. L ocate links high on a page 7 . Pictorial presentation to help you to understand the concept better. 8. F ix broken pages F irst, let’ s define authority: domain authority is the likelihood of a single domain to rank well. T he higher the rank the higher authority that site will have and vice a versa. H ere’ s how to do that: 1. L ink a cluster of pages by topic 2. Send more links to one particular page 3. Send domain-based ex ternal links to hero pages 4. Avoid cannibaliz ing keywords 5 . D rive ex ternal links to the hero page from relevant website 6. L ocate links high on a page 7 . Pictorial presentation to help you to understand the concept better. 8. F ix broken pages An ex clusive video with SEO and web marketing ex pert N eil Patel. D rive ridiculous amounts of leads to your blog and learn the 7 secrets of conversion rate optimiz ation. An ex clusive video with SEO ex pert N eil Patel. D rive ridiculous amounts of leads to your blog and learn the 7 secrets of conversion rate optimiz ation. This is an example of rotation use some fun 3D elements have you noticed it' s in 3D * ?
."' >' ";
You now have reference to the original source ( y ou ! ) of the content in your R SS feeds. A s always, check your work to make sure its been done correctly.
C reate Thank You’ s Some personalization and a thank you to your readers can go a long way. H ere’ s how to set up a simple message in your feed. G o to O ptimize
B rowserF riendly
Content O ptions
Click ‘ enable’ and enter a personal message! Time Your R S S
Emails
Time Your R S S
Emails
E ncourage more opens from your R SS email list by controlling send time. G o to P ublicize
E mail Subscriptions
D elivery O ptions
Select your timezone and the best time for your audience. 9 am- 1 1 am is often a good choice. R edirect W
ordPress R S S
to Feedburner
You may have a standard R SS feed built into W ordP ress. You may even have subscribers to it! W ith the help of a P lugin called “ F eedburner R edirect” we’ re going to make sure everything is going through feedburner. You can find the plugin here -
http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/te n tb l ogge rs- fe e db u rn e r- rss- re dire ct- pl u gin /
[1]
Install it in your W
[2]
A ctivate it.
ordP ress setup.
E nter your feedburner UR L in both fields. A nd you’ re done!
VIDEO SITEMAPS
NO 13
VIDEO SITEMAPS
If you have any sort of video on your website or blog, and especially if it’ s marked up with metadata, you need to have a video sitemap. T his gets your video content noticed, processed and index ed much faster by G oogle and B ing. O PTI O N A
- M
A NUA L
G ENER A TI O N
If you have a small site with only a few videos, and you’ re not adding them all of the time, you can easily generate your video X M L sitemap manually. F irst, I want to provide you with the skeleton template of the X M L structure. You can cut and paste the template and then add your own data. T his is j ust the most basic template with the req uired fields. STEP ONE
C reate an Empty X M
L
File
Create a file, the name doesn’ t matter, but I like to use: sitemap_ video.x ml T hen save it in your root directory, like:
http://www.q u icksprou t.com/site map_ v ide o.x ml
A s mentioned, it doesn’ t matter so much what you name it or even where you put it, but you’ ll need to know this later for when you submit the sitemap to W ebmaster T ools.
STEP TWO
Paste This I nto the X M
L
File
Many of the properties in the template are optional, but I wanted you to have the whole thing :-) Required Fields URL of Page Video File URL or Player URL Title Description Thumbnail So let’s fill in our example template. I’ve stripped out all the other properties for now, so you can clearly see it with only the required elements; Basic Code for One Video in XML Video Sitemap
Adding Additional Properties There are many additional properties you can add to your video sitemap, such as;
Let’s add a few of these back into our example, so you can see them in action!
L et’ s add a few of these back into our ex ample, so you can see them in action!
M any of these should be self ex planatory. You can always check G oogle’ s documentation for further ex planation of all the individual fields allowed.
STEP THREE
O ption A S ubmit it to W
S ubmit Your S itemap to G oogle W
ebmaster Tools
ebmaster Tools D irectly
T his is the preferred method to submitting any x ml sitemap to G oogle. S ign in to W e b maste r T ool s V ie w the profil e for y ou r we b site N av igate to S ite C on figu ration - > S ite maps Click “ A dd/ T est a Sitemap” in the right hand corner E nter the name of your sitemap and hit submit O ption B A dd The Following L ine To Your R obots.tx t File Sitemap: http://www.e x ampl e .com/site map_ v ide o.x ml L ike with any x ml sitemap, if your robots.tx t file set up correctly, G oogle with find and process your video x ml sitemaps through having found it in robots.tx t
NO 14
.HTACCESS HACKS
T hese tips only work if your client is using A pache. If your client is using W indows IIS, then look at IIS hacks. [1]
L ocate your .htaccess file on your server. ( See “ H ow to locate .htaccess on your server” )
[2] O nce you’ ve located it, edit the file using a tex t editor. If you are using W indows, I recommend N otepad. If you’ re using M ac, download a free tex t editor like T ex tW rangler. [3] I n your htaccess file decide what you want to do, then add a line of code: To create a custom 40 4 page Use “ E rrorD ocument” and put the UR L to your custom 4 0 4 page at the end. E x ample: E rrorD ocument 4 0 4 http://www.e x ampl e .com/my - cu stom- 4 0 4 - page .html To password protect a folder A . F irst, you will need to first need to create an .htpasswd file. T he easy way is to use this online tool to create it: http://www.tool s.dy n amicdriv e .com/password/ B . E nter your desired username on the left, and the password you want that person to have on the right. C. In the “ path to .htpasswd” box , put it in a folder that isn’ t accessible to the public. Usually, it’ s safe to put in your home directory like “ / home/ myusername” D . Click submit and put the downloaded .htpasswd file into “ / home/ myusername” E . N ow that you’ re done that, type this into your .htaccess file AuthUserF ile /home/myusername/.htpasswd AuthN ame EnterPassword AuthT ype B asic req uire user some_ users_ name
R eplace “ some_ users_ name” with the username that will be allowed into this folder. To block users by I P address T ype these four lines into your .htaccess file: O rder allow, deny D eny from 111.222.333.444 D eny from 5 5 5 .666.7 7 7 .888 Allow from all
In the lines that say “ deny from, ” replace the ex ample IP addresses “ 111.222.333.444” with the real IP address you want to block. To block users by referrer A dd these three lines to your .htaccess file: R ewriteEngine O n R ewriteC ond % { H T T P_ R EF ER ER } R ewriteR ule .* - [ F ]
somedomain\ .com [ N C ]
R ewriteEngine R ewriteC ond % { R ewriteC ond % { R ewriteC ond % { R ewriteR ule .*
somedomain\ .com [ N C ,O R ] anotherdomain\ .com [ N C ,O R ] 3rdD omain\ .com [ N C ]
If you want to block more than one referrer, add more R ewriteCond lines like this: O n H T T H T T H T T -
P_ R EF ER ER } P_ R EF ER ER } P_ R EF ER ER } [ F ]
N otice that every line ex cept for the last one should end in “ [ N C ,O R ] ”
Notice that every line except for the last one should end in “ [NC,OR]” To make something other than index.html be the default page. Let’s say you want “home.html” to be your default page. Use this line in the htaccess file: DirectoryIndex. home.html
To 301 redirect an old domain to a new domain Add these lines to your htaccess file
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]
Replace "olddomain.com" with your old domain name. This will 301 redirect links form your old domain to your new one with the WWW in front of it. To prevent someone hotlinking resources on your website Add these lines to your htaccess file
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F]
Replace mydomain.com with your domain name. These lines will prevent someone from hot linking GIF, JPG, JS, and CSS files. To redirect all pages from HTTPS:// to HTTP:// Add these lines to your htaccess file
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^80$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/$1 [NC,R=301,L]
Replace domain.com with your own domain. To redirect all pages from HTTP:// to HTTPS:// Add these lines to your htaccess file
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [NC,R=301,L]
Replace domain.com with your own domain. To redirect one URL from HTTPS:// to HTTP:// Assume the URL is http://www.domain.com/mypage.html
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^80$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com/mypage.html [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/mypage.html [NC,R=301,L]
DETECTING GOOGLEBOT
NO 15
T here may be many reasons why you’ d want to detect G ooglebot as the User A gent. T hese can be left to your imagination :) [ 1 ] C ut and paste the following code anywhere in the < body> of your document> if( strstr( strtolower( $ _ SER V ER [ ' H T T P_ USER _ AG EN T ' ] ) , "googlebot") ) { }
// what to do
[ 2 ] R eplace with your content R eplace “ / / what to do” with whatever you want to happen. Tip: T o make it H T M L D o this; if( strstr( strtolower( $ _ SER V ER [ ' H T T P_ USER _ AG EN T ' ] ) , "googlebot") ) { ? > Put your H T ML here
L et’ s break apart each piece of the P H P . if( condition) { }
- this is j ust a simple function that says “ if x is true, do y” .
N ow we’ ll work from the inside of the nested statement out. ‘ H T T P_ USER _ AG EN T ’ - this ex tracts a browser specific ID
string
$ _ SER V ER - this is an array with information such as headers, paths, and script
locations, which is created by the web server
strtolower - returns string with all alphabetic characters converted to lowercase. strstr - returns part of haystack string starting from and including the first
occurrence of needle to the end of haystack { }
// what to do
forward slashes / / are j ust used to make a comment. A ll we’ re saying here, is to put whatever you want to happen between the curly brackets. If you like visuals better - this is a good ex planation of the pieces of code;
NO 16
ADD CUSTOM SEARCH ENGINE TO YOUR SITE
A
custom G oogle search on your site can be a powerful feature, yet still many people are not using it. I’ m going to walk you through the steps of installing it on your site. G o to - http://www.googl e .com/cse STEP ONE
C ompose a Title and D escription
A dd S ites To B e I ncluded in S earch
STEP TWO
T his is where a little technical know how applies.
You can’ t j ust simply add the site UR L - you must include an asterisk ( * ) after the UR L for it to search the entire site, like this; http://www.q u icksprou t.com/*
S elect Edition and C onfirm
STEP THREE
A fter we have done all this, we’ re given the opportunity to try out the custom search engine before installing it on our site.
LET’S LET’S
CHECK IT OUT
A
search for [ twitter tips] in our custom engine shows good results and variety among the sites in the engine. ( N ote the ads will be present unless you pay for a premium version) . N ow it’ s time to install in your site!
I NS TA L L I NG
C US TO M
S EA R C H I N YO UR
S I TE
T his type of installation is going to either be a new page or a new post. L et’ s use a new page in this ex ample, however a new post will work in the same way. [1]
Navigate to a “ new page”
[2] Edit in HTM
W
L
M
ode
e’ re going to edit in H T M L mode since we’ ll be pasting J avaScript code into the page. [3] Paste C ode
W
e’ re going to edit in H T M L mode since we’ ll be pasting J avaScript code into the page. [3] Paste C ode
LET’S
PREVIEW IT
NO 17
MULTILINGUAL MARKUP AND GOOGLE TRANSLATE
I’ m going to show you a way to allow visitors who speak any language to enj oy
NO 17
MULTILINGUAL MARKUP AND GOOGLE TRANSLATE
I’ m going to show you a way to allow visitors who speak any language to enj oy your site, with the installation of G oogle T ranslate. T his is fairly new, and not many people are doing it, so its still a good time to get in early. N avigate to: http://tran sl ate .googl e .com/tran sl ate _ tool s
PHASE I
GETTING THE CODE T he first phase of getting translate running on your site, is to select all the options and generate the code snippet.
STEP ONE
Translate Page or Part of Page? F or most of you, you’ re going to want to “ translate the whole page” . In very specific circumstances where you may have a section of tex t in a different language you have the option to translate j ust a section of your page.
S elect L anguage of Your W
ebpage
STEP TWO
A gain, for most of us that’ s going to be E nglish.
STEP THREE
S how O ptional S ettings I recommend using optional settings to completely customize your translation ex perience on your site. You can select ex actly which languages your page can be translated to.
You can select how the translate box will
You can select how the translate box will display on your site. I personally like “ inline” and “ dropdown only” .
T he you’ ve got some more advanced setting choices. H ere we’ ve chosen to automatically display the banner to people who need to translate the page. A nd we’ ve select to track the usage in G oogle A nalytics.
Q UI CK TI P: F AS T W AY TO FIND YOU R G OOG L E A N A L Y T I C S I D 1. 2. 3. 4.
G O T O Y OU R WEBPAG E V I E W S O URCE C O N TRO L F (I N CHRO M E) TO FI N D TEXT S E A RC H F OR “ U A-” (WI TH THE DASH)
A fter you’ ve made all of your selections you should see the completed snippet of code.
Preview The Page You can do a q uick preview of your translate button before you go to copy the code and add it to your site.
Preview The Page You can do a q uick preview of your translate button before you go to copy the code and add it to your site.
PHASE II
INSTALLING THE CODE ON YOUR SITE N ow that we’ ve got the code ready, it needs to be installed on your site. If you’ re running a content management system like W ordP ress, this should be fairly easy. W e’ re j ust going to locate the spot where the code needs to be inserted.
STEP ONE
D ecide W
here You W
ant To Translate B ox To A ppear
T here’ s likely to be two basic places you’ ll decide to install the box . O ption A
O ption B
W
W
ould be somewhere in the header, like here on Q uickSprout;
STEP TWO
ould be somewhere in a sidebar, like here on Q uicksprout;
I nstalling The C ode I n The Header [option A ] A
q uick look at the source code again, will give you a good idea where the code needs to go;
STEP TWO
I nstalling The C ode I n The Header [option A ] A
q uick look at the source code again, will give you a good idea where the code needs to go;
You can see, it needs to go inbetween the search box and the logo. [1]
L og I nto W
[2]
ordPress
[2] Navigate to the “ editor” [3] S elect “ Header” [4] Paste Translate C ode I nto Header.php File
[3]
L ocate the place in the code where your translate box needs to go and paste the snippet in the header.php file and save.
[4]
[1] STEP TWO
I nstalling the C ode in a S idebar. [option B ]
T his option is a little easier, because you will likely be able to j ust create a new tex t widget. [1]
[2]
Navigate to your widgets
[2] A dd a new “ Tex t W
idget” to your sidebar
[3] Paste the Translate C ode I nto Your W A ll done! N ow visitors of any language can enj oy your site!
idget
[3]
NO 18
BLOCK POTENTIALLY MALICIOUS OR HARMFUL LINKS TO YOUR SITE
O ccasionally a hacker or even j ust someone inex perienced without malicious intent will send a back link over to your site with a q uery parameter attached to the end of it. It might look something like the following: http://www.q u icksprou t.com/? n e il pate l scam
( P lease don’ t link to me or anyone else like that) A nd the malicious q uery string can end up on different pages: http://www.q u icksprou t.com/page /2 /? n e il pate l scam http://www.q u icksprou t.com/page /3 /? n e il pate l scam
T hese pages can get index ed as such, and could potentially replace the real pages in their index . T his is unlikely, but in either case, you may need a way to fix this if it happens. H ere’ s a bit of .htaccess code to do so: #
F I X B AD L I N K S
S imply do the following: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5 ]
M ake sure the .htaccess is in your root directory. P lace this bit of code at the bottom on the .htaccess file. R eplace “ q uerystring” with the malicious q uerystring being used. R eplace ex ample.com with your site’ s UR L T o add multiple q uerystrings use the “ pipes” ( | ) as an “ or” ex pressions: ( neilpatelscam| q uicksproutripoff| badblogger) for the q uerystring. [6 ] F inally, run a site: q uery in G oogle a week or two later, such as: site:q uicksprout.com/ ? neilpatelscam to see if they’ ve been removed from the index .
NO 19
BROWSER PLUGINS FOR ON-SITE ANALYSIS
B rowser plugins can greatly speed up your workflow and efficiency. I’ m going to show you some plugins for G oogle Chrome, and a little bit about how to use them in more advanced ways. T his section of browser plugins revolves around the ones that help optimize your sites accessibility and index ation. F irst, here’ s the list. B roken L ink Checker
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /oj kcdipcgfae kb e ae l aapakgn j fl fgl f
W
eb D eveloper
http://chrispe de rick.com/work/we b - de v e l ope r/
R edirect P ath Checker
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /aomidfkchockcl dhb kggj okdkke b mdl l
SE O moz T oolbar
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /e akacpaij cpapn dcfffdgphdiccmpkn p
Chrome Sniffer
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /homgcn aoacgigpkkl j j j e kpign b l ke ae
G oogle A nalytics D ebugger
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /j n kmfdil e e l hofj cij ame phohj e chhn a
M icroformats for Chrome
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /oal b ifkn mcl b n mj l l j de mhj j l kmppj j l
R ulers G uides and E yedropper Color P icker
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /b j pn gj gkahhfl e j n e e mihpb n fdoafoe h
W
ord Count
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /kmn dj oipob j fj b hocpoe e j j imchn b j j e
Source K it
https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /iie e l dj dihkpoapgipfke oddj ckopgj g? hl = e n - U S
I’ m going to show you how to use some of these in an advanced way.
B roken L inks C hecker N ot only is the broken links checker a great plugin to find broken links q uickly on your site, but you can use it in creative ways on other people’ s sites to get ideas for linkbuilding and prospecting. F or ex ample, try running it on the sitemap of a competitor’ s website. H ere’ s how: [1] F ind a competitor with an H T M L sitemap. F or this ex ample I’ m going to randomly use www.bizchair.com and their sitemap is http://www.b iz chair.com/site - map.html
[2] R un the L ink Checker Click the icon for the ex tension W ait for it to find the broken links - in this case there are q uite a few.
N ot only is the broken links checker
N ot only is the broken links checker a great plugin to find broken links q uickly on your site, but you can use it in creative ways on other people’ s sites to get ideas for linkbuilding and prospecting.
C hrome S niffer T his plugin automatically shows you the CM S or script library a website uses. E x tremely handy if you are looking to reach out to only W ordP ress site owners, for ex ample. A s you browse the web, the icon to the far right of the UR L will change to match which CM S or library is being used. F or ex ample, you can see that my site is built on W with D rupal
ordP ress and here is a site built
R edirect Path C hecker T his plugin will automatically alert you if you were taken to a page via any kind of redirect. Can be very useful when browsing your site, in the case that you are internally linking to outdated UR L s ( or ex ternally for that matter) F or ex ample, I j ust found on my site this link to G izmodo 3 0 2 redirects: H ow did I know? B ecause the plugin alerted me to the 3 0 2 .
A nd then you can click on the icon and it will show you the redirect ( or series of redirects) that the browser took to get to a page.
The S EO moz Toolbar & Plugin You can do many things with the M oz plugin. A you might use it to look for are:
few of the more advanced things
Q uickly finding followed vs nofollowed links O r finding the country and IP address for the website
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER ONE! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER TWO: SITE SPEED & PERFORMANCE
TAKE ME TO
INTRODUCTION
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER TWO
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
BY NEIL PATEL
SEO
AND SUJAN PATEL
02
CHAPTER 02
SITE SPEED & PERFORMANCE T he first section covered how to make your site crawlable and accessible. T hat’ s a fantastic first step, once accomplished, to make your site better than many others on the web. N ow we’ re going to crank it up a level and help make your site faster and perform more efficiently. T his is not only great for user ex perience but search engines love it to. F ollow this section straight through for some tips to get your site up to speed.
NO 1
MEASURING YOUR SITE SPEED
P age speed or page load time is crucial these days, not only for a possible small boost in rankings, but because u se rs wil l l ov e y ou . P roviding a fast ex perience for visitors is essential! W
e’ re going to cover how you can measure your site speed through G oogle P age Speed O nline.
STEP ONE
G o To G oogle PageS peed O nline
G o to https://de v e l ope rs.googl e .com/page spe e d/
R un The Tool O n Your Homepage
STEP TWO
R un The Tool O n Your Homepage
STEP TWO
T his gives you an overall score, and being your homepage is a good gauge of your site as a whole. T hen you can drill down into the list of prioritized issues;
You should focus on the high and medium priority items first. Click on each item to get the details.
T he tools gives you detailed suggestions for each item. F ix ing many of the common issues is covered later in this document. F or now, we’ re simply running the tool to diagnose any issues.
STEP THREE
R un the Tool O n I nner Pages ( E sp ecially T hose T hat M
ight B e D ifferent F rom
T he H om
I have a page on my site, Q uickSprout, which is entirely different than most of the other pages - http://www.q u icksprou t.com/pro/ So I would also want to run the P ageSpeed tool on this page to look any differences, especially because it’ s an important sales page.
Test Your S ite For M Click the “ mobile” tab top right;
O B I L E S ite S peed
ep age)
STEP FOUR
Test Your S ite For M
O B I L E S ite S peed
Click the “ mobile” tab top right;
R emember to test your inner pages as well;
NO 2
TRACK PAGE LOAD IN ANALYTICS
You may know that you can also track page load speed within analytics. B ut you may not know of a few little ex tras you can do along with this. W
e’ re going to cover doing this two ways: [1] Tracking within W ordPress [2] Tracking within a Non W ordPress site
SETTING UP TRACKING IN WORDPRESS STEP ONE
I nstall the Normal Tracking C ode
W
You probably all know how to install the normal analytics tracking in W ordP ress, and you may even know how to install the page speed code snippet as well. e’ re using the G oogle A nalyticator P lugin for this. A gain, this is likely very basic, but j ust a reminder. Install the tracking code here.
NEXT B efore we configure the page speed part, we’ re j ust going to be sure you’ ve configured the user tracking correctly. M ight as well, since we’ re in here, right?
T o do this, follow these simple three steps; [1]
S elect “ no”
[2] C heck which users you do NO T want to track for traffic ( I l ike j u st admin )
[3] S elect “ R emove” - this is the easiest method
NEXT T he site speed portion. Its made so easy in this analytics plugin.
J ust be sure its “ enabled” . You might think that was easy, and this is an advanced guide. N ow that we have the basics setup, let’ s add some more important features.
S T E P T W O S et S ample R ate
N ot many people know to do this, but you can set your sampl e rate . N ormally, G oogle A nalytics does not track a very large percentage of your site speed data ( on l y 1 % b y de fau l t) — so if you have a small site, you could potentially be missing out on a lot of important data.
T his gets installed before tracker initializ ation, so be sure to put it in the correct box . H ere’ s the code snippet ( T he A sync snippet) ; _ gaq .push( [ ' _ setSiteSpeedSampleR ate' , 5 ] ) ;
N otice the number ‘ 5 ’ . T his is the new sample rate — 5 % of all visits. F or a small site, that receives less than about 1 0 , 0 0 0 visits a month, feel free to crank that up to 5 0 or even 1 0 0 , but only a reasonable amount to collect the data you need. B ut please note, that if your site receives more than 1 0 K automatically only collect a 1 % sample.
hits a day, G oogle will
It is also recommended to keep your sample size as low as possible but large enough to collect data.
STEP THREE
C heck S ource C ode
You should always check your source code to be sure its rendering correctly. ( R e me mb e r, don ’ t che ck it whil e l ogge d in to W ordP re ss, b e cau se as an admin y ou wil l b e e x cl u de d from se e in g the code ) .
STEP THREE
C heck S ource C ode
You should always check your source code to be sure its rendering correctly. ( R e me mb e r, don ’ t che ck it whil e l ogge d in to W ordP re ss, b e cau se as an admin y ou wil l b e e x cl u de d from se e in g the code ) .
You should see the Sample R ate code j ust above the T rack P ageview code, as shown in the screenshot.
02
SETTING UP TRACKING IN NON WORDPRESS
T his is a very similar process, but we’ re going to lay it all out specifically so you can see it.
STEP ONE
L ocate Your G oogle A nalytics
D epending on how your custom site may be set up, you might have a .php file that handles the header ( l ike in W ordP re ss) or you may have static H T M L files with the header in each file ( in which case y ou wil l hav e to u pdate e v e ry fil e ) . O ur ex ample will have a header.php file.
STEP TWO
A dd Page L oad Time C ode
T his is all pretty basic, but j ust make sure you have the page load time code added in analytics;
Your analytics will look like the following, with the page load code bolded; <script type="tex t/j avascript"> var _ gaq
= _ gaq
| |
[ ] ;
Your analytics will look like the following, with the page load code bolded; <script type="tex t/j avascript"> var _ gaq _ gaq _ g a q
_ gaq = .push( [ .push( [ . p u s h ( [
_ gaq | | [ ] ; ' _ setAccount' , ' UA-15 89983-1' ] ) ; ' _ trackPageview' ] ) ; ' _ t r a c k P a g e Lo a d Ti m e ' ] ) ;
( function( ) { var ga = document.createElement( ' script' ) ; ga.type = ' tex t/j avascript' ; ga.async = true; ga.src = ( ' https:' == document.location.protocol ? ' https://ssl' ' http://www' ) + ' .google-analytics.com/ga.j s' ; var s = document.getElementsB yT agN ame( ' script' ) [ 0] ; s.parentN ode.insertB efore( ga, s) ; } ) ( ) ;
STEP THREE
:
A dd S ample R ate C ode
N ex t, we’ ll add the same sample rate code;
T he code again is; _ gaq .push( [ ' _ setSiteSpeedSampleR ate' , 5 ] ) ;
A nd you use the number ( in this case 5 ) to control the percentage of the site being tracked for page speed.
WHERE TO FIND THE REPORT You will view this data by going to; Content
O verview
Site Speed
M ost people miss this nex t step! G o to “ page timings”
and click on “ technical”
NO 3 STEP ONE
USING YAHOO’S YSLOW PLUGIN I nstall YS low
G o to http://y sl ow.org/ Install the YSlow plugin in your browser ( pre tty mu ch an y thin g b e side s I n te rn e t E x pl ore r) .
STEP TWO
O pen and R un YS low
T his is all pretty basic, but j ust make sure you have the page load time code added in analytics;
www.zappos.com
You’ ll notice there are three rulesets to choose from; [1] YS low ( V 2) - R uns the full set of 23 rules [2] C lassic ( V 1) - R uns the first 13 rules [3] S mall S ite or B log - R uns 14 rules that apply to small sites I would use small site or blog only if you’ re getting less than about 1 0 , 0 0 0 visits a month. O therwise use YS low ( V 2) if you’ re getting over 1 0 , 0 0 0 visits a month. L oad the page you want to test. H it “ R un T est” .
STEP THREE
R eading The R esults
O verall performance score - You should strive for an 8 5 ( B ) .
A lso, note that you can filter the report of the type of result. A s a strategy of prioritization, I would focus on the F ’ s first.
name:
is seo? 1 . what w? t i s y s lo 2 . wha ts? req ues H T T P r e w e f e ? 3 . mak wtowrk very ne li e d t n a conte 4 . Use href d SR C h gzip? 5 . A voi nts wit e n o p om press c 6 . Com top? CSS at 7 . P ut kups? N S lo o D e c u 8 . R ed
E ach error provides a short ex planation and a link to read more information on the Yahoo D eveloper site.
N otice the first error returned in YSlow? M ake F ewer H T T P R eq uests “ T his page has 2 3 e x te rn al J av ascript scripts. T ry comb in in g the m in to on e . T his page has 7 e x te rn al sty l e she e ts. T ry comb in in g the m in to on e . T his page has 1 9 e x te rn al b ackgrou n d image s. T ry comb in in g the m with C S S sprite s.” T his is very common, and it is because the CSS and J S files are not optimized and minified. C he ck ou t the se ction ” U sin g L E S S to optimiz e C S S ” for how to improv e the se are as. L et’ s tackle one of the easiest win areas: reducing large images.
NO 4
FINDING LARGE IMAGES TO REDUCE
L arge images are often the biggest culprit when it comes to slow site speed. I’ m going to show you a few ways to find the worst offenders so you can take action and reduce them.
01
GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH
T hat’ s right! You can find large images within G oogle image search. T his is a q uick method to catch any low hanging fruit.
STEP ONE
G o To G oogle I mage S earch
image s.googl e .com images.google.com
D oA
S ite S earch
STEP TWO
site:q uicksprout.com shows me all the images from my site G oogle has index ed;
images.google.com
S hut O ff S afe S earch
STEP THREE
S hut O ff S afe S earch W
STEP FOUR
STEP THREE
e want to be sure we’ re getting all the images in results.
Filter B y S iz e
Start with a conservative number, and filter for images larger than 6 4 0 x 4 8 0 .
STEP FIVE
L ook at R esults
W
hen you’ re looking at results, see if you spot any images that end up as being “ large” that you know shouldn’ t be. You know they’ re probably being resized in the CSS or H T M L and should be reduced to the actual size you want. H ere are the results. T his one image caught my attention;
images.google.com
A nd you can see when clicking on the photo, the actual size is much to large
T his is a really q uick method to find some really obvious ones. L et’ s do some approaches that work much better at scale.
02
USE SCREAMING FROG SEO SPIDER
W
e’ re going to use Screaming F rog to crawl a site and show us the largest images by file size.
STEP ONE
C rawl The S ite
If you haven’ t already, crawl the site you want to check. T hen view images
F ilter by those over 1 0 0 kb
Sort by size
E x port to .csv
Use the spreadsheet as you track your progress to reducing images. You may have a lot of large images, and reducing them could take a few sessions!
N 5 O
GOOGLE CLOSURE TO OPTIMIZE FOR SPEED
W
hen you minify your J avaScript and turn it into a single file you increase the speed of your website because it’ s only one small download instead of many larger ones. T his tutorial will help you install G oogle Closure T ool and minify all of your J avaScript. [1]
G o to the G oogle C ompiler closure website T he website is: http://code .googl e .com/p/cl osu re - compil e r/
[2] C lick on the download T he download is the link that says “ compiler- latest.zip” images.google.com
[3] O pen the Z I P file ON A MAC O N the A Psame C D ouble click on the Z IP file. It will create a folder with name containing a “ J A R ” file.
Google Drive
compiler-latest
compiler.jar
Desktop
compiler-latest.zip
COPYING
Applications
README
Documents Downloads inbox
[4] C opy the J A R
file to the folder where all your J avaS cript is located
In this ex ample, we dragged the compiler.j ar file to the folder where our J avaScript is located.
Google Drive
compiler-latest
compiler.jar
Desktop
compiler-latest.zip
COPYING
Google Drive
README
Desktop
Applications
favicon.iso
application.js
img
bootstrap.js
javascripts
bootstrap.min.js
Documents
Applications
job-ques
compiler.jar
Downloads
Documents
robots.txt
d3.min.js
inbox
Downloads
stylesheets
extensions.js
inbox
[5 ] O pen a command line window
jquery_spinner.js
[5 ] O pen a command line window ON A MAC
G o to your F inder, then open A pplications > Utilities > T erminal
Google Drive
TimeTracker
Podcast Capture
Desktop
TinkerTool
RAID Utility
Applications
TinyUmbrella
Remote Install Mac OS X
Documents
Twitter
Spaces
Utilities
System Profiler
Vagrant
Terminal
Downloads inbox
ON A WINDOWS
Click on Start, type in “ command prompt” , click on “ command prompt”
[6 ] C hange to the folder where your J avaS cript is located ON A MAC
T ype in “ ~ / ” then the folder where your J avaScript files are located. In this ex ample, my J avaScript was in the home directory under a folder called code, then os2 , then public, then j avascripts.
ON A WINDOWS
T ype in “ cd \ ” then the folder where your J avaScript files are located.
[7 ] Type in the J ava command to create your minified J avaS cript file ON BOTH WINDOWS AND MAC:
T ype: j ava -j ar compiler.j ar --j s j q uery.j s
j q uery_ spinner.j s --j s_ output_ file output.j s”
R eplace “ j q uery.j s” and “ j q uery_ spinner.j s” with the names of the J avaScript files you want to minify. If order is important, type them in the correct order they need to go in. R eplace “ output.j s” In this ex ample, we compiled j q uery.j s and a plugin called “ j q uery_ spinner.”
[8] Add the minified JavaScript file back into your project In this example, we added line 8 to add the JavaScript back into this HTML file.
[9] Finally, test your application to make sure everything is still running
NO 6
OPTIMIZING CSS AND JS FILES
In sections two and three we covered how to evaluate the performance of your site. H ere we’ re going to cover an advanced way to optimize CSS and J S files, with “ L E SS” . L ES S is a dynamic stylesheet language that creates CSS for you. T he advantage of using L E SS is that a L E SS compiler will automatically make your CSS files smaller so they are faster to download for your users. STEP ONE
D ownload and I nstall L ess A pplications
L ess has a free application you can download to compress your CSS files FOR MACS G o to http://in cide n t5 7 .com/l e ss/ and download L ess.A pp.
http://incident57.com
FOR WINDOWS G o to http://win l e ss.org/ and download the W
inL ess application
http://winless.org
O pen the L ess A pplication
STEP TWO
O pen the L ess A pplication
STEP TWO
FOR MACS
D ouble click on the download and move the L ess application to your applications folder.
Google Drive
Less
Desktop
Less.zip
Applications Documents Downloads inbox
STEP THREE
O pen the Folder W here your C S S Files are and R ename your C S S Files as “ .less”
In this ex ample, we took a W them all with “ .less” .
ordpress theme’ s CSS files and renamed
BEFORE
AFTER
Google Drive
index.php
404.php
Google Drive
index.php
404.php
Desktop
modernist
archive.php
Desktop
modernist
archive.php
pagelines
editor-style.css
pagelines
editor-style.less
readme.txt
footer.php
readme.txt
footer.php
twentyeleven
ie-fixes.less
twentyten
index.php
Applications Documents Downloads inbox
STEP THREE
twentyeleven twentyten
ie-fixes.css
Applications Documents
index.php
Downloads
style.css
inbox
D rag the folder with your L ES S into the L ess application
files
In this ex ample, we’ re dragging the folder that contains the L E SS files into the application:
style.less
STEP FOUR
C lick on C ompiler, then C ompile A ll
T his will create new CSS files that have been minified for faster downloads.
STEP FIVE
L ess will A utomatically M inify your L ES S Files into C S S Files W hile it’ s O pen
W
hile the application is open, every time you change your less files, it will automatically update the minified CSS for you.
Your L E SS files will look normal so you can still edit them:
B ut your minified CSS files will look like this:
B ut your minified CSS files will look like this:
In this ex ample we shaved off 2 k in file size. W hile it’ s only a small difference doing many small optimization tweaks will add up and give your users a much faster download.
NO 7 [1]
INSTALLING GOOGLE’S MOD_SPEED FOR APACHE
I nstalling G oogle’ s M
O D _ S PEED
for A pache
If you are running your website on an A pache server and you have control over the configuration of the server at the module level, then you can install the M O D _ P A G E SP E E D module for an easy speed boost. WARNING: Although this tutorial looks very advanced, it’s relatively easy for someone with experience configuring Apache at the server level. However, doing this on your own with no experience may result in your whole website going down! You should know how to install Apache modules and configure your webserver from a command line. If you don’t know how then you should leave this up to a professional web developer or system administrator who has experience.
F or additional information about M O D _ P A G E SP E E D
see:
https://de v e l ope rs.googl e .com/spe e d/docs/mod_ page spe e d/u sin g_ mod
IF YOU’RE USING A DEBIAN BASED SERVER (SUCH AS DEBIAN OR UBUNTU): [1]
S S H into your server
[2] D ownload the mod- pagespeed .deb package If your server is a 3 2 - bit machine use this command:
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux /direct/mod-pagespeed-beta_ current_ i3 86.deb
If your server is a 6 4 - bit machine use this command:
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux /direct/mod-pagespeed-beta_ current_ am d64.deb
[3] I nstall the .deb package T ype this into the command line: dpkg -i mod-pagespeed-* .deb
[4] C orrect any broken dependencies in place T ype this into the command line:
apt-get -f install
IF YOU’RE USING A REDHAT BASED SERVER (SUCH AS REDHAT, FEDORA, OR CENTOS): [1]
S S H into your server
IF YOU’RE USING A REDHAT BASED SERVER (SUCH AS REDHAT, FEDORA, OR CENTOS): [1]
S S H into your server
[2] D ownload the mod- pagespeed .deb package If your server is a 3 2 - bit machine use this command:
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux /direct/mod-pagespeed-beta_ current_ i3 86.rpm
If your server is a 6 4 - bit machine use this command:
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux /direct/mod-pagespeed-beta_ current_ x 8 6_ 64.rpm
[3] I nstall “ at” using the Yum package manager T ype this into the command line:
yum install at
[4] C orrect any broken dependencies in place T ype this into the command line:
rpm -U mod-pagespeed-* .rpm
CONFIGURING MOD_PAGESPEED [1]
O pen your A pache configuration file for editing If you’ re using Ubuntu or D ebian the file will be located in: /etc/apache2/mods-available
If you’ re using CentO S or F edora or R edhat, the file will be located in: /etc/httpd/conf.d
[2] L ocate the pagespeed_ module directives. T hey will be wrapped inside an IfM odule directive. Enabling or disabling the module per folder A dd the following line to any .htaccess file on your website: T o turn M odP agespeed on:
ModPagespeed on
T o turn M odP agespeed off: ModPagespeed off
NO 8
BROWSER CACHING
(NON-WORDPRESS SITE)
M ost of you are likely running W ordP ress sites, and we’ re going to cover some plugins you can use with W ordP ress to speed up performance. B ut for some of you who may not be running W some technical info on optimizing for speed.
ordP ress, I still want to give you
H ere, we’ re going to cover some advanced things you can do within your .htaccess file to leverage browser caching. So when you see that warning within G oogle P ageSpeed O nline, you can use the following techniq ues to fix it. N O T E : You should be a little comfortable
editing your .htaccess file. Talk to your webmaster if you’re not sure this is something you should be editing.
STEP ONE
L og I nto Your FTP S erver and B ackup Your .htaccess file
Use your F T P client of choice, or you can download and use F ileZ illa -
http://fil e z il l a- proj e ct.org/
I am sure you are familiar with how to log in via F T P , but in case you need a q uick reminder; Host: website name Username Password Port: most cases you can leave this blank
STEP TWO
Find Your .htaccess File
T his is located in the root directory. M ake sure you can see hidden files, otherwise you may not notice it.
N O T E : In some cases your site may not have
an .htaccess file, so you can just create a new file. Start a new document in your text editor and name it .htaccess
STEP THREE
D ownload and B ackup the .htaccess File
N ex t, we’ re going to download the .htaccess file and save a backup so we can safely edit it, but restore it if there is a mistake. In F ileZ illa you right click and download;
PHOTO FILES [1]
Turn R ewriteEngine O n this should be the first thing in the .htaccess file
[2] A dd < file>
wrapper tags
[3] A dd the file type( s) within the wrapper
[4] A dd the code which creates the caching and sets the max time to one week
[5 ] A dd the same code for other photo file types .png and .gif
CSS
N otice the code is basically the same, but we’ ve chosen a different length of time for W e’ css. re setting the cache time for one week for photos. You should determine a the reasonable time frame for your site, depending on how often the photos change T and his people will cache your CSS for one day. A gain, visit. this depends on how often you change your JAVASCRIPT css files, and how often people return back to your site. T he code for j avascript caching is also similar, but in this case we’ ve set it to a month.
CSS N otice the code is basically the same, but we’ ve chosen a different length of time for the css. T his will cache your CSS for one day. A gain, this depends on how often you change your css files, and how often people return back to your site.
JAVASCRIPT T he code for j avascript caching is also similar, but in this case we’ ve set it to a month. T his will depend on how heavily your site req uires J avascript and how often it changes.
TIME CHEAT-SHEET H ere’ s a few different time frames, since they are calculated in seconds; 5 minutes in seconds = 3 0 1 day in seconds = 8 6 , 4 0 0 1 week in seconds = 6 0 , 4 8 1 month in seconds = 2 , 6 2 6 months in seconds = 1 5 , 1 year in seconds = 3 1 , 5 3 6
0 0 0 9 ,0 0 0 7 7 4 ,0 0 0 , 0 0 0 ( basically ‘ infinite’ )
A s mentioned, you can mix and match the file types with time frames that make sense for your site. W hen in doubt, set your time frames a little shorter j ust to be safe!
If you’ ve followed and implemented the tips in this section you should have one of the faster sites on the web! N ex t we’ re going to cover new and groundbreaking areas of search. You should be doing these things now to stay ahead of the competition.
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER ONE! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER THREE: NEW SEARCH?
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER ONE
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER THREE
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
BY NEIL PATEL
SEO
AND SUJAN PATEL
03
CHAPTER 03
NEW SEARCH
N ow your site is crawlable, index able and lightening fast. T ime to ramp it up another notch with some new search elements. Search is moving towards a more semantic “ real to life” environment. T his means a world where engines understand the relationships between real world obj ects like people, places, movies, businesses etc. T ime to get on board now and integrate this into your website!
NO 1
SCHEMA.ORG METADATA IMPLEMENTATION
Schema.org is a universal metadata markup introduced in 2 0 1 1 by the maj or search engines. Its used to communicate to them the intended type of content on your website. T here are still many people not taking full advantage of this! W
e’ re going to cover several types of schema implementation, and how to get the correct markup into your H T M L code.
01
BASIC ATTRIBUTES OF MICRODATA
ITEMSCOPE ITEMTYPE ITEMPROP ITEMID ITEMREF
T hese five elements are best described with an ex ample.
Here is some code without schema metadata:
<meta charset=utf-8> Anything You Want
Author: Derek Sivers Category : business About the book
You can see it is just pure HTML with no special markup. Now, here is the code with metadata; <meta charset=utf-8> Anything You Want
Author: Derek Sivers Category : business About the Book
Let’s look at each element one by one.
ITEMSCOPE
Everything about the book goes in between the itemscope element. You’re telling the search engines “everything inside here is about a book”
ITEMPROP Anything You Want
The itemprop is simply the name of the book. Author: Derek Sivers Category : business Category : business About the Book
Itemprop is also the author and the category and the genre of the book. Pretty simple so far, right? You’re using a tag to insert the itemprop elements.
02
USING SCHEMA IN YOUR BLOG
I know many of you likely run blogs of some sort. W ell you can put schema data into blogs as well! If you’ re using wordpress you’ ll want to check with the author of your theme to see if this is possible, or if wordpress will strip out the tags. T his does depend on your specific wordpress setup, so I will show you a generic ex ample below.
CODE WITHOUT SCHEMA <meta charset=utf-8> A C heat Sheet for B uilding H igh R anking Authority… Without C heating
CODE WITH SCHEMA <meta charset=utf-8> A C heat Sheet for B uilding H igh R anking Authority… Without C heating
EXPLANATION OF ELEMENTS REL = AUTHOR
You may be wondering why this is inside the < head> < / head> of the H T M L . T hat is because G oogle now allows you to reference the author in this way. It’ s as simple as it looks;
B idhan C hatterj ee
T hat code goes in the < head> and then you point your G oogle P lus profile back at your blog - j ust like in the section on G oogle A uthorship, which you can find later in this guide. INTEMSCOPE
A gain, j ust like before, this is used to signal the type of thing or item your document is talking about. BONUS: SOCIAL SHARING SCHEMA
You can also include social sharing data in your schema. T he elements itemprop and interactioncount will do the trick, for ex ample. <meta itemprop="interactionC ount" content="F acebookL ikes:8"/> <meta itemprop="interactionC ount" content="G ooglePlus:3"/> TESTING
A s always you’ ll want to test your markup with the rich snippet tester provided by G oogle: http://www.googl e .com/we b maste rs/tool s/richsn ippe ts
NO 2
VIDEO INDEXATION MARKING UP YOUR VIDEOS WITH SCHEMA.ORG
Using Schema.org to markup your videos can give you a powerful boost with click through rate. J ust check out this ex ample of how SE O moz is utilizing video metadata to give them a giant visual boost in the SE R P s;
SEARCH
whiteboard Friday link building About 193,000 results (0.24 seconds)
It turns out adding the code is not too difficult, you j ust need to know the proper markup to use. B efore you begin, there’ s a few assumptions; [1]
You’ re “ self- hosting” your video
( this can not be done for Y ouT ube em
[2] You have access to the HTM
STEP ONE
A
L
beds for ex am
p le)
so you’ ll be able to edit the code
Paste the Normal V ideo C ode O n Your Page
typical ex ample of video embed code may look like this; N eil Patel
V ideo: Advanced SEO for B loggers
W
rap I n V ideo O bj ect W
STEP TWO
rap the code in a
A dd the V ideoO bj ect data.
STEP THREE
A dd B asic M
arkup
BASIC PROPERTIES ARE;
N ame T hu mb n ail D u ration D e scription T he name and description fields are added within < span> tags which wrap around ex isting content;
T he duration and thumbnail properties go within < meta> tags which typically get added below the name and before the actual video;
N ote: the duration is in ISO _ 8 6 0 1 format. L earn more about it here:
http://e n .wikipe dia.org/wiki/I S O _ 8 6 0 1
STEP FOUR
A dd A dditional M
arkup
You can add any property for a M ediaO bj ect ( the pare n t ob j e ct of a V ide oO b j e ct) ; associate dA rticl e b itrate con te n tS iz e con te n tU R L du ration e mb e dU R L e n code sC re ativ e W ork e n codin gF ormat e x pire s he ight pl ay e rT y pe re gion sA l l owe d re q u ire sS u b scription u pl oadD ate width O r you can add properties ex clusive only to video; caption produ ction C ompan y thu mb n ail tran script v ide oF rame S iz e v ide oQ u al ity H ere’ s an ex ample with upload date, width and height added;
G o add your video markup and steal massive clicks from the competition! FINISHED CODE
V ideo: Advanced SEO for B loggers
<meta itemprop="duration" content="T 1M33S" /> <meta itemprop="thumbnail" content="neil-patel-video-thumbnail.j pg" /> <meta itemprop="uploadD ate" content="2012-04-01T 08:00:00-05 :00" /> <meta itemprop="width" content="640" /> <meta itemprop="height" content="480" />
02
AN EXAMPLE
[1]
A ll R D Fs start with the X M
L
declaration and the R D F wrapper tags
[2] The you have to declare the R D F syntax and the UR L is referring to;
the data
[3] Nex t we’ ll declare the ex act items to be described in the document
H ere, we are talking about the specific CD that CD is on. [4] A dd The Elements W
“ T hriller” and referencing the UR L
hich A re Properties O f the R esource
Using the wrapper tag
03
COMPLETED CODE EXAMPLE
H ere’ s an ex ample of the completed code which you can use and modify for your needs
Use the V alidator to check your work! http://www.w3 .org/R D F /V al idator/
NO 4
ADDING THE DUBLIN CORE TO YOUR SITE
T he D ublin Core is another metadata format which is used to describe data on the web. T here are a variety of elements used by the D ublin Core, including;
01 02
title creator subj ect description publisher contributor date type format identifier source language relation coverage rights
the name given the resource the person or organization responsible for the content the topic covered a tex tual outline of the content those responsible for making the resource available those who added to the content when the resource was made available a category for the content how the resource is presented numerical identifier for the content such as a UR L where the content originally derived from in what language the content is written how the content relates to other resources, for instance, if it is a chapter in a book where the resource is physically located a link to a copyright notice
AN EXAMPLE
A n ex ample of some of the D ublin Core metadata in action would be the following. T his code represents a hypothetical document on q uicksprout.com
If you have a webpage that already ex ists, try running it through this free D C generator. http://www.u kol n .ac.u k/me tadata/dcdot/
N 5 O
GOOGLE REL=AUTHOR TAG IMPLEMENTATION FOR MULTIPLE AUTHOR SITES
T here are two methods to implementing rel=author for multiple author sites.
SIMPLE METHOD W
ith this simple method, all you will need to do is point a link from each post to the corresponding G oogle P rofile page, using rel=author.
STEP ONE
L ink To The I ndividual A uthor Profile From Each Post
So let’ s say we have a blog with two posts: P ost A and P ost B . I wrote post A B is a by a guest author. You will do as follows for each post
but P ost
POST A: THE GOOGLE PLUS BADGE
G o to https://de v e l ope rs.googl e .com/+ /pl u gin s/b adge /pe rson al - con fig as before to generate the code ( don ’ t forge t to u se y ou r G oogl e P l u s I D ! ) . B ut this time, you’ re only going to paste it into the individual posts you authored. OPTION B: USE THE REL=AUTHOR TAG < a hre f= " https://pl u s.googl e .com/1 0 9 4 1 2 2 5 7 2 3 7 8 7 4 8 6 1 2 0 2 ? re l = au thor" > N e il P ate l < /a>
T his again is the traditional rel=author tag. Substitute your name and G oogle P lus P rofile ID and paste the code only in posts or pages you authored. NEW ALTERNATE OPTION: USE THE SPECIAL PARAMETER LINK < a hre f= ” https://pl u s.googl e .com/1 1 2 7 5 9 9 0 4 4 5 3 5 7 7 8 9 2 4 7 2 ? re l = au thor> + N e il P ate l < a/>
T his is the simplest way to link to your author profile. J ust put the above code ( pe rson al iz in g y ou r n ame an d l in k) only on the pages you authored.
POST B You are going to repeat the above step, choosing whichever option is best for you. B ut this time you are going to add the author link for each guest author on their posts.
POST B You are going to repeat the above step, choosing whichever option is best for you. B ut this time you are going to add the author link for each guest author on their posts. OPTION A: THE GOOGLE PLUS BADGE Cut and paste the G oogle P lus B adge code from
https://de v e l ope rs.googl e .com/+ /pl u gin s/b adge /pe rson al - con fig this time using the
profile information of the guest author.
OPTION B: USE THE REL=AUTHOR TAG A
tag of this style for a guest author might look something like; < a hre f= " https://pl u s.googl e .com/1 0 0 6 1 3 0 6 0 1 1 9 6 9 5 6 3 7 2 1 3 ? re l = au thor" > G u e st A u thor< /a>
O nce you have done so for every page with a guest author, you are ready to move to step two.
STEP TWO
Each A uthor A dds “ C ontributor” L ink To Every B log They A re a G uest A uthor O n
N ow, each author that can contributes to your site, must add a link to your site in the “ contributor” section of their G oogle P lus profile. You can have as many links as you want in the “ contributor” section, so no matter how many sites you write for, you can show you are the author. T ake for ex ample Suj an P atel’ s profile, where he is a contributor to three sites;
ADVANCED METHOD STEP ONE
L ink To The I ndividual A uthor Profile From Each Post
W
ith this advanced method, every author is going to need their own page. SE O moz does this well, as you can see below;
Some W ordP ress themes may have this functionality built in. If they do not, you can see the section on “ setting up a custom author profile in W ordP ress” .
STEP TWO
A dd rel=
“ author” L inks From B log Posts To Profile Page
R emember how in the single author blog, you pointed a “ rel=author” link to your G oogle P lus P rofile. In the case of a multiple author blog, you’ re going to point r e l = a u t h o r to your profile page on that website.
STEP THREE
A dd rel= “ me” From B io Pages To G oogle Profile
N ex t, we have to create the third link in the chain: link from your bio page to your G oogle P lus P rofile. T his establishes the final connection in the chain, which simply looks like this: P ost ( rel=author)
B io/ P rofile ( rel=me)
G oogle P lus P rofile
T he chain works backwards too, as you’ re about to see in step four. G oogle P lus P rofile ( contributor link)
STEP FOUR
B io/ P rofile
C lick on C ompiler, then C ompile A ll
You should now be familiar with adding a link from your G oogle P lus P rofile back to the site you contribute to. T he important part in this last step, is that the link needs to go directly to your bio/ profile page on the website you contribute to. T he link from my G oogle profile pointing back to SE O moz would be; http://www.se omoz .org/u se rs/profil e /3 6 1 1 3 7
NO 6
GOOGLE REL=AUTHOR TAG IMPLEMENTATION FOR SINGLE AUTHOR
BEFORE YOU BEGIN: SET UP YOUR GOOGLE PROFILE If you do not already have a G oogle profile set up at this point, you should do that know. T his is eq uivalent to creating a G oogle P lus page now.
T he concept with setting up your author profile is that you are basically putting a link in two places. You’ re reciprocal linking from your website to your G oogle profile. L ike this; Every Page O n Your website ( r e l = a u t h o r ) G oogle Plus Profile ( contributor)
Your W
G oogle Plus Profile ebsite
Its fairly simple to do, once you’ ve walked through the steps, but there are a few options and specifics to know about.
STEP ONE
A dd R el= A uthor To Your S ite
OPTION A Install the G oogle Plus B adge on your site https://de v e l ope rs.googl e .com/+ /pl u gin s/b adge /pe rson al - con fig
G rab the code as shown in the above snapshot and paste it where you want it on your site. T his will usually go in a sidebar widget if you’ re running W ordP ress. B e sure to use your G oogle P lus P rofile ID .
OPTION B You can link from every page on your site to your G oogle P lus profile with the rel=author attribute. T his was the first method available when A uthor P rofiles first came out. You need to link your name from every page of your blog to your G oogle profile. In a content management setup like W ordP ress, this can easily be done via the footer or sidebar widget if you have an “ about” box with your name in it. H ere’ s the code. Simply cut and paste it into the sidebar or footer; < a hre f= " https://pl u s.googl e .com/1 0 9 4 1 2 2 5 7 2 3 7 8 7 4 8 6 1 2 0 2 ? re l = au thor" > N e il P ate l < /a>
O bviously, substitute your name and your G oogle P lus profile ID .
STEP ONE
S pecial Parameter L ink
M ost people do not know about this new simple method to link your blog pages back to your G oogle profile. It was introduced after the initial release of rel=author as an easy way to implement the link without needing to edit H T M L . F irst, be sure your author name appears on appear page of your site, and simply turn it into the following link; < a hre f= ” https://pl u s.googl e .com/1 1 2 7 5 9 9 0 4 4 5 3 5 7 7 8 9 2 4 7 2 ? re l = au thor> + N e il P ate l < a/>
N otice the plus in front of my name? T hat helps signal to G oogle that you are using the special parameter at the end of the UR L . A nd again, you obviously want to use your G oogle P lus P rofile UR L when doing this. T his method replaces the need to use the re=author attribute or G oogle P lus badge. W
hichever of the three methods you have chosen to use, now you are ready to point your G oogle profile back to your site. L ink B ack To Your S ite From Your G oogle Profile
STEP TWO
G o to your profile page while logged in and click edit. www. pand a.com
Use the “ contributor” section in your profile.
A dd your blog as a link.
T est with the rich snippets testing tool
http://www.googl e .com/we b maste rs/tool s/richsn ippe ts
SEO PANDA
T his will show you if you have implemented the authorship correctly, and how your page may look in the SE R P s.
NO 7
ENTITY SEARCH
E ntity search is still very much in its earliest stages. O nly certain types of people, websites or businesses will be able to utilize it, but it won’ t be long until everyone can participate. T his section will be one of j ust a few that talks a little bit more about the concepts.
WHAT IS ENTITY SEARCH?
It is often also referred to as “ the knowledge graph” . It is about connecting people, places and things - more than j ust keywords which don’ t have much of a meaning. F or ex ample the keyword “ boston” could be the place but it could also be the band.
http://google.com/boston
L et’ s look at the current knowledge graph for “ boston” H ow does that data get there? G oogle draws data from a large variety of data repositories around the web, such as wikipedia T he knowledge graph on the right hand side of the SE R P s is only the most obvious place you’ ll see entity like results. T hey are sometimes hidden - but here’ s where you might see some entity type results.
IMPLIED SITE SEARCH
G oogle hasn’ t been doing this long, but there is this thing called an implied site search. You probably know what a normal site search is:
site:quicksprout.com outreach About 6 results (0.12 seconds)
SEARCH
B ut check out what you get with this:
SEARCH
quicksprout outreach About 8,950 results (0.12 seconds)
T he top six results are still all from q uicksprout.com - G oogle has recognized q uicksprout the company as a business - an e n tity - and can thus rewrite the search into a site search for the top results. THE RELATED SEARCH OPERATOR
N ot many people use this, but check out the results for a related: search on q uicksprout.com related:quicksprout.com About 90 results (0.20 seconds)
SEARCH
You can clearly see the association of q uicksprout having to do with the topics of we b de v e l opme n t, b l oggin g an d an al y tics. T his is very much how entity relationships work. T here are no significant keywords shared between these site - yet they are seen as related to one another. T o illustrate that this association to being an entity, doesn’ t apply to everyone automatically, here’ s a related: search with no results
related:distilled.net
SEARCH
NATURAL LANGUAGE SEARCH
You also see some entity results in “ natural language search” . T his would be a search q uery that is a q uestion, a complete sentence or a very long- tail description. T ake “ what’ s the capital of florida? ” for ex ample
What’s the capital of Florida?
SEARCH
About 358,000,000 results (0.44 seconds)
G oogle returns the answer to your q uestion. T his has nothing to do with “ keywords” and everything to do with the idea of F lorida being a state and T allahassee being the capital of that state . Is it becoming apparent that being viewed by G oogle as an entity could be a very good thing? It gives you the possibilities of appearing in more places around the web, and of boosting your authority. T he nex t section will cover some specific ways you can get included in entity based sources.
NO 8
ADDING YOUR SITE TO ENTITY BASED SOURCES
T he last section taught you all about the importance of appearing like an entity to G oogle and having as much related information tied to you as an entity as possible. H ow do we make that happen? B y making sure you appear in F reebase. H ere’ s the most ex tensive list I know of, for the places G oogle uses to get its entity information. ab c.state .v a.u s/P rice l ist/R U M _ (I M P O R T E D ). html A dhe re n ts.com A rX iv B ase b al l A l man ac B e rl in I n te rn ation al F il m F e stiv al B ooks an d W rite rs kirj asto.sci.fi/ b orn rich.com B oston .com B u re au of L ab or S tatistics, U n e mpl oy me n t in U S B u re au of L ab or S tatistics, U n e mpl oy me n t in U S C ou n tie s B u re au of L ab or S tatistics, U n e mpl oy me n t in U S S tate s C â mara dos D e pu tados ce l e b rity n e tworth.com C e n te r for R e spon siv e P ol itics C he fM oz chickipe dia C l au d B u tl e r croctail .corpwatch.org/ C rore C ru n chb ase .com D atab ase datab ase b aske tb al l .com datab ase F ootb al l .com D atab ase O l y mpics D ay L ife .com E -L IS e n .citiZ E N diu m.org/wiki/ E n gl ish W ikipe dia E u rostat, M in imu m W age in E u rope e x pl ore dia.com F ace b ook F actu al fame n e tworth.com F D IC F ood an d D ru g A dmin istration F orb e s F ran ce F re e b ase G E B C O U n de rse a F e atu re s G az e tte e r G e ographic N ame s I n formation S y ste m G e on ame s.org G e rman W ikipe dia G oogl e P l u s H e al thcare C ost R e port I n formation S y ste m https://prote cfu e l sav e r.com/die se l - fu e l - cl e an e r https://prote cfu e l sav e r.com/gas- fu e l - cl e an e r https://prote cfu e l sav e r.com/oil - sy ste m- re hab https://prote cfu e l sav e r.com/P R O T E C - I n te rn al - E n gin e - C l e an e r H u lu I E S N C E S P u b l ic L ib rary S u rv e y imdb .com I n fochimps I n stan tE n core I n te rn e t M ov ie D atab ase I n te rn e t S pe cu l ativ e F iction D atab ase I n te rn e t S pe cu l ativ e F iction D atab ase IS O 1 5 9 2 4 IT IS L ib rary of C on gre ss
L ib rary of C on gre ss id.l oc.gov / L u rkmore .ru M B L W H O I L ib rary M e dpe dia M e tawe b topic me rgin g al gorithm M e x ican I N E G I statistics M il l ion M u sicB rain z M y S pace N ame d e n tity re cogn ition N ation al C e n te r for E du cation S tatistics N ation al F ire D e partme n t C e n su s D atab ase N ation al O ce an ic an d A tmosphe ric A dmin istration N atu re N e tfl ix N ie l se n C ompan y O fficial W e b site O pe n L ib rary O pe n L ib rary P roj e ct O u rA irports P aragl idin g E arth P ocke t S tatistical D ata on S witz e rl an d 2 0 0 6 P ocke t S tatistical D ata on S witz e rl an d 2 0 0 7 P u b l ic domain P u b M e d C e n tral Q u otation sb ook R an ke r.com R e fe re n ce .com S e cu ritie s an d E x chan ge C ommission se c.org S imon P rope rty G rou p S ky G rid S l ov ak S tatistical O ffice S tan ford U n iv e rsity S tarC raft an d S tarC raft I I W iki T he F ootb al l D atab ase T he H ol l y wood R e porte r T he N ation al I n stitu te of S tatistics, S pain T he T V D B T he W orl d F actb ook the riche st.org topics.n y time s.com T V R age tv rage .com U .S . F ood an d D ru g A dmin istration N ation al D ru g C ode D ire ctory U N S tats U n ifie d M e dical L an gu age S y ste m R e l e ase 2 0 1 1 A B U n ite d S tate s C e n su s B u re au U n ite d S tate s C e n su s B u re au , P opu l ation U n ite d S tate s D e partme n t of H ou sin g an d U rb an D e v e l opme n t U n ite d S tate s I n te rn ation al T rade C ommission U n ite d S tate s S e cu ritie s an d E x chan ge C ommission V irtu al I N te rn e t A u thority F il e v iaf.org/ W ikipe dia W ikipe dia C ate gorie s W ikipe dia in fob ox e s W orl d B an k, W orl d D e v e l opme n t I n dicators
F reebase draws from all of the above places for data. If you are not in freebase, this is how you can add yourself.
F FR RE EE EB BA AS SE E N O T E : Please don’t look at this like directory submission or a place to spam.
Freebase is a publicly edited database (started by MetaWeb, bought by Google). Its not a place to drop links or create extra submissions (that probably won’t do much). You’re goal is to be sure your entity information is complete and accurate.
[1]
C reate an account
[2] O nce your account is created, set yourself to be in edit mode ( m ak es it easier when browsing top ics to edit)
[3] Then check to see if your entity ex ists D ouble entries are not liked very much ( and they’ ll get deleted anyway) . F rom any page, use the search box to see if your entity ex ists
[4] I f it does NO T ex ist - look for your “ topic” Your topic is the category the entity should most fit into. F or ex ample “ Z appos” is a Company. “ A merican Idol” would be a T V P rogram, etc. Q uickSprout seems to fit best into “ Internet Company” - so you want to go to that topic page.
[5 ] W
hen on your topic page, click to “ view all”
[6 ] Then you need to “ add more topics”
[7 ] R un the S earch again for your entity j ust to be certain ( when you don’ t see it p op up , click “ create new top ic” )
[8 ] Then you’ ll see your new topic in the list - click on it
[9 ] S ince you’ re automatically in edit mode ( from step 2) you’ ll be able to add and edit all information for your new topic.
A gain, this is not a sales page. T hink of this like a W
ikipedia entry - factual.
H opefully by the end of this section you’ ve gained some in depth understanding of how important things like schema and entity search are. A nd you’ ve helped make your websites more “ future search” friendly!
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER ONE! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER TWO: SITE SPEED & PREFORMANCE?
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER TWO
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
BY NEIL PATEL
SEO
AND SUJAN PATEL
04
CHAPTER 04
WORDPRESS
We’ve been covering some best practice techniques for optimizing your website. But now we’re going to get a little more specific and dive into WordPress. Its the most used CMS in the world. I know for a fact most of my readers use WordPress. So I wanted to give you some advanced tips for using it more effectively.
N 1 O
ADVANCED INDEXATION FOR WORDPRESS SITES (YOAST SEO)
Most people usually get the basics done well when settings up WordPress. However, in this section we’re going to walk step by step through all of the settings in Yoast SEO, and go over exactly what you want to use them for — and their most common applications.
N O T E : Some of the options that appear in Yoast’s
settings depend on what theme you are running. I’m demonstrating on a basic free wordpress theme, but some of the options you see may be slightly different.
GENERAL SETTINGS Title settings you only need to check this box if for some reason your title tag settings are not working S ite- wide meta tags you should typically only check of “ no- index sub- pages of archives” Clean up the - you usually don’ t need to check these off.
P PO OS ST T T TY YP PE E S SE ET TT T II N NG GS S T his section is not only where you set up title and description templates, but also how you control index ation of these parts of W ordP ress. You D O want to let both pages and posts get index ed. It is very rare to not index these. You do NO T usually want to index media.
TAXONOMIES C ategories you’ ll most often want to index these Tags more and more these should not be index ed. G oogle doesn’ t return them as much in results as they used to and it’ s always better to rank a page, post or category instead. Format it’ s usually safe to leave this unchecked.
O OT TH HE ER R A uthor A rchives it’ s best to NO T index these. A lso, if you are running a single author blog you should disable them. Users will get redirected back to your home blog page. D ate A rchives its also best to NO T index these, but you should usually keep them enabled. E nabled j ust means users can browse posts by date.
X XM ML L S S II T TE EM MA AP P S SE ET TT T II N NG GS S NO TE: B e sure you are N O T using another X M L sitemap plugin or that your theme does not have this functionality activated. Ping You can ping both yahoo and I Ex clude Post Types You should ex clude any you’ re not index ing. P ut another way: che ck off the b ox e s of page s y ou are n ot in de x in g.
C CA AT TE EG GO OR RY Y D DE ES SC CR R II P PT T II O ON NS S In Yoast, you will have set up a template to display a default category description for the meta tag, like this:
H owever, the mistake many people make is not writing this description in the first place! You have to go to P osts Categories — and when you add a new category the description area then becomes
C CA AT TE EG GO OR RY Y D DE ES SC CR R II P PT T II O ON NS S In Yoast, you will have set up a template to display a default category description for the meta tag, like this:
H owever, the mistake many people make is not writing this description in the first place! You have to go to P osts Categories — and when you add a new category the description area then becomes the meta description set up in Yoast SE O .
E ED D II T T .. H HT TA AC CC CE ES SS S F F II L LE E A lso, all of the .htaccess methods given throughout this guide can be implemented within Yoast SE O . You go to edit files — and most often your additional code will go at the bottom:
O
NO 2
SECURING WORDPRESS
A lthough not specifically SE O related, perhaps nothing can be more damaging to a website’ s bottom line than a security problem. SE O is great but only when your site is secure. B ecause of this I want to show you some ex tra security measures you can take in W ordP ress. T hey are a little code intensive, so if you are not comfortable doing the following things, please get ex tra help. B ut anyone somewhat comfortable with technical things should be able to do these. [1]
CHANGE YOUR FILE PERMISSIONS R un the following two commands to change file permissions recursively. You will need shell access to the server. T his is for directories; find /path/to/your/wordpress/install/ -type d -ex ec chmod 7 5 5
{ }
\ ;
find /path/to/your/wordpress/install/ -type f -ex ec chmod 644 { }
\ ;
T his is for files;
[2]
SECURE WORDPRESS INCLUDES You’ re going to need access to your .htaccess file to do this. A gain, please use care and if you feel like you need help, try it on a test site or get someone to assist you. A dd this code above #
B egin WordPress
L ike this; # R
B lock the include-only files. ewriteEngine O n ewriteB ase / ewriteR ule ^ wp-admin/includes/ - [ F ,L ] ewriteR ule ! ^ wp-includes/ - [ S=3] ewriteR ule ^ wp-includes/[ ^ /] +\ .php$ - [ F ,L ] ewriteR ule ^ wp-includes/j s/tinymce/langs/.+\ .php - [ F ,L ] ewriteR ule ^ wp-includes/theme-compat/ - [ F ,L ] R R R R R R #
B EG I N
WordPress
T his blocks outside access to your ‘ include’ file directories. NO TE: If you want this to work for a multi- author site remove this line; R ewriteR ule ^ wp-includes/[ ^ /] +\ .php$
[3]
- [ F ,L ]
SURE YOUR WP-CONFIG.PHP FILE D id you know wp- config.php is where your username and password is installed? If you used a one- click installation through your web host, you may have never worked directly in the wp- config.php ( which you do on a manual install) .
OPTION A
R ewriteR ule ^ wp-includes/[ ^ /] +\ .php$
- [ F ,L ]
SURE YOUR WP-CONFIG.PHP FILE
[3]
D id you know wp- config.php is where your username and password is installed? If you used a one- click installation through your web host, you may have never worked directly in the wp- config.php ( which you do on a manual install) .
OPTION A M
ove wp- config.php up one level
wp- config.php normally sits in the root directory B it did you know, you can actually move wp- config.php up one level above the root directory. L ike this;
OPTION B
htaccess file code If you don’ t want to move around files, you can also use this code in the .htaccess file. P ut this at the very TO P of the .htaccess file.
T his will block anyone trying to open it with their browser.
NO 3
MAKING WORDPRESS COMMENT REPLY LINKS NOFOLLOW
G o to appearance
editor
functions.php
T his will block anyone trying to open it with their browser.
NO 3
MAKING WORDPRESS COMMENT REPLY LINKS NOFOLLOW
G o to appearance
editor
functions.php
P aste the following code into the very bottom of your functions.php file;
A dd a rel="nofollow" to the comment reply links function add_ nofollow_ to_ reply_ link( $ link ) { return str_ replace( ' ") \ ' >' , ' ") \ ' rel=\ ' nofollow\ ' >' , $ link ) ; }
add_ filter(
' comment_ reply_ link' , ' add_ nofollow_ to_ reply_ link'
) ;
It’ s the str_ replace( ) function which is replacing the default closing of the anchor tag - and its appending the nofollow to it. R emember to update the file.
A nd you can always q uickly check for followed/ unfollowed links with the SE O moz toolbar;
NO 4
INTERNAL LINKING WITH SEO SMART LINKS
B y now I’ m sure you know the importance of “ Internal L inking” - that is how you link from page to page within your own website. B ut what happens with most blog posts? A s time goes by, they get further and further away from the homepage and their linkj uice is buried. U n l e ss y ou con siste n tl y l in k to the m from n e w posts an d page s. T his part of the SE O guide is going to show you how to install, configure and use the SE O Smart L inks plugin. ( M ore on ide n tify in g which page s y ou shou l d l in k to b e l ow in # 2 4 - C rawl in g Y ou r S ite S cre amin g F rog.) F or ex ample, in this post from A pril 9 th, 2 0 1 2 , I link back to a post from D ecember 5 th, 2 0 1 1 . ENTER “SEO SMART LINKS” PLUGIN. L et’ s walk through a this plugin in detail. It makes internal linking to older posts easy.
STEP ONE
I nstall The Plugin
G o to - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/se o- au tomatic- l in ks/ O R search for “ SE O Smart L inks” within W ordP ress and install it within W ordP ress.
STEP TWO
C onfigure
T his is where some people can get confused, and I am here to help you out :- )
Choose where links will appear: Posts
Choose where links will appear: Posts Pages Prevent links in Headers Choose T argets and Settings Target Posts only u n l e ss y ou hav e page s re al l y importan t to y ou Process only single posts Process R S S Feeds this is a good ide a I gnore posts and pages H e re y ou can ask the pl u gin to N O T l in k to ce rtain page s or posts. I gnore keywords H e re y ou can al so ask it to ign ore ce rtain ke y words whe n l in kin g.
N ex t, you’ ll want to add specific posts that should be linked to when specific keywords appear ( pe rhaps the cool e st fe atu re of this pl u gin ) . C ustom K eywords P revent duplicate links E nter the keywords and the UR L E nter as many keywords as you’ d like, comma separated E nter the UR L you want those keywords to link to. D o this for e v e ry post you want direct control over the links
L astly, we’ re going to set limits; M
LIMITS ax L inks —
I l ike to ke e p this at 5 for the ty pical l e n gth of my posts.
M
ax S ingle — M
ax S ingle UR L s —
1 1
EXTERNAL LINKS Nofollow —
this is n ot n e ce ssary to e n ab l e
O pen in new window —
I l ike this for the u se r e x pe rie n ce , an d the y are more l ike l y to n av igate b ack to y ou r site .
INTERNAL LINKING {A FEW BONUS TIPS} If you’ re doing some manual internal linking, here’ s some important tips to keep in mind; L ink from the sn ippe t or from the top of the post — this way ( for a short pe riod of time ) your links will be on your homepage, and send important authority back to your older posts. T he link closest to the top gets the most linkj uice. User testing has shown people are more likely to click on links with about seven words in the anchor tex t.
NO 5
GET RID OF DATE IN SERPS / WORDPRESS
P eople have often asked me how to remove the date from displaying in a G oogle search result when running on W ordP ress. It is often not desirable to have the date shown, as in the ex ample below.
how to make sushi at home
SEARCH
About 11,700,000 results (0.36 seconds)
F F II N ND D II N NG G A AN ND D R RE EP PL LA AC C II N NG G T TH HE E_ _T T II M ME E (( )) F FU UN NC CT T II O ON N T he hardest part about this perhaps, is finding the right spot in your W ordP ress setup to alter the code. T he function we’ re looking for is ‘ the_ time( ) ’ . T he three most common places you will the_ time( ) are; archiv e .php in de x .php sin gl e .php
H HO OW W T TO O S SE EA AR RC CH H Y YO OU UR R W WO OR RD DP PR RE ES SS S F F II L LE ES S [1]
Use an FTP client like Filez illa
[2] D ownload your wordpress theme files to your local computer ( y ou shou l d do this an y way some time s as a b acku p) B e su re to n ot copy the e n tire wordpre ss in stal l ation — wp- con te n t/the me s/y ou r- activ e - the me - fol de r
j u st copy the fol de r
[3] S earch multiple files with a tex t editor like Tex twrangler
[3] S earch multiple files with a tex t editor like Tex twrangler G o to Search- > M ulti- F ile Search...
E nter ‘ the_ date’ in the find field Click other - navigate to your theme’ s folder and select Your dialogue and selections should look similar to the one below, with only the theme name differing.
You will see a result listing all of the files that contain ‘ the_ time’ . These are the files you should edit directly in the W ordPress editor.
A lter the_ time( ) I n A ll O f Those Files It will probably look something like this;
j S, Y ' )
? >
R eplace it with this:
<script language="j avascript" type="tex t/j avascript">document.write( "") ;
j S, Y ' )
How it works: W e’ re wrapping the P H P function int J avascript. G oogle does not use j avascript when pulling data for the description. So it will display for the user but not read by G oogle.
NO 6
CREATING A CUSTOM WORDPRESS AUTHOR BIO PAGE
T he default “ author archive” in W ordP ress is j ust a list of all the posts by that author. F or my site, you can see that my author page http://www.q u icksprou t.com/au thor/admin / is simply as list of the posts I have written, which I why I choose to not index it. Custom author pages work best on multi- author blogs. If you are running a single author site, simply having an “ about” page may be the better option for you. So this tutorial is going to assume you are running a multi- author site.
THESE ARE THE FIVE STEPS: S tep S tep S tep S tep S tep
O ne - File S etup Two - C urrent A uthor D etection Three - R ough D raft Four - V ariables Five - Putting I t Together
C omplete C ode S ample STEP ONE
File S etup
T he file you need to edit is author.php G o to appearance
E ditor and look for author.php
T he default themes, twentyeleven and twentyten have an author.php file
If it D O E S ex ist, that’ s the file we’ re going to edit make a backup copy now. If it does N O T ex ist make a copy of archive.php rename it author.php L astly, we’ re going to clean it out to prep for editing: O pen your new version of author.php in your tex t editor ( if you’ re really brave you can do all the editing in the appearance editor, but I don’ t recommend it) . D elete from between get_ header( ) &
STEP TWO
get_ sidebar( )
C urrent A uthor D etection
C urrent A uthor D etection
STEP TWO
N ex t we have to put some code in to detect the current author - here’ s the code:
STEP THREE
R ough D raft
T his isn’ t so technical, but I recommend sketching out a little rough draft of the layout of your author page. T his makes it easier to set up your variables. You can do so within the tex t editor itself. T his is j ust a great way to get the idea of how you way to display the info in there before entering the code.
STEP FOUR
V ariables
N ex t, based upon the info you’ d like to display, you can grab the variables we’ ll need to build the code. H ere’ s a list of all of the author variables: $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu $ cu
rau rau rau rau rau rau rau rau rau rau rau rau rau rau
thththththththththththththth-
> aim; > de scription ; > displ ay _ n ame ; > first_ n ame ; > I D ; > j ab b e r; > l ast_ n ame ; > n ickn ame ; > u se r_ e mail ; > u se r_ l ogin ; > u se r_ n ice n ame ; > u se r_ re giste re d; > u se r_ u rl ; > y im;
THE ONES WE’LL NEED ARE; $ cu rau th- > n ickn ame ; ( most ofte n u se d to displ ay the n ame , y ou can u se displ ay n ame too) $ cu rau th- > u se r_ u rl ; $ cu rau th- > u se r_ de scription ;
$ cu rau th- > u se r_ u rl ; $ cu rau th- > u se r_ de scription ; STEP FIVE
Putting I t Together
N OTE : Your exa ct HTML and C SS styli ng w i ll p rob ab l y be a l i ttl e d iffe r e n t t h en t h is e x am ple . Thi s i s just one e xam p l e of a v ari e ty of w ay s y o u coul d bu ild i t You’ re first going to put your author bio information this is j ust an ex ample.
If you’ re comfortable with H T M L , adding the variables it easy. If what you want to display is: About: N eil Patel
You j ust replace the actual name with the variable and the php wrapper. So N eil P atel gets replaced with < ? php echo $ curauth- > nickname; ? > like this: About: nickname; ? >
and the whole code sample is: About: nickname; ? >
T hen we’ re going to start the loop and get the posts in there here’ s what the code looks like and some ex planation:
J ust like with the above section — W ordP ress variables.
you write the H T M L but then place in the
TH E COMPLETE CODE SAM PL E H ere’ s the compl e te author.php file. R emember, parts of it may need to change slightly to match your theme! About: nickname; ? >
Posts by nickname; ? >:
W
NO 7
USING WP-SUPER CACHE
P Super Cache generates static H T M L pages to serve up instead of hefty P H P files. T his improves the speed of your site significantly. Correct setup is not always immediately obvious, especially for first time users. So we’ re going to walk through the best practice
NO 7
USING WP-SUPER CACHE
W
P Super Cache generates static H T M L pages to serve up instead of hefty P H P files. T his improves the speed of your site significantly. Correct setup is not always immediately obvious, especially for first time users. So we’ re going to walk through the best practice configuration for this great time saving plugin. If you want the documentation for the plugin you can view the W ordP ress page for it here http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- su pe r- cache /
T here are several similarly named plugins, so when you choose it in the plugin installer, make sure you choose the correct one;
O nce installed and activated there are a few tabs with important settings, we’ re going to walk through the steps. If you have trouble finding it, go to settings
W
P Super Cache
TA B ON E — EAS Y J ust like it says, this tab is “ easy” ! A ll you need to do is turn on caching.
TA B TWO — ADV AN C ED: C HOOSE SETTINGS S elect the following options;
TA B TWO — ADV AN C ED: C HOOSE SETTINGS S elect the following options; Cache hits to this website for q uick access Use P H P to serve cache files Compress pages so they’ re served more q uickly to visitors D on’ t cache pages for known users Cache rebuild M obile device support E x tra homepage checks
C heck That C aching I s W
orking
A t this point, before continuing, you may want to check to see that caching is working properly. You should also periodically visit your website during any plugin setup and configuration to be sure it hasn’ t broken anything. T o check caching [1]
V isit a page on your site
[2] V iew S ource [3] S croll all the way to the bottom [4] A nd look for the W
P S uper C aching comments in your code;
TA B TWO — AD VANC ED: SETU P G AR AG E C OLL EC T I O N Setting the garbage collection controls how often stale or old cached files are thrown out. Simply put; S ite s that are u pdate d more ofte n , wil l n e e d to ru n garb age col l e ction more ofte n . S ite s that are n ot u pdate d ofte n , don ’ t n e e d to ru n garb age col l e ction as ofte n .
E XPL A N ATI ON OF S ETTING OPTIONS
You have T W
O
choices for garbage collection;
You have TWO choices for garbage collection; The timer schedules it to run at regular intervals (in seconds). This is for sites that update most frequently The clock runs on a set schedule daily, twice-daily, or hourly. This is for sites that are not updated as often. And you can receive email notifications too. Let’s look at two different setting options.
SIT E S S ERVI N G A LO T OF FR ESH DATA If you’re serving a lot of fresh content, you’ll want to empty the trash often and have a short timeout. So you may want to start with the following settings; Set your timeout to update every minute (60 seconds). Set your timer to run every 90 seconds. This way you’re always cleaning out stale cached files as new ones are created. This is a starting point for very frequently updated sites — you should adjust these intervals specific to your situation.
SIT E S THAT DO NOT UPDATE AS OFTEN These settings are for sites that might have only one piece of new content a day at the most. Also for sites with no widgets or RSS feeds in the sidebars.
The setting you see above are for a site that might get one update a day or just a few a week. Set your timeout to 10 days (864000 seconds). Use the clock in this instance, and set it to twice daily and at a time that makes sense for your site. If you typically post new content in the evening, a time of 10:00 might make sense - it will empty garbage just after you’ve posted your new content at night, and do so once again at 10:00am to keep things clean.
DI S A B L I N G GARBAG E C OL L EC TION If for whatever reason you want to disable garbage collection, enter ZERO for the timeout.
NO 8
ADDING YOUR SITE TO ENTITY BASED SOURCES
A lthough not totally “ hands on” we’ re going to wrap up the W ordP ress section with the most comprehensive list of valuable plugins I know of, that I personally know work. T here are a lot of incomplete lists, or lists that contain sub- par plugins.
D I S C L A I M E R : I know these to work at the time of publishing this
guide. No guarantees they will work by the time you read this :)
A kisme t- http://akisme t.com/? re tu rn = tru e A l l in on e S E O P ack - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/al l - in - on e - se o- pack/ A rt D ire ction - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/art- dire ction / A skA pache R e dire ct V ie we r - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/askapache s- re write ru l e s- v ie we r/ A u tomattic - http://au tomattic.com/wordpre ss- pl u gin s/ B roke n L in k C he cke r - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/b roke n - l in k- che cke r/ B u ddy P re ss - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/b u ddy pre ss/ B u ddy P re ss M ob il e - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/b u ddy pre ss- mob il e / C D N tool s - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/cdn - tool s/ C l e an O ption s - http://www.mittin e agu e .com/de v /co.php C M S D ashb oard - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/con te n t- man age me n t- sy ste m- dashb oard/ C ode A u to E scape - http://priy adi.n e t/archiv e s/2 0 0 5 /0 9 /2 7 /wordpre ss- pl u gin - code - au toe scape / C omme n tpre ss - http://www.fu tu re ofthe b ook.org/comme n tpre ss/ C ommu n ity S u b mitte d N e ws - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/commu n ity - su b mitte d- n e ws/ C ompact A rchiv e s - http://rmarsh.com/pl u gin s/compact- archiv e s/ C u stomiz ab l e P ost L istin gs - http://www.coffe e 2 code .com/wp- pl u gin s/ D B C ache R e l oade d - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/db - cache - re l oade d/ D igg D igg - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/digg- digg/ D igre ss.it - http://digre ss.it/ D ispl ay W idge ts - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/displ ay - widge ts/ D ofol l ow T rackb acks - http://www.tu rkhitb ox .com/se o/dofol l ow- trackb acks- pl u gin .html F ace b ook su b scrib e b u tton s - http://de v e l ope rs.face b ook.com/docs/re fe re n ce /pl u gin s/su b scrib e / F e e d C ou n t (c u stom) - http://digwp.com/2 0 0 9 /1 0 /fe e d- cou n t- pl u gin / F e e db u rn e r R e dire ct P l u gin - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/fe e db u rn e r- pl u gin / F itV ids for W ordP re ss - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/fitv ids- for- wordpre ss/ F ol l ow B u tton - https://de v .twitte r.com/docs/fol l ow- b u tton F V C ommu n ity N e ws - http://www.fran k- v e rhoe v e n .com/wordpre ss- pl u gin - fv - commu n ity - n e ws/ G oogl e X M L S ite maps - http://www.arn e b rachhol d.de /re dir/site map- home / H e l l o B ar - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/he l l ob ar/ hitcou n te r - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/hitcou n te r/ H y pe r C ache - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/hy pe r- cache / J u iz S mart M ob il e A dmin - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/j u iz - smart- mob il e - admin / L ist C ate gory P osts - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/l ist- cate gory - posts/ L iv e fy re R e al time C omme n ts - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/l iv e fy re - comme n ts/ L ogin L ock - https://wpse cu rity .n e t/wordpre ss- se cu rity - l ogin - l ock/ M ake Y ou r S ite S ocial - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/gigy a- social iz e - for- wordpre ss/ M ob ify - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/mob ify / n re l ate R e l ate d C on te n t - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/n re l ate - re l ate d- con te n t/ P aral l e l iz e - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/parral l e l iz e / Q u ick C ache - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/q u ick- cache / R A W H T M L S n ippe ts - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/raw- html - sn ippe ts/ R e spon d.j s for W P - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/re spon dj s/ R e spon siv e T we n ty T e n - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/re spon siv e - twe n ty te n / S e arch an d R e pl ace - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/se arch- an d- re pl ace / S e x y B ookmarks - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/se x y b ookmarks/ S hare b ar - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/share b ar/ S ib l in g- C hil d L ist - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/sb - chil d- l ist/ S impl e B asic C on tact F orm - http://x y css.com/tool s/wordpre ss/ S impl e L ocal A v atars - http://ge t1 0 u p.com/pl u gin s/simpl e - l ocal - av atars- wordpre ss/ S impl e :P re ss – F oru m P l u gin - http://simpl e - pre ss.com/ S impl y E x cl u de - http://www.code hool igan s.com/proj e cts/wordpre ss/simpl y - e x cl u de /
S impl e B asic C on tact F orm - http://x y css.com/tool s/wordpre ss/ S impl e L ocal A v atars - http://ge t1 0 u p.com/pl u gin s/simpl e - l ocal - av atars- wordpre ss/ S impl e :P re ss – F oru m P l u gin - http://simpl e - pre ss.com/ S impl y E x cl u de - http://www.code hool igan s.com/proj e cts/wordpre ss/simpl y - e x cl u de / S ocial M e dia W idge t - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/social - me dia- widge t/ S ocial M e trics - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/social - me trics/ S ty l e M y G al l e ry - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/sty l e - my - gal l e ry / S u b scrib e T o C omme n ts - http://tx fx .n e t/code /wordpre ss/su b scrib e - to- comme n ts/ T D O M in i F orms - http://the de adon e .n e t/down l oad/tdo- min i- forms- wordpre ss- pl u gin / T he S l ide - http://simpl e re ach.com/ T he me S witch - http://www.n ku ttl e r.de /n kthe me switch/ T u mb l r I mporte r - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/tu mb l r- importe r/ U l timate C omin g S oon P age - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/u l timate - comin g- soon - page / W 3 T otal C ache - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/w3 - total - cache / W 3 T otal C ache - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/w3 - total - cache / W appl e A rchite ct - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wappl e - archite ct/ W idge t L ogic - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/widge t- l ogic/ W ordpre ss D own l oad M on itor - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/down l oad- mon itor/ W ordP re ss M ob il e P ack - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wordpre ss- mob il e - pack/ W ordP re ss P opU p http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wordpre ss- popu p/http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wordpre ss- popu p/ W ordP re ss W iki - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wordpre ss- wiki/ W P A u toshare P ost - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wordpre ss- au toshare post/ W P D atab ase B acku p - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- db - b acku p/ W P D atab ase M an age r - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- db man age r/ W P fil e C ache - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- fil e - cache / W P F l u id I mage s - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- fl u id- image s/ W P H T T P C ompre ssion - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- http- compre ssion / W P M in ify - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- min ify / W P M ob il e D e te ctor - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- mob il e - de te ctor/ W P O rb it S l ide r - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- orb it- sl ide r/ W P P age N av igation - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- page n av i/ W P smu sh.it - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- smu shit/ W P S u pe r C ache - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wp- su pe r- cache / W P T ou ch - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wptou ch/ W P - C l e an u p - http://www.j ortk.n l /wp- cl e an u p- optimiz e - an d- cl e an u p- y ou r- wordpre ss- datab ase / W P - D B M an age r - http://l e ste rchan .n e t/portfol io/programmin g/php/ W P B ook F ace b ook A pp - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/wpb ook/ W Y S I W Y G B l ocks of C on te n t - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/smart- wy siwy g- b l ocks- of- con te n t/ Y e t A n othe r R e l ate d P osts P l u gin - http://y arpp.org/ Y ou T u b e S hortcode - http://wordpre ss.org/e x te n d/pl u gin s/y ou tu b e - shortcode /
N ow you should have a super powered W ordP ress site! T his concludes the last section of on- site optimization techniq ues. In the nex t section “ A dvanced D ata R esearch” we’ re going to begin our j ourney of off- site SE O techniq ues.
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER FOUR! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER FIVE: ADVANCED DATA RESEARCH?
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER THREE
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
BY NEIL PATEL
SEO
AND SUJAN PATEL
05
CHAPTER 05
ADVANCED DATA RESEARCH A fter the first 5 sections, you should have a rock solid website. B ut there’ s way more to SE O than speed, index ation and metadata. W
e’ re going to begin our off- site SE O ImportX M L !
NO 1
techniq ues with some
INTRO TO IMPORT XML
W
hat is ImportX M L ? Import X M L is a way to retrieve information from file types such as html, x ml, csv and more using x path. T his can be incredibly useful for scraping and sourcing information off of websites, as it imports it right into a G oogle D ocs Spreadsheet, and you can also run some advanced searches to scrape information that would otherwise be hard to collect. I’ m going to walk you through a few ex ample uses of ImportX M L
BASIC SYNTAX ImportX M L is j ust like any other E x cel or G oogle D oc formula - it uses a pretty straightforward syntax ;
=importX ML ( UR L , Q uery) UR L = the url you will be scraping Q uery = the x path q uery to run on the url
BASIC EXAMPLE SCRAPING QUICKSPROUT FOR H1 TAGS Create a new G oogle D oc Spreadsheet
Q uery = the x path q uery to run on the url
BASIC EXAMPLE SCRAPING QUICKSPROUT FOR H1 TAGS Create a new G oogle D oc Spreadsheet
Set up your UR L
Create a basic x path function to grab the H 1 of the page. ( O b v iou sl y we cou l d do this v ia S cre amin g F rog or othe rwise crawl in g the site — b u t we ’ re j u st u sin g this as a simpl e e x ampl e ) A dd the importx ml function to cell B 2
N ote that we’ re referencing cell A 2 , where the UR L is. T he q uery gets wrapped in q uotes. T hen the x path defines what portion of the file should be returned. / / h1 tells it to return the contents of every h1 on the page ( this is what the “ //” part doe s asks for e v e ry occu rre n ce of the h1 “ path” n o matte r how man y l e v e l s de e p or how its n e ste d) . H ere’ s what it returns;
Cool! W e’ ve got the H 1 of the post pulled right into G oogle D ocs. So let’ s get into some useful ex amples of importx ml for G oogle D ocs.
NO 2
IMPORTXML — QUORA/TWITTER
W
e’ re going to use Q uora again to source users who may be influential or authoritative for their T witter UR L s. H ere’ s the final product, so you can see what we’ ll be building:
STEP ONE
Find a G roup or Topic
L et’ s use the blogging topic in this ex ample http://www.q u ora.com/B l oggin g/fol l owe rs
STEP TWO
Enter The Q uora UR L W
I n C olumn A
e’ re going to be referencing this cell in the function that’ s going in Column B .
C reate the importx ml Function To S crape Usernames
STEP THREE
the function is: =importx ml( A2, “ //h2/a/@href” )
L et’ s break that down, so you understand and can create your own. =importx ml( )
this is the empty function
A2
this is the “ UR L ” field which references the Q uora UR L
//h2
this references every h2 from that UR L
/a
this references a tags nested within the h2 ’ s
/@href
finally, this references only the links contained in the anchor tags
A s you can see, this returns a list of the top 2 0 users from the B logging T opic.
STEP FOUR
C reate Full UR L s
A
A s you may have noticed, Q uora links with relative UR L s, so we need to convert them to absolutes. simple concatenation function will do the trick;
In case you’ re not sure, the concatenate function is this; =C O N C AT EN AT E( “ http://q uora.com” ,B 2)
In case you’ re not sure, the concatenate function is this; =C O N C AT EN AT E( “ http://q uora.com” ,B 2)
L et’ s break that down as well =C O N C AT EN AT E( )
T he empty concatenate function ( comb in e s mu l tipl e strin gs of te x t in to on e )
“ http://q uora.com”
T he beginning of the Q uora UR L ( an y thin g n ot re fe re n cin g an othe r ce l l n e e ds to b e in q u ote s)
B 2
R eferences the cell with the incomplete user UR L
O nce you do that you need to grab and drag the formula down the rest of the columns;
STEP FIVE
S crape For Twitter UR L s
N ow for the last step, let’ s get those T witter UR L s!
H ere’ s the function. Its a long one so we’ ll break it out piece by piece; =I mportX ML ( C 2,"//div[ contains( @class,' profile_ action_ links_ section' ) ] //a[ contains ( @href,' twitter.com' ) ] /@href") =importx ml( )
T he empty importx ml function
C 2
T he cell of the complete Q uora profile UR L we’ re referencing
[ contains( ) ]
Contains will allow us to narrow down the div tag
//div
( @class,’ profile_ action
R eferencing any div tag in the H T M L H ere we’ re selecting class element
A
_ links_ section’ )
screenshot of Q uora’ s code shows it in the H T M L
//a[contains(@href,’twitter.com’)]
Select anchor text which includes a link to Twitter
/@href
Do the actual scrape of the link within the anchor text
Don’t forget to grab and drag the formula down through the rest of the columns; And now you can instantly get lists of 20 Twitter users at a time! This being a technical guide (a “How-To”) it’s of course your decision how you can use such a list, but I’m sure you can think of many applications :-)
NO 3 [1]
SCRAPING UBERSUGGEST FOR KEYWORD IDEAS
C reate a new G oogle D oc spreadsheet Click Create > Spreadsheet
[2] I n cell A 1, type in something that you want to q uery Ubersuggest for In this ex ample, we typed in “ how to ...” to start the q uery.
[3] I n cell A 2, type in the following formula and press enter =I mportX ML ( "http://ubersuggest.org/? q uery="&A1& "&format=html&language=English% 2F USA&source=web&submit=Sugg est", "//li/span")
T he spreadsheet will fill up with Ubersuggest’ s answers:
N 4 O
FINDING ANY HTML IN A LIST OF WEB PAGES
I’ m going to show you a really fast way to prospect 1 0 0 ( or more ) sites at one time. You can do this with ex pensive link prospecting plans. B ut if you’ re on a budget or want to minimize your tools, this is a fantastic method, j ust as easy. A nd fun! T his works when you’ re looking for H T M L in a list of documents, that is not part of the content — its code. In this ex ample we’ re going to look for the presence of a ‘ rel=author’ tag — because this means two things. O ne, the website owner is likely to be “ on top of things” from a marketing standpoint if they have taken the time to set this up. Second, they ( or some on e he l pin g) must have some amount of technical skill — so they may be an easier prospect to work with. W
http://panda.com
e’ re going to follow a few step process; [1]
C ome Up W
ith A
Few G oogle S earches
[2] S crape The R esults [3] Use S creaming Frog To L ook for C ertain C ode in Your L ist
STEP ONE
G oogle S earches
T he type of results you’ re trying to get, is a list of possible sites you could get a link from. L et’ s say you’ re a food blogger, and you want to find other blogs to guest post on. You might do a search like; food in u rl :b l og in titl e :su b mit post food in u rl :b l og in titl e :con trib u te post or you might get more specific with keywords; gou rme t food in u rl :b l og in titl e :su b mit post e cl e ctic de sse rts in u rl :b l og in titl e :su b mit post W
hen you nail down a good search, you should see a number of potential sites in the results — as well as not too many results. F or ex ample;
health food inurl:blog intitle:submit post About 4,400 results (0.44 seconds)
SEARCH
T he above is an ex cellent ex ample of a q uery to start with.
S T E P T W O S crape the UR L s from the G oogle R esults
W
e need to get all of those G oogle results into a tex t document to prep for running through Screaming F rog. [1]
To prep for scraping, set G oogle to return 10 0
results per page.
G o to search settings Set to 1 0 0 results per page
G o back to G oogle and run the results again. T hen use the SE R P redux bookmarklet —
click the link.
Copy the list of UR L s on to your clipboard
P aste them into your tex t editor
Save as a .tx t file.
STEP THREE
[1]
Filter the UR L s through S creaming Frog
S et S creaming Frog to list mode.
[2] S elect your tex t file and open
[3] G o To C ustom S ettings
[4] Enter HTM L to filter T he way we’ re doing this part is key. W
e want four lists created; [ a] [ b] [ c] [ d]
Contains rel= author D oesn’ t contain rel= author Contains rel= me D oesn’ t contain rel= me
[5 ] V iew Your C ustom R esults Click the ‘ custom’ tab - and then you can select filters 1 - 4
In this case, this particular list only found one rel= author blog. B ut that’ s ok! T hat’ s actually good. Imagine having to sift manually through all of those results to find the one with authorship? N ow you have one much more targeted prospect - and you can easily get many more by running through this process.
NO 5
USE CITATION FINDER TO FIND LINK OPPORTUNITIES
T his section covers using a tool that is paid. T here is a free version, but it does not have all the features. You can probably try some of the things in this section with the free version though. I am not affiliated with the tool in any way. B efore we start, go to - https://www.white spark.ca/l ocal - citation - fin de r/ R egister for your free or paid account.
01
SEARCH (WITHOUT A PROJECT)
G o to the first tab and enter your info in the fields
You have to wait a few minutes:
You have to wait a few minutes:
You should receive an email alert though when your report is ready:
Next, you’re going to see a report like this. Click ‘compare citations for these businesses’
Then you should export as a csv
You can open up and save as an Excel file — and we’re going to customize it a little so you can easily see WHO has the most citations.
You can open up and save as an E x cel file — and we’ re going to customize it a little so you can easily see W H O has the most citations. W
e’ re going to use a little ex cel formula =C O UN T I F ( A2:A111,"* Y * ")
like this ( assuming you’ re in column B ) :
A nd of course you can autofilter to see j ust the Y’ s or N ’ s
02
P art one is great for general prospecting, but what if your business isn’ t included in the report? T he you can use the “ search by phone number” feature.
You can use your phone number O R your business name ( title is a little deceptive, although phone number works best) . E nter your info, and we’ re also going to add this to a proj ect:
M ake sure you have a proj ect created
T he report you see will tell you all citation sources not tied to any keyword. Its j ust a raw list.
Click on the little plus to see all pages with the citation ( u su al l y me an in g a phon e n u mb e r)
A nd you have a few more options when it comes to ex porting the data:
R e- run and append.......runs the same report again, ex cept adds in any N E W results that weren’ t there before. Ex port C S V ....................E x ports the data, but without individual UR L s, j ust the name of the website Ex port C S V
w/ UR L s......includes the UR L s ( what y ou se e whe n cl ickin g the pl u s sign s) in the full report.
NO 6
HARVESTING EMAIL ADDRESSES
F or this section of advanced scraping we’ re going to use the Citation L abs Contact F inder — http://citation l ab s.com/tool s/ — you should register to create an account before we begin. T his tool is amazing if you have a list of prospective UR L s — you can then q uickly gather most of the email addresses needed for outreach.
01
GATHER URLS
I’ m going to assume you’ ll either have a list of prospect already, or ( with the he l p of this gu ide ! ) you’ ll know how to get a list q uickly. F or this ex ample, I’ m going to take a list of scraped G oogle UR L s — let’ s say I was a food blogger and wanted to submit recipes. I might use a search like: recipe inurl:submit
recipe inurl:submit About 147,000 results (0.24 seconds)
O nce you have your search, navigate to the contact finder
SEARCH
Once you have your search, navigate to the contact finder
Then fill out the form
You can experiment with regular expressions (regex) to fine tune your results. This expression; ^(Contact|About|Email|Submit)
will look for results that begin with the words contact, about, email or submit. I also do not limit anchor text to number of words. Click on the contact tab to get your results (you might have to wait a few minutes for processing).
As you can see, there are a few types of results; Emails..................email addresses found Forms...................form submissions found Contact Pages.....pages with contact information but an email addresses was not findable Empty..................no results of any kind You then have the option of downloading any report, or all, into a CSV
Empty..................no results of any kind You then have the option of downloading any report, or all, into a CSV
A s you can see in the above report, out of 1 0 0 UR L s, it captured 3 8 e mail s 4 7 form U R L s 7 con tact page s on l y 8 e mpty
NO 7
SOCIAL LISTENING: ADVANCED LISTENING TO TWITTER
B efore we set up your searches in some different tools, the first step is to develop lists of advanced searches to follow. L et’ s say your main topic is interior decorating — you’ d want to create a list of as many of those variations as possible — much of this won’ t look different than keyword research; in te riorde coratin g in te rior de coratin g # in te riorde coratin g in te riorde sign in te rior de sign # in te riorde sign T hese are your core words. T hen you can have a list of words to gauge intent. L ike; n e e d he l p trou b l e l ookin g for tips q u e stion A nd if you’ re looking to target anything location based; L os A n ge l e s C A C al iforn ia L A D on’ t forget some of your brand ( min e wou l d b e ) ; Q u icksprou t n e il pate l kissme trics kiss me trics craz y e gg craz y e gg I ' m kin d of a b ig de al T hese keywords and search combinations will give you any mention of these keywords by anyone. M ore on specific user monitoring below. You can create and test your own here https://twitte r.com/# ! /se arch- adv an ce d
A
good search may have a few good results in the last 2 4 - 4 8 hours.
CREA TE AN I F TTT REC IPE N ex t, when you find your searches you want to monitor, you can create and IF T T T recipe to watch for them. T he beauty of IF T T T is that you can receive your alert across a few dozen different platforms. W e’ re going to set it to send you an email or a tex t message when an alert is triggered. NO TE: T he se work gre at for l e ss fre q u e n t re su l ts. Create an account ( it’ s fre e ) and make a new recipe
Use T witter as the “ trigger”
Fill out the search field — if it’s just a simple search you can use plain text. But you may need to use advanced operators.
Select either email or Gmail as the “Action” channel.
Fill out the fields and customize as needed
If you want to receive a text message
And set your fields
And wait for the emails to come in!
B ON U S : SE T UP EMA IL FIL TER S Take your listening to the next level with some Gmail filtering. Create a filter to get all your alerts sent to a folder:
A D V A N C E D TWI TTER SEAR C H SYNTAX Fortunately, if you use Twitter’s advanced search creator, it will come up with the search for you: Just go to: https://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced and run the search - the results will include the search syntax with operators etc in the results:
TW I TTER F OR I N F LUENC ER L ISTENING
TW I TTER F OR I N F LUENC ER L ISTENING L et’ s continue with the interior design niche. L et’ s say you want to connect with more interior designers who are also bloggers. You’ ll want to know when they need help with something. F irst — find people who you can listen to with a tool like followerwonk http://fol l owe rwon k.com http://followerwonk.com
T hen, create an advanced search for when she mentions something you can help with. M aybe you’ re a computer guru. You could do a search like this:
She may only tweet about that once a year. B ut if you’ re trying to connect with really high authority people, it will be worth creating an IF T T T recipe to know when she needs help via tex t message; A gain, twitter gives you the syntax for the search when you run it via the T witter search page
TRACK WI TH MON I TTER M onitter is a great free tool to listen for tweets that contain a certain keyword in large volume. T hink of it as a live T witter monitor. G o to http://mon itte r.com and create an account Start creating some columns with your search terms
H ere we’ ve added four streams for four different interior design type searches:
H ere we’ ve added four streams for four different interior design type searches:
W
T hen, you can set advanced settings to track tweets online from a certain geographic location
hen you spot a tweet to respond to, you can do so right within M onitter
M O R E T WI TTE R TOOL S T here are dozens of other tools to monitor T witter http://ifttt.com
connect multiple online platforms together to automate things
http://mon itte r.com/
set up multiple columns and track twitter searches live
http://twe e tme me .com/ view popular articles being shared http://tre n dsmap.com/ to see what’ s trending in particular locations - nice visual setup http://twe e tb e e p.com/
get all mentions of your brand, you or anything else emailed to you ( like what IF T T T can do)
http://www.u b e rv u .com/( paid tool)
NO 8
BROWSER PLUGINS
B rowser plugins can greatly speed up your work flow and efficiency. I’ m going to show you some plugins for G oogle Chrome, and a little bit about how to use them in more advanced ways. T his section of browser plugins revolves around the ones that help optimize your sites accessibility and index ation. F irst, here’ s the list. B roken L ink C hecker https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /oj kcdipcgfae kb e ae l aapakgn j fl fgl f W
eb D eveloper http://chrispe de rick.com/work/we b - de v e l ope r/ R edirect Path C hecker https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /aomidfkchockcl dhb kggj okdkke b mdl l S EO moz Toolbar https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /e akacpaij cpapn dcfffdgphdiccmpkn p C hrome S niffer https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /homgcn aoacgigpkkl j j j e kpign b l ke ae G oogle A nalytics D ebugger https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /j n kmfdil e e l hofj cij ame phohj e chhn a M
icroformats for C hrome https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /oal b ifkn mcl b n mj l l j de mhj j l kmppj j l R ulers G uides and Eyedropper C olor Picker https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /b j pn gj gkahhfl e j n e e mihpb n fdoafoe h W
ord C ount https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /kmn dj oipob j fj b hocpoe e j j imchn b j j e S ource K it https://chrome .googl e .com/we b store /de tail /iie e l dj dihkpoapgipfke oddj ckopgj g? hl = e n - U S I’ m going to show you how to use some of these in an advanced way.
BROKEN LINKS CHECKER N ot only is the broken links checker a great plugin to find broken links q uickly on your site, but you can use it in creative ways on other people’ s sites to get ideas for linkbuilding and prospecting. F or ex ample, try running it on the sitemap of a competitor’ s website. H ere’ s how: [1]
F ind a competitor with an H T M L sitemap. F or this ex ample I’ m going to randomly use www.b iz chair.com and their sitemap is http://www.b iz chair.com/site - map.html
[2] R un the L ink Checker
W
Click the icon for the ex tension
ait for it to find the broken links —
in this case there are q uite a few.
Wait for it to find the broken links — in this case there are quite a few.
A great one to immediately notice is the “resources” page. Its often easier to recreate resource content or otherwise use it to get some links.
CHROME SNIFFER This plugin automatically shows you the CMS or script library a website uses. Extremely handy if you are looking to reach out to only WordPress site owners, for example. As you browse the web, the icon to the far right of the URL will change to match which CMS or library is being used. For example, you can see that my site is built on WordPress Here is a site built with Drupal
REDIRECT PATH CHECKER This plugin will automatically alert you if you were taken to a page via any kind of redirect. Can be very useful when browsing your site, in the case that you are internally linking to outdated URLs (or externally for that matter) For example, I just found on my site this link to Gizmodo 302 redirects:
How did I know? Because the plugin alerted me to the 302.
And then you can click on the icon and it will show you the redirect (or series of redirects) that the browser took to get to a page.
A nd then you can click on the icon and it will show you the redirect ( or se rie s of re dire cts) that the browser took to get to a page.
THE SEOMOZ TOOLBAR & PLUGIN You can do many things with the M oz plugin. A you might use it to look for are:
few of the more advanced things
Q uickly finding followed vs nofollowed links
O r finding the country and IP address for the website
NO 9 W
USING A PROXY
hat is a prox y and why would you want to use one? A
prox y acts like the middle man between you and other servers. In other words, they make you an on y mou s on the web. You appear to be using the IP address of the prox y, and not yours. A nd this is perfect for rank checking if you use local software like R ank T racker. R un too many automated G oogle searches to check rankings from your location, and you run the risk of sending a red flag to G oogle. N ote that some people use prox ies for less than ethical means, and I do not recommend doing so. B ut it is a fantastic way to check your rankings without sending unusual activity to G oogle from your IP address. So how to you use a prox y? I have a simple but little known method for you to find and check dozens of free prox y addresses all at once.
STEP ONE
G o to http : //www. rosinstrum
ent. com
/p rox y/ You will see a list of free public prox y IP addresses. T hese change often, so be sure to refresh your browser if you have had the window open for a while.
C opy and paste prox ies into S crapebox to Test Them
STEP TWO
T his is the magic step! Since prox y addresses go bad so q uickly and often, its a huge waste of time to try them each all individually. H it “ M anage” , then “ T est” . A fter a few minutes, your prox ies will have been tested. K eep following the steps, and you’ ll have a clean list of dozens of prox ies to choose from.
R eturn G ood Prox ies B ack To M
ain L ist Select “ T ransfer G ood P rox ies to M ain L ist” under “ E x port” . You will then be left with a clean list of working prox ies.
R eturn G ood Prox ies B ack To M
ain L ist Select “ T ransfer G ood P rox ies to M ain L ist” under “ E x port” . You will then be left with a clean list of working prox ies.
STEP FOUR
C opy Prox y A ddress I nto Your R ank C hecking S oftware
In R ank T racker, you can enter the prox y address like this:
Since the addresses to go bad after a while, you may want to retest your list and/ or cut and paste more from http://www.rosin stru me n t.com/prox y /
BONUS: WANT AN ALTERNATIVE TO A PROXY? T he above method is free, which is the best part, but if you want something more robust? You can get a “ V irtual P rivate Server” ( V P S) . M ost web hosting companies offer this. Its like having your own private dedicated IP address. It may be a small monthly fee, but as something more robust than public prox ies, it may be worth it for you! I’ d be surprised if you’ re not an ex treme data collection ex pert now! B ut we’ re not done! O n to some less- traveled paths to keyword research.
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER ONE! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER SIX: KEY WORD RESEARCH?
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER FOUR
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER SIX
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
BY NEIL PATEL
SEO
AND SUJAN PATEL
06
CHAPTER 06
KEYWORD RESEARCH You’ ve all used G oogle A dW ords keyword tool before right? W e’ re not going to cover that here though. W e’ re going to go beyond the common keyword research tools and ex plore some less talked about ways to find the best keywords to target for your site.
N 1 O
BEYOND GOOGLE ADWORDS KEYWORD RESEARCH
M any people get keyword data from A dW ords. B ut there’ s other sources of keywords and search volume. W e’ re going to walk through a few of them now! [1]
B ing T he newer B ing keyword research tool, although still in development, is a good place to check. Sign in ( or cre ate an accou n t)
Start with the basic settings. B ing’ s keyword tool is a little different than G oogle’ s. If set to 3 0 days, it give you the e x act amou n t of se arch from those 3 0 day s.
You can export the data
Use the benefit of exact search numbers to judge long tail:
You can bring in Google AdWords data for a comparison of search volume metrics:
N ow, let’ s get a little more refined. Set the language to E nglish ( assu min g that’ s y ou r targe t l an gu age ) — and ex pand the date range to 6 months. T his is going to give you a large data set to make good decisions:
Set to “ strict mode” for basically B ing’ s version of “ ex act match”
[2] W
ordtracker and S EO
B ook’ s K eyword R esearch Tools
T hese versions are free. You can also register and pay for the pro versions.
R un the report in SE O
B ook to ex port CSV ’ s
Use the overall daily estimates for measure potential traffic across the entire web:
[3] W W
ordpot ordpot is another source of keywords you may not have thought of.
It also shows definitions, synonyms, related words and associated words
[4] YouTube K eyword Tools O f course if you’ re doing optimization for YouT ube you’ ll be interested in the search volume — but if not, this is still a fantastic tool very generating more keyword ideas.
G o to the bottom, click “ add all 1 0 0 ” and then click ex port to CSV file of your choice
or the
A lso — let’ s say you want to rank in youtube for “ search marketing” . [1]
S e arch for the te rm “ se arch marke tin g” in Y ou T u b e .
[2] F in d the top ran kin g v ide o
[3] E n te r that v ide o in the ke y word tool — ke y words for that v ide o
this giv e y ou the top
You can add these to the ex isting report or start over
NO 2
USE SEARCH SUGGEST SCRAPERS FOR FAST KEYWORD IDEAS
T he web collects data every day. D ata that people are actually typing — telling us what they are looking for.
they are
Search suggestions are a great place to look for words people are actually typing. T his can often bring immediate content ideas as well as keyword prospects. T he important part in this process is collecting as many ideas as possible. M any SE O ’ s out there miss some of the most useful tools. L et’ s walk through some now! F irst, a list of suggest scrapers http://www.u b e rsu gge st.com http://soov l e .com/ http://tool s.se ob ook.com/ge n e ral /ke y word- in formation / http://www.z u u l a.com/ http://www.ke y wordb u z z .n e t/ A ll are great ( the re ’ s a l ot ou t the re on u b e rsu gge st) but I’ ll show you a few tricks with Soovle and K eywordB uzz
SOOVLE T here’ s two ways we’ re going to use Soovle. F irst, we’ re going to use it as a general suggest scraper. [1]
S et it is 15 engines. W
e want as many keywords as possible!
[2] S tart typing the root keyword surrounding the topic you’ re researching
[3] Use Scraper for Chrome to Key Them in a Google Doc Who wants to cut and paste all of those words? We can get them in a Google Doc with a small tweaking to the Scraper xPath
You’ll see the default results don’t include every keyword.
Eliminate the [4]
Scrape again (or hit enter)
Export the results to Google Docs.
[4] Filter and sort the raw data You’ll notice there’s a little extra stuff in there to clean up. There’s some data from others divs and duplicate keywords.
Delete the extra two rows at the bottom
Sort by keyword alphabetically
Now we need to filter duplicates! In cell B2 put this formula; =if(A2=A3,true,false)
This will put true if the items are the same and false if they are different.
Then hover over the corner (wait for the cross to appear) and double click.
This marks every items as a duplicate or not. Before we do the next step, copy the true/false results and paste as values onto its self. This won’t visually change the true/false results but will remove the formulas and leave just the words.
N E X T sort descending by column B
This should put all the TRUE’s at the top. These are your duplicates. Delete all the “TRUE” rows.
You’re left with about 100 of unique and diverse keywords!
S OO VLE TO CATC H T R EN DS N ex t, we’ ll use Soovle to capture trending keywords if you want to create q uickly and catch a trend. [1]
C lick on the S tar T his will bring you to the trending words for the day.
[2] D o a control- f in your browser. S earch for words surrounding your niche
[3] Then — enter THA T word back into the suggest scraper.
K E YW O R D BUZZ I j ust want to show you one thing with keywordbuzz.net — other scrapers to do this. First —
I don’ t know of any
arrive at the search screen and enter your keyword.
Then — not only can you download as a tex t file. You can instantly check domain availability for .com .net and .org
NO 3
USE GOOGLE CORRELATE
G oogle correlate is another not often talked about tool for keyword research, especially seasonal trends. http://www.googl e .com/tre n ds/corre l ate /
H ere’ s an ex ample —
if you enter ‘ re d win e ’ this is the result:
You can see it gives us keywords where search volume across time has a strong correlation. T his is a useful tool for ex ploring trends and coming up with some outside of the box keyword ideas — let’ s ex plore a few!
01 tip
ADDITIONAL TOPIC IDEAS
L et’ s say you’ re a food blogger — and you like to do an article on red wine every once and awhile. W ouldn’ t you like to know some other topics you could attach to red wine? T he correlate result for red wine is:
You can see that a lot of people are searching for cheese related things around the same time they are searching for wine. T his is somewhat ex pected, but there are many targeted keyword ideas you may not have thought of. A nd you know these trend right along with red wine - so you could time your content to go with the seasonal trends a bit better too. You can show more words and also do a CSV ex port
02 tip
IDEAS BY LOCATION
T he location feature in G oogle Correlate is great for targeting an audience in a particular location, with a parallel interest. T his works great with seasonal items, or interests that fluctuate in search patterns through the year. F or ex ample, let’ s say you’ re an eCommerce shop that sells grills etc. You might be interested in people searching for “ outdoor party” . You know this search pattern matches the seasonality and interests of your customers. A n initial correlation shows:
T his shows similar search patterns for “ poison oak” and “ boat registration” . B ut let’ s get more targeted and get correlations for the location.
A nd the results are:
H ere you have people in the states of C onnecticut and S outh C arolina interested in an A ntigua all inclusive vacation. So what do you do? You do a v acation giv e away to the A n tigu as for your customers from those states at the time of year people begin having outdoor parties ( and buying grills) .
N 4 O
TRACKING INTERNAL SITE SEARCH
M any site owners often overlook the most obvious place to get keywords. Your own website. I’ m not j ust referring to keywords people use to arrive at your site. R ather, searches users are making within your site.
T his especially works if you have a larger site — ecommerce or a large editorial site. You will have a lot of data to work with and many opportunities to learn about how people are using your site and keyword ideas you’ d never think of otherwise. I’ m assuming you already have a search function in your site. I’ ll show you how to set it up in analytics and use the data effectively. STEP ONE
C heck How Your S ite D oes a S ite S earch
You’ re going to need the UR L parameter your site uses to track site search. F or ex ample, the site I’ m demonstrating this on, looks like the following;
See the search parameter? /search.php? search=search+ex ample
where “ search ex ample” is the keyword typed. T he parameter is “ search” ( hint: if in php its afte r the q u e stion mark)
STEP TWO
S et I t Up in A nalytics
H ead over to your analytics profile. G o to the A dmin area. Click on P rofile settings In profile settings, you’ re going to scroll down to “ Site Search Settings” T ype the q uery parameter we found in the first step in the field. A lso, select to strip q uery parameters from the UR L .
STEP THREE
How To Use The D ata
I’ m going to show you how to best access this data for keyword research. W e’ re going to do this within analytics but you can also ex port the data for further use. First - V iew the site search keywords
W
If you’ ve never done this before, its best to zoom out at least six months.
e’ re going to apply a few different filters to the data. ( Y ou cou l d do this with adv an ce d se gme n ts too for a more “ pe rman e n t” fil te r) . T his first filter says “ show me words that get searched more often but then most people immediately leave my site. ( Y ou may hav e to pl ay with the n u mb e rs spe cific to y ou r me trics) . T hese are the words you want to build new content around.
A nd may get something like this;
O R you can do sort of the opposite. Say “ show me words that get searched a lot but where people stay on the site. A gain, the ex act number will depend on the behavior of people on your site.
STEP FOUR
Take A ction
E ither way, you’ ll have a list of keywords you can take immediate action on. H ighl y se arche d words whe re pe opl e l e av e
= cre ate the con te n t!
H ighl y se arche d words whe re pe opl e stay
= ke y word re se arch an d optimiz e arou n d those words.
NO 5
STEP ONE
SCRAPING SEARCH SUGGEST FROM THE COMMAND LINE Ex tract I nitial J S
File
G oogle runs a script when computing its search suggest words. You can use the following UR L in your browser, and in turn generate a J S file.
P aste the following into your browser. http://www.googl e .com/s? su ge x p= pfwl & cp= 1 5 & q = < se arch te rm he re > R eplace < se arch te rm he re > with your keyword. L et’ s do marketing. http://www.googl e .com/s? su ge x p= pfwl & cp= 1 5 & q = marke tin g P aste in your browser
It will automatically create and download a J S file
O pen it and you’ ll see your raw suggest terms
T hat’ s not very much practical use, so there’ s more!
STEP TWO
C reate an .sh File
Simply copy and paste this code into your tex t editor # ! /bin/bash q =$ ( echo "$ 1" | sed ' s/ /% 20/g' ) curl -s "http://www.google.com/s? sugex p=pfwl&cp=15 &q =$ q " | ' s/\ [ /\ n\ [ /g' | cut -d' "' -f2 | tail -n +4
Save it as an .sh file. You can simply name it suggest.sh
sed
STEP THREE
R un The C ode I n Terminal ( M
R un the following command in terminal
W
./suggest.sh "marketing"
hich will produce the follow results; marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing
j obs in wa solutions plan solutions wa j obs strategies drive mix internships
( n ote that some re su l ts may b e l ocal iz e d) .
ac)
NO 6
RUNNING YOUR OWN KEYWORD FREQUENCY ANALYSIS
T here’ s many tools available out there to run a keyword freq uency analysis. Some are free, some are paid. B ut there may be reason and benefit to having the control to run your own reports. I’ ll show you one way to do this! STEP ONE
C reate your .sh C ode
Start by cutting and pasting this into your test editor; # ! /bin/bash input=$ 1 I F S=$ ' \ n' # for keyword files... if [ -e "$ input" ] ; then cat "$ input" | sed ' s/ /\ n/g' >> tmp for word in $ ( cat "$ input" | sed ' s/ /\ n/g' | sort | uniq ) ; do count=$ ( grep -c "^ $ word\ $ " tmp) echo -e "$ count\ t$ word" >> tmp_ o done cat tmp_ o | sort -hr rm tmp tmp_ o # for web pages... elif [ [ "$ input" =~ "http://" ] ] ; then # check if links is installed. found solution at http://stackoverflow.com/q uestions/5 92620/check-if-a-program-ex istsfrom-a-bash-script type links >/dev/null 2>&1 | | { echo >&2 "T his script req uires ' links' but it' s not installed. Aborting."; ex it 1; } links -dump "$ input" | sed -e ' s/ /\ n/g;s/\ ( .* \ ) /\ L \ 1/' | sed ' s/\ W//g' >> tmp for word in $ ( cat tmp | sort | uniq ) ; do count=$ ( grep -c "^ $ word\ $ " tmp) echo -e "$ count\ t$ word" >> tmp_ o done cat tmp_ o | sort -hr rm tmp tmp_ o fi
Save this as a file —
STEP TWO
anything will work, such as keyword.report.sh
R un the S cript
O pen up T erminal in your M ac You can run the script in two ways —
BY FILE
either by file or by UR L .
BY URL
bash keyword.report.sh keyword.file.tx t
bash keyword.report.sh http://q uicksprout.com
‘ keyword.report.sh’ is the name of your .sh file and ‘ keyword.file.tx t’ is the name of your file with the content in it you’ re analyzing.
A gain, ‘ keyword.report.sh’ is the .sh filename and then you j ust put the UR L ! E asy!
I bet you have a killer list of keywords and data now! N ow your site is fast, crawlable, semantically correct, and you’ ve got the best keywords. T ime to target and create content that will attract links while you sleep.
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER SIX! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER SEVEN: LINK BUILDING WITH CONTENT?
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER FIVE
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
BY NEIL PATEL
SEO
AND SUJAN PATEL
07
CHAPTER 07 LINK BUILDING WITH CONTENT I bet you’ ve heard time and time again by now, how important “ q uality content” is to attracting links, shares and of course traffic. T his section spells out some step by step actions you can take to create your own amazing content — and also how to incorporate the right techniq ues into that content so it performs even better.
F irst up, a step by step approach to creating a “ top” list to attract links.
NO 1
CREATE A “TOP” LIST AND GET LINKS
A lthough this strategy isn’ t terribly new, there’ s also not many resources detailing how to do this q uickly. T o refresh, this techniq ue basically involves building a piece of content — that’ s a list of the “ top 1 0 , top 2 0 etc..” of something involving your niche. E x amples across the web are: http://www.de l ish.com/food/b e st- of- food- b l ogs http://www.social me diae x amin e r.com/top- 1 0 - social - me dia- b l ogs- the - 2 0 1 2 - win n e rs/ http://www.we b de sign school sgu ide .com/l ib rary /top- 1 0 0 - b l ogs- for- smal l - b u sin e ss- cost- cu ttin g- in spiration .html
N otice all of those resources have a good amount of back- links. B ut not all top lists do. W hat are they doing right that others are not? If you have a good sized follower list, first you’ re going to find those that you know or are closely connected to with websites you could include on the list.
W
Then, you’ ll filter further by choosing blogs by social strength ( n ot we b site stre n gth) . ho you already know +
social strength =
content success.
Use Simply M easured to E x port and A nalyze T witter F ollowers
W
ho you already know +
social strength =
content success.
Use Simply M easured to E x port and A nalyze T witter F ollowers [1]
G o to: http://simpl y me asu re d.com/fre e - social - me dia- tool s# re port- 2 0
[2] Enter the Twitter username you want to analyz e [3] R un the report, and “ pay with a tweet” ( to run it for free) . Note: you do not have to “ pay with a tweet” the same account you are analyz ing. [4] W hen your results are ready, download the spreadsheet for ex cel - this is where the fun begins! First, we’ re going to filter your list of followers by the topic you want to create the list about. L et’ s say you’ re doing a top 1 0 food bloggers list.
Set your filter:
T he results are pretty good!
T hen we’ re j ust going to pull those into either a G oogle D oc or another spreadsheet to mix with other bloggers. A t this point you can sort by followers and add a “ follows me” column since we’ re going to be mix ing in non- followers.
N ex t, we’ re going to grab some more prominent bloggers from F ollowerwonk.
N ex t, we’ re going to grab some more prominent bloggers from F ollowerwonk. Use _ _ _ _ _ _ blogger in q uotes. “ B logger” instead of “ blog” means you’ ll likely get more people ( rather than companies) . Q uotes means they will have had to call themselves a blogger on that topic. N ot j ust someone who blogs and happens to like food. F or ex ample:
You may need to broaden your search, but definitely start with it more specific like that. T hen, using either the scrape for Chrome plugin or a pro followerwonk account — ex tract the data and add it to your spreadsheet look for people with about 1 0 , 0 0 0 - 2 0 , 0 0 0 followers. T hey’ ll be the easiest to get attention from and still carry good social weight.
N ow with your mix , you can choose a list of 1 0 - 2 0 people to feature in a “ T op F ood B loggers” list. Some of them will already be following you - they’ ll be so complimented they’ ll definitely share the content and link to it. T his will help drive shares and links so the higher level influencers see it.
TIPS C reate a S eries - D on’ t j ust do this once! You’ ll get more attention by doing these list annually, q uarterly or even monthly! L et bloggers know ahead of time - Send them a q uick tweet or email to let them approve the list before it publishes. If they know about it ahead of time they’ ll be more likely to share when it does go live.
NO 2
NO 2
BUILD LINKS WITH PDFS
T his tutorial assumes you know the basics of creating a P D F — so I’ ll show you a huge checklist of things you should do — but the specific process and order can be up to you! W
rite valuable, well structured copy and use a keyword strategy! Using images: create an A lt T ag Use keywords in the filename J ust like a properly optimized UR L , the filename of your P D F matters. Use a keyword rich ( an u se fu l for the u se r) filename. Separate words with hyphens ( - ) . O ptimiz e Your M eta D ata A lso like a normal webpage, metadata is an important optimization step. You’ ll either need the full version of A dobe R eader http://www.adob e .com/produ cts/acrob at.html or this free P D F editor for W
in dows http://www.b e cy home .de /b e cy pdfme tae dit/de scription _ e n g.htm
O ptimiz e the following areas: T itle
this tu rn s in to the titl e tag of the we b page .
A uthor
this wil l l ab e l the docu me n t with the au thor, an d P D F s wil l ofte n ge t grou pe d b y au thor
S ubject
this is ofte n u se d b y G oogl e as the de scription in the S E R P s. T his may al so b e in fl u e n ce d b y the first fe w se n te n ce s in y ou r docu me n t.
K eywords
u se 5 - 1 0 ke y words he re .
Use links in your document J ust like regular SE O - use some internal links within your P D F . W
atch The File S iz e P agespeed is more important everyday. If you’ re using A dobe R eader to create your P D F — go to P D F O ptimizer A dvanced right- size. A lso, use “ O ptimize for fast webview” to have your P D F load one page at a time. S elect The B est V ersion Use version 1 .5 or lower. N ot all users have the most updated version, and you’ ll risk some people not being able to open it. O ptimiz e The R eading O rder T he re adin g orde r se ttin gs with A dob e R e ade r P D F . T o display and edit the reading order: [1] G o to A dvanced > A ccessibility > A dd Tags to D ocument. [2] Then select A dvanced > A ccessibility > Touch Up R eading O rder
Upload the PD F near the root directory of your site K eywords towards the front of your UR L s will perform the best in search and be easiest for users to remember. T his P D F I did on my site Q uickSprout is a good ex ample of a short UR L : http://www.q u icksprou t.com/b u sin e ssmistake s.pdf L ink to the PD F from a strong page on your website T his is not only useful for users but will pass stronger authority to your P D F . A void duplicate content L ike any page, be sure your P D F is totally uniq ue content! A dd Your PD F to PD F D irectories H ere’ s a list. D ocS toc.com C al ame o.com E b ook8 8 .com G e tF re e E b ooks.com F re e - E b ooks.n e t S hare ware E b ooks.com E - b ooksD ire ctory .com E b ookD ire ctory .com M e moW are .com E b ookJ u n gl e .com
If your P D F is an eB ook try these sites: http://www.chan ge this.com/ http://www.fre e - e b ooks.n e t/ http://www.ge tfre e e b ooks.com/ http://www.the fre e site .com/ http://www.e b ookj u n gl e .com/ http://e - l ib rary .n e t/ http://e b ookdire ctory .com/ http://www.me moware .com/ http://www.e b ook8 8 .com/ http://www.share ware e b ooks.com/ http://www.e b ooke e .com/ http://www.fe e db ooks.com/ http://dire ctory .pdf- se arch- e n gin e .com/ http://www.howto.co.u k/ http://www.e - b ooksdire ctory .com/ http://b ooks.googl e .com http://www.ide amarke te rs.com/b ids/b ookproce ss.cfm
NO 3
LINK BUILDING WITH IMAGES
I talked about building links with images a little on my post on SE O moz:
http://www.se omoz .org/b l og/the - 1 0 - gol de n - ru l e s- to- attractin g- au thori ty - l in ks but we’ re going to go into more depth here.
T he post talked about building an image library online and making it easy for people to find and use your images, giving you credit with a link. B ut why wait for them to come to you? H ere we’ re going to do the same, but reach out to people who might want your images. L et’ s say, for ex ample, you either have access to photos of N ew York City, or you live in N ew York and freq uently take good q uality photos on your phone. You already have a library of photos of NYC offer people who might find them useful ( and give you a link! ) . T his is going to follow a few steps; [1]
C ollect your photos and format them
[2] Find people who could use your photos [3] Narrow to those worth reaching out to [4] C reate your outreach letter and contact them
STEP ONE
C ollect and format your photos
Use the best q uality settings on your camera. A the best raw q u al ity possible. F or ex ample, on your iP hone use the H D R
great q uality photo begins with
settings.
T his will ensure you have the highest q uality photo going into your iP hone. Nex t —
to q uickly upload them all to your computer, you can use a service like B ump — https://b u .mp/ - you upload photos from your iP hone to your computer simply by “ bumping” the spacebar with your phone. N o matter how you upload them, use the highest file size and pix el size possible — iP hone calls this “ actual size” . Stay O rganized! A s you upload and store photos, categorize them — I suggest something simple like; / people / architecture
the
if photos of a city,
I suggest something simple like; / people / architecture / streets / attractions / events / nature A nd n ame y ou r photo fil e s something relevant - like empire- state- building- dusk.j pg
NEXT: PREP THE FILE AND LINK T hen you want to provide these photos with an easy way for people to link back to you — so use some pre- written H T M L .
F ree image courtesy of N eil Patel and Q uicksprout
T his is a really easy way for them to give you credit, and a link, all at once.
STEP TWO
Find People W
ho Need Your Photos
L ots of people and sites might fit your profile; bloggers businesses located in N YC enterprise businesses needing any city photos B ut within that, we want to narrow it down more with the following criteria; Single author sites Sites where contact person is readily findable Sites with high P R or D A Sites with strong social metrics Sites with good author authority H igh number of R SS readers P ositive link profiles themselves ( y ou don ’ t wan t to ge t a l in k from b ad n e ighb orhoods) A lso — you can start with people you already know. W ho do you know who owns or runs a website who wouldn’ t die for some q uality photos? So —
start a spreadsheet following this format; URL
SINGLE AUTHOR
CONTACT
DA
domain.com
Y
[email protected]
67
G+ FB SHARES CIRCLES 545
( e x ampl e spre adshe e t) with the fields meaning the following; UR L ........................ site you’ re prospecting S ingle A uthor....... Y for single author, N for multi author C ontact.................. email address
3,200
RSS READERS
LINK PROFILE
300
4
(example spreadsheet) with the fields meaning the following; URL ........................ site you’re prospecting Single Author....... Y for single author, N for multi author Contact.................. email address DA.......................... SEOmoz domain authority FB Shares.............. number of facebook shares on the homepage G+ circles.............. number of circles the person or business is in RSS readers.......... how many RSS readers the site has (if there’s a feed) Link profile........... 1 is poor, 2 is good, 3 is very good, 4 is exceptional As we use the following resources, you’re going to fill your spreadsheet with sites and metrics. So, let’s get to actually finding people to reach out to! Some tools to use;
https://followerwonk.com/ http://www.socialmention.com/ http://klout.com http://www.google.com/blogsearch http://topsy.com http://amplicate.com/ http://zerply.com/ http://twtrland.com/
Let’s run through an example of using followerwonk. You want to find bloggers who don’t have good photos. This is often bloggers who are more focused on the writing — like NOT photographers, artists, graphic designers or people otherwise likely to have the photos covered. A search like “blogger writer” is great because they blog, but may focus on writing, and therefore be weak on photos.
Once you get the search you like, you can use the Scraper for Google Chrome plugin to get them into a Google Doc — https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd
Right click on the info you want, and click scrape similar
A window will pop up and you can then send the data over to a new Google Doc
Using techniques like the above you can gather some pretty good lists fairly quickly. Sort through your metrics to find the best bloggers to reach out to! Use best practice outreach practices to make your contacts and help them use better photos.
NO 4
CREATE A 3D JAVASCRIPT PAGE OR MICROSITE WITH HTML5 AND CSS3
I haven’ t seen many people doing this. W ith some open source code from github you can make a 3 D presentation or landing page. B ecause it’ s built with H T M L 5 and CSS3 , the content is fully crawlable and index able. H ere’ s where you’ ll find the code. https://githu b .com/b artaz /impre ss.j s STEP ONE
D ownload the C ode
I nstall on your S erver
STEP TWO
T o install, simply paste the files in whatever directory you want them either on your local, test, or live server.
STEP THREE
C reate Your S lideshow
T o do this, all you need to edit is the index .html file included in the install. It has a pre- built demo slideshow included, which you may borrow code from, or delete and create your own from scratch.
NOTE: when editing code, do not edit anything above the part shown;.
You can see the demo live here - http://b artaz .githu b .com/impre ss.j s/# /b ore d E verything should be inside an “ impress” < div>
You can see the demo live here - http://bartaz.github.com/impress.js/#/bored Everything should be inside an “impress”
I will show you some ways to use the functions so you can come up with your own slideshow. Let’s look at all the possible id’s classes and parameters for the slideshow. FIELD
SINGLE AUTHOR
id - (can use anything you want, or leave empty)
the name of the “page” or slide as it appears in the URL. If left blank, it will say /slide-1 (for the first slide, and so on.)
class=”step slide”
the slide “slides” into view
class=”step”
the slide “turns” into view
data-x
horizontal position on the canvas from the center of the element
data-y
vertical position on the canvas from the center of the element
data-scale
scaling an element ie: data-scale=”5” is 5 times larger than other elements
data-rotate
will rotate the item. ie data-rotate=”80” will rotate it 80 degrees clockwise
data-z
adjusts the 3rd dimension, depth
footnote
wrap contents in this element to display it smaller at the bottom
data-rotate-x
rotates around the x axis
data-rotate-y
rotates around the y axis
NO W F O R S OME EXAM PL ES! Example 1 — Simple Text Suppose you want to spice up your online presentation or microsite.
Example 2 — Include an Image You can create a stunning visualization
...and even include images
Example 3 — Scaled Slide Step then you should try impress.js*
* no rhyme intended
Example 4 — Rotation
caught mid turn
by the screen capture software!!
(very slick)
Had to capture it mid turn to give you the idea:
Ex ample 5 —
Third D imension: D epth
T his element looks like it’ s being zoomed in from far away ( notice the big “ g” it sits inside of) .
Ex ample 6
—
3D
Tilting
You can copy the ex act ex amples above, and replace with your own content, or try some layouts of your own.
T his section took the idea of creating link worthy content head on. B ut what about some good ‘ ol link building tips and tricks? D on’ t worry! T he nex t section is filled with fifteen special link building techniq ues. A pply them to your site and content for some massive improvements to your performance in search.
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER SEVEN! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER EIGHT: LINK BUILDING TECHNIQUES?
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER SIX
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
BY NEIL PATEL
SEO
AND SUJAN PATEL
08
CHAPTER 08
LINK BUILDING TECHNIQUES T he first section here may be a simple list of places to submit your site ( to ge t fol l owe d l in ks) . B ut don’ t be fooled! T his section is packed with step by step instructions to capitalize on 1 5 link building techniq ues. I definitely encourage you to follow them or come up with ideas of your own!
NO 1
SUBMIT TO SITES WITH FOLLOWED LINKS
T his section is a list of some well know, and other lesser known sites where you can easily get a followed link. P lease note, I can not guarantee these sites will still all work. T hey did at the time of creating this guide, but things do change q uickly. http://9 ru l e s.com/ http://associate dcon te n t.com/ http://b arry wise .com http://b ib son omy .com/ http://b l og.fib e rdre ams.com http://b l og.ru ski.co.z a http://B l oge n gage .com/b l ogge r http://b l ogge ru n iv e rsity .b l ogspot.com http://b l oggin gz oom.com/ http://b l ogoria.com/ http://b l u e hatse o.com http://b l u e v e rse .com http://b u mpz e e .com/ http://b u sin e ssfin an ce mag.com http://b u z z marke tin gwithb l ogs.com http://cl ipcl ip.com/ http://coran k.com/ http://cu rre n t.com/ http://cu rry b e t.n e t http://de ardrmoz .com http://digg.com/
http://kikol an i.com http://kirtsy .com/ http://kthre ad.com http://l il l ie amman n .com http://l in gu isticsz on e .b l ogspot.com http://l in kagogo.com/ http://l in ke din .com/ http://l in ks.org.au http://me me stre ams.n e t/ http://miste r- won g.com/ http://mix x .com/ http://more e arn in gs.com http://my b l ogl og.com/ http://my l in kv au l t.com/ http://n owpu b l ic.com/ http://O ddB l ogge r.com http://phpcafe .n e t http://pol y ge e k.com http://poston fire .com/ http://pq in te rn e t.com http://prope l l e r.com/
http://coran k.com/ http://cu rre n t.com/ http://cu rry b e t.n e t http://de ardrmoz .com http://digg.com/ http://dotcommogu l .n e t http://e dopte r.com/ http://e x tre me j ohn .com http://fl ickr.com/ http://googl e - adse n se - te mpl ate s.co.u k http://graphicde sign b l og.co.u k http://grav ity cu b e .n e t http://grokdotcom.com http://growsmartmain e .org http://harry .su fe hmi.com http://howtowake u pe arl y .com http://I n cS u b .org http://I n dian o.n e t http://j u staddwate r.dk
http://phpcafe .n e t http://pol y ge e k.com http://poston fire .com/ http://pq in te rn e t.com http://prope l l e r.com/ http://radpix e l s.com http://ran domhacks.n e t http://re al e state te stb l og.com http://se ob y the se a.com http://se ol u tion s.n e t http://social me diapowe r.com http://te chn orati.com/ http://the j u n gl e marke te r.com http://u n common photographe rs.n e t http://wal l pape rstop.com http://wassu pb l og.com http://we b l ogtool scol l e ction .com http://wordpre ssmax .com
NO 2
CAPTURING LINKS FROM BRAND MENTIONS
T his may certainly apply more to a larger brand or influential person. B ut even if you’ re not as well known, you can still receive some benefit from capturing links when your brand is mentioned, yet no link is given. Use G oogle A lerts w/ R S S
and I fttt
W
e’ re going to set up some custom G oogle alerts to get notified as soon as mention ( withou t a l in k) happens. L et’ s say I want to monitor G oogle’ s index for mentions of any of my brand or name. Some ex ample q ueries might be: - site - site - site - site
:q :q :q :q
u icksprou u icksprou u icksprou u icksprou
t.com t.com t.com t.com
- site - site - site - site
:craz :craz :craz :craz
y e gg.com y e gg.com y e gg.com y e gg.com
- site - site - site - site
:kissme :kissme :kissme :kissme
trics.com trics.com trics.com trics.com
" n e il pate l " q u icksprou t craz y e gg kissme trics
T hen set up your alerts with these settings A s you get emailed your results, you can check to be sure they received a link. You could run a whole list of results through Screaming F rog to check them in bulk.
B ON U S : MONI TOR WITH R SS AND/OR IFTTT B y default G oogle alerts will send you an email when it discovers new content to go along with that search. B ut you may want to get notified sooner. O R you may want to catalog the results in a more permanent manner. You can receive a tex t message when a mention happens F irst, create your alert as an R SS F eed:
V iew the alert and click the G oogle R eader link to open it in G oogle R eader
F rom G oogle R eader —
go to ‘ view details’
Copy the feed address
T hen head over to ifttt.com and start creating a
T hen head over to ifttt.com and start creating a new recipe. Use T he R SS R eader as the trigger
Select SM S as the action and you’ ll receive a tex t when a new mention of your brand happens!
You can also bookmark all mentions to D elicious when you receive a mention online. You may want a catalog of them, or you may want to simply go in and review them a week or two at a time. Set your trigger as the R SS F eed and set up delicious as the action:
NO 3
USING SCRAPEBOX FOR FAST WHITE HAT BLOG COMMENTING
Scrapebox is normally thought of as a black hat tool. B ut it can be used for white hat link building j ust as well. W e’ re going to walk through a smart way to speed up your blog commenting using scrapebox in a way that it totally white hat — j ust more efficient. In this method we’ re going to be using Scrapebox ’ s “ Comment P oster” in “ manual poster” mode. W
e’ ll be mainly in this bottom right hand section of Scrapebox .
STEP ONE
O pen Tex t Files
T ex t files are referenced with Scrapebox to populate the commenting fields, which are; Name............ a l ist of possib l e n ame s to comme n t with W ebsites.......a l ist of we b site s ( l in ke d from the n ame ) Emails...........a l ist of e mail addre sse s to go with the n ame s C omment......a spu n comme n t B log L ists.....the S crape b ox l ist of harv e ste d b l ogs y ou ’ re goin g to comme n t on You’ re going to; Click O pen Select a tex t file ( e ithe r pre made or y ou make ) for each field.
H ere’ s what they look like selected;
You can click the ‘ E ’ which will open an edit window, and you can edit them right within ScrapeB ox .
NO 4
GETTING A LINK FROM DMOZ
D M oz, as you may well know, has a lot of value because of its high pagerank and its long history on the web. B ut one thing you may not have heard, is D moz gets scraped by many other sites — so getting that link can also get your link scraped and used elsewhere around the internet. Choosing W
here T o G et Your L ink
T here are two important factors when choosing your categories. [1] R elevance D moz has multiple editors across all the different categories - thus you can choose two different categories that make sense for your site/ business and attempt submission to these few categories. O ne editor may be slow to respond, while others may be more active. [2] PageR ank M ost people don’ t do this. J ust because its D moz, this doesn’ t mean every page has an eq ually high value. Check the pagerank level of the page and divide by number of links on that page. Ideally, you’ ll want a page with the highest pagerank and lowest number of outgoing links. E x ample: L et’ s say you’ re looking for a good “ T ravel” category. Use this UR L structure too see all categories for travel: http://www.dmoz .org/se arch? q = trav e l & start= 0 & ty pe = more & al l = n o& cat=
T he results should look like this:
L ook for a relevant category with a lower number of links. T ravel seems to have many that are over 1 0 0 , so we’ ll look for under 1 0 0 . T hese two look promising.
Both pages have a PR of 4, which is decent for the ODP.
With only 55 links the “Specialty Travel: Family” category would work very nicely. If you want to access value very quickly for pages on the ODP — you can use opensiteexplorer.org and run a report of the internal pages. [1]
Go to www.opensiteexplorer.org
[2] Enter http://www.dmoz.org [3] Click the ‘Top Pages’ tab [4] Export the report into a .csv for quick analysis of the top pages.
SUBMITTING
Once your top two categories are chosen, here’s the suggested process for submitting. [1]
Choose the best category page and make your submission [a]
From the category page where you want the link click ‘submit a URL’
[b]
Follow the directions and guidelines very specifically.
[2]
Wait 2 months.
[3]
If you haven’t received the link, submit to your second choice category.
[4]
If no one responds, keep repeating this process every 2-3 months, alternating categories you submit to. Sometimes the best way to get your link is patience and consistent submission.
[5]
If this still does not work after 8-12 months, you may want to try a third category. Don’t give up! You can get a link with some persistence and patience.
NO 5
COMMENT LINKS WITH DISQUIS
A lthough blog commenting tends to have lower value because links are nofollowed, and G oogle does not weigh them as heavily — there is still some value you can get, and referral traffic as well. T his is an easy method to find sites with D isq us commenting system. T he benefit of D isq us, is how easy it is, and your comments will almost always show instantly. [1]
First — register a D isq us account for the category of comments you will be acq uiring. T he username will be the anchor tex t for your link. A lthough you may want to try some accounts with keywords as the anchor tex t, you shouldn’ t go too overboard with this.
[2] S econd — search for blogs with D isq us in your category. Use the following type of q uery; B e sure to have some sort of SE R P analysis tool in use — the M oz SE R P analysis or SE O Q uake.
“powered by disqus” travel photography About 83,500,000 results (0.10 seconds)
SEARCH
[3] C hoose results with highest PageR ank or D A " powered by disq us" travel photography
/ PA
“powered by disqus” travel photography
SEARCH
About 83,500,000 results (0.10 seconds)
[4] Post your comment! M any of these sources will have 0 comments, and with yours being the first, it may get more referral traffic.
B ON U S : RECENT LI NKS [1]
Narrow Your G oogle S earch
“powered by disqus” travel photography
SEARCH
About 83,500,000 results (0.10 seconds)
N arrow your search for the past week to get results where an immediate comment is more likely to be relevant and come at the highest trafficked time of the post.
[2] C reate a G oogle A lert D epending on how active your search or categories are, you may want to play with these settings.
A lso, create multiple alerts for the most immediate opportunity as it happens.
NO 6 STEP ONE
BROKEN LINK BUILDING G et Your Elements R eady
F or this style of link building you’ re going to need the following elements; G oogle Q uery B ookmarklet —
http://www.on l in e sal e s.co.u k/googl e - re su l ts- b ookmarkl e t/
T ex t E ditor such as T ex tW rangler Screaming F rog or X enu L ink Slueth T he W ayback M achine — www.archiv e .org W ebsite to Create Content O n
If you have access to all of the above we’ re all set to get started! STEP TWO
D etermine G oogle Q ueries
You may need to test a few different q ueries before you hit upon that goldmine. L et’ s say you’ re building links for a site in the travel industry, specifically hotels. You want to build links from .edu’ s or .gov’ s. You might try some q ueries like; site:.edu intitle:" site:.gov intitle:" site:.edu intitle:" site:.gov intitle:"
hotel industry" - inurl:pdf - inurl:doc - inurl:ppt hotel industry" - inurl:pdf - inurl:doc - inurl:ppt hotel management" - inurl:pdf - inurl:doc - inurl:ppt hotel management" - inurl:pdf - inurl:doc - inurl:ppt
L ook for q ueries that have 2 0 0 - 5 0 0 0 results. T his means you’ ve got a targeted set up results, not too large yet not too small.
STEP THREE
W
Ex tract UR L s
hen you’ ve got your q uery, then you need to ex tract the UR L s into your tex t editor. [1]
A dj ust your search settings to 10 0 T hen run the search again to show 1 0 0 results. R un the B ookmarklet and cut and paste the “ plain listings” Save as a .tx t file
STEP FOUR
R un UR L s Through S creaming Frog ( or X enu L ink S leuth)
N ow comes the magic. R un 1 0 0 UR L s at a time through Screaming F rog to check them all for broken links. H ere’ s how! Set Screaming F rog to L ist M
ode
Select your tex t file we j ust create ( the l ist of U R L s)
V ery I mportant S tep —
G et Your Settings R ight
You should have Screaming F rog set to check ex ternal links and search depth of 1 . C lick start — its going to take a while to run and crawl all the ex ternal pages!
STEP FIVE
Ex amine The UR L s W
ith B roken L inks For R elevance
V iew T he E x ternal L inks F ound
E x port T he R esults T o a CSV — you can ex port the UR L s to save all for later and keep a record of which ones you’ ve taken action on.
STEP SIX
D etermine G oogle Q ueries
D irectly within Screaming F rog, you can see the pages linking to broken ( 4 0 4 ) content.
W
hen you find a page relevant to your site, visit www.archive.org to see what the broken page used to look like, and see if its a piece of content you already have or can recreate. R ecreate the Content and O utreach! !
NO 7
ADDING EASY TO COPY AND PASTE EMBED CODE
M any of you I’ m sure have used Infographics in your content and link building strategies. H ave you make sure to include easy no- brainer cut and paste H T M L ? H ere’ s how! L et’ s use this infographic from K ISSM etrics “ H ow D o Colors A ffect P urchases? ” http://b l og.kissme trics.com/col or- psy chol ogy /
L et’ s go through the steps to embedded easy to cut and paste H T M L directly on the page.
STEP ONE
W
S witch To HTM
L
M
ode
e’ ll be entering some H T M L so you’ ll want to work in the H T M L editor.
D isplay I mage on Page
STEP TWO
B efore we even create the embed box , we need to be sure the image is displayed on the page, along with any other content.
STEP THREE
R eturn G ood Prox ies B ack To M
ain L ist
T he < tex tarea> wrapper is what displays the box in H T M L where the code will sit.
H ere’ s the code;
cols="7 0" onC lick=select( )
>
“ R ows” and “ cols” controls the height and width. onClick= select( ) is a great little piece of J avaScript that automatically selects the content within the box .
STEP FOUR
Place The C ontents W
ithin < tex tarea>
You’ ll see there are two parts to this. [1]
I mage reference and link to the image — this places the actual image on the page when your reader pastes the code on their page. I n other words, it visually renders the image. B ut the important part is getting the link and anchor tex t you want!
[2] Here’ s where you can get massive back- link value from the infographic. You’ re putting your own link and anchor tex t in the code. H ere’ s the code from above; 
D on’ t forget to change the links and image sources when using this code!
H ere’ s the code;
cols="7 0" onC lick=select( )
>
“ R ows” and “ cols” controls the height and width. onClick= select( ) is a great little piece of J avaScript that automatically selects the content within the box .
STEP FOUR
Place The C ontents W
ithin < tex tarea>
You’ ll see there are two parts to this. [1]
I mage reference and link to the image — this places the actual image on the page when your reader pastes the code on their page. I n other words, it visually renders the image. B ut the important part is getting the link and anchor tex t you want! [2] Here’ s where you can get massive back- link value from the infographic. You’ re putting your own link and anchor tex t in the code. H ere’ s the code from above;
D on’ t forget to change the links and image sources when using this code!
Preview The Page
STEP FIVE
R emember to check and be sure everything is working!
If you see all of the appropriate code in the tex t area box then you’ re all set!
NO 8
LINK BUILDING WITH YOUR TWITTER PROFILE
T his method works great, and is easy to do, but may depend on your aesthetic preferences. A ll it takes is a simple yet overlooked modification of your T witter profile. G o to T witter and edit your profile. A dd a UR L and twitter handle to your bio, like this;
W
hen you do this, other sites that source T witter for data, such as T witter lists will end up putting these two links in the listing. You’ re automatically building links to your T witter profile and website. A n ex ample of some sites include; www.tagwal k.com www.crowdre e l .com www.sn pros.com www.twitpe rts.com www.re twe e tran k.com www.fav oriou s.com www.twtb iz card.com www.fav star.com www.twe e tl e v e l .com www.l istoriou s.com www.twitahol ic.com www.twitte rcou n te r.com www.twe l l ow.com twe e t.grade r.com www.kl ou t.com
G o to each individual T witter site. Create or claim your profile and you can further optimize them for links!
NO 9
COPY AND PASTING LINK BUILDING WITH TYNT
T ynt is a little used tool which gives you links a traffic as people copy and paste content from your website onto places around the web. [1] G o to www.tynt.com [2] Fill out the form to sign up for free [3] You will see some J avaS cript —
we’ ll want to customiz e this first
Click customize
[4] C lick “ customiz e address tracking bar”
[5 ] Enable address bar tracking and save
[6 ] Then you’ ll want to customiz e attribution
[7] You’ll add a few custom settings in here to spice it up. Add your Twitter and/or facebook profile. You can also choose whether the title, URL or both for the link anchor text.
[8] Then save, and you will return to the main screen. [9] Copy the JavaScript code to your clipboard
[10] Paste the code just before your closing tag. For WordPress users, this is going to be under Appearance->Editor->Header.php (as shown).
[11] Then test your code installation with the code provided at the bottom.
NO 10
FINDING AN INCREDIBLY LINK WORTHY DOMAIN
W hat’ s a great domain name in 2 0 1 2 ? It should probably have these characteristics: relatively short easy to say easy to spell ( if ex plained j ust once) uniq ue available for a low cost descriptive and vivid A nd in 2 0 1 2 this is very important for back links. B efore penguin, back links needed to be more rich in keyword anchor tex t. B ut now, you want anchor lots of brand based anchor tex t. You can’ t have this unless you have a uniq ue brand name and domain name. A re you bagster the rubbish collection company, or www.b agste r.com - the motorcycle company? H ere’ s a few tools and techniq ues to coming up with an amazing domain name.
STEP ONE
C ollect S ome W
ords
W
e j ust want a raw list of about 2 0 - 3 0 words you like. L et’ s say you’ re a software company selling productivity software. G o to the thesaurus and type “ productive” and “ productivity” . F rom that, we get ( the b e st on e s) : prolific inventive creative useful fruitful effective efficiency work rate output yield helpful T hen think of a word that describes your company with an image, a n ou n . M any a productivity product might make you think of machines — type “ machine” into the thesaurus: appliance device engine tool automation N ow we have some words! L et’ s put them to use. S T E P T W O Use B ustaname to check for domains
T here’ s a great tools called www.b u stan ame .com that will allow you to mix words and check for availability all at once. You will see some basic settings to choose from. I’ ve indicated some interesting ones to get some great ideas.
T hen you’ re going to take your list of words from step one and paste them in: A nd you can see the results show up in lists and available domains. R ollover the list of more word ideas to add.
I find it easier to sort by “ readability” T hen you can add ones you like into the third list on the right for purchase or to save for later.
STEP THREE
Use the D omain M
aker
O n the same website, there’ s also a tool called “ D omain M aker” . Some basic settings for this as well:
D efinitely ex periment with the settings and words to get some great domain name ideas. R emember we talked about keep your name uniq ue? You might want to find a domain name where the .com .org .net and even .biz are all available. T hat way you can purchase all of them to protect the brand.
Use these settings to do so:
STEP FOUR
C ross C heck S ocial w/ K nowem
J ust looking at random yieldy.com was a decent domain name - but is it unclaimed in social? Use www.kn owe m.com to find out.
G ood thing we checked! You’ ll want to keep digging until you find a name also available on social networks. K nowem also checks domain names and trademarks — you can see this one was trademarked but has ex pired so it can be claimed.
NO 11
RECOVERING LOST LINKS
T his is similar to monitoring for brand mentions but with a twist. W ith this you’ re monitoring for an actual mention of the UR L itself. Instead of “ N eil P atel” we’ re going to listen for “ q uicksprout.com” — and this works even better if you have a really uniq ue domain that may only get typed if it was intended to receive a link. F or this method alerts will work, but we’ ll also want to search retroactively. T hese mentions could have happened in the past and you may not know about them. [1]
R un an A dvanced S earch intex t:q uicksprout.com - site:q uicksprout.com works as a starting point. In the case of a larger site, you may want to narrow your search some more. T ry filtering for “ past year” and “ order by date” . You’ ll have the most success with the most recent mentions. intext:quicksprout.com -site:quicksprout.com
T hen, once the results start looking good on screen, ex port the UR L s using the SE R P s redux bookmarklet mentioned throughout this guide. Copy and paste results into your tex t editor
O pen Screaming F rog. W
e’ re going to run some crawls in list mode on these UR L s T hen set up some custom filters — a few to trap n o l in ks and the others to trap l in ks.
R un the spider —
and lets check out some of the results:
You may get a few duds, but this one looks promising already
Sure enough financialpost.com mentioned q uicksprout.com without making it a link!
NO 12
SECOND LEVEL LINK BUILDING
You’ re pretty familiar with the idea of building links to your site at this point? I would hope so! T here’ s a certain benefit to building links to other sites as well - if applied right. It can be done in white hat ways and not so white hat ways. W e’ re going to focus on white hat.
THE CONCEPT F irst, you need to be running a website with traceable conversions. P erhaps you’ re selling an ebook or other a W ordP ress theme, or perhaps you have goals like email sign ups. E ither way, you can single out an ex act page that drives these conversions. T hen, you need to identify referral visits to that page which have a high conversion rate. L astly, you’ re going to build that referring page up in rankings, by building second level links to it.
HOW TO DO IT STEP ONE
I dentify The Page O n Your S ite
T his should be pretty easy for most of you. F or ex ample, on Q uickSprout, this is one of them http://n e il pate l .com/? u tm_ sou rce = side b ar& u tm_ me diu m= michae l arrin gton & u tm_ campaign = ads
N otice the trackin g U R L s that al so he l p te l l me e x actl y whe re the sou rce of traffic is from.
STEP TWO
I dentify High C onverting R eferrals
Use your analytics software to segment your traffic and identify ex ternal pages that send higher than normal converting traffic to your landing page. F or ex ample, let’ s say this article on Search E ngine J ournal sends high converting referral traffic: http://www.se arche n gin e j ou rn al .com/b ran d- n ame - se o- titl e - tags/1 0 2 6 9 /
http://www.se arche n gin e j ou rn al .com/b ran d- n ame - se o- titl e - tags/1 0 2 6 9 /
STEP THREE
How D oes The R eferring Page R ank?
T he goal of linking to this second level page is to get it to rank higher and thus drive more referral traffic back to your site. It’ s about brand names in titles tags — good benchmark: brand name in title tag
thus the phrase [ brand name in title tag] is a
SEARCH
About 29,100,000 results (0.31 seconds)
A s you can see, the SE J page ranks # 3 for this term currently, and improvement to the 2 nd or 1 st spot would certainly drive more traffic to is, thus more traffic to my landing page. T hen, using all the superstar link building methods at your disposal, go out and build your links j ust like you normally would!
NO 13
SECOND LEVEL LINK PROSPECTING
Suppose you run a fashion website — maybe you’ d want a link from elle.com or vogue.com? T his may come in due time. B ut how can you still take advantage of their linking authority sooner? G et links from sites they link down to. H ere’ s a really fast way to find your prospects. [1]
Fine tune some G oogle S earches A gain, we’ ve used this techniq ue before. You’ re going to use G oogle to source your initial list of prospects. In this case though, this list is going to be the high authority sites we might get a link from in the future. W e’ re going to use this list, to get our final list. Suppose you have a fashion blog — you would want to get a link that’ s passed from elle.com or vogue.com right? D o a search like this. intitle:fashion
SEARCH
About 87,900,000 results (0.12 seconds)
F ew important things about this search; u se b l og se arch se t to v ie w home page s u se the in titl e : ope rator T hese are all to provide some finer filtering - to get only the B E ST results. [2] Using the S ER Ps redux bookmarklet, pull the top ten results into a tex t file. A gain, we’ re using the SE R P scraper to get the results into a tex t file, for importing into Screaming F rog.
[3] Crawl the 10 URLs with Screaming Frog The settings on this step are the most important part!
You need Screaming Frog to crawl external sites one level away from the core list. set search depth to 1 check external links crawl external nofollowed links Then you’re going to end up with a list like this;
Notice some important tweaks to the list; set to view HTML. There’s no need for images, JS etc to be in there. make sure you’re viewing external links :) and sort by inlinks. Why? The more incoming links, the higher authority the site is likely receiving. Then export!
NO 14
PERFORM A BACK LINK AUDIT
W
hether you’ ve done active link building on your site, or whether new or old, it’ s ex tremely important to know how to read your own backlink portfolio. I’ m going to teach you some advanced ways of doing so, with a variety of methods and tools. W e’ re going to break it down and take it step by step.
01
COLLECTING YOUR LINK DATA
OPEN SITE EXPLORER (OSE)
SE O moz’ s O pen Site E x plorer — www.ope n site e x pl ore r.org is know to be the most comprehensive and data- rich source of link info on the web. M ost of the features shown in this tutorial are available as a paid SE O moz member, but you can still access many of them with a free membership. [1]
O S E Ex plorer - Prepare and D ownload C S V
R eports
G o to www.ope n site e x pl ore r.org and log in. W I
e’ re going to run four reports and ex port them; n b ou n d L in ks op P age s in kin g D omain s n chor T e x t T L A
I’ ll be demonstrating this link audit using q uicksprout.com as the ex ample.
INBOUND LINKS
Start by entering your site and hit search. T he “ inbound link” report is the default report, but we have to tweak it a bit.
Change the Inbound L ink settings to the following; O n l y e x te rn al P age s on this root domain
Hit filter and download the CSV file.
Download your CSV. You may have to wait a few minutes if OSE is busy.
TOP PAGES
Next we’re going to download the top pages report. This one’s pretty simple, there is no configuration, just click the top pages tab and download the CSV.
LINKING DOMAINS For the linking domains report, we just want to filter for “Pages on this root domain” to get all linking domain information for the entire site. Hit filter and export to CSV.
ANCHOR TEXT Next and lastly we’re going to run the anchor text report for the site. Leave anchor text set to phrases Show links for all pages on this root domain Hit filter and export your reports.
[2] OSE Explorer — Prepare and Download CSV Reports If you’ve been using Chrome as your browser of choice, there’s an easy trick to get to all four downloads at once.
You see them all at the bottom of the browser, and to the right you see where it says “show all”? Click “show all” and you can then open all four. Get all four CSVs opened up with Microsoft Excel.
[3] OSE — Merge Four CSVs into one Excel spreadsheet. Create a new spreadsheet.
Drag the tab of each CSV sheet over to the new Excel document. So you will be dragging four tabs over to the new excel sheet.
When they’re all brought over, it should look something like this.
[4] OSE — Create Headers and Freeze Frames I like to make a few final preps to the excel file to make it easier come time for analyzing. You can of course come up with your own settings for display, but these are just some that I like. Bold the top row.
“Freeze Panes” Select cell A2
G o to W
indow
F reeze P anes N ow the top row ( ou r he ade r) will stay put when we scroll.
D o B E F
those steps for the other three sheets: ol d H e ade r dit H e adin gs re e z e P an e s
You should now have an ex cel document with four sheets of O SE data ready to ex plore!
MAJESTIC SEO A lthough not as data- rich as O pen Site E x plorer, M aj estic SE O ’ s index is very fresh, and you can see historic data as well, which can be very useful for certain types of analysis. L et’ s check it out free a free account ( y ou mu st cre ate an accou n t an d l ogin , b u t y ou don ’ t n e e d to pay ) . E nter your site:
T he first thing to be sure of is if you want to look at “ historic” index or “ fresh” index :
L et’ s look at historic data first:
If you own the site you can create a fre e report ( othe rwise y ou hav e to pay )
Although the paid version gets you more data — there’s still a lot you can gather with the free version. For example, go to the “top pages” report:
Scroll to the bottom and look for “download csv”:
OSE + MAJESTIC MASHUP Lastly, wouldn’t it be great to get Majestic and OSE data side by side? Create your file. We’re going to have two excel sheets in there:
You should already have the top pages report from Majestic. Create one again for OSE if you don’t have a recent one:
Export to csv and open in excel and we’re going to combine the two csv’s into one sheet:
When doing the vlookup the two comparison columns have to be exactly the
W
hen doing the vlookup the two comparison columns have to be ex actly the same. You may notice M aj estic ex ports without slashes at the end of the UR L and O SE has slashes. R emove these with a regular ex pression find and replace in your tex t editor:
$ is the grep command for “ end of the line” in T ex tW
rangler
Copy back to ex cel:
W
e’ re going to use a vlookup: =V L O O K UP( A2,ose! A2:I 26,2)
If you’ re not so familiar with vlookups: A2.......... the ose! ...... the A2:I 26... the 2........... the
ce l l we ’ re goin g to match with the array s n ame of the othe r spre adshe e t we ’ re pu l l in g data from ran ge of the tab l e array we ’ re se archin g for a match se con d col u mn afte r the first col u mn to pu l l data from an d b rin g ov e r to the first she e t.
N ex t: in order to drag this formula down through the rest of the table, you need to add the absolute sign ( dollar sign) before each column letter and cell number Your vlookup is now going to look like this: =V L O O K UP( A2,ose! $ A2:$ I $ 26,2)
Drag it down all the rows: Rinse and repeat for each column going across to the right - change the last number (increase by one) to grab the next column over from your source sheet).
Fill these all the way across and you’ll have a great mashup of Majestic and OSE data to analyze!
ANALYZE LINK DATA WITH LINK DETECTIVE + OSE Link Detective - www.linkdetective.com - is a new free tool. It gives you a very useful visualization of your OSE inbound link data. The tool basically attempts to categorize all of your links into buckets, such as blogroll, footer, blog comments, etc. There are always some unknowns, but for the most part it will gove you a really great idea of the types of links you (or a competitor) is getting. Go to www.linkdetective.com Create a username and password.
Drag it down all the rows: Rinse and repeat for each column going across to the right - change the last number (increase by one) to grab the next column over from your source sheet).
Fill these all the way across and you’ll have a great mashup of Majestic and OSE data to analyze!
ANALYZE LINK DATA WITH LINK DETECTIVE + OSE Link Detective - www.linkdetective.com - is a new free tool. It gives you a very useful visualization of your OSE inbound link data. The tool basically attempts to categorize all of your links into buckets, such as blogroll, footer, blog comments, etc. There are always some unknowns, but for the most part it will gove you a really great idea of the types of links you (or a competitor) is getting. Go to www.linkdetective.com Create a username and password.
You’re going to name the project. Then, you’re going to
You’ re going to name the proj ect. T hen, you’ re going to upload your O SE CSV file. This has to be the C S V from the “ inbound links” tab.
You will see a confirmation message. W hen the report is finished, which usually take about 1 0 - 6 0 minutes, you will receive an email.
F ollow the link in the email to view your report. T here are two basic types of reports you will see - link type and anchor tex t.
LINK TYPE REPORT
NO 15
SCALABLE OUTREACH
T he key to effective large scale outreach is automation. You may be able to handle small scale outreach with more manual methods, but to scale it up and really get the most out of your efforts, you’ ll need to automate! You could more accurately call this “ semi- automation” because you still want to maintain some control over your outreach, so that your communication can be personable. F ortunately there are some tools to assist in this process. W e’ re going to take a look at what they are and some tricks for how to use them better.
THE TOOLS G mail C an n e d R e spon se s R apportiv e B oome ran g T ou t B u z z S tre am T han kT han kN ote s S e n d an d A rchiv e F ol l owU pT he n
USING GMAIL CANNED RESPONSES F irst, make sure Canned R esponses is enabled in G mail
T hen, to start setting them up, start a new draft. Clear it of any signatures — it needs to be completely blank. P ut a draft of a common outreach type email in there.
T hen, save it as a canned response
N ex t, when you’ re ready to use it in an outreach email —
start a new draft
USE FOLLOWUPTHEN http://fol l owu pthe n .com/ is a newer tool. Its like B oomerang but with a lot more features.
T his tool is perfect to use if; the re ’ s an e mail y ou wan t to re spon d to in a fe w we e ks, b u t ge t it ou t of y ou r in b ox fol l ow u p with an ou tre ach l e ad in a mon th se n d an au tomatic re min de r to b oth y ou rse l f an d the re cipie n t if n o re pl y W
ith the paid pro version you can even receive reminders via tex t message and calendars, although we’ ll j ust cover the free version here. S end an automatic reminder to the recipient
CC: E ntering the special address in the cc: field means b oth you and the recipient will get the reminder. 3 days@
—
this means the reminder will get sent back in 3 days.
Follow up with an outreach lead in 1 month If you’ ve contacted a prospect and they say something like “ now isn' t a good time for that link/ article/ story, can you email me back in a month? ” — this is the reminder to use. B cc: this mean only you will receive the reminder 1 month@ — this will send the follow up back to you in one month. W
ow! You’ ve made it so far and by now you must be flooded with traffic. W e’ ve got one more section to go, and this is “ search verticals” . D ealing with video, image, or local? T his section is for you!
WELL DONE! YOU MADE IT THROUGH CHAPTER EIGHT! ARE YOU READY FOR CHAPTER NINE: SEARCH VERTICALS?
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER SEVEN
TAKE ME TO
CHAPTER NINE
THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO
SEO
09
CHAPTER 09
SEARCH VERTICALS If you operate in a search vertical, you’ re in a uniq ue place to capitalize on some great traffic. T hese areas are not as often talked about in SE O , but you can capture some high converting targeted traffic in these areas. W
e’ re going to cover local, mobile, slideshows, youtube and more.
NO 1
MOBILE FRIENDLY SITES — CSS
M any options are available for displaying a uniq ue layout for mobile users. Yet there remains the issue of duplicate content when using, essentially, duplicate pages, such as an ‘ m’ subdomain. W
e’ re going to walk through a method using dynamic CSS that eliminates any duplicate content issues and provides a better mobile ex perience. T here are two steps; [1]
D etecting the User- A gent
[2] S erving the C orrect C S S
File
NOTE: his method can be used for WordPress or any other PHP based CMS.
STEP ONE
C reate C ode To D etect The User A gent
[a] You’ re going to start out with this line of code, which normally appears in the header.
N ote that the ‘ href’ portion is empty. T his is where we’ re going to add a bit of P H P . [b] Here’ s the PHP;
' /( up.browser| up.link| mmp| symbian| smartphone| midp| wap| pho , strtolower( $ _ SER V ER [ ' H T T P_ USER _ AG EN T ' ] ) ) ) { O MO B I L E C SS F I L E* * "; O
N O N
MO B I L E C SS F I L E* * ";
T his P H P code is a basic if/ then - if it detects a mobile browser it will serve the mobile CSS file ( which we ’ l l cre ate in the n e x t ste p) . if not ( “ e l se ” ) it will serve the normal CSS file. [c]
Put it together - and you get; " />
Copy and paste the above code into your header.php file ( or simil ar l ocation de pe n din g on C M S ) . B e sure to replace “ L IN K STEP TWO
T O
C reate a Uniq ue M
…
F IL E ” with your actual absolute file path
obile C S S
File
You have two main options for this. O ption 1 Create an entirely new CSS file. T his will depend on how complex your site is and how savvy you are with CSS. You’ ll have to start from scratch identifying all the class and id elements, which is why I don’ t recommend this approach. O ption 2 ( B est O ption) - Copy your ex isting CSS file and alter it to make it work for a mobile ex perience. T his often means a few fundamental things, such as; S ome B asic R esets html, body { background: # fff; padding: 3px ; color: # 000; margin: 0; }
NO 2
OPTIMIZING ONLINE SLIDESHOWS
Slides are still an underutilized vertical of content on the net. T ons of people are optimizing for videos, images, news and blog comments. B ut the fact is, slideshare pages are ranking well in some competitive markets. J ust check out R and’ s slideshow showing up 7 th on the search “ marketing for startups” .
T here’ s several things you can do to rank well for slideshows — generate visits to your slideshow content, and possibly some referral traffic to your site. [1]
Pick Your Target K eyword( s) In this case, R and chose; [ marketing for startups] [ inbound marketing for startups]
[2] O ptimiz e Your Title, UR L
& O n- Page Elements
W
hen you first upload your slides, the title field becomes the < title> tag and the UR L . B e sure to get your target keywords in there.
R and’ s title is uniq ue but still has the keywords “ inbound marketing for startups”
You can see it ends up in the title and UR L - and the length is ideal.
You can see it ends up in the title and UR L - and the length is ideal.
[3] M
ake Your S lide L inks C lickable Include links in the bottom of your slides. T hey supposedly do not carry any SE O value, but can drive huge referral traffic.
[4] Embed the S lideshow O n Your W
ebsite
H ere you can see that R and has also embedded the slideshow into SE O moz’ s blog.
[5 ] G et Your Presentation O n The Homepage Slideshare will put your presentation on their homepage if it gets a good amount of shares and views in the first day. You’ ll get lots more views and referral traffic from this. D o not upload your slides until you are ready to share them Immediately when you post your slides - share them across your social channels and ask others to share them as well. Use bitly.com to make an easily shareable link. [6 ] O ptimiz e Your Profile Your slideshare profile allows you to add a link. T his is not a followed link, but if anything, still provides referral traffic value.
[B onus] Try These O ther Presentation S ites! T here’ s lots more sites besides slideshare. Such as; www.sl ide b oom.com www.au thorstre am.com www.sl ide rocke t.com www.pre z i.com www.scrib d.com www.my pl ick.com
T hey are not as used but sometimes this will allow you to stand out more.
NO 3
DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE WITH YOUTUBE
WARNING: Some of the tips in this section stretch a little beyond “white-hat”.
Please use your own measure of risk
tolerance and judgment. I am simply telling you some technical facts and while I don’t always advocate their use, it’s important for you to know the options.
L et’ s talk YouTube — you referral traffic.
how to get tons of eyes on your videos which will then send
A lso, you may be tempted to use less than awesome content to get your accounts filled with videos. It’ s always better in the long run to use the highest q uality content possible. I’ ll call these “ parts” because you can do these in many orders.
01
MAKE SEVERAL ACCOUNTS
L et’ s say you’ re in the home improvement industry. Your company is “ Q uality H ardware” You’ ll want a brand page /q u al ity hardware
A nd some other accounts that look like people. /diy gu y /home re pairman /tool shan dy man /hamme rsan dn ail s K eep them all in a spreadsheet so you can keep track of the accounts and your progress.
02
MAKE 3-4 VIDEOS
M ake 3 - 4 videos that present the main point of the website you’ re trying to promote. K eep them high q uality and short. 1 - 3 minutes is best.
ALTER THE VIDEOS SLIGHTLY (1 FOR EACH ACCOUNT)
03
ALTER THE VIDEOS SLIGHTLY (1 FOR EACH ACCOUNT)
N ex t - you’ re going to be posting the same video across several accounts. So you’ ll want to alter them slightly so YouT ube’ s auto detection doesn’ t pick them up as being the same and flag your account. You can alter them in several ways; chan ge chan ge sl ightl y chan ge
the mu sic the b ackgrou n d col or chan ge the timin g ( this way y ou ’ l l al so ge t a diffe re n t pre v ie w image ) the col or of an y caption s y ou may hav e
04
UPLOAD
W
hen you’ re ready, upload the slightly different videos across all accounts. O nly use the same video on up to 3 accounts. So if you have seven accounts and 4 videos, spread them across the seven accounts. Use an optimized title, description and tags — practice optimization.
target your keywords with best
Consider a tasteful clickable link also overlaid onto the video itself. Transcribe your video ( Y ou T u b e ’ s au to- tran scription is u su al l y pre tty b ad — make y ou r own an d u pl oad it) T o Upload A [1]
T ranscription
S ee if one ex ists already [a] S ign into your YouTube account [b] G o to your video [c] G o to ‘ C aptions’
[2] S ee if one ex ists already You will see it broken up frame by frame — most of the time the auto- transcription is terrible ( e v e n fu n n y ) . Click D ownload, as shown below.
[3] Edit it and upload a new transcription file
[3] Edit it and upload a new transcription file
05
INCLUDE YOUR REFERRAL LINK
W
hen including your referral link, it goes in the description. F ollow the following guidelines; P ut it first. O therwise it will get buried and the user may not see it. Include the full ‘ http:// ’ - this way it becomes clickable and active nofollow link. Use the G oogle UR L B uilder
http://su pport.googl e .com/googl e an al y tics/b in /an swe r.py ? hl = e n & an swe r= 5 5 5 7 8 to
track the success of each link more specifically.
If linking to a deeper page within your site, use best practice UR L construction and have keywords and descriptive words in the UR L .
06
INCREASE VIEW COUNT EARLY
I will always advocate organic and natural marketing. I do not promote the actual use of the following websites. B ut they ex ist, and the choice is yours. T hese free services will help you increase view- count q uickly, which is an important factor in YouT ube ranking. http://v age x .com/ http://v ie w2 .b e http://e n han ce v ie ws.n e t http://u 2 b v ie ws.com/
You of course should ex ercise all natural and long- term methods of getting eyes on your videos before falling back to less than honest options.
07
OTHER YOUTUBE RANKING FACTORS
F av orite s
C omme n tin g S harin g T hu mb s U p S u b scrib e rs E x te rn al L in ks to Y ou r P age /V ide os
BONUS TIPS FOR OPTIMIZING YOUR VIDEOS: T he following takes a little more effort up front, but can also work to optimize your YouT ube video to get views q uickly. [1]
Find another video similar to yours that has a high number of views and ranks well.
[2] Use their title, description & tags and alter them slightly to fit your video. [3] Post your video [4] THEN get people to comment on your video and the one you used for the draft of your title and description. YouTube will see a connection in content and hopefully value: it will associate the highly viewed video with your new video and rank it higher. A lso, if you embed a video on your website — do not let it autoplay. N ot only do users find this annoying, but N O N E of the views from the embedded version will count towards total view count.
NO 4
LOCAL SEARCH TECHNIQUES
W
hile many local SE O guides give you the usual tips, like keeping a consistent N A P across listings, or increasing the number of citations you receive — we’ re going to assume you’ re familiar with the basics. TIP [1] W
H O IS Info - M ake sure it matches your N A P L ook up your whois info with
http://whois.domain tool s.com/
TIP [2] W
hen you register your local listings, register from the actual place of the business.
T I P [ 3 ] Upload or correct your listings with G P S data services. T here are a few of
these that I know of.
http://mapre porte r.n av te q .com/ http://mapin sight.te l e atl as.com/mapfe e db ack/in de x .php
H ere’ s how you’ ll start that process for each site
T hen you can either add a new listing or edit the ex isting one F ill out the info
TELEATLAS Its a very similar process for teleatlas
T I P [ 4 ] Use the microformat hCard to display contact information
hCards are most commonly used to display information semantically about people and organizations. http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
If we were to make an hCard for the pizza place in Seattle it would look something like this: Piecoras Work: 1401 East Madison Street Seattle, WA 98101 USA Work +206-322-9411 Email: [email protected]
You can use that as a basic template to create your own hCard.
INSTALLING THE FACEBOOK OPEN GRAPH
R emember, this is an in depth technical guide. M ost websites do not fully integrate the F acebook like button into their website. W e’ re going to get very in depth and walk through the complete installation of the like button, which includes creating a basic app account as well as installing the open graph meta tags. F or the sake of this guide, we’ re going to assume you understand the benefits of a complete integration of the like button within your website. F or a full ex planation from F acebook, you can read their documentation http://de v e l ope rs.face b ook.com/docs/re fe re n ce /pl u gin s/l ike /
T his process is broken into six steps; [1]
C reate a Facebook A pp I D
[2] G et the L ike B utton C ode [3] G et the O pen G raph Tags [4] I ntegrate the L ike B utton C ode [5 ] I ntegrate the O pen G raph C ode [6 ] C heck I nstallation W
ith the D ebugger
P lease note for this entire section, you need to be logged into F acebook. :- ) STEP ONE
C reate A
Facebook A pp I D
G o to the apps for F acebook page and click “ create a new app” . https://de v e l ope rs.face b ook.com/apps/
H ere, you’ re going to fill in some basic information to create your app. W doing this to get an A pp I D # .
You can fill in your website name for the A pp name. Click continue
W
O n the nex t screen, you’ re going to see your A pp ID Save this in your tex t editor for later.
# .
e can now complete the rest of the process of creating the A pp. A s mentioned, this was only to get your A pp ID , but we need to finish filling out the form.
e’ re only
„
„
NO 5
You can add an icon.
T hen complete the form where shows and save changes. You’ re done with the A pp step, and ready to get your like button code!
S T E P T W O G et The L ike B utton C ode
T he forms for the like button and open graph can be found here; http://de v e l ope rs.face b ook.com/docs/re fe re n ce /pl u gin s/l ike /
T he first thing we’ re going to do is get the code for the like button, which is ex tremely simple.
You’ ll want to leave “ UR L to L ike” blank ( b e cau se we ’ re goin g to al l ow F ace b ook to fil l this dy n amical l y from whate v e r page the b u tton is on ) . T he other options are simply design and function choices: button size, showing faces, etc. Choose what you’ d like! hen you’ re doing, go ahead and get you’ re W
O nce you click “ get code” the following window is going to pop up.
B ecause ( at the time I ’ m writin g this) W ordP ress is not fully H T M L 5 compliant, you’ ll want to select X F B M L format. M ost of you are probably using W ordP ress, and that’ s currently the best way to go. B e sure to select the correct A pp I D y ou cre ate d in the prior ste p) .
from the dropdown menu. ( T he on e
A ll we’ re doing here is copying and pasting all three sections of the code and saving them in your tex t editor ( al on g with y ou r A pp I D ) for later.
W
You should now also double check that your A pp ID ’ s match. e’ ve got our code saved, time to get the O pen G raph tags!
G et The O pen G raph Tags
W
e’ ve got our code saved, time to get the O pen G raph tags!
STEP THREE
G et The O pen G raph Tags
T he O pen G raph T ags are going to go in the header of your website. R emember, we’ re going to be on the same page as we j ust were ( scroll down) to get your open graph code. http://de v e l ope rs.face b ook.com/docs/re fe re n ce /pl u gin s/l ike /
T here’ s only three fields to complete here. T he rest we’ re going to leave blank ( j ust as before, they’ ll get filled in later dynamically) .
Select the type of your website from the dropdown. E nter your site name. A nd remember the A pp ID paste that into “ A dmin” .
STEP FOUR
from earlier? You’ re going to copy and
I ntegrate The L ike B utton C ode
A gain, I’ m assuming most of us are using W ordP ress. W e need to put that first big chunk of code j ust below the opening < body> tag. F or most of us in W ordP ress, this is going to happen in the E ditor header.php file So first go to A ppearance
editor
F rom here, you’ ll need to navigate to the header.php file.
F rom here, you’ ll need to navigate to the header.php file.
L ocate the opening tag.
A nd copy the first chunk of code and paste it j ust below the tag.
N ex t, we’ re going to paste the second bit of code in the tag. F acebook’ s documentation says this is to enable compatibility in some versions of Internet E x plorer.
T he third and final piece code is the actual like button itself. E verything else so far has been additional code that helps the like button out. O n Q uickSprout, I have my like button in the right- hand sidebar.
F or most of you, this is going to mean having it in a widget in W we’ re going to navigate to A ppearance W idgets.
ordP ress. So
D epending upon your theme, you’ re likely going to have a sidebar called “ right
D epending upon your theme, you’ re likely going to have a sidebar called “ right sidebar” or “ post sidebar” or “ pages sidebar” . B asically, you’ ll want to follow these steps for every widget needed to place the button on the pages desired. F or some of you, this will be j ust one sidebar spot, while for others, it may be 2 or 3 . D rag and drop the “ T ex t” box from “ available widgets” . T he tex t box allows you to insert or write anything with H T M L etc into it. Its a great all purpose widget, and perfect for our like button code. You can fill in a title, which will give the tex t area a heading if you’ d like.
You’ re going to take the third portion of the like button code, and copy and paste it into the “ T ex t” widget.
You can of course place other elements in the tex t box if you’ d like — buttons, P interest etc
STEP FIVE
T weet
I ntegrate The O pen G raph C ode
T he last step is the most technical. B ut you’ ve made it this far, so don’ t give up! T he benefit you will receive from having a complete O pen G raph installation is very worth it! Since we’ ll be integrating a little P H P , let’ s first move the open graph code to a new file and re n ame it with a .php fil e e x te n sion . W e won’ t be using this file, but this way we’ ll be able to see the code better, as your tex t editor should color it to match the syntax . D on’ t get scared! W e’ re mainly j ust going to be cutting and pasting to complete your open graph tags, which will then get placed in the W ordP ress header.php file.
H ere’ s what the code looks like in a .php file.
this is the header.php file of a WordPress theme. Copy whatever is between