uGuX SEO

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted (about 2 months)… This post is about a few techniques that don’t seemed to be discussed very much in the SEO community (i.e., sphinn.com).

Google toolbar

First off, the Google toolbar is used on countless computers. It’s well-known to any adSense user that Google will pay $1 per download with FireFox. This toolbar allows Google to track which sites are visited as long as their referrers, passer-by, return users, etc.

Social media

Users of Google, that use its accounts, know that you can mark sites in the SERPs with a positive or negative note — similar to Wikipedia’s search engine rating system. This gives additional information besides the desired linked “anchor-text.”

Unknown factors

• CTR - click-through-rate: How often your site is clicked vs. others? This influences sitelinks besides just standard ranking.
• Bounce rate to Google - Do visitors that go to your site automatically click “back” and then go to another site after yours?
• Duration - The longer they stay on the page you rank for — the higher it will rank on the SERPs.

All of these factors are very easy to track. I’ve tested these techniques and have seen a correlation for the higher the duration, the higher you will rank — even if you have only a few backlinks.

Now, for some SEO speculation

It is also quite possible that Google will use the data gathered in Google trends or maybe even from its analytics.  Yeah, but who know?

Now, one way to learn SEO is to study the success of other SEO strategists.  Recently, SEO.com was no where to be seen on the Google search engine results, but now they are:

As you can tell, SEO.com is ranked number 10 for the highly competitive keyword.  Now, how did they do this? That is what this post will attempt to answer.

SEO.com’s BlackHat tactics

Currently, some believe that they have used a few unethical ways to achieve their current success.  The tactic that I linked to sums up their spam on Sphinn.com (an SEO and search related news site).  Now, this is certainly BlackHatSEO.  Although many social news sites use nofollow attributes in their links, Sphinn does not.  So, SEO.com essentially had some of their employees create multiple accounts at Sphinn and inject/force links to their site.

Buying links is BlackHat, but buying a site with links is not

After SEO.com was purchased, a huge buzz was found on many SEO and flat-out geek blogs about the purchase.  It sold for 5 million dollars.  Many of these blogs wrote up a little post — saying, “Wow, SEO.com sold for 5 million,” etc.  And of course, most (or many) of these blogs resulted on providing links directly to SEO.com.  (Technorati estimates 205 blog reactions for the site.)

And yes, of course, there were already links pointing to the domain before it was purchased.  Now, 15,100 links according to Yahoo.

Getting closer to a conclusion

With a site, with the perfect domain, and with near-perfect anchor text (hyperlinks pointing with either “seo.com” or “seo”), it leaves no wonder to my mind why they have received a 1st page ranking.

On-site SEO?

Ahh, glad you asked.  Neglecting all keywords with 2 characters and less (via GoogleRankings - Keyword Density)…

…they are certainly optimized.

Regarding other aspects:

• Their site is regularly updated (main page, as well) by showing snippets of each of their blog posts.
• Each of their pages stays on topic (mentions related terms — “search engine optimization”, etc.).
• Inner links very well.

Conclusion

This post is not meant to be rant but rather a way to look at sites that may be your potential competitor.

They’ve optimized well, and it appears to have been a great buy (according to their site):

After  4 ½ months with SEO.com our average monthly sales more than doubled. The decision to hire SEO.com has been one of the best we’ve made in launching our small business.

So, I received an email back from Marcus Ruark (Vice President, Sales and Marketing) of Gigablast with a press release for March 18th, 2008, and in it were a few SEO tips:

“The most frequent complaint regarding alternative site search services is the freshness of the site search results,” said Marcus Ruark, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Gigablast. “Gigablast Site Search with Gigaboost provides a tremendous search advantage to websites with dynamic, user-generated content, frequent page updates, or regular sales promotions.”

Moreover, since web pages with Gigablast Site Search receive priority in the Gigablast indexing process, web searches on www.gigablast.com, or on any of Gigablast’s affiliate sites, will have fresh and comprehensive access to those Gigablast Site Search web pages.

Their most important SEO tip is very similar to ranking highly on MSN/Live.com search. They pointed out that freshness and updating is of tremendous importance. To boost your rankings, I would suggest your include frequently updated content. If you don’t write a lot of content, encourage user comments or parse an external RSS feed into your site.

I posted a few other tips in Gigablast SEO and Gigaboost part I.

BTW, I just checked, and it appears that this site is ranked first for “Gigablast SEO“.

CNN.com is probably one of the most-perfect examples of pure SEO. A simple search for “news” reveals them as the authority in news:

A lot can be learned just from examination. Personally, I believe the reason is that they are the only ones with a Google PageRank of 9 on the entire page (and it’s certainly not because of anchor text).

Okay, there’s an obsession with *.edu backlinks — and I’m here to fill that void. Essentially, this will be a tutorial on how to find .edu/.gov backlinks (nothing too fancy). Be forewarned, the last few suggestions are slightly less serious.

• Competitive Backlink Checking - Look at a domain name that is in direct competition for your site and then run the following “backlink” query on Yahoo.

1. To rank this site highly, I might check a site that ranks high for the term “SEO”. I see that SEOinc.com ranks highly on Yahoo, let’s run this query: linkdomain:www.seoinc.com +site:.edu -site:.com -site:www.seoinc.com
2. If I was in direct competition with Jim Boykin, I’d run this: linkdomain:www.webuildpages.com +site:.edu -site:.com -site:www.webuildpages.com at Yahoo.
3. So, running this on any site that looks to have artificially produced backlinks would be a good start.

• Add Links to User Contributed Pages - Find a site that uses some type of software to have pages produced. i.e., guestbooks, ffalp, forums, blogs, etc. So, check-out a demo of that script, and scroll to the bottom to see any type of copyright notice or a link back to the original site — now, copy that text and run a query (like one of the below):

1. Using a Free For All Links Page: It had the text on the bottom of the demo: Script Created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt’s Script Archive. Now search: site:.edu “Script Created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt’s Script Archive”
2. Remember adding to related sites will have the best results. This is not spamming as long as you add your site to just relevant pages. To do this, search site:.edu “name of script” “desire query for optimization”. Doing this will dramatically decrease your number of pages to submit to, but at least you’ll get much higher quality results.

• Provide a Business Service - I’ve personally added some of my sites (other sites) into online business directories.

1. If you take a look at this post — you can actually offer internships and receive a decent backlink because of it. Now, you’ll certainly need to be innovative while trying this technique, but it can work quite nicely.

• Go to College - I doubt all of you will take this advice.

1. …Harvard might be a good start, though (see the link — then you’ll see why).

• Buy ‘em

1. Buying backlinks is no longer considered “white hat seo,” so maybe I should say, “donate.”

• Other Techniques - Acquiring links without pushing for them.

1. Create something that reference-able (yeah, I know its not a real word).
2. Create a mathematical application or tool related to programming or any related subject at schools. Essentially, all educational tools work well. (I’ve done this one fairly well for one of my sites.)

Is the “.edu” really that necessary?

It’s not any better than any other TLD (or maybe I should say they aren’t supposed to be — Matt Cutts confirmed this before). Other than the reason Matt Cutts gave, age is also a factor.