Seo Lair | Seo For Beginners | Technology

Google Caffeine

Many SEO sites have been reporting that web page load times could potentially effect rankings in the future, including SEO Lair.  This news come out of various interviews with Matt Cutts from Pubcon Las Vegas.  While most SEO news hubs are going conservative and saying web page load times “might” or “potentially could” effect rankings, I’m just going to come out and say it will be included in the Google Algorithm some time in the future.  I’m saying this for multiple reasons.  The main rational is that Google and all the other search engines try to deliver two key things:  relevant results and a good user experience.  That being said, the user experience is devalued if Google sends users to web page that load slower than the user wants.  Google has also paved the way for implementing this in their US Patent Application #20050071741.  Check out my post about SEO news from pubcon for more details on this.

So we know that webpage load times will be important but how can you tweak your site for better performance?  There are a few excellent resources out there to answer this question: Read the rest of this entry »

Pubcon Las Vegas SEO

A Pubcon conference was held recently in Las Vegas and included a site review session featuring key players from Google, Microsoft, and Bing including Matt Cutts,  Derrick Wheeler, and Nathan Buggia.  While multiple sites were reviewed with the usual intermediate/advanced recommendations being pointed out, there were a few note worthy issues that came up which I’d like to highlight.

Keyword stuffed footer links are potentially harmful: The Chief of Webspam at Google pointed out that multiple uses of keywords in anchor text, particularly in the footer, can be construed as being potentially manipulative.  I always run across sites with a ton of sidebar or footer links which contain potentially spammy.  I would link to one but I don’t want to reward them with link juice .  Most of the time these sites have an extremely large footer with upwards of 10,20,30+ links.  Yahoo has also Read the rest of this entry »

Google's Twitter Algorithm

How will Google incorporate live twitter updates into their search algorithm?

News recently came out that Google and Bing will be featuring live twitter updates into their search results.  The big question here for SEO’s is how they will incorporate twitter into their algorithms.  In order to shed some light on the potential of Google’s Twitter Algorithm, I’ve looked at how different Twitter grader algorithms work and any additions to these that we might see go live.

One of the more popular site’s out there that will rank your Twitter profile is the Twitter Grader by the guys over at Hubspot.  Now while I wouldn’t suggest you optimize your Twitter profile for this tool, it is still useful for gauging success.  Over on their blog, Hubspot details what factors are part of their Twitter Grader’s algorithm.  Here’s a list of potential factors in the Google Twitter Algorithm:

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Be An SEO CHampion

Everyone wants to be the champ. In terms of professional SEO this means delivering results based on success metrics. These are usually things like SEO revenue, organic leads, etc…Whatever your SEO goals are, achieving high rankings for relevant/high converting keywords is always a supporting metric- sometimes the primary one.

The SEO champs are those who are keen to Google’s algorithm and act accordingly. With over 300 factors in Google’s Algorithm, this can be a daunting task. A good starting point is to figure out which factors are the most influential and develop your SEO strategies with those ranking factors in mind. But its not all about optimizing for the top ranking factors.

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