For those of you who don’t know, Rich Skentra was the founder of Dmoz, the best known directory on the web and is also the CEO of Topix. Judging by this pretty impressive portfolio it should be no surprise he knows a thing or two about SEO…or does he?

In a recent post on his personal blog, Rich gave some on-page SEO advice for Mahalo, so today I’m going to look through it and see if he really knows what he’s talking about.

Point 1:

Hyphens instead of underscores, Jason! C’mon guys this is basic stuff.

I’ll give Rich some credit on this one because until recently a lot of people thought the same. Search Engine Land confirms now though that this is not the case and all 4 major search engines treat Underscores and hyphens the same. Rich’s blog doesn’t even do this so I’m not sure why he even mentioned it.

-1

Point 2:

Put the guide note under the <h1> and call it <h2>, it’ll do better. Mahalo needs lots of guide notes. Without the contiguous block of text from the guide note, the links aren’t enough to validate a landing. 250 words is ideal but anything is better than nothing.

The text ‘ Guide Note’ is not under anything but I’m not sure if its worth being an <h1> or <h2>, <h2> if anything though. Rich makes a good point, basically what he is saying in that in order for the page to be more than links this block of text under the guide note is important. Beefing this out a bit might help up the quality of the page in the eyes of the Search Engine’s although I don’t think it would make that big of a difference. I’ll explain why at the end.

+1

Point 3:

<title> should match <h1> should match url. Don’t forget to add <meta name=”description”>, this should match the <h2>

On pages I have checked the title is matching the <h1> fine and the URL’s are good. There is currently no descriptions on the search results, which probably should match the guide note as mentioned. Well spotted Rich

+1

Point 4:

Not really seo but a general idea … Reference pages in general are boring. Jason is the supreme master of linkbait… Could each mahalo page be turned into a controversy of its own? When someone biases a wikipedia page, it gets more attention and traffic, not less…

I guess this could work so he scores a point for mentioning linkbait. I do however think that Jason is only interested in creating solid, clean results and would have no interest in stirring up controversy.

+1

Does he know what he is talking about?

With a not-so-serious score of 3/4 I think Rich Skrenta has a clue about on-page SEO and has pointed out some aspects that Jason should take notice of. No matter how much Jason Calacanis wants to go away from doing ‘SEO’, having a description tag is basic web design unless I’ve missed it. With a portfolio consisting of two of the biggest sites on the web when its hard to own 1, Rich is doing pretty well for himself.

Does Mahalo deserve to rank?

I’m not being harsh here but if I’m not mistaken, according to new changes in the Google Guidelines you shouldn’t  be allowing search results to be indexed. Maybe it should be up to Google to sort this out and not the webmaster but Mahalo’s search results are still ranking. Of course, it may not be that way for long.

P.S. Don’t go looking over this site. I have some work to do yet

To understand what semi-ethical linkbuilding really is, I guess we have to go into what semi-ethical linkbuilding really isn’t, that way we can see whether you or I have been going to the dark-side with our linkbuiding campaigns. A link building campaign can actually better the web in my view, it helps the world see a quality site that they may not have noticed before, as the old saying goes ‘build it and they will come’ doesn’t really work in online terms.

So looking at what linkbuilding isnt. S-EL (Semi-Ethical Linkbuilding) is not going to the corner of the web looking for places to plant your links, it’s not commenting on edu blog’s without a nofollow tag, it’s not spamming forums with your signature link on show and it certainly isnt emailing random people with some ‘clever spam’ asking them to link to your website.

S-EL is using the webs resources to be able to build links to your site, but still offering something quality in the process, ill give some examples:

Creating a Squidoo Lens, this can add content to the web that wasn’t there before whilst being helpful you can also link back to your website or a clients website

Small Directory Submissions, by this I mean submitting to no more than 50 quality directories in order to start off a good base for the link building campaign. These shouldn’t be directories that accept any site and should regularly monitor old listings

Writing Articles for Article sites, although there’s debate on the quality of these types of links, if they get picked up for the right reasons you can see them all over Google and Yahoo groups. Having a link in an authors box doesn’t take away from the quality of the article and still builds links.

Doing something Original / Unique, this is what I meant by improving the quality of the web. It’s not easy doing something unique that people will enjoy or talk about, but if you do it then you deserve all the use and linkbacks it gets.
Linkbuilding really can be an enjoyable process. Brainstorming ideas on the type of content that can appeal well on digg related to your site, then something more political for netscape then maybe something humorous for Stumbleupon. If you get traffic to the right people you can easily genearte links for any website, don’t go spamming on the corner of the web.

Disclaimer: The reason I mentioned Semi-Ethical Link Building is because I dont believe Link Building can truly be called ethical by anyone, the reason behind link building is often some form of Search Engine Manipulation after all.

I know ive already written this post, but had to restore a backup of my blog so Im just going to write it again. Ive just came back from 3 weeks in Asia and happy to see that when you now search for ‘Optimisation’ on Google it no longer asks if you meant ‘Optimization’

The same goes for searching for ‘ViperChill’ no longer asks if I meant to search for ‘VapoChill’. Its clear Google have made some changes in this area and in my opinion its definitely for the better.

No, these builders aren’t part time SEO’s or helpers in my company; but I am a client of theres, just like the people that we Market sites for are clients of ours. So…whats this got to do with link building and what did they teach me?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is part 4 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about On Page SEO!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation as Im sure you know if you are already reading this blog. On Page SEO is basically the changes you can make to your site to make more Search Engine & User friendly; so lets dive right in.

Titles

Titles are extremely important for many factors, firstly they are a key tag to tell search engines and users what a site or particular webpage is about. The key is to keeping these unique for all pages of your site and trying to keep them actually relevant to what the page is about so if you do rank for the term on search engines you are getting targetted traffic and not completely random traffic to your site (who wants that?). Keep it unique, short and sweet. Put your brand name in their on the homepage but I personally remove it for this blog on content pages.

Meta Keywords & Descriptions

These carry little importance compared to how they used too. Gone are the days where you ranked for whatever keywords were in your meta keywords. Although they are of little importance, they should be added as dont forget; descriptions are the content that searchers see when your website appears on the search results. Try to make the text interesting and inviting so that people click through from the search engines onto your website.

Linking Structure

Theres many reasons why its a good idea to have a good linking structure throughout your site. Firstly it helps the flow of PageRank (linklove) spread throughout your website. Secondly it allows pages of your site that may be ‘deeper’ in terms of levels than other pages to be found and spidered, therefore indexed and another potential traffic point for your website. The easiest way to link to all the pages on your site is to create a sitemap, if you have more than 100 links / pages on your site then try to have a couple of these and use them as ‘index’ pages.

301 Redirect / Robots.txt

Try not to have too many versions of the same page, such as a normal version and a print version. Its better to block of the one that you probably wouldnt want to rank (the print version I assume) by adding a rule to your robots.txt file so theres no duplicate content issues within your site. Next I would recommend re-directing the non-www version of your site to the www version. This is something I do with all my sites and all my clients as I truly believe it works well and helps links spread throughout the site better; dont forget that you can set your preferred version in Webmaster Central.

Have it finished

I hate seeing pages that have ‘under construction’ on them, imagine having a few of these pages then remember that they are all going to have the same content. Dont setup or ‘link’ to pages that arent finished, have little content or are under construction. This could be the same saying for having friendly-URL’s so instead of having /page1.htm you could have /on-page-seo.htm. This adds more keywords to the site and can tell both users and search engines what a page is about before they even visit it.

Get these things in place and you are on your way to having setup a well optimised website. What are you waiting for?

This is partly for the project over at ProBlogger and partly because I think it will make an interesting post. So as the title says heres a look at the top 5 Search Engine Spammers

5. Blogspot

Thats right, Google owned Blogger / Blogspot are reported to have 80% of their blogs being pure spam.

…14 of the top-15 doorway domains have a spam percentage higher than 74%; that is, 3 out of 4 unique URLs on these domains (that appeared in our search results) were detected as spam. To demonstrate the need for scrutinizing these sites, we scanned the top-1000 results from two queries – “site:blogspot.com phentermine” and “site:hometown.aol.com ringtone” – and identified more than half of the URLs as spam easily.

4. Affiliates

Im not going to generalise them, as I dont think they are ‘bad’, I actually think they are good at getting their Affiliate pages ranking in the top results of Google more than the original website who has the offer. Spam?

(Click The Image Below)

3. Paid Link Buyers

Thats Right! If youve ever bought a paid link in order to help you with Search Engine Rankings then you are now officially a Search Engine Spammer.

And well you could argue if you’re signing a ton of guestbooks really fast, or you’re doing a ton of trackback or referer spam, you know that almost does get towards the denial of service attack, but this is the first time where you could actually go to a court of law and you can say, “look, here’s my account, I got hacked, here’s all the stuff.”

And on some level, it is almost kind of a silver lining, in that for the first time you could go, and you know, you could actually get an SEO convicted of doing something like this. - Matt Cutts of Google

2. 5 Billion Indexed Pages

Comon these guys had to be up there, They even made it on the front page of digg getting over 5 billion of their pages indexed and ranking highly in Google, impressive to any blackhat. Caught by a DigitalPoint Member

1. Roger Webbe

Sorry Roger if your reading this and think we have the wrong end of the stick, dont worry we are going to explain. In the eyes of an SEO who is the best Search Engine Spammer? Then It has to be Roger Webbe. This guy gets his sites to rank for terms they dont deserve to rank for with Blackhat techniques and then trys to openly teach spammesr why what they are doing is wrong:

“I want these SEOs to comply with guidelines and made the site to cause controversy to get people to listen,” he said.