SEO Update

Title Tag Format

Best Practice:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keywords | Brand

Or

Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

Reasoning:

We recently finished our first round of intensive search engine ranking factors correlation testing. The results were relatively clear. If you are trying to rank for a very competitive term, it is best to include the keyword at the beginning of the title tag. If you are competing for a less competitive term and branding can help make a difference in click through rates, it is best to put the brand name first. With regards to special characters, we prefer pipes for aesthetic value but hyphens, n-dashes, m-dashes and subtraction signs are all fine.

Title Tag Coorelation

via SEOmoz | SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz’s New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data.

From now on, if you wish to sculpt PageRank, you’ll want to use one of the following classic PR sculpting methodologies:

* Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don’t want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)

* Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)

* Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links

* Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors

via SEOmoz | Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow.

• Phrase search (”")
  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Alexander Bell" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.
• Search within a specific website (site:)
  Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ iraq site:nytimes.com ] will return pages about Iraq but only from nytimes.com. The simpler queries [ iraq nytimes.com ] or [ iraq New York Times ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention the New York Times. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ iraq site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ iraq site:.iq ] will return results only from Iraqi sites.
• Terms you want to exclude (-)
  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words ‘anti-virus’ but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ jaguar -cars -football -os ]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the ’site:’ operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.

# Dig your internal traffic analytics for traffic drops or bad trends;

# Perform [site:yoursite.com] search in Google to see if Google reports same number of indexed URLs;

# Check if Google Webmaster Tools report any problems;

# Take a look if Google toolbar PR has changed (graybar PR might be a signal of penalty);

# Check your site ranking for a “domain-name” search (without the TLD).

via 10 Ways to Diagnose a Google Penalty.

1. Basic technical optimization

1.1. General Configuration

Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms straight out of the box, but there are several known issues that can be taken care of. The first step is to get the most recent release, 1.2.1. Then, to get started, enable Server URL rewrites. You will find this setting under System => Configuration => Web => Search Engines Optimization. Another good thing to configure now you are on this screen is “Add store Code to Urls” under “Url Options”. In most cases it is better to set this functionality to “No”.

via Magento SEO – Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

1. Is it easy to spell? I mean EASY! The masses can’t spell.
2. Is it easy to remember?
3. Will it look good on a billboard or in a commercial?
4. Will it pass the radio test?
5. Is it commercial or social?
6. Does it mean something just standing alone?
7. Can the domain go up in value by 100x? by 1000x 10,000x?
8. Is this a retail price or a wholesale price?
9. Are the other extensions taken?
10. Does it get ANY traffic or make ANY income consistently?
11. Is it a plural when it should be a singular? Or is it a singular when it should be plural?
12. Will there be mistypes? If you buy a .net and build it without owning the .com how much traffic will you lose?
13. If I decide I don’t want the domain anymore is it good enough to be liquid?
14. Are there other related domains that would help or hinder?
15. Is this the best domain I can find for the money?
16. Can I use the money in a better way?
17. Does it add value to your overall portfolio?
18. Could you open a business around that domain name?
19. Is the traffic type in or is it coming from any other way?
20. Could you envision a large company using that domain in a national ad campaign?

Readmore

These days predictive utilities like Trellian, WordTracker and AdWords are only half the keyword research story. State of the art processes combine these standard search predict tools’ output with “what we already know,” by mashing in site-specific datasets at the keyword level.

via Analytic Mashups For Advanced Keyword Research » aimClear Search Marketing Blog.

Duplicate content – search engines sometimes have difficulty determining if two URLs contain the exact same page (see canonicalization for more information). In this case, we’re creating this problem because we’ve created multiple URLs for the same page. Search engines are likely to find all three URLs for the home page and store/ rank them as separate content within their index. This could cause the search engine robots to crawl the page three times instead of just once (which may not be a big deal if we are only tracking two promotions, but could become a big problem if we used similar tracking parameters for many other campaigns and URLs). Not only are the robots using more bandwidth than is necessary, but since they don’t crawl a site infinitely, they could spend all the allotted time crawling duplicate pages and never get to some of the good unique pages on the site.

URL Referrer Tracking.