Ask me anything about SEO!

[Jay Wessman]

I saw K's 'ask me anything about free traffic' thread as well as FourthGearMedia's 'ask me anything about cloaking' thread so I thought I'd do an 'Ask Me Anything' about my specialty - SEO.

So yeah. If you've got questions that are bugging you about SEO then ask awaaaaaaaaay!

 

[EymardSiojo]

Are web 2.0's a good way to steal some spots in the first page of google?

 

[K]

How many keywords do you target per site?
I'd love to see your plan/map that you do step by step for a new site.

 

[Andy Haskins]

How many keywords do you target per site?
I'd love to see your plan/map that you do step by step for a new site.

This... are there any 'must do' steps that you carry out without fail on a new site, e.g. submitting sitemap to webmaster tools, sharing on G+ etc?

 

[Jay Wessman]

Are web 2.0's a good way to steal some spots in the first page of google?

They are but I only really use them to target extremely low competition keywords that get a few searches but not enough for me to bother targeting on my main site.

My main purpose for the web 2.0s is usually just to get a backlink but I also usually target a low competition keyword just for the hell of it and it'll usually bring in a trickle of extra traffic.

You can definitely use Web 2.0's to target higher competition keywords but it'll usually require a lot more work on them (building backlinks to them etc) and the reason I don't bother with this is because I'd rather just focus that attention on promoting pages on my own sites.

How many keywords do you target per site?
I'd love to see your plan/map that you do step by step for a new site.

There's no set number. Usually just as many as possible unless the niche is VERY niche and only can be expanded so far before I run out of keywords to target. But for most niches there's an infinite number of keywords that you can target as you continue to build your site up.

Pretty much all of my sites these days are WordPress based and the way that I do it is have my homepage target a 'main keyword' that gets quite a lot of searches but still relatively low competition.

So for example this might be 'Garden Ornaments'.

Then each of my categories will be set up to target different types of that product that gets searched.

So for example these might be things like 'Japanese Garden Ornaments', 'Metal Garden Ornaments'and 'Antique Garden Ornaments'.

Then each of my actual posts on the site targets a specific product that also gets searches.

So for example one product might target the keyword 'Pondless Water Feature'.

This way my sites are set up in a way that every single page of the site is targeting a keyword that I want to rank for.

This... are there any 'must do' steps that you carry out without fail on a new site, e.g. submitting sitemap to webmaster tools, sharing on G+ etc?

I don't submit sitemaps for any of my sites. If you interlink between all of your pages well then Google wont have any trouble finding your pages and just by doing this Google pretty much indexes all of my pages on every site as I have.

As for 'must do' steps though I would say definitely build up social profiles for EVERY site that you have on all of the big social sites out there.

I made a thread on how to do this here.

I also make sure to install a social sharing plugin on every site to encourage users to share my stuff.

Then once you have a some decent social profiles built up you can just add viral AND keyword targeted content to your site, share it out through your profiles and you'll get re-shares and backlinks to just about every product on your site. Furthermore people will re-post links to your stuff on other sites too including blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites etc.

I also make sure to interlink between all of my pages constantly (think Wikipedia style how every time they mention any word they have a page about they create a link to it) and so whenever I add a new product and get new shares, backlinks etc some more link juice will flow to those other pages which in turn will then flow to other pages and so on.

And of course I install an SEO plugin on every site and target lots of keywords (I use the Yoast SEO Plugin).

 

[Marc]

Hi Jay,

since a few weeks I am no more sure about the cloaking of links, since it is against G's guidelines.

What do you think? Continue cloaking - or only (1) shorten (e.g. long and ugly amazon links) and (2) rename the links with the keyword in it, and then set them (3) no-follow ??

How do you deal with it, respectively which tools or plugins do you use for it?

 

[Jay Wessman]

Hi Jay,

since a few weeks I am no more sure about the cloaking of links, since it is against G's guidelines.

What do you think? Continue cloaking - or only (1) shorten (e.g. long and ugly amazon links) and (2) rename the links with the keyword in it, and then set them (3) no-follow ??

How do you deal with it, respectively which tools or plugins do you use for it?

Hey Marc!

Are you referring to doing simple redirects to your affiliate links so that your links are shorter and look 'nicer'?

If so unless Google has changed their rules recently this isn't what Google classes as cloaking.

They define cloaking as showing different content to visitors as you show to Google.

You can find out exactly what they define it as in this vid:

[video=youtube;QHtnfOgp65Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtnfOgp65Q#t=25[/video]

So yeah simple PHP redirects and such should be fine. Some of my sites use them some don't but none of the ones that do seem to have been really affected in any way to date.

Furthermore if you look at a lot of other big sites (including SEO blogs) you'll see they also cloak.

In a way services like 'bit.ly' and Google's own shortener service 'Goo.gl' are doing the exact same thing and I doubt Google is going to crack down on sites with links to those services anytime soon.

If you are still uncomfortable about using them though just using straight affiliate links with a nofollow tag would be my next best way to go. I have lots of sites where I do it this way too and I don't really notice a whole load of difference in sales or anything.

If however you've seen or read something about them changing these rules recently link me to it but I haven't heard anything about simple redirects being frowned upon.

 

[Marc]

Is not the no-follow tag the general solution for all the cases of "dubious" links, even for the cloaked ones directed to different contents?

I mean, with a no-follow the crawler shouldn't follow the link at all, neither to the same, nor to a different target.

Since I know the risk of cloaking, I only yet "mask" my links in doubtful cases with 301 redirects, and this should be Ok, but the more I think about these questions, the no-follow tag seems to be the safe solution for all kinds of links you would rather hide from the search engines, even the cloaked ones.

Is that right?

 

[EymardSiojo]

There is an article regarding this. Even Yoast of SEO plugin told that cloacking links the right way is better than not cloaking at all.
I recently cloaked all my links using robots.txt, subfolder, and a 302 redirect.

If I can link, here's a tutorial about it by JacobKin: How To Cloak Affiliate Links - Quick and Dirty WordPress Tutorial

 

[Marc]

ꜛꜛ Oh Eymard, this seems to be a hot topic, but an important one.

If I understood the article correct, then I would say, the described method is not a cloaking, but only a hiding with a Disallow.

My opinion meanwhile is, that a masking and a no-follow tag should be sufficient that aff links can not be recognized by the crawlers, but I'm also curious about Jay's view.

 

[Jay Wessman]

Is not the no-follow tag the general solution for all the cases of "dubious" links, even for the cloaked ones directed to different contents?

I mean, with a no-follow the crawler shouldn't follow the link at all, neither to the same, nor to a different target.

Since I know the risk of cloaking, I only yet "mask" my links in doubtful cases with 301 redirects, and this should be Ok, but the more I think about these questions, the no-follow tag seems to be the safe solution for all kinds of links you would rather hide from the search engines, even the cloaked ones.

Is that right?

I don't personally do 'cloaking' in the sense of sending Google to different content than I show my visitors so I've never really looked into the best ways to hide it however I'm not really sure that even a nofollow link would make cloaking in this way safe.

I use nofollow tags on my affiliate links not to try to hide that I am using an affiliate link but so that I'm not passing on link juice to other pages that are trying to rank for the same keywords as I am.

There's nothing wrong with using affiliate links on your site it's a common part of the internet and many, many sites do it but I would say it's only risky when EVERY link on your site in an affiliate link. This is why I make sure that my sites have links to other things too. I link to Wikipedia pages, youtube vids, other related sites etc and I also include products that aren't affiliate products too just so that my site isn't full of 100% affiliate links.

 

[adrian]

Ok I have a question about structure, I'm building an eCommerce site and don't want to overkill the keywords. Which format would you use?

bobsbrew.com-wine accessories- wine aerators- bobs wine aerator
bobsbrew.com- wine accessories- aerators- bob wine aerator
bobsbrew.com- accessories- aerators -bobs wine aerator

While it probably won't make huge difference, it's good to start off the best scenario.

 

[Jay Wessman]

Ok I have a question about structure, I'm building an eCommerce site and don't want to overkill the keywords. Which format would you use?

bobsbrew.com-wine accessories- wine aerators- bobs wine aerator
bobsbrew.com- wine accessories- aerators- bob wine aerator
bobsbrew.com- accessories- aerators -bobs wine aerator

While it probably won't make huge difference, it's good to start off the best scenario.

I assume you are talking about for the title section of the page that appears at the very top section of the browser?

If so I would go for something like 'Bobs Brew - Awesome Wine Aerators And Accessories!'... it's just an example but basically I'd pick something with my main keywords in there that ALSO looks appealing so that when people see it in the search engines it will catch their eye and they will want to click it.

 

[K]

Do you use pingler?

 

[adrian]

I assume you are talking about for the title section of the page that appears at the very top section of the browser?

If so I would go for something like 'Bobs Brew - Awesome Wine Aerators And Accessories!'... it's just an example but basically I'd pick something with my main keywords in there that ALSO looks appealing so that when people see it in the search engines it will catch their eye and they will want to click it.

That's awesome I didn't think of superlaxatives, I mean superlatives. We are not in the same area but it will work non the less. I didn't want to overkill the keyword in the category tree and get flagged for stuffing right off the bat

 

[crysper]

Awesome thread Jay

 

[Jay Wessman]

Do you use pingler?

I don't ping any of my stuff. I never really have a problem with getting my stuff found and indexed through just backlinks and good interlinking and I prefer to just let Google find my stuff naturally.

 

[K]

Whats the advantage of having multiple google + profile over using pages for your site?

 

[Jay Wessman]

Whats the advantage of having multiple google + profile over using pages for your site?

Up until recently you couldn't make your page 'follow' someone you could only 'follow' people using a persons profile which meant that if you are building up accounts like I posted about here then you needed a separate account for each site.

Recently however Google+ made a change so that you CAN make your page 'follow' people which allows you to easily build up a following for the page itself so you don't have to have multiple profiles anymore however I've found that you can follow more people faster using personal profiles and they are just quicker to build up so I still tend to do a personal profile AND a page for each different niche.

Ultimately you can do it either way really I just tend to stick with an individual profile and page for each niche so that I have two big audiences I can promote my stuff to on plus - my page itself and my profile.

Hope this makes sense!

 

[volarex]

My website got hit by this update and it was ranked 1 on google last week. What's the latest google penguin update about and how we should rank our site again?