SEO 101 | The Beginning SEO Podcast

What can be considered duplicate content and how does it affect SEO?
What is valid xhtml and why is it important?

You said a few things about white hat and black hat. When you do white hat stuff your content is the same as what your users see?

Black hat stuff is your users see a different content than what the search engines see?

Why would someone do that bad part? Besides to try and get ahead of say my site?

By white hat stuff, your site title? H1 tags? etc. Your talking about these?

Great podcast. You guys make it simple. KISS

Keyword Research

How does one know what key words to use? I mean toolbarn sells tools, so I am assuming you would use any word or words that you would for tools.

On a shopping mall it would have a lot of keywords. You can not use them all on your main page, so how does one pick out what to use?

You’ve mentioned spiders and bots a few times. I have some inkling of what these are and what they mean so SEO, but some facts to back up my suspicions would be helpful.

When creating internal links, what is better, using relative links or absolute links.

I was wondering if you could give us newbies some tips of placing our Google advertisements to help gain the important clicks!

Thanks.

I was listing to your bot pod cast and was wondering what are some of the reason that bots will not crawl your site. Things like no-follow, restricted, etc.

What software and hardware if any do you use to make these pod cast? You site software is wordpress, so I assume there is a mod/plug-in for this. What is it called?

If someone wanted to do what you guys are doing what is required to get going?

YourWeb.Info
http://www.yourweb.info

Firstly, love the podcasts.

Q:
You mentioned a couple of episodes back about using dynamic content as a means of getting indexed more regularly. I assume you weren’t talking about simply printing the current server time in the page footer. Could you possibly elaborate upon what you meant?

Thanks guys!

[...] Ask a question [...]

In the podcast “How do I check my rankings via software” you mentioned “API” several times, and how I must use it or the 800 pound gorilla will get me. Google defines it as Application Program Interface. Can you tell me more about API and how I use it?

Hi, I really like your site and podcasts.

In one of your recent podcasts you mentioned the Google API, required for doing bulk Page rankings. Sometime ago I looked into this and came across http://www.googlerankings.com/, they say the Google API you need is the SOAP Search API, however when, you investigate further you get the following message “As of December 5, 2006, we are no longer issuing new API keys for the SOAP Search API. Developers with existing SOAP Search API keys will not be affected.”

I know there are loads of types of Google API’s, so is there another one that can be got that does the same job?

Keep up the great work and keep selling those power tools.

Diarmuid

Could you tell me the difference between a Home Page and a Landing Page, and how does that difference affect my ranking?

I was listening to your podcast regarding “cloaking” and have a related question. I often develop Flash based web pages which are notoriously difficult for search engines to deal with and was considering serving the same exact “content” to the web crawlers in a more digestible format (xml or xhtml perhaps). Would this be considered “cloaking” and fall under the “don’t do it” guidelines you recommend? My intent is not to do anything deceptive but rather to make the sites more accessible and searchable while providing people with a richer user experience.

I appreciate your podcast. Thank you for your time.

hi guys
can you explain what the Google APIs are and what do I need to get one? GoRank.com’s SEO tools require one, but im confused as to how to ge one and what one i need!

if you are starting a new site or blog and have no budget for promotion, what are the main methods you can employ to gain traffic?

is it possible that search engines follows meta tags and data of all the pages of my site but list only my sites’ index page, so for all the keywords it display main page only

What is the best way to gain subscribers to your rss feed?

On your SES Latino Recap pod cast I heard you guys talking about the Latino people. You guys started to talk about call centers and having someone that can speak which ever language. What about cites say like YourWeb.Info that do not have call centers or for that matter any site that sells a product but are not big enough to have a call center. Is there something they can do to help out trying to reach say the Latino people? What would we have to do?

Hi, The company I work for is developing a new website. It is a dynamic coldfusion site and I am concerned that the new pages will not have the same URLs as the old pages. What is the best way to handle this as the majority of our incoming links will now become 404 errors? Thanks.

Hi There, firstly I would to congratulate you and your fellow podcasters for an excellent and informative SEO podcast. I’m learning so much, keep up the good work. I have a few questions regarding topics that you covered in previous shows.

Questions:
1. In the podcast it was mentioned that the the best top level domains to get would be a .com or .net If you live outside of America e.g. I live in South Africa, would it be best to use a Country specific top level domain e.g. .co.za or use a .com or .net?

Do you know of any site I can use to check KEI for a top level domain for domains other than .com?

I tried to check for keywords of a .co.za site on quantcast but couldn’t find any details for a co.za domain site there.

2. If I already have domain name and I would like to create subdomain’s for various bloggs that I would like to start e.g. photography. Does it matter what name I use for the subdomain e.g. photographyzone@xyz.co.za or just photography@xyz.co.za and then rely on my content to drive traffic to my site.

I searched for the word photography and this resulted in many hits in google but when I searched for the name e.g. photographyzone this resulted in less hits. I was thinking of using a theme for me bloggs e.g. photographyzone@xyz.co.za and petzone@xyz.co.za etc or would it be better to just use pets@xyz.co.za.

I hope I haven’t confused you too much with my query.

Thanks again and keep up the good work.

Great Questions Brainbugg we’ll definitely answer that on our next show!

DB

Hi Guys

I have a few more questions:

1. I came across numerous bloggs where the person references articles on other sites e.g. if the blogg is re: photography then he would post an extract to a news article on another site, at the bottom of the article he would include a link to the full article.

Now my question is, is this a good thing to do if you have a blogg informing people on news worthy articles relating to photography or would it be better to write your own views and then include a link at the bottom to the full article? If you just copied an extract would this be flagged but the bots as duplicate content and just cause your blogg more harm than good.

2. Relating to the topic of internal linking. Is it a good or bad thing if you build your site using PHP and the links to other pages on your site is PHP. I’m still learning PHP so I’m not sure if I understand the working on PHP correctly. The reason I’m asking is because you guys mentioned that it’s best to use plain HTML for internal site navigation as opposed to Flash etc.

As always excellent podcasts guys, I feel like a sponge just soaking up all the info which I’ll put into practise soon. What’s the purpose of having a directory listing site?

I checked out http://www.massivelinks.com site and I don’t see any advertisements on it so how do they make their money unless it’s through the links which people pay to list.

Thanks again and keep up the good work.
BB

What are the “datacenters” you refer to when you mentioned that you search across datacenters for your search index.

I let my girlfriend listen to one of your SEO podcasts to try and explain to her the inportantance of SEO. She is an editor for an in-house magazine, PR and content writer. Most of the time she was a bit confused because she didn’t understand all the terms eg. META, PR etc but she had a few questions which made me stop and think.

Thought I would pose these questions to you:

Here are her questions.

How do the search engine bots know what words to search for? Isn’t SEO a battle which can’t ever be won because if a search engine suddenly changes the way it indexes then pages that were previously ranked well could suddenly disappear overnight.

If SEO is an art and can be learned then won’t it become a problem when suddenly the “secret” is out and everyone knows how to do it then everyone’s pages will be ranked the same.

Hope these questions are too silly.

Cheers and thanks.
BB

Hey fellas,

Love the podcast. It lacks the BS of competing podcasts. Keep up the good work.

I’ve got a quick question - relates to protecting you hard-earned SEO work from being hijacked:

How do you recommend protecting against KeyCompete?

Look forward to hearing your response.

Cheers,
Jason

Hi Guys

Are you still around, getting worried because havent seen any new podcasts coming out.

Hope nothing to serious

Cheers and thanks again for the good work

Hi Guys

I have a question regarding CMS e.g. Joomla or blogging software such as Wordpress. How would you go about optimising these type of sites for SEO?

Another question, how important is it to update your main page of your website with fresh content?

Is it ok if you just add new content on other pages e.g. your main page doesn’t change much but has a link to a blog on your site which changes often.

Waddup BCD,

I’ve heard in the past that the search engines consider subdomains as different websites. If that’s true, does domain.com and http://www.domain.com count as two separate websites according to the search engines, even though they aren’t?

If so, is this causing me to have duplicate content within my own website?

And if yes, is there a way to fix this so I’m no longer penalized?

Hi Guys

Glad to see that you guys are back.

I’m back once again with more questions. I realise that “Content is King” but how important is it to continously update your Main page i.e. 1st? If the 1st page of your site is fairly static and doesn’t change much but has links to content within your site that changes alot e.g. various blogs etc will this do more harm than good to your rankings since the 1st page doesn’t get updated?

Thanks again for an awesome blog and keep up the good work.

Brainbugg

Greetings Brian, David and Carolyn,

You’re Questions from BrainBugg show was great, one of the best shows so far.

Answers to questions is what we need!

Below are some questions and comments that come to mind.

Question 1

Google Tool Bar Page Rank (TBPR) Update - At the time of writing its being 156 days, what is going on with that? I know all SEO experts suggest that page rank is unimportant, but still mention it proudly when a site they are working on, shoots up in the Page Rank stakes.

So, can we expect to ever see a TBPR update again and if so when?

I wrote a lengthy explanation of why I feel Google TBPR is important on Matt Cutts blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-pagerank/.

I would add to that post by saying, if the reason for not altering the TBPR is to hamper the efforts of people selling links or even domains with high published Page Rank, I feel the reverse will be the effect, in that lengthening the space of time between updates, gives these “unscrupulous” people more time to benefit from historical PR. My preference would be to see TBPR undated at least one a month, keeping us all on our toes.

Question 2

In the Brainbugg show, you mentioned paid listings sites such as Business.com, where no longer going to deliver much value in terms of link juice. Is it possible to know which directories are affected? As nearly all directories (DMOZ been the notable exception), have some form of paid listings or reviews. Does this make all our directory submissions a waste of time? Bar off course the very occasional click through you get from them.

A Comment

I have to comment on one of the points you mentioned in answer to a question about country domains. You might have guessed by my name I am Irish. My site, http://www.cpdwise.com, has a .ie domain as well as .com and .co.uk. My target audience are spread across the world, but the in addition to Ireland, the UK would be a natural market for the site. Our position in Google.com, Google.ie, Yahoo.com and Yahoo.co.uk are all improving. However Google.co.uk is very different.

So I have done quite a bit of research on the subject. To do well in Google.co.uk you must have you site hosted on a server that is physically located in the UK. Often even UK ISP’s host their servers outside the UK. You have to check before signing up with a new ISP.

Having a .co.uk will help your position in Google.co.uk, having links from sites based on severs with UK based IP addresses and .co.uk extensions will also help more than links from outside the UK.

I felt your answer to the question, did not strongly enough emphasis these points. They are so important for any site seeking a UK audience.

Because, I did not know any of the above when I started out and because US ISP’s are cheaper, offer higher spec’s, are faster and have friendlier support. I got the site hosted in the US. To change would now be a big deal.

As an example of the effect of this decision, for a particular search term, http://www.cpdwise.com is No 1 in Google.com and Google.ie and a depressing 18 in Google.co.uk and that is before users even click search UK only results.

To find out where a site is hosted, place your url after the equals sign in the URL below.

Here is the report for your site: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.podcast.neo1seo.com

Amusingly if you try the same search for Google.co.uk, you see it is hosted in the US.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.google.co.uk

I am not sure if Google.co.uk is the only “country specific Google” which adopts such a stance.

I hope this comment helps some of your listeners avoid a mistake that I have made to my cost.

Love the show.

Kindest Regards and keep up the good work.

Diarmuid

WebCEO Pro or WordTracker?

http://www.orangesprocket.com

I have a similar question… I was playing with SoloSeo and WordTracker. Wordtracker is good like everyone says, but expensive. SoloSeo is cheaper but I didn’t quite get my head around it.

So: are there any free or open source tools which are a reasonable substitute for WordTracker?

Oh one other thing. Not for lack of trying — I’ve listened to almost all the podcasts and also read here and there, but I might be getting myself confused…

So let’s say I locate the very best keywords and keyphrases for my site. My understanding is that these can be dozens or even hundreds in some cases.

Does an SEO person basically tape that list on the wall of their office and just make sure to use those phrases in the key places (meta tags, titles, h-tags, inside the content, etc.) at any and every opportunity?

Is that the crux of it, or do you do something different/more with the keywords?

Hey guys,
First, I really appreciate your show. You do a super job. Here’s my question: Recently I launched a new content-heavy website.

I have a folder on my site that contains blank redirection pages. I link to these pages from the main content areas of my site, if there is a link that I want my visitors to go to.

Here’s the problem: In my robots.txt file I completely disallow the folder, by using the following text.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /goto/

For an extra layer of security, I put this exact meta tag in the head of every redirection page in the /goto folder:

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work. When I do the site:mydomainname.com in google, only 2 of my content pages come up, and 3 of my goto pages show! Its taking quite a long time for the content pages of my site to get crawled, even though I have some really good links pointing there. I’m guessing that the bot’s distaste for blank redirection pages is the problem, because my site is full of quality content. The thing is, the bot shouldn’t have even crawled those redirection pages in the first place!

Tis’ very complexing. What say you?

Hello,

thank you for a super great seo podcast, I finished listening to all of them in a week or so, you have talked for quite a while, had to listen from the early morning to late at night But is was really worth it.

I have a question you might find interesting to contemplate on.

would you expand an existing website, adding “article”, “questions and answers”, “forum”, “shop” etc to the same domain or creating 5 different websites, and heavily interlinking them together?

the problem is i have a wedding directory and I want to expand it adding articles + shop + forum + blog + etc. I would go adding sub domains, like /articles,domain,com + / shop,domain,com (or domain,com/articles/ and domain,com/forum/) but my existing domain is very long, something like vvv,thebigweddingdirectory,com and if i make “articles,thebigweddingdirectory,com” it would be even longer.

So I am planning to buy another domain for articles, like weddingexperts,com and one for a shop, like weddingshop,com and for a questions-answers, like weddinganswers,com and interlinking them together, like internal linking.

Could I get a good side effect of passing a good ranking from each other, so they are 5 good ranking websites, and I could take the first 5 Google places for “wedding” (in my own language, certainly):) or could I be blacklisted for something like “spam”?

I hope this question was not too long. Hope you will answer it someday. I will be listening to your great podcast, and also move to find some more advanced stuff, need to get the knowledge in as little time as possible to become advanced, advances plus and someday an expert like you guys.

Best regards,
Rokis

Greetings Brian, David and Carolyn,

Thanks for to devoting so much time to answering all my previous questions. You even did a fairly good job of pronouncing my name.

Have you any tips for composing compelling Google Ads that have a good prospect of converting into sales?

For example, if you have an e-commerce site, should you mention the price of what you are selling?

Diarmuid

Hey guys,

These type of redirection pages that I mentioned above serve a rather useful purpose in affiliate marketing. Usually, merchant links are very long, and/or point to a completely different domain which and can cause the user to think something is fishy. It is usually a best practice to have the user go to redirection page on one’s own site. So that’s my little explanation for ya.

Here’s an update on my ‘question’…

Finally after about a month and a half, my site was completely crawled. At about that time the blank pages in the /goto folder disappeared from the index. I’m suspecting that the disallow rule doesn’t exactly do what we think it does. I looks like Google DOES initially crawl pages that have it the disallow rule in the robots.txt file, but eventually drops them when it feels like it.(?) This identical pattern has happened the last two sites I put out in the last 6 months. (PS - I do use Google sitemaps for my sites)

Oh, and Dave was right on… it is pronounced tim-O-thius.

Is all this ‘Web 2.0′ stuff worth it?

Leaving aside all the intangible (imagined?) benefits, do you have statistics showing how much extra traffic / money you have gotten through all your blogging and podcasting?

I started a blog nearly 5 months ago - and it is already getting 1,500 visitors a month. But if I added up all the hours I had spent on it compared to the amount of extra traffic it has brought to my main web site - I would have to say it has not been worth it so far!

Also - the eCPM from Adsense adverts on my blog were very poor compared to my main (free image) web site. So much so that I ended up removing them completely (although not in time to prevent Google from ’smart pricing’ my Adsense account).

OK - I do not have concrete evidence to support the smart pricing statement - but it seems like a distinct possibility!

Suppose you have a website with lots of dynamic product information. When you’re sold out of product (quantity available = 0) the items no longer appear in category pages and details pages for the user or search engine spider to find. Do you keep the items appearing on your site to maintain long-tail ranking for the keywords associated with those items or do you let them go until you have them in stock again? My thinking is that if you’re going to have them in stock later to keep them live on the site with dynamic “out of stock” text appearing for those items. What the general consensus there?

Hey guys, thanks for the response which I caught yesterday.

(A reasonable way to pronounce my name is as if it was written “Pete O’Solace”; no I am not Irish although from time to time people hear my name that way. I am also not Greek, Carolyn, in fact I am of Spanish descent.)

But here’s a question: In my application, my site doesn’t have hundreds or thousands of products, it actually has one primary one and about 5 secondary ones. (It’s http://www.blogbridge.com - a high end rss/blog aggregator - recently one an award from SeoMoz.com)

So the keywords I am trying to rank for are far fewer than the hundreds of thousands you guys were talking about. They are more or less generic ones like:

free blog reader
open source blog reader
and so on…

and more specific ones like:
tracking blogs for public relations
tracking what people are saying about
track what people are saying about
and so on…

With all the variations I can come up with about 50 or so phrases, all of which in the end point to general page on the site, or an application specific one on the site. So again here there’s a difference, instead of thousands of landing pages I might have 5-10.

For me, a conversion amounts to a download and/or a signup.

I describe this whole scenario to you to ask the following question:

In what ways should my approach to SEO be different given this scenario? What changes, what special suggestions do you have?

Thanks a million! (a $million?)

I’m really enjoying the show, thanks!

My question is I’ve been hearing that Google has updated there search engine. Should I still spend time on adding my site to directories?

You guys (and girl) going to be doing any new shows anytime soon?

Hi there,

Just wondered if you would consider inviting us to do a podcast on your shoe or on webmaster radio. I would be delighted to contibute!

Thanks,

Allan Stewart

I’ve heard you all talk about the benefits of aged domains. I am working on some projects that have me creating a few subdomains. Will subdomains benefit from the age of the core domain, or will they be looked at a completely new domains by the serps and start the aging process over?
Big fan of the show, and avid listener. Thanks for all the great info.

G

Hi guys,

Can you tell me, if I have a multi-region site is it better to host each region site on a seperate server with region-specific TLD, or should I keep them all on my 14-year-clean-and-active domain?

In other words, I wonder whether Google would prefer to see my German site on a .de on a german server than on our generic domain, even if that means moving from a trusted old domain to a new one.

I find that we rank really well for japanese queries because the domain is registered in japan along with the nameservers, but our 1 year old site in English, German etc ranks very badly indeed despite having similar content and no obvious SEO problems.

Thanks,
Godzilla

Thanks for answering my Q in the podcast!

I never thought about geo-targetting before. I tried to find out more but there’s not much info available.

My understanding is you propose this:

http://www.example.com/page1.html shows german text if the users IP is in Germany, Korean if they in Korea etc.

If so, I dont understand how Google will index the page. It can only index the page once right? So how does it know whether to index german, korean or english? Surely it will only index the page in one language (the language of the IP of googlebot). Unless google.de has its own googlebot I dont understand how this will work…

Hi guys
I run a site for my local club, we have http://www.clubname.co.uk and are ranking well for our chosen keyphrases.

If we were to purchase http://www.clubnameKEYWORD.co.uk, would it be better to either:

1. Just forward the URL to http://www.clubname.co.uk, or

2. Take out hosting for http://www.clubnameKEYWORD.co.uk, have just an index page and navigation that points to pages on http://www.clubname.co.uk.

I hope this makes sense - great podcast, keep it up:)

Dazzyd

Hey Guys,

Would you mind discussing best practices for building good internal link structure on a future podcast? I think this is a major confusion point for many of us newbies.

Also, another possible topic would be “beginning” link building strategies. I think it would be interesting to hear about how you would go about building links from scratch today, given that directories seem to be devalued and the possible minefields with paid links. Maybe how to buy links under the radar?

Thanks in advance; I (we) truly appreciate all of your help and insight.

Best,
Jason
(lev-ridge)

Thanks for answering both of those questions!

The internal linking part makes more sense now, and it sounds like you share the “content siloing” theory that I’ve heard Bruce Clay talk about.

Thanks again,
Jason

Hi guys

Thanks for making your extensive knowledge available to us newbies.

My question:

I currently have a South African site (.co.za) that I would like to expand to offer my product to international clients (.com domain). The international site will basically be the same, but some key features will be different.

Do I have to create an entirely unique site, or can I copy the site? Some of the content will be different, but some articles will be relevant to all clients, thus will be the same. I’m concerned about duplicate content for this.

I don’t think a redirect is the answer since the sites will have some key differences.

What is the best way to go about this?

Thanks again for a great podcast.

Regards
Bernard

Hi guys

Thanks for a great podcast - I learn something new with each episode.

My question:

I have a South African site (.co.za) that I offer some products and services on. I would like to expand the offering to an international market (.com domain). Does this mean I have to create an entirely new site for the .com domain, or can I make a copy of the current site? Some features of the .com site will be unique, but much of the content will be applicable, thus will be the same. I’m worried about the duplicate content ssue.

I don’t think a redirect will work, because there will be some key differences in the site.

Thanks again for sharing your extensive knowledge with us newbies.

Regards
Bernard

Hello,

I have been listening to all of your shows, and last year you talked about log files, that they are very important to have. Earlier I had awstats on one of my sites, but i changed the hosting plan, and I dont have good statistics.

I want to collect my log files, contacted my hosters, 1 said they keep the file for 2 days, the other keeps the files for 7 days. The only way they suggested to download them is through http://ftp. How do you collect you log files for future analysis? I dont have time to ftp my sites every day some tool to send them by email every day? some backup on to the hard drive? any suggestions?

Thanks for hard work, we can all learn from you a lot.

Good Job.
Rokas

I was recently told that search engines can read PDF files. So - I need to optimize my PDFs the same way I would web sites.

I’ve never heard of this before, and I think it sounds kind of crazy… but who knows. So, I’ll ask you guys… Is this true? If it is — how can a bot read a linked PDF file? Does it download and search the file?

Or - is this all bull?

As always, thanks for the informative and entertaining podcast.