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Sunday, March 28, 2010

Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2010-03-26



March 26th, 2010

Welcome to this week's SEO Chat newsletter. With many of us taking advantage of social networking sites for a variety of purposes, it's a good idea to make sure our behavior doesn't act at cross-purposes to what we're trying to accomplish. Think before you click, be it on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere. Before you turn to Miss Manners for a guide, you might want to look at the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek. It should help you stay out of trouble with friends, family, and co-workers when networking on Facebook.

So what else do we have for you this week? If you own a strongly content-based WordPress site, you'll appreciate the two-part article on turning WordPress posts into PDFs. It will allow your readers to print out posts from your site more easily, so they can peruse them later at their leisure. (Hard copy is still more useful than content on a screen for certain purposes). On Wednesday we turned our gaze to Twitter, focusing specifically on the deals this microblogging site has struck with all three major search engines and what effect that has on the search results.

If you've heard that some keywords are harder to succeed with than others, you need to check out this week's thread. You'll find that changing the keywords you're working with can affect your position in the SERPs more than you might realize. This is one of the reasons that SEO still gives the impression of being much more of an art than a science.

Science or art, if you're trying to increase your knowledge of SEO, in addition to the articles and forums on SEO Chat, you might want to check out Tutorialized. You'll find more than 100 SEO-related tutorials covering topics like choosing keywords, website marketing, and more. You can also submit tutorials to the site, where they'll be read by a global audience.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, focuses on link building. You've probably heard that quality is more important than quantity these days, but how can you tell whether a particular link will be worth your time to pursue? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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Search Engines Adding Twitter Content to Their Results

Adding PDF Conversion to Your WordPress Website

Convert a WordPress Post to PDF Without a Plug-in or Module
SEO on Tutorialized
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Search Engines Adding Twitter Content to Their Results
by Joe Eitel
2010-03-24

Who would think that a service as apparently inane as Twitter could come out of nowhere to suddenly start making money -- and even affecting search results ? It sounds strange, but it's true. Keep reading for a closer look at the trend, and why search engines are starting to include these 140-character bursts in their results.

It's hard to pinpoint an exact time when Twitter began gaining momentum. The microblogging service, which is now four years old, was just a blip on the radar a few years ago, well after it had been launched. At first, some critics dismissed it as a silly fad, but it began to pick up steam when celebrities began using the service to "tweet" their whereabouts, vent their frustrations, and start the occasional Twitter fight with other random celebrities -- in 140 characters or less, of course.

Recently, the San Antonio, TX-based research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets over a two-week period for six hours each day. Based on their research, the firm was able to break down each tweet on the site into six categories. For example, Pear Analytics found that 41 percent of tweets are pointless babble, while 38 percent are conversational. The rest of the numbers are equally unimpressive, with just 9 percent being characterized as "pass-along value," 6 percent as self-promotion, and equal parts spam and news at 4 percent each.

Read Search Engines Adding Twitter Content to Their Results

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Adding PDF Conversion to Your WordPress Website
by Codex-M
2010-03-23

This is the second part of a two-part series that shows you how to convert WordPress posts into PDFs without a plug-in or module. In the first part, you learned the important concepts for implementation, the required PHP class and a little about formulating the GET request which serves as an input to postcreator.php to grab the correct content from the MySQL database . In this final part, we will discuss how to completely integrate this application into your WordPress blogging/CMS platform. It is highly recommended that you read the first part to avoid confusion.

Importance of using proper title tag

In the first part, you learned how to formulate the GET request by extracting ID parameters in the URL that consist of the post ID, which will then be used by the PDF creator script to grab the necessary content from the MySQL database.

However, since most blogs use different permalink structures, the above method cannot be used. This leads us to the second and most important method of distinguishing post content; namely, the Title Tag.

Read Adding PDF Conversion to Your WordPress Website

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Convert a WordPress Post to PDF Without a Plug-in or Module
by Codex-M
2010-03-22

This two-part article series will explain how to convert your WordPress post content into an Acrobat PDF document without using a plug-in or a PHP module. The objective is to present a downloadable link to the users in PDF format. This will make things easy and decrease some security risk associated with installing third-party plug-ins.If you have an educational or information-based website, you can expect that a lot of readers will spend a lot of time reading your content. In addition, these readers may intend to use your content for personal and educational purposes. A typical example involves sharing your content with fellow classmates or readers.

When content or information is shared, one of the most effective and most popular file types for sharing is the PDF format. PDF is also known as an Acrobat Reader document. Documents shared using PDF are efficient ; the format reduces the file size as compared to common document-related file types such as MS Word, which can be heavy to share online. One of the great benefits of using PDF is to preserve the formatting of the document, and making it a read-only file that makes the document very readable.

On the other hand, the Internet presents the modern medium of exchanging information. One of the most popular blog publishing platforms is WordPress. This open source blogging and CMS solution is very popular because it is user friendly, easy to install and very convenient to readers, because it is very content-oriented.

Read Convert a WordPress Post to PDF Without a Plug-in or Module

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

Tips for SEO Friendly Websites
Form follows function. Before designing a website there are quite a few important factors to consider.
Read the tutorial.

What Does Seo Stand For?
What does seo stand for? Simply put SEO stands for search engine optimization.
Read the tutorial.

Submit Your Sitemap to Google
Techniques you can use to submit your sitemap to Google. An imperative step to get good rank!
Read the tutorial.

30 SEO Tips for Web Designers & Small Business Owners
30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready.
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Submitting your URL to Search Engines
How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible.
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How to Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Crowd
Quick tips to improve your blog from every aspects!
Read the tutorial.

 

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When you're new to SEO, it's tricky enough to understand which keywords you should be trying for. When your efforts don't have the effect you expect, it's even worse. Fortunately, there's often some kind of explanation, as the original poster of this week's thread learned. Be sure to stop by the thread and share your experience.


Josephbm91

Hello all.

So I'm very new to SEO. My site is about 2 months old.

Originally I had "small business," "web design" and "tyler tx" as my main keywords. After about a month and a half, that got me to #1 for "small business web design tyler tx." After a while I realized that was getting me no clicks, so I thought it was time to move on.

The only possible thing I was doing in terms of linking was just going hardcore on forum posting. I thought those links didn't count much though.

Anyway, before I began to switch keywords up,I got up to #10 for "website design tyler tx", which was a pretty big deal to me, and I was really happy about it. I was also #16 for "web design tyler tx." Those are the most important phrases for the niche I'm working with.

I decided that "website design tyler tx" would be my next push. So I used "website design" and "tyler tx" as my new keywords, changed my page titles and everything. The next week, my site fell from #10 to #23 for "website design tyler tx," although the page is optimized for that specific phrase.

Although I'm upset about it, I was just experimenting to gain experience, so there's no way I could've known it was going to happen. I would just like a little insight to understand why this happened so I can avoid it again. Thank you!


careercubicle

Hi,

It is very simply that before you were using long tail keywords; that's why your website had good ranks. Long tail keywords always have less competitors.

Now you are using "website Design" and other keywords. I think these keywords might have a greater number of competitors. It will take some times to come up with a good rank.

Keep link building and try to do good on page SEO work.

RichInJapan

In terms of fluctuations that's not a huge one and you may find that your site creeps up the rankings again.

It's also worth remembering that during any SEO experiment it's very difficult to precisely gauge the effect of changes which have been made. There are two key reasons for this. Firstly, changes aren't immediately considered by Google and it's entirely possible that there could be a considerable lag between a given change and its affect on rankings.

Secondly, and probably most importantly, we don't have the ability to freeze all other conditions in the experiment; every one of your competitors is likely to have a webmaster who is also trying to improve their site's ranking. It's entirely possible that a site which has received sensible SEO-driven changes to actually drop in the SERPs simply because competitors have also been modifying their sites.

To be honest, I'm not sure if this reply has really been helpful, but what I'm trying to say is that you should be very careful when trying to associate specific changes to your site with absolute results in the SERPs.

Oh, I agree with the long tail keywords comment. If you plan on increasing the number of pages on your site then you'll be able to cast your net a bit further in terms of page titles etc - but I'd refrain from doing this purely for SEO purposes as site usability must always take precedence.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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How Valuable is That Backlink?

We all know how important it is to build backlinks to our websites, and how easy it is to get caught up in building more and more links. Before you spend too much time on this task â€" and yes, it IS possible to spend too much time link building â€" step back a minute from the idea of quantity and consider the importance of quality. Not all links carry the same weight...and if you're going to the trouble of getting a link in the first place, you want to make sure you'll get as much of a return on it as you can.

So what criteria should you use to decide whether a particular link is worth going after? PhilipSEO, one of the more respected members of the SEO Chat forum, posted a guide to link building fairly recently. It included a section on link assessment that listed seven items to consider. I'll cover just a few of them here; the entire guide (indeed, the entire thread) is well worth reading.

One of the most important factors is relevance. How relevant is the link and the linking page to its target page and keywords? If you're the unique seller for a particular product and receive a link from a blog post reviewing that product, it's hard to get more relevant than that. Often, though, it's not that clear-cut. Look for keywords in the usual places: title tag, domain and URL, heading tags, text, and backlinks pointing to the linking page.

Another factor to consider is how much Google trusts the page and the site. This can be hard to measure, but it's important, because more highly trusted sites pass along more “link juice,” all other things being equal. Other things you should consider that relate to this are the number of internal and outbound links on the linking page (as link juice is divided among those links) and whether the links on the linking page are nofollow.

Considering whether a link is nofollow brings up a peripheral but interesting point. “Remember that links have other value besides SEO,” PhilipSEO pointed out. Relevant links can bring relevant traffic to your site from users following the links directly from the linking page, as opposed to the search engines. Those links “can help you generate sales and leads and build your brand,” he noted. That kind of link building calls for a slightly different focus; PhilipSEO cites articles, guest blog posts, online discussions with leaders in your industry, and “growing expertise-based relations with the media” as possible routes for this kind of link building. However you choose to build your links, you can expect to put in some hard work, but the rewards are well worth it. Good luck!

Read the relevant forum thread.

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