There are a few techniques which I see still work very well in manipulating rankings which perhaps avoid automated detection by Google. Hopefully by highlighting them here people will know what to look out for when looking at ways to get ahead of competitors that pay for paid links. These methods are by no means new or groundbreaking but can sometimes get missed when looking for paid links:

Paid links within CSS style banners

This is something that I’ve seen systematically work time and time again for competitors over a multitude of industries (although most common in finance and travel verticals). The process would usually work by providing a piece of code to the site selling a link(s) – this code consists of a CSS style, made up of colour, boarders, widths and fonts, then at the location of the “banner” the <div> calls the CSS class making it look like a normal banner. In reality the text in the visual banner is search engine readable as are any links too. So to many (and seemingly search engines) this goes usually un-noticed.

Drop Down Boxes with Paid Links

I’ve seen this become more popular within the last few months. Works on the same princible as the CSS banners but instead of appearing visually like a banner it looks like a harmless drop down box. Again the coding is unique to the drop down box so doesn’t interfere with any existing site style sheets. The links dont look external and again seem to go unnoticed.

Blogroll Paid Links

A couple of years ago I talked about how and if Google would ever discount blogroll links as so many blogs sell links in these locations. I guess the answer is no (for now), but it’s the easiest location for bloggers to sell links and it’s a genuine area of a blog that would usually contain external links so to Google it probably appears “normal”. This happens most effectively on blogs that link out to relevant websites in their blogrolls - even for manual paid link reviewers there’s no way to distinguish paid and natural links here.

Personally I feel that blogrolls are part of blogging and help people share genuine resources and useful related websites, just on occasions this is used for paid links.

(NB – I do not sell blogroll links on this site, I’m just using an example of a blogroll)

A sitemap can be a very powerful platform for SEO and I mean VERY powerful and yet it is so simple and often overlooked. Matt Cutts recently asked the question, which would he choose, an XML or HTML sitemap? He chose the HTML sitemap because both users and spiders can use the data. See the full video below:

Now the real benefit of having a good sitemap is the ability to make pages throughout a website accessible to the search engines. Most commonly great chunks of valuable content are hidden away in areas of a site which may seem to follow “SEO protocol”, in terms of URL structure and on page optimisation but for a search engine spider the content is hard to find.

An example of this would be on an e-commerce site whereby the structure follows homepage > category > sub category > products > content.  In the eyes of search engine spiders they have to crawl 4 levels before they can reach the juicy information/content and although Google are getting better at finding content (i.e. Caffeine) it can still help enormously by reducing the number of “obstacles” in their way. The theory is that by including a sitemap accessible from the homepage then Google will only have 1 “obstacle” to have to deal with before finding direct access to the rankable content.

Now to make a really effective sitemap for SEO it requires a little more methodology and architecture. It’s commonly thought that Google will take notice of at least 150 links on any one page before they start losing interest and move on to another area of a website. So for large websites that have thousands or even tens and thousands of pages it’s just not going to work including all your pages on one sitemap page.

So what’s the solution?

The most effective way to deal with high volume content websites is to create separate sitemaps for each website section. This deals with a few issues, firstly your main sitemap page will not go over the maximum number of links therefore all pages will be crawled and given value. Secondly the search engine spiders will still be able to access your deep content much easier than the normal way i.e. homepage > category etc.

The diagram below illustrates how a sitemap can be structured to ensure content can spidered.

For more information Rand explains well why this is an effective SEO technique:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture

For those of you thinking – how does this help increase my rankings? Well pages that were not previously indexed will now become listed therefore helping you rank for new terms. Acessibility really is the key here, internally and externally.

The final little treat for those of you that have taken the time to read the entire article; the anchor text used in a sitemap does seem to play an important part in terms of assigning value to those pages. This works on the same method as internal linking, assign keyword relevant descriptions to links in sitemaps and you will see better results than not doing so – tested and proved!

The anchor text on any website is completely editable and can provide some great SEO value from inside a website and from external websites as well. Essentially the best practice to use in any situation is to provide the most accurate description of what the link destination is as possible. Use the image below as guidance, so for example “Johns Cars” website had 3 important pages about; car engines, types of wheels and cars for sale.

Now what’s important within the internal structure of Johns Cars is what kind of anchor text is used to link to these pages. What you should try and avoid in the setup of your navigation or links within content using unrelated anchor text to link to a page. Terms such as “click here” and “this link” don’t really provide any useful description of what’s at the destination or what users should expect.

If you provide a good description of a page explaining what users can accurately expect to see once they arrive at the link destination then you’re optimising your internal link structure successfully. By doing this you are letting the search engines know what’s on the page, making the destination more relevant to a page with just a “click here” link. See the diagram below to show how internal anchor texts should be used:

SEO pour des informations sur la page. Pourtant, il off page SEO variations EUR notables dans différents conteneurs et “cibles, vous verrez seulement le trafic à l’aide à long also mot-clé queue de plus naturel et ne sont pas à classer par ordre L’.

This type of method also applies to external links i.e. backlinks. In an ideal world you would aim to have hundreds or even thousands (depending how greedy you were) of links with accurate anchor texts pointing to your content. Google and the other search engines use the anchor text to help determine how useful pages are, and rank them accordingly (this is only a fraction of the ranking algorithm). The only problem is, you have no legitimate way of controlling what anchor text is used to point to your website. What we don’t really want again is phrases such as “this site” or “check this out” – although a link is a link and beggars can’t be choosers!

As the diagram indicates above although these links are pointing to Johns Cars they are not really providing any real added value in terms of anchor text. They are not telling the search engines or users what content should be expected on the website. Not to go too far into detail about getting the correct anchor texts as there are ways such as paid links and link bait but essentially any external links should ideally be keywords you are trying to rank for, so in Johns case, “Cars for sale”, “Types of wheels” and “Car engines”.

While many SEOs headed back to the drawing board to think up new and innovating ways to attract links to websites some SEOs have continued to play the paid links game. I’m not one to judge, if you buy links, there are risks, if the pros out way the cons then go for it. There are plenty of large brands out there who have more than obvious paid links strategy, yet never seem to receive any penalties, in fact they seem to get rewarded by great rankings.

I get questions from people and clients asking “is there a safe way to buy links?” well the short answer is no – but there are ways that websites seem to avoid detection which cut risks. From my analysis of competitors over the last 12 months there are methods which are used:

1. Link Brokers – These give you access to a selection of websites that are willing to sell text ads. Usually the system is automated, sellers place code on their sites allowing brokers to distribute links throughout networks. These seem to be the most obvious method that is identifiable by Google.

2. Unrelated content – If you buy links on a website that has no relevance to your own content then what value does this give the users? None. Organic or natural links more often than not will link to relevant content, providing added value to their website and the users that visit the links.

3. Anchor text – In an ideal world every link established naturally would contain keywords and phrases that you want to rank well for. Unfortunately this very rarely happens, natural link growth will include nofollow tags, banners, brand terms and a selection of utterly useless keywords such as “here” or “this website”.

4. Link relationships – Having 100% followed links with targeted keywords will undoubtedly set some Google alarm off somewhere. A natural link relationship look will have a selection of followed, nofollow, affiliate and tracking parameters.

5. Link increase – Something that is often overlooked by other SEOs is the natural versus manipulated link growth. A natural increase will be slow but generally consistent, with maybe a few spikes due to new content and site updates (which I believe Google checks). A manipulated increase will be quick with many spikes and even overall drops – people do forget to pay for their links. See the diagram below to show how a natural link increase usually looks and a blatantly obvious manipulation:

6. Link placement – A sure way to get found out for buying links is placing your link in the footer of a website where there are no other relevant links or too many external links. If you’re stupid enough to think doing this will give you any ranking value or traffic think again. Natural links usually get listed on resource pages, blogrolls, in blog posts (not paid) and perhaps the body of website copy.

7. Looking for Page Rank – It is true, people still search the high seas looking for page rank, alas this will do no good. Content and site relevance plays more of an important role these days than page rank in terms of obtaining high quality links. If a new website suddenly gets 10 page rank 5,6 and 7 links pointing to it then I fear its life in the Google index will be short lived.

At the end of the day as you can see trying to create a paid links strategy is a long, time consuming process which does hold risk. If you get away with it, you’ll achieve great rankings (which many top websites do) but the more rewarding ethical method is of course to create a linkable website with valuable content. Google will undoubtedly have 101 other paid link identifiers in their algorithm, plus they already have the option to report paid links in the Google webmaster console. If a linking opportunity arises be sure that you are within the Google guidelines to be safe.

It’s kind of obvious that having a targeted keyword in your domain name is going to help you in some respects in terms of rankings. However there are other indirect benefits of choosing a domain name with keywords included in them.

Natural links

These natural/organic/golden/mythical links which are generated over a long period of time are the ones Matt Cutt’s and Google say will bring the most value to any website. It just so happens I agree with them (lucky Google), however if you run a small to medium sized website they are often few and far between. Ideally you would hope that the anchor text given out of generosity would contain your desired keywords, however if your company/domain name does not contain any keywords then the likelihood of this happening is very small. If your domain name is keyword driven then guess what – you’ll probably get a bunch of desired anchor text links naturally.

Directory listings

Now it’s fairly easy to get into most directories, except a few high value ones which have certain criteria’s for listings. One such common listing must is that your website anchor text be your website or company name. Bad news for the majority of websites out there as you are probably losing a little bit of value by having your brand name as your anchor text. However if you have desired keywords in your website name then your anchor text is much more appropriate to the phrases you’re trying to target. Of course directory owners have the right to refuse your listing, but the majority which come with a sign up or review fee will gladly accept such a method.

Blog Links

As many of you will know or should do, the most common referrals in a blog posts are:

• Joe blogs at Website name

• Source: Website name

• Website Name

These phrases are generally used the most by bloggers (not necessarily SEO bloggers) to describe a finding online or to point to a recommended resource. So it really does pay to have keywords in your domain name as the amount of targeted natural links you will acquire will be much larger than if your domain/company name has no keywords associated with them.

Of course I attended to explore the possibilities of widgets and SEO but found myself with a wealth of widget knowledge instead. Some really interesting facts and figures which may surprise a lot of you, but here’s a summary of some data:

•    The number 1 widget in the world (installs) = YouTube
•    The number 1 MySpace comment = “Thanks for the add”
•    Facebook “gifts” application made $30 million last year alone
•    The average widget only lasts 200 page views
•    Every human can only hold 150 meaningful relationships at once, the rest are lightweight
•    Each widget has a maximum lifespan of 6 weeks
•    For every widget install you should expect a maximum of 50 unique visitors

I also copied down some internal Gigya data to show the most common uses for widgets:

Anyway, I learned a lot more than what was written down on this post, but of course you have to hold back something for yourself! Thanks to all the guys that took part and I look forward to the next one!

A recent project for a client made me think that an actual design of a WordPress theme can hold SEO benefits, which a lot of the time are overlooked.

1. Make sure your theme is widget compatible – The free downloadable widgets provide great value to a blog and can help increase links and RSS subscriptions. Of course if you are a coder and want to add this separately the same results can be achieved but this will add time to the final cost.
2. Make sure the blog title is search engine readable – I know again you would think this is standard but I’ve seen many that only offer background or images for the header section.
3. Include RSS feeds in your design – Sounds like common sense but make sure then entries and comments are coded in the theme design, preferably near the top fold of the page. The basic blog feed, not feed burner or other feed websites, the bare basics.
4. Give people space to breathe – Ok, so not directly SEO related but the design should encourage the client or end user of the theme to include a sufficient level of customisation, be this adsense, MyBlogLog or other synthetic extras.
5. Site architecture – When deciding where to put your pages, categories or recent posts consider could enhance your design. Ideally put your pages at the start of the readable code i.e. in the header file, I personally like to see categories next in readable code from a search engine perspective, this will increase the speed of crawling throughout your site, thus keeping everyone happy!

I have never really opened the gates to a good old fashioned rant on Seounique before, so here goes!

Have you ever wondered why your interesting blog posts or link bait you pay hundreds of bucks for never makes it big on social media sites? You start asking yourself questions like; is my avatar too offensive? Is my title not “catchy” enough? Or is my blog just worthless?

Well the flat out answer is no, no and no! It doesn’t matter how ultra juicy your story or post may be, it’s all about whom you know and what kind of reputation you have. Unfortunately this seems to be the case in every social media environment, although if it wasn’t the case then the quality of the stories making “published” status would probably vary.

Now if you’re reading this for the first time, don’t panic, and whatever you do, please don’t think you can cheat the system. If you’ve read a blog post explaining that you need to build a reputation to get submissions noticed – don’t be an ass!

This is just one example of someone clicking the Sphinn button as many times as possible for as long as possible. This is not an isolated incident by any means and I’ve seen plenty of users do it, I imagine this happens across the board so this is by no means a punt at Sphinn.

What these people are doing:

1. Reducing the quality of stories by voting rubbish stories
2. Not achieving anything because your reputation will look false
3. Thinking a number is better than the interaction
4. Giving their brand a bad name (if applicable)

So I urge all you geniuses out there to stop trying to look good, its not big and not clever and it’s a waste of your time!

Rant over lol!

An interesting debate broke out on Digital point last week that seems
to have continued gathering interest as it moves on. Someone provided a “tip” for “seo newbies” to help build up links for free using appropriate anchor text descriptions.

The tip was, to quote:

“When you’re commenting on other people’s blogs it will usually ask you for 4 things, your name, email, URL and a comment. Be sure to use your keyword anchor text as your name. When your comment is posted, the url you enter will be attached to whatever text you entered in the “Name” field. So instead of putting John in the name field, put My Widgets Rule, or whatever your site’s keywords are. Oh, and try to say something that’s somewhat useful in the comment section, so it doesn’t look like 100% blatant spam.”

Now I must own up and say in the past I have used such techniques but this was before starting this SeoUnique blog. Since then my opinion on this subject has changed. Because the blog world relies so heavily on the community “vibe” I don’t think it’s ethical to use such methods. Of course a lot of blogs carry the NoFollow tag which renders such methods useless anyway but my point is that at the end of the day it’s just rude. Unless a comment that I regard to be of epic standards I will not approve messages from people that use anchor text in their posts.

I’m not a spoil sport and I want everyone to do well in life but if you want to make a comment about a good/bad article you should not expect anything in return.

I have setup a poll to get your opinion on the subject to whether or not you consider this kind of technique ethically right? The results will be interesting, remember be honest!

I’ve used them on some of my early creations and to be frank, have made a little money from them (they take half your much needed money for their troubles). So after the update you would think that a site that “Sells Links” should in fact be punished like the rest? Well this is where it all gets a bit strange – and un-Google like.

If you do a search on Google for “Buy Text Links” or “Text Link Ads” by Google’s own standards they “should” provide the most relevant content to the user who makes the search. Text Link Ads is their name so by all accounts they should be positioned number one for that term. They are not, in fact they don’t appear in the index at all…strange? Very! What’s even stranger to me is that if you log on to the site it remains, or possibly they have increased their PR to PR7.

Search Results for “Text Link Ads“:

Notice the Page Rank:

Getting confused?

So Google have removed Text Link Ads from their Index but have ranked the website a PR 7. I have to be honest but it seems a bit strange, if Google are going to punish websites that sell links surely a site devoted to selling other website’s link positions should also have its Page Rank reduced? I would have thought so, obviously being removed from the index is worse but this should be explained. This could support some theories that PR is being phased out all together? Perhaps, but this is certainly a strange situation, watch this space I say.