Take a comprehensive SEO quiz at seomoz.org

SEO Professional – 74%

Are you an SEO Expert?

Uh! I’m an SEO Professional according to SEOmoz’ quiz that values your knowledge of Search Engine Optimization.

(If you find the information at the SEO Practices Blog useful, please help us support it by giving this Blog some “Link Love”: Linking to us or bookmarking our site.)

I took the quiz, it’s about 75 questions on SEO, it kind of told me I have a lot of reading to do, but it’s very interesting to know, how you’re building up your knowledge, of course by reading every day like 50 something blogs on SEO, plus attending work, posting etc.,… It’s good to know that you’re up to the standards.

There’s a lot of reading to do, I better get my a** back to reading, SEO it’s a constant changing field.

So take the quiz and let us know how you do, you might be surprise…

Best Practices for Conversion – Free PDF Guide.

Conversion rates are distinct measurements that determine how many of your prospects take your preferred action step. Typically, micro-conversions (for instance, reading different pages on your site, or signing up for a newsletter) lead to your main conversion step (making a purchase, or contacting you for more information).

After a few days away from the SEO Practices Blog, we wanted to share a great PDF guide we found from Omniture , which explains you the process of optimizing your site to increase conversion rates, it defines 7 Steps to Increase Conversion Engagement—Applying Relevancy:

(If you find the information at the SEO Practices Blog useful, please help us support it by giving this Blog some “Link Love”: Linking to us or bookmarking our site. Also leave your comments, we will like to know what do you think about the information you find here and what other information related to Search Engine Optimization are you interested on… please don’t spam us, thank you.)

1. Identify Conversion Goals & KPIs
2. Define & Acquire Target Profiles—Apply 40/40/20 Rule
3. Organize and Optimize Site Structure
4. Develop a Compelling Message
5. Place Effective Calls to Action
6. Enhance Shopping Cart / Lead Capture Process
7. Test, Measure, and Refine

Check the PDF guide, is only 6 pages long but of great value if you want to have better results with your Website:

Download Optimizing your Site to Increase Conversion Rates

Learn to Determine if you’re Submitting to Valuable Directories

Directory submission is still a good way to build links in 2007 if you know how to choose the right ones. Is not about doing mass submissions as we used to a couple years ago, back then it was a great way to build links.

Today link building is more about getting quality related links rather than quantity. Links from Directories like dmoz.org, yahoo, business.com, etc are very valuable if we can get them. But there are still plenty of good directories out there that can be of great help to a Link Building Campaign.

I found a good video from Rand of seomoz.org giving a few tips about the subject:

(If you find the information at the SEO Practices Blog useful, please help us support it by giving this Blog some “Link Love”: Linking to us or bookmarking our site. Also leave your comments, we will like to know what do you think about the information you find here and what other information related to Search Engine Optimization you are interested on… don’t spam us, thank you.)

From Rand of seomoz.org a great SEO video with a few tips about Directory Submission in 2007, he mentions a few aspects on the subject to have in mind when doing it:

1. Does the directory itself (the home page) rank for any of the moderately competitive terms in it’s title…
2. Do the pages inside the directory rank well for their targeted phrases…
3. Check the links to the directory – do they appear legitimate and valuable…
4. Check out mentions of the domain on the web…
5. Check the page strength – do they have links from edu and gov domains? Are they listed in places like dmoz or Wikipedia?…

Directory Submission Video Tips for 2007 from seomoz.org:

Are you looking at how is your site being linked?

Image of Anchor Text used to link at seopractices.com. Tool used: Anchor text backlink checker from webuildpages.com

Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink; it’s one of the most important factors of Search Engine Optimization next to the Title Tag to have in mind if you want to achieve top positions for a specific keyword. Anchor text is the text that people uses to link to you, and usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination.


Anchor text is one of the most important factors that Search Engines evaluate when ranking Websites for specific keywords.  The reason behind this is that a link to your site is considered as “a vote of trust” from that other site linking to your site, and so the better reputation the site linking to your site has, the more valuable is the backlink. So if I get links pointing to my site with the text: SEO Best Practices, is because my site is probably talking about that specific subject. I don´t have enough links to rank for that keyword yet, but I’m working on it (see image above).

For instance if I want my Blog to rank in top places for the keyword: SEO Best Practices, I would want people to link to my site with that text in the link. The more inbound links I get to my site with that text, the higher I will rank for that particular keyword. 

Of course there are other factors to have in mind that are very important such us relevancy and quality of the site linking to my site.  To me a link to my site from one of the most respected and well known Sites to learn Search Engine Optimization such us the seobook.com is worth probably 1000 links of any other site that is just starting and it’s about shoes.

Another aspect to have in mind is that we should have different variations of the keyword we want to rank for, that is if I want my site to rank for the keyword: SEO Best Practices, then I can use or asked to link to my site with the following combinations:

SEO Best Practices
Good and Bad SEO Practices
Best SEO Techniques
Ethical SEO Practices
Unethical SEO Practices
Link Building Practices
Best SEO Techniques

There is a great article about the Power of Anchor text from soloseo.com, read the article, it will give you a broader idea of the subject.

You can also check the W3C tip for link text.

Link Building Guide.

As we all know Link Building is the “Holly Grail” of  Search Engine Optimization and Marketing. Link building is a Search Engine Optimization technique where a website owner attempts to build relevant, quality inbound links to their website, throughout different practices, with the intentions of increasing the website’s importance, and by this increasing ranking in the Search Engines.

Link building can be done through several techniques:

1. Reciprocal links (link exchange): Is the mutual exchange of links from one Web site to another Web site. It used to be a very popular method.  Nowadays, we can still do some link exchanges, but we have to be careful with the number, quality and relevance of the links we are exchanging.
2. Directory Submission: Is about presenting your site to Directories (A human edited index of Web sites categorized for easy searching). Most popular Directories are Yahoo and Open Directory.
3. Blog Comments: Registering and participating in relevant Blog’s comments is a very common practice today.  The key to this technique is to be an active and truly participant of the Blog community, being careful not to leave “spammy” comments or you risk being banned out of the community.
4. Forum Participation: The same as with Blog comments, the idea is to be an active participant of the community helping others and getting answers to any questions you may have related to your subject of interest.
5. Social Media: Very popular today also.  The Network has become very social; we can see the Internet as a Net of Social Communities, where everyone has a voice.  Back in the old Internet days communication was done in one way.  Today the community has a voice and is helping out to build the Internet.
6. Link Baiting:  It’s about creating great content of any type (posts, video, audio, images, etc.)  that naturally attracts links for that web page by getting people to talk about it, discussing it on forums, blogging about it, posting it on Social Media Sites del.icio.us, Furl, Digg, Shoutwire, etc., and linking to it from their sites. It also attracts a lot of visitors.

These are the most common practices to build links in 2007, of course there are others but these are the ones I considered to be more accurate. The best recommendation is to use a mix of all the techniques presented above, trying to make them look as natural as possible.

Remember SEO is a learning process.  At SEO Practices we want to encourage you to research, investigate, practice, and experiment what works better for you. 

We also invite you to check a great link building guide from Jim Westergren, it’s really a very comprehensive article.

So, what kind of Site do you have?

Building a strong Website is one of the main purposes you want to have in mind from the beginning when you are thinking of establishing your own business online. Being able to know how to build a strong Website it’s really important; that will help you build a good plan for the process…

I came across an article where Andy Hagans points out an interesting classification about building strong sites. He mentions that in order for a Website to be on the right path, it must be defensible, sustainable, diversified and strategically valuable. So, what kind of Website do you have?

Defensible Websites (read on and take the 10 point quiz) are the ones with a good domain name, well branded, diversified traffic sources, diversified revenue sources and measurable assets like RSS and newsletter subscribers.

Sustainable Websites A niche where consumer interest is growing not shrinking, a site with low legal risk (e.g. you don’t host a bunch of copyrighted files or infringe on trademarks). He also mentions that profit margins based on CPC campaigns are rarely sustainable over the long term.

Diversified Websites – Revenue: You don’t make most of your money from Adsense, and you are selling leads or acting as an affiliate to multiple merchants. Traffic: You rank well on all 3 search engines (or at least 2), plus get a majority of your traffic from non-search sources like direct links, RSS subscribers, bookmarks and typeins.

Strategically valuable Websites are the ones that doesn’t reflect negatively on the entity who owns it, and one that exists in a niche with a mature lead marketplace (it is highly profitable to be an average player in a highly profitable niche).

I’m sure this will give us a broader perspective respect to building strong , highly profitable sites. So next time you think of building a Website or evaluating your established one have in mind the aspects mentioned above.

Virtual SEO Seminar from Business Marketing Association

We found a great video from BMA Boston, hosted by Chris Boggs, a specialist on Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search since 2000; it has information on the most recent hot topics of Search Engine Optimization.

You will be able to find great information on:

1- Introduction to basic SEO definitons
2- SEO: “The Roux”
3- Site Structure best practices
4- Content best practices
5- Linking best practices
6- Common SEO myths and misperception
7- Some paid search thoughts

Continue to check the video, it’s really worth the time…

Why do you need to optimize an E-commerce Website? The idea is to make your Website more easily found by Internet users through Search Engines. There are a few basic seo practices you can start checking and implementing on your E-commerce site that will warranty you better results: more traffic to your site.

The following article from Reuben Yau’s Site shows us in a very simplistic and easy to understand way, the essential search engine optimization practices for each of the different pages that a common small to medium sized ecommerce website has: Home page, category pages, product pages, informational pages, miscellaneous pages (about us, contact us, privacy policy, sitemap), as well as basic practices to create unique titles, description and H1 headers so you can avoid your website pages to disappear in the Google supplemental index because of duplicate content issues.

Continue reading Basic E-commerce SEO Tips | digg story

I found a great article at: Publising2.0 of Scott Karp, discussing SEO and its practices: The truth about SEO.  Scott exposes its position about SEO, mentioning that “there’s an imbalance of value between publisher and consumer” referring as how through SEO many sites without high quality value for the user get to top rankings in the Search Engines result pages. Check the article it’s really interesting.

But what called my attention was the challenge Scott gave to visitors about posting in the comment section a list of top 10 SEO Pratices.  Some of the top SEO Practitioners took the challenge:  Aaron Walls, Danny Sullivan, Searchenginewatch, etc.

Here is a great list of top 10 SEO Practices Aaron Walls contributed with:

 - Preventing search engines from indexing low quality (duplicate content, user tags, etc) or low information web pages (so that more of your link authority is focused on the high quality pages).

- Writing page titles that satisfy search engines and searchers and are interesting enough to be linkworthy.

- Researching keywords to determine how deep one can profitably go covering a specific topic.

- Encouraging social interaction, consumer feedback, and integrating user feedback into the site in a meaningful way.

- Creating self reinforcing authority ideas, improving mindshare, and brands that build links.
- Requesting links or coverage on high quality websites.

- Buying relevant advertising that may lead to indirect links or directly improve your trust scores (for example, Google recommends submitting sites to the Yahoo! Directory).

- Look as search logs from search engnies and internal site search to see how well your content satisfies those demands, and using keyword modifiers and semantically related words to help the page rank for more related phrases (a page which is too focused on a core term but lacks supporting vocabulary may get filtered out of the search results).

- Create additional content where your site is lacking, or in related fields that relate to profitable fields.

- Restructure a site’s internal link structure to ensure important content is getting indexed and place emphasis on popular or profitable pages.

- Correct search engine indexing or ranking problems caused by content management system issues, site hacking, or other potential problems.

- Linking within content to drive conversions.

- (For ad driven sites) Balancing ad revenues with site credibility and forward linkworthiness.”

I think this list pretty much includes the basic SEO steps to have in account. You should go and read the whole article, there is a few other comments that are worth reading too: Danny Sullivan, Pete Wailes , etc.

Have you noticed any reduction of your blog’s traffic recently? Have you checked your blog with the command “site” in Google to see if some of the pages are in Google’s supplemental index?
Site:www.xxxx.com

Supplemental Index: Pages are located in Google’s supplemental index when they are having certain issues with Google guidelines.

If you see a result like this:
www.xxxx.com/xxxx/ – 77k – Supplemental Result – , this means your blog’s pages are being put in Google’s supplemental index.

Aaron Walls of SEO Book wrote a great article mentioning a couple seo
practices you might want to have in mind to avoid having pages in the supplemental index:

1. Get High quality, related links for those pages.
2. Deal with all duplicate issues on your blogs created by feeds, duplicate posts, etc.
3. Don’t link at garbage.
4. Allow comments on your blog pages to get more unique content.
5. Make unique titles and description for those pages.

I’ll add a couple more:
5. Add a couple paragraphs of original content to those pages.
6. Check the internal linking structure of your blog, linking to pages on the supplemental index from non supplemental, related pages in your blog with high PR.

Check the article by Aaron Walls of SEO Book:
Get Your Blog Out of Google’s Supplemental Result Hell

I also recommend to check Steven Bradley’s article:
Problems With WordPress Posts Going Supplemental In Google’s Index