Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘SEO Tips & Tricks’ Category

According to the Wikipedia, Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms.

Google uses LSA in its algorithm when determining which pages to serve back to users, the process is called latent semantic indexing (LSI).

Here is a quick way to discover what words Google sees are semantically related to the word you’re trying to optimise for:

In the Google search box preceed your keyword by ~. so for instance if you’re trying to see what keywords Google sees as semantically related to the keyword tennis, type in the Google search box ~tennis.  Here is what you’ll see .  Note all the keywords that Google bolds (besides tennis).  These words like Wimbledon, Sport, and WTA are all semantically related to the keyword “tennis”.

How do you use this information?  Whenever you’re writing new copy for your website, make sure to include semantically related words in the title, meta description and copy of your website.

Also try to get as many links pointing to your site with your original keywords as well as words semantically related to it.

Do you research your competitor’s seo strategy and activities?  If you don’t then you should, this is the only way to beat them at their own SEO game.

Firstly lets define a competitor. Comptetitors are not necessarily your traditional bricks and mortar competitors.  Your online competitors are the websites with the number one to five positions in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the keywords you’re targeting.

Now that you’ve discovered your true competitors, its time to start researching their seo strategy in order to discover why they are ranking on top of the serps.

There are a few things you can do immediately to get an overview of their seo strategy:

1. Perform a site colon search for their url on Google.  This will show you all the pages in their site listed in Google.  So for example if you’re trying to research my site, you would typed in the Google search box site:omarkattan.com. Analysing the results of the site colon test you can quickly find out if their doing seo or not and if they are, you can find out what keywords their trying to target in their meta tags.   

2. Next, go to Yahoo! and perform a link colon for their url.  This will take you to Yahoo’s site explorer where you can start researching your competitor’s link popularity.   Make sure to select the drop down options of “Except from this Domain” and “Entire Site”  This will exclude any internal links and will show links pointing to the entire site, not just the homepage.

3. Go to Technorati and type in the domain name into the search box.  This will show you how popular your competitor is in the blogosphere

4. Go to Google image search and type the domain name in the search box.  his will show you if their images are optimised to show up in the search results (an increasingly important factor) as Universal Search is becoming the norm.

5. Go to YouTube and type in their URL, this will show you if their optimising for video search, again a universal search biggy.

The above are but a few factors you can measure, there are many more, but if you start with the above, you’ll be in a better position to implement a winning seo strategy.

“Link Juice” is the cumulative effect of the link popularity that your site gains over time as more and more sites link to yours.  If not managed properly, this link juice can be diluted unnecessarily within your site’s internal pages.

So how do you go about managing your internal link “link Juice”?   Easy..Use the Nofollow link attribute wisely within your sites internal linking structure.

First of all, lets define the Nofollow attribute.  The Wikipedia defines the Nofollow as:

“a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.”

Basically, the Nofollow is telling search engines not to attribute any “link juice” to the “nofollowed” link on the page.  Here is what a nofollow link looks like:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”yoursite.com” mce_href=”yoursite.com”>this is a nofollowed link</a>

The Nofollow tag can also be implemented on a per page basis thereby instructing the search engines not to attribute any link juice to any of the links on the page.  The Meta Nofollow Tag is placed in the <head> section of the page and looks like this:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOFOLLOW”>

Why would you want to use the nofollow on some of your internal links?  Well in a nutshell, because some of your site’s pages do not require as much internal link popularity as your other strategic pages.

Some of the links that should have a nofollow link attribute include:

• Links in your breadcrumb leading to the copyright statement, the contact us page, etc…

• Links to external sites such as the designers, coders, etc…

• Duplicate links on the same page

By properly managing you site’s internal link juice, you’ll be well on your way to getting your important pages ranking better in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

Good luck!

Here’s a good optimisation tip, did you know that you can add optimised title tags to your site’s internal links?  Here is what it looks like:

<a title=”Computer Monitors ” href=”your-link” mce_href=”your-link”>Home</a>

Home

I’ve bolded the title tag in the above example “Home” link, and as you can see, while the visitors can still see home as the link text, the title tag allows engines to understand that the home link is also the home page for a site about in this instance, “computer monitors”.

Users can also see the words “Computer Monitors” when they hover over the link so make sure you don’t stuff the tite tag with too many works otherwise it will lead to bad user experience and may be construed as spam!

By following the above simple example, you can insure that all your website’s internal links are optimised for the keywords you’re targeting and supporting your overall onsite optimisation efforts.

Using the link title tag will contribute to your overall efforts to rank higher in the search engines results pages.

Here’s a quick way to find and eliminate spam on your website.

Type:  “popular spam word” site:yoursite.com in Google and analyse the results.  You’ll be surprised, well I was!  I noticed that someone had managed to spam some of my members’ blog comments in my Invision forum blog software.  They had used spam words such as “vi*g*a”, “c*si*o” and “p*nis enlargement”.  Anyway I deleted them right away.

So why is it important to remove spam from your site?  Well, its as simple as this: 

Search engines want to provide the best possible user experience to their users and serving sites that contain spam undermines that goal.

So go on and remove spam from your site today!

Again, the way to do it:

“spam word” site:yoursite.com

where spam word can be something like vi*g*a or any of the spam words found here.

Good luck!