Dan Thies is holding a free SEO teleclass Tuesday, May 30, 2006. Well worth a listen if you are new to SEO or you would like to get a holistic overview of how the search market has recently changed and will continue to change going forward.

[Update: Dan's current class is full, but if you give him your email on the above linked page he will notify you when more classes become available.]

SEO Question: Many people say write naturally for SEO, but what does that mean?

SEO Answer: About a month and a half ago the New York Times published an article by Steve Lohr titled This Boring Headline Is Written for Google. The article flits with the idea of writing newspaper articles with Google in mind. That story got a decent amount of buzz because newspapers usually do not put much consideration into search engine marketing.

Old School Search Engine Optimization:

A few years ago you could do SEO like this:

• start your page title with your keyword or keyword phrase
• include that keyword phrase on most every heading or subheading on that page
• link to the page sitewide with that same keyword in the anchor text
• build a ton of links from external locations, with most (or all) of them containing that keyword phrase

Does Old School Still Work?

For MSN (and, to some extent, Yahoo!) you could still use a somewhat similar keyword stuffing philosophy and see outstanding results, but the problem with the stick my core phrase everywhere SEO method! is that Google does not want to show the most optimized content. They want to show the most relevant content.

As noted above in the New York Times article, most news articles (and likely most quality web documents) are not heavily focused on concentrating on optimizing for a keyword. Instead they use the natural language associated with that topic.

If too many of your signals are focused on just one word or phrase and you lack the supporting vocabulary in your document you may get filtered out of the search results for your primary keyword targets. It has happened to me several times, and it is a pretty common occurrence, especially for websites that have few authoritative trustworthy votes and try to make up for it by aggressive use of a phrase in the page content.

Here is an example of a snapshot of a spam page I saw ranking for a long tail keyword

The problem is, that page was ranking for Michigan Smoker's Life Insurance when it targeted a way different phrase. The page will never rank for the main phrase it was targeting, so unless they redirect searchers to a more relevant page it is going to be hard for them to convert any visitors that land on a page like that.

Read a bunch of SEO forums and you eventually come across threads with titles like Non optimized pages higher in SERPS than optimized ones???

How to Optimize for Google:

So if old hat optimization is considered overoptimization and/or is potentially detrimental to your rankings what do you do?

You could

• say screw Google they will eventually rank me if I get this keyword on the page 1 more time ;)
• say screw Google I am pulling in plenty of money from Yahoo! and MSN
• not worry about SEO at all
• evolve SEO to a more productive state

Onward and upward I say. How to mix it up to become Google friendly:

• Start the page title with a modifier or couple non keywords instead of placing your primary keyword phrase as the first word of the page title. Example... instead of search engine marketing company start your title with professional search engine marketing...
• Stemming is your friend. Use plural, singular, and ing versions of your keywords. I have seen pages that used a bunch of the plural version filtered out of Google for the plural version but still ranking for the singular version. If you mix it up you can catch both.
• Mix up the anchor text, subheaders and page content. Use semantically related phrases, and, in some cases, write subheaders that are useful for humans even if some of them do not have any keyword phrases in them.
• Make sure each page is somewhat unique and focused in nature.

Semantically related phrases:

If you think of words as having relationships to one another and you visualize optimizing for a keyword as optimizing for a basket of relevant related keywords it will help you draw in relevant related search traffic while also making your page more relevant for its core keywords.

For example, the acronym SEO would have the following as some semantically related phrases

Now you wouldn't necessarily need to get all of those in your page copy, but if a person was writing naturally about the topic of SEO it would be common for many of those kinds of words to appear on the page.

Where do I Find Semantically Related Phrases?

GoRank offers a free semantic research tool. You can also find semantically related phrases by using a Google ~ search, the Google Keyword Tool, clustering engines, or concept pairing tools like Google Sets.

I link to all those tools on my keyword suggestion tool, and here is a background post on latent semantic indexing.

An Over Abundance of Modifiers:

In addition to using words that are semantically related it makes sense to use words that are common modifiers. For example common buying / shopping searches might include words like

• Free shipping
• Coupons
• Coupon
• Deals
• Deal
• Cheap
• Expensive
• Budget
• Bargain
• Bargains
• Affordable
• Low Cost
• Free
• Find
• Get
• Buy
• Purchase
• Locate
• Compare
• Shop
• Shopping
• Search

I created a keyword modifiers spreadsheet with free keyword modifier ideas for a few different search, transaction, and classification types. I might try to expand it a bit if people find it useful.

If it All Sounds Like a Bit Much...

If it seems complex or complicated then don't focus too heavily on the modifiers or semantic related phrases or even your core keyword that much.

First write your article about your topic without even thinking about the search engines. Then go back and tweak it to include relevant modifiers and semantically related phrases. Make sure that you use multiple versions of your primary keyword phrase if it has multiple versions.

To make the page easy to read and to make it easy to add related phrases and alternate versions of your keywords break up the page using many subheaders. Also add leading questions that lead people from one section to the next. For example, I could say did you find this search engine marketing article helpful in your website promotion quest? Do you think it will help you do a become a better search engine optimizer and more holistic internet marketer?

I am a bit tired and I think this was a bit verbose, but hopefully it helps somebody. If not, arggggg... hehehe.

SEO Question: So here is my question. I have followed a good deal of your advice and am thankful for it as I see myself sitting pretty for some of my keyword phrases. However, my friend in Idaho sees different results and my friend in Saudi sees different results - and I wanna know - does Google index differently according to geographical locations?

Assuming that you mean where you rank in the SERPs (also known as the search results page) and not PageRank - which is a rough estimate of global link popularity, there are a number of factors which may show you different search results than what your friends see when they search Google. The 3 major factors are:

• data center

• location
• personalization

Google's Data Centers:

Google has a boatload of data centers around the world. In fact some of them even be running in shipping crates. They usually route search queries to the data center that is nearest you. In a recent interview Google's Matt Cutts said:

In fact, even at different data centers we have different binaries, different algorithms, different types of data always being tested.

If they roll new filters or make large changes to their algorithms you might notice different results as you hit one data center or another.

Location:

A friend of mine owns a site in a hyper competitive market that used to be owned by a person from Australia. While the site does not yet rank as well as my friend would like on Google.com it ranks for amazingly competitive single word queries in Google Australia (Google.com.au) due to having many links from websites that are located in Australia.

Within Google's local search they allow people to search for all websites or just local ones. You can appear in local databases by hosting your site there, using a domain with a local extension, or having many links from sites that are deemed local in nature.

If you are in Canada even if you search on Google.com those search results will be biased toward Canadian websites. If you are located in another country but want to see what Google's search results look like in the US you can search Google from a proxy.

Search Personalization:

If you are logged into a Google Account they will bias your search results based on websites you have visited, especially those you have clicked through to from search results.

If you visit a site or page frequently they will improve the positioning of that page in your personalized search results. If you visit a page occasionally just rank checking, and then sometimes clicking onto your result then clicking back nearly immediately Google will demote those pages in the SERPs.

You can turn off Google personalized results by clicking a link on the results that says something like Turn Off Personalized Results

Free Google Keyword Rank Checking Tools to Use:

There are a number of free tools that make it easy to track where you rank.

I like tracking some core keywords using Rank Checker. It is free and stores historical results, offering data refreshed however often you would like it refreshed. And since it sits on your desktop you don't have to worry about others spying on and aggregating your data to compete against you.

If you just want to check where you rank in Google I have a few rank checkers in the tool section on my website as well.

Keep in mind that many of the rank checkers will set the number of results per page to be a different number than the default 10, and that will cause a slight ranking skew. Also if you wanted to check your rankings on different data centers McDar has a free tool which makes it easy to check your rankings across a number of data centers all at once.

You could also manually go to any of the data centers directly and do a search query from their IP address, like 66.249.93.104 or 216.239.51.104

Paid Rank Checkers

If you need to track rankings in some search engines outside of the core global search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing, & Yahoo! Search) say like Baidu or Yandex then you might want to give Advanced Web Ranking a look. In addition to storing your rank data they store the entire top 50, and allow you to create graphs with it and provide many different useful reports that give you various looks at ranking trends amongst competing sites.

Server Logs & Tracking:

It is easy to get hung up on where you rank for a specific term, but it is far more important to try to rank for a diverse set of terms. See what terms are driving searchers to your site and track which of those terms are converting. From that data you can create more content around what converts or spruce up the top performing pages by adding a few modifiers or making the content more compelling to human visitors, and thus further increasing conversions.

Text Link Ads recently announced a new tool to price the value of text links.

If I could sell 10 on this site it would amount to about $5,000 a month in passive supplemental income. I would be more likely to try to sell just 1 exclusive for something like that price though :) The tool's goals might be a bit self serving, and the actual link value might vary from what the tool reports, but it could be a helpful tool to people new to SEO looking to price the value of a link.

Jim Boykin recently mentioned that Text Link Brokers created a link building wiki. You know the market is getting more competitive when you got all the link brokers creating free tools and resources :)

I was chatting with a friend of mine recently, and he talked about liking to link out to related relevant resources from his new site. Given that Google has blatantly stated that they look at the quality of both your inlinks and outlinks why not help search engines associate your site with related sites when you are new.

I also got thinking about a couple other easy ways to build co-citation data and trails for building your brand and sending relevant traffic streams to your site... Directory listings provide quick and easy co-citation data. A trivial expense for large businesses, but they can be costly for people new to the web.

Squidoo is quick and easy to set up a free topical page on. By mentioning your site along with some of the top sites in the same field you can get some quick co-citation data, while also showing that you are an industry expert.

I sorta missed the ball on the Google Notebook launch. I didn't mention it because I was working on a big project and did not have much time to dig through it, but I think it is a great marketing tool for new webmasters. You can create notebooks about different topics then mark them to be publicly accessible.

Tagging is an easy way to get seen by a few people and show what you are related to. Reviewing related products on your site and major sites like Amazon.com is another way to identify your name and brand with your field. I also am a fan of learning from forums, Google Groups, and Yahoo! Answers.

Where are your favorite ways to get co-citation data or easily tap related traffic streams?