Mobile Friendly Directories & Links
Creating a mobile stylesheet has more than just usability benefits. There are now hundreds of directories on the web, of varying quality (though many are good), that list mobile/PDA-friendly websites. Some require a payment, many are free, and some have other hoops to jump through, but it’s definitely a worthwhile opportunity depending on your niche.
Check out:
- PDA Friendly Directory
- Mobile Accessible Directory
- Windows Mobile Website Directory
- Directory of Mobile Friendly Websites
Once again, this is an excellent place to use the juicy link finder tool.
Link Building Help in Many Verticals
A friend of mine from the SEO world recently noted that he has a lot of good link building and acquisition opportunities in many verticals:
online degrees, plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, personal injury law, sexual health (no viag spam), cruise travel, south American real estate, seo, fitness, and a few others
If you’d like to get in touch and see what he has, get in touch with me and I’ll point you in his direction.
Live.com Loves KWs in the URL
I’ve spent a lot of time running searches a Live.com this week and noticed that, more than any of the other engines, Live seems to rank domains and pages that have the keywords in the URL, and the domain name. This appears to work equally effectively for subdomains, so using a subdomain strategy when targeting Live in particular may be a great way to go. Of course, they’re one of the most active engines about algo shifts, so it may not last for long, but its certainly effective right now.
Find out what the engines think are your most important pages
This is an easy one – it’s not perfect, but it will give you a fairly good idea of which pages on your site have the most “juice” with each of the engines. Use the query format – site:yourdomain.com inurl:www (sorry folks who don’t use the www). Here’s some examples:
- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aseomoz.org+inurl%3Awww (I note that this matches up almost exactly with the data webmaster central gives me for pages with the most links)
- http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Aseomoz.org+inurl%3Awww – Yahoo! has a bit of a different opinion (but still looks very relevant)
- http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Aseomoz.org+www – at Live.com, they don’t allow the “inurl” operator, so you can just use “www” which may skew things a bit, but you’re still likely to see many of the most important pages first
This can be very useful for figuring out where your high link juice pages are and re-directing some of the goodness over to places that need it.
Geotargeting? Use Addresses
The folks inside the search engines and studying the local search space seem to agree – putting your business’ address at the footer (or header) on every page of your site is a great way to pull in local search traffic. Not only does it help the engines to identify your location more properly, it’s also terrific to get local modifiers into your longer tail queries. Just by having location information (particularly city & state) on the page, you might find you’re relevant and ranking for queries you never saw traffic from before.
Write Intelligently About Blogs You Want to Link to You
One of the best ways to compel bloggers, even very popular blogs, to write about or mention your site is to write about their sites critically and intelligently. The topic can be positive or negative, but the tone and approach should be professional. When you write about another blogger, it pays to choose an issue that’s both timely and begs a response – talk about their tactics, opinions, subtle beliefs that might be swaying their writing or focus.
When you do write about other bloggers, make sure to have the facts straight and come across as compelling and trustworthy – it’s easy to ignore the uninformed ramblings of an outsider, but tougher to dismiss honest, calculated, well-researched posts.
You’ll have an easier time getting that link if you also email the blogger after posting and let them know that you’d like to check the accuracy of the piece with them – that often will earn a read and a response.
Optimal Keyword Usage
If you’re in a semi-competitive battle for rankings, you might want to re-think your use of keywords on the page. For the specific term/phrase you’re going after, here’s what I generally recommend:
- Used at least once in the title tag, possibly twice (or part of a phrase twice) when appropriate and not spammy looking
- At least once or twice in the meta description tag – not for rankings, but for CTR
- In the H1 tag of the page at the very top – as the true headline of the piece (this is good for users and search engines)
- In at least one other headline, possibly in a modified form
- 1-2X in bold on the page
- 4-6X in the body text at minimum, but only as it makes sense and flows gracefully in the sentence structure. You really can’t go “overboard” with too many keyword uses as long as the writing doesn’t start to sound like you’re stuffing the keywords. It’s a tough call, but as with many subjective things, you’ll know it when you see it.
- In the alt tag of at least one image – this lets you pull in image search traffic, but it’s also another way of saying the page has multiple types of content about the subject
- NOT in external link anchor text
- NOT in internal link anchor text (unless it’s pointing to a more specific kw phrase that includes the target term, like “loans” in anchor text for “auto loans”)
If you abide by these, you’re generally hitting 80-90% of your on-page optimization. Some folks like to experiment and see how far they can take keyword usage, but I’ve always been of the mind that if you do the above, adding a few more instances will have 1/100th the effect of going and grabbing even one more valuable link.
p.s. Folks have been confused about what I mean when I say “don’t use the term in external anchor text.” What I mean is – DO NOT use it on your page, linking out to other sites. You should, absolutely, have others link to you with that term/phrase.
Use AdLabs Demographic & KW Tools
The MSN AdLabs tools aren’t popularly mentioned in the SEO world, but they’re incredibly valuable, and from what I’ve seen, pretty accurate.
- Demographics of your competitors’ sites – http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx
- Detect commercial intent – http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/OCI.aspx
- Find “similar” keywords – http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx
- Cool results clustering (determine what pages are related) – http://adlab.msn.com/SRC/SRC.aspx
- Seasonal keyword forecasting – http://adlab.msn.com/Forecast/
- Content categorization – http://adlab.msn.com/kts/CCAT.aspx
- Search funnel data (useful to understand a query path) – http://adlab.msn.com/SearchFunnel/
The full list is here – http://adlab.msn.com/default.aspx – note that you need to use IE for many of these, as it breaks down in Firefox 
Using the Juicy Links Tool to Great Effect
The new Juicy Links Tool for premium members is a paradise for link builders, so long as you know how to search. My recommendation – use terms like:
- directory
- add url
- submit site
- resource links
- recommended sites
- add profile
in conjunction with your primary keyword phrases and you can really put together a fantastic list of potential targets for link acquisition. We tried these searches a couple times and were blown away with the value we could get from it.
Changing Your Internal Anchor Text
Sometimes, you’d love to link to your home page with your keyword as the anchor text, but it just doesn’t look right in the top menu or sidebar. An easy way to make your internal anchor text links reference your content with the anchor text you want while still maintaining the sensibility of your permanent navigation is to:
- Place your header/sidebar/permanent nav into an iframe that you serve on every page (that also limits the amount of unique content the spiders have to crawl per page – a nice benefit)
- In your footer, link to your content as you see fit – it makes more sense to use anchor text here and will serve to give you the kind of internal linking you want for both engines and visitors
Obviously, you can overdo this and get penalized, but if employed properly, it’s a great way to leverage your internal link juice in a more optimized fashion.
