One of the SEO arguments out there is the detrimental effect of outbound links on "link juice" and PageRank dilution. While not completely inaccurate this is somewhat of a myth that requires further explaination.

Link baiting is a powerful strategy to build one way links from relevant sites and improve a site's overall popularity.  How do you go about baiting links?  Here are a few steps to follow in order to conduct a powerful linkbait campaign.

Arrange a brainstorm session that includes various people from your organisation including marketing, IT, creative agency reps and last but not least, your SEO.

List the various categories within the target audience of your website.  An example of this could be You... Read more..]]> http://www.omarkattan.com/2009/02/19/linkbaiting-process-the-guardian-example/feed/ 1 http://www.omarkattan.com/2009/01/17/google-webmaster-tools-setup-and-data-usage/ http://www.omarkattan.com/2009/01/17/google-webmaster-tools-setup-and-data-usage/#comments Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:55:17 +0000 Omar Kattan http://omarkattan.com/2009/01/17/webmaster-tools-setup-and-data-usage/

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google which allows webmasters to have an insider's view on how Google views a website.   Google Webmaster Tools also provides webmasters with a commnication channel with Google to provide them with info such as reporting spam in the Google index, reporting paid links (eg by competitiors ;-)) and most crucially,  submitting a site reconsideration request  (if your site has been penalised by Google!)

Setting up a Google webmaster tools account is very easy, follow these simple steps: 

Lets get the new year started on the right SEO footing.  I've summarised below a laundry list of critical SEO items to check for the new year.    

Meta Data Check all your site's meta data and ensure that it conforms to SEO best practices incuding length (60 characters for title, 150 characters for description), keyword optimised (for density, and proximity) and most importantly ensure that meta include an appropriate call to action.

Internal Links Ensure that your s... Read more..]]> http://www.omarkattan.com/2009/01/02/seo-checklist-for-the-new-year/feed/ 0 http://www.omarkattan.com/2008/06/12/finding-valuable-pages-on-your-website-using-google/ http://www.omarkattan.com/2008/06/12/finding-valuable-pages-on-your-website-using-google/#comments Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:45:19 +0000 Omar Kattan http://omarkattan.com/2008/06/12/finding-valuable-pages-using-google/

Ever wondered what search engines see as the best perfoming pages on your website?  This post shows you how to find out what google sees as the most important pages on your site. 

Why is it important to find the most valuable pages on your site?  Very simply put,  to help you  optimise your internal "link juice".

For the most important pages on your site, type into Google

Google Analytics is by far the most robust free site side analytics program out there.  Now owned by Google, Google Analytics started out its life as a small analytics company called Urchin.

Google Analytics is used by millions of sites (hobby as well as ecommerce) to measure the amount and quality of traffic to a website. 

Moreover, if configured properly, Google Analytics can also measure predefined KPIs and Goals such as purchases, downloads, subscriptions, thereby showing you which keywords convert to business.

There's been much debate about whether ot not the strategy of creating subdomains to improve natural search ranking works or not. Well, I'm writing here to tell you that it does, but only if you do it right.

First of all, let me explain to you what a subdomain is.  Its basically what it says, a sub section of your domain (your site) and it usually looks like this:

subdomain.domain.com

Keyword Cannibalisation is the term used for the common SEO mistake of having several of your website's pages targeting the same keyword.  This confuses the search engines as to which page to serve back to users.  This also confuses other sites owners that want to link to your site thereby leading different sites to link to different pages leading to a dilution of your link popularity.

So what are the most common causes of keyword cannibalisation?

Duplicate Title and Meta Tags

Dupl... Read more..]]> http://www.omarkattan.com/2008/01/08/avoiding-keyword-cannibalisation/feed/ 0 http://www.omarkattan.com/2008/01/03/dead-seo-strategies/ http://www.omarkattan.com/2008/01/03/dead-seo-strategies/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:17:42 +0000 Omar Kattan http://omarkattan.com/2008/01/03/dead-seo-strategies/

A good article was published by Brett Borders on his Copy Brighter blog listing 7 SEO techniques that no longer work.  here's the summary with links to related posts on this blog:

Reciprocal links. Read: A Reciprocal Link Building Strategy that Works

There are so many SEO companies out there, each with their strengths and weaknesses, some with very experienced staff who know exactly what it takes to achieve high rankings, and others with no clue what so ever and worse yet, no full time staff but instead, part-timers or freelancers working in cheap labour counties such as India and China.

So how do you choose a good SEO company?

Its not that difficult, it has to do with a bit of due dillengence on your part before you sign on the dotted line.

Here are a few... Read more..]]> http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/12/05/choosing-an-seo-company/feed/ 0