Goodbye SEOMoz?

Just heard that SEOMoz is rebranding itself as just plain Moz. WTF? Seems like taking a risk. Also doesn't Moz feel like a nickname for Mozilla? Sure I get that you don't want to be lumped in with other lackey companies that foolishly put SEO in their title and domain. But SEOMoz should be considered an exception.

Impact of Links

Seems like it used to be that you could increase the number of inbound links to your site and get some juice. Well Google has become more and more wise about that. These days some links will not count toward your site's authority. And extra links might even count against you. So webmasters beware.

Link exchanging used to be a cool trend. It did not seem to black hat. However now reciprocal links just cancel each other out. That is, unless you can get a swap from a site with more authority. I think that might just benefit you a little.

The more important thing to look out for is links from a scammy source. You can't just buy up a domain and point a bunch of links to you. You have to consider the history of that new domain. Was it a link farm before? Don't get associated with it. It may just bring you down.

Heheh. I can think of some black hat tricks to help you out. You could get ahold of a lot of these scammy sites. Then you could bulk link from them to your competitors. When they get penalized, you could rise up. Sounds pretty evil. I like it.

Links and Keywords

I checked out an SEO guide and heard more of the same I always knew. But there were a few tricks I had not thought about. Sure you need links to your page. You should not have too many links out of your page. The links to you should be static text ones. The real light was shed on the use of keywords.

Put your keyword in your header. Check. Also put keywords in your H1 tag. Okay. You sould also have your keywords appear in the body of your text three times. Bamm. Keyword should be bold. Oh snap. Had not thought much about that.

Final new idea I read was that your titles should not be too long.

SEO Tuneup

SEO is an ongoing process. You need to keep up with your site to remain on top of the search results. One of the main jobs is to find the pages on your site that return errors. Find those pages with broken links and correct them.

You should also get rid of duplicate info on your site. That means duplicated across your site, and duplicated by others. Make sure your pages are relevant to your site's keywords. A quick way to do that is to put tag clouds on all your pages. Then you can see if they are relevant.

Good luck.

Blogging Tips

I just finished skimming a book about Google Blogger. Much of the book focused on how to get your blog read. These were good old fashioned SEO practices I will share with you now.

Note that text link ads might actually drop your Google page rank. Ouch. I got to make that money. But I did not know it would push me lower in the SERPS.

You should put keywords in your title. Add keywords to the first couple sentences of your blog post. Keywords should be part of your URLs and image names. Tags should contain your keywords.

Use keywords in your links, as well as around your links. Links within your blog help a little bit. Frequent posting is required. Comment on other blogs to get people to come to your own.

We're Number One

Some guys from my old team needed a little help with some Oracle database programming. They were confused by the syntax of some C coding. Luckily I had dealt with this issue before, and could point them in the correct direction.

I did a Google search for the phrase EXEC SQL AT. Wouldn't you know it? A blog post I had written a year and a half ago is sitting on Page 1 of the SERP. In fact, I am in position number 2. Woo hoo.

Now here comes the good stuff. If you enclose EXEC SQL AT in quotes, then a Google search puts me at number 1 on Page 1. Yes. Perhaps this is a niche search query. But I love that I am on top. It just so happens that my page explains the background needed by a developer to get busy with understanding the concept. I am glad Google has rewarded me with the honor of being at the top.

Site Silos

When you set up the link structure for your site, you want to maximize the flow of page rank flowed between your pages. One way is to set up a number of site silos. A silo is a bunch of pages that are related by content. The key is arranging the links between the pages.

You have one main home page. However each silo should have its own main page. Point links from your main home page to each of the silo main pages. Every page in your silo should link back to the silo main page.

The goal is to funnel the link authority to your silo main pages. Try not to link to other pages. This allows the silo main page link to contain all the juice. Personally I only link out to other pages when a great page warrants it. Otherwise I try to link to my own pages on my site. A silo strategy is a way to organize the links to maximize the result.