Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

We can all admit (at least to ourselves, if you aren’t willing to admit it to others!) times when we were new to the whole SEO thing and we made a typical newbie SEO error. But some of those mistakes, even if they weren’t considered mistakes at the time you did them, can live on forever on your websites. Because let’s face it, when was the last time you went over your older site with a finetooth comb? Unless it happens to be under 20 pages, probably not since the day you created it. And sometimes what should be obvious, such as the title tags on all 2,000 pages of your site being the identical “YourSite.com - Insert Your Fancy Slogan Here” (whether a deliberate 1999 error or a website auto-update gone horribly wrong) to the 100 extra linked keywords you creatively placed below the copyright notice on a page you were trying to get ranked higher three years ago, can simply go unnoticed and forgotten about…. well, forgotten about by everyone except the search engine’s algorythms.

And your linking strategies definitely fall into this category. When was the last time you looked over your outbound links or had a better look at your inbound links other than the quick number check doing link: and the quick skimming of the first few listed links? I would hazard a guess it has probably been a while, and you are overdue for a link health check.

Here are some things to consider and look for as you evaluate the linking strategies on your sites and see how well they are working for you.

Visit all your outbounds.
First and for most, go through your site and click all the links. No, I am not talking about sending a link walker through your site to see what pops up with a 404, although it is fine to use that as a preliminary check to remove any dead links you have on your site (Xenu is one of the popular tools to do this, although there are many more out there now). But what you need to do is actually point and click through each and every external link on your site.

Why? You want to make sure you aren’t linking to any “bad neighborhoods”. This could be anything such as a site that hasn’t really changed much in the four years you’ve linked to it, but now you can identify it as being something less-than-worthy, whether it be a FFA page or a bunch of scraped content. Or perhaps the webmaster of a site you linked to decided it was more worthy of an arbitrage site, and changed it to something with three large AdSense blocks and requiring three taps on the page down button before you even see some semblance of content, original or um, borrowed. More on What exactly qualifies as a quality link.

You also want to make sure that none of the websites you linked to have let their domain name drop and it has been picked up by domain parkers, or worse, turned into a porn site. It isn’t good for business when you send your site targeting seniors looking for travel information to a site that has since turned into a hardcore alternative sex site! It definitely isn’t good for business.

NoFollow anyone?
Do any of your outbound links need to have a rel=nofollow added? You might link to a site that is a pretty iffy site, however still could be of some use for your visitors. So instead of removing the link altogether, simply no follow it.

Link bait
Ah, good old link bait. Fortunately, gone are the days when everyone tried to spin everything as something that could get Dugg or Slashdotted for both the monumental traffic and the links that would inevitably follow as people discussed the topic on their own blogs. More on link bait at Is link bait dying as a search engine optimization technique. Fortunately, it isn’t nearly as prolific or annoying as it was when I originally wrote that article. But with so many people doing it, it is definitely a diluted technique. Just watch how quickly the front of Digg moves… blink and you miss it, which means many people who might have found your blog post on Digg and blogged about it might not even see it. Bring on Link Bait V2.0, although I know some will argue it is here and being used already

Link exchanges
If you participated in any link exchanges over the years, make sure the return link still exisits. Some webmasters are notorious for leaving a link on for a few weeks, then removing it, assuming (correctly, in nearly all cases) that the webmaster wouldn’t ever make a return appearance to check and make sure the link is still there. There are certainly less devious reasons there might not be a link back to your site anymore, such as a website was sold to a new owner or the domain was snatched up by a domain speculator when it was dropped.

Another thing to look for is whether or not it seems the site is passing link juice. In other words, a site might have a perfectly fine link to your site, but it won’t help your site at all in terms of a boost in the rankings.

And lastly, avoid using the words “link exchange” or URLs with “links.html” in it. And avoid soliciting on your site for “link exchange partners”, there are many ways to creatively say this without using those words.

Did you get nofollowed?
Obviously, no one likes a nofollow tag on their link. So how can you handle this? There are a few ways. The first is to simply pop a rel=nofollow on the link back to their site. Effective, but doesn’t really help your own site’s rankings. You can also ask the webmaster about it, although depending on your site’s topic area, he or she might be more or less willing to remove the tag. Or, if the nofollow tag is removed, do watch incase it makes a return appearance in the coming weeks.

Cross linking
Are you cross linking your sites? If so, make sure that it isn’t too obvious. Obvious would be linking all 8 of your sites to each of the other sites, and then placing those links on every single page of each site. One or two links on a site is fine, and place the links where it makes logical sense, such as an article related to the theme of another site. You should also check to make sure all of those sites aren’t sitting on the same IP, something that was definitely more common several years ago and something that many hosts still do by default (GoDaddy is well known for hosting thousands of websites, even tens of thousands, on a single IP). And also make sure those cross-links aren’t the only links coming into the site.

What is the anchor text?
Have a look at the anchor text for both internal and external links and see if you can clean any of them up. More on Choosing your anchor text for incoming links.

Linking images
Don’t forget that when you link to a page with images, to be sure you include an alt tag (alt=) in the linking code. And this would definitely include any logo you have linking to your home page.

Buying links
I won’t get into the whole “Google said, webmasters said” thing here. I am sure you all know where to go to find the opposing sides in this battle! But if you are buying links, you do need to keep a few things in mind. First, buy links well under the radar. This means you will probably have to go alternate routes than buying through the mainstream brokers. Second is the disclaimer, there is the possibility you might find your site losing rankings in Google because you are buying or selling paid links. Many webmasters state they don’t care that Google is threatening to remove sites buying links, however at the end of the day, it is your site, and it is up to you how close to (or over) the line you wish to go when it comes to paid links. If your livelihood would crumble if Google banned the site you are considering buying links for, then tread very carefully or have a good backup plan in place.

Selling links
Again, read above. Selling links is usually much more obvious, so it is harder to stay under the radar on this one. If you do decide you have to sell links, then avoid the most obvious placements of footer links and navigation links, and only sell to those sites that are in your market area. Having a website that cater’s to a woman’s shoe fetish with footer links to viagra, poker, texas holdem, credit cards, loans and online pharmacy. Okay, at a stretch you could say that credit cards and loans are targeted to women who need to finance their need to be the next Imelda Marcos, but all those links together in a known spam placement sends up plenty of red flags.

www versus the non-www version
The age-old question, should you leave the www or remove it? The simple answer for an exisiting site is to select which version ranks best, as well as which has the greater number or most valuable incoming links. Then choose that as your default. And then make sure you use it yourself, and check the incoming links you can change to ensure you are helping the cause too. You can also select your choice in Google Webmaster Central, effectively telling Google which one you prefer.

While these are not the only things you should look at when checking your links, it is a definite good starting place for evaluating and checking your linking status. Anything else you would suggest?

I talked about why usability testing is so important for website owners, and why it is also important to test those internal entry pages, and not strictly the homepage. But once you have your usability testers held captive, here are some questions you can ask them after their perusal through your money website.

You can either ask testers for written answers or just ask them verbally. You will likely get more honest replies with written answers, however, because of how much time this would take, you will need to severly cut back the number of questions you ask. And written answers would need to be done with a “while you wait” mentality because the longer your tester delays in writing them, the less accurate they will be, both in what they say and with how much they actually remember after the fact.

And of course, remain neutral. They won’t want to answer very thruthfully if you respond to one of their answers with an “Are you crazy?” or “How could you possible have thought that?”, no matter how well you know the person! Always remain neutral, listen to the answers carefully, and do your best not to lead your testers onto the answers you want? For example “Could you tell this site was for teenage girls?” would likely elicit a yes, even if the person thought it was for moms with six or more kids. Asking “who do you think the intended audience is?” would definitely get you the answers you were looking for.

And don’t talk too much tech or geek. If you use your mother-in-law as a tester, would she know what a “browser” is or know what a “javascript style menu” is? Take care that you don’t go too far over your tester’s heads with terminology that is familiar to those in the web industry, but definitely not many in the mainstream public.

After he or she is done surfing around, ask some questions…

Have you visited this site before?
Previous familiarization with a site can skew first impressions.

What do you think the purpose of this site is? (ie. selling, informing, entertainment, etc)
If they think it is a selling site, but it is actually a content information site, question what made them think the purpose was different than it really is.

Who do you think the intended audience is?
You know your targeted demographic, but perhaps they noticed clues that would leave them to believe a completely different audience was intended.

Could you find what you were looking for?
You want to know if everything was there the user expected or if there was something he or she thought they’d find but didn’t

Was it easy to get to the home page from the page you started on?
If the user expresses trouble getting to the home page, reassess your navigation structure or find out where they expected to find a link to the home page but didn’t.

Was there something missing you were expecting to see?
For prompting, you can ask about more text, more images, a FAQ, a question answered, etc.

Could you tell what the page was about?
If they sound confused, ask specifically what they thought it was about, and what those indicators were.

Was anything too obtrusive?
Particularly important if you use pop-up or pop-under ads, IntelliTXT type advertising products, an in-your-face style of ad placement, use of flash, etc.

Was anything too well hidden?
If you noticed he or she seemed to be hunting around the site, prompt with this.

Problems or kudos on the color scheme?
Too flashy? Too bland? Just right?

Easy to read (both font style and size)?
Was the font size too large or small? Was the chosen font difficult to read or in a color that made the text not as readable as it could have been?

How did you find the layout of the site?
Was everything organized well and set out as expected? If the layout is not a usual style, question that experience as well.

How intuitive and helpful is the navigation system?
If you are using any kind of javascript or floating menus, this question is crucial to find out if there were any problems from a visitor’s perspective. Oftentimes there are.

Did you notice… (advertising, newsletter signup, video, search box… etc)
Any other elements of the site or design you need to ask?

What would encourage you to return to this site in the future?
Was there something that could have been added to increase the return visitor rate?

Name your three favorite things about the site, and your three least favorite
This usually can bring up the unexpected things about your site that either endear people to it, or make them more likely to bounce quickly.

If you could change one thing on the site, whether it is major or minor, what would be at the top of the to do list?
You will get all kinds of responses, however it can help you gauge what people see as the most important things that hindered their experience. But if multiple people all say how annoying a single element is, such as the auto-play video you placed on the home page is, chances are good you should probably remove it the same night!

Obviously you can change these questions to suit your particular site. I will also be doing a new entry on usability testing specifically on ecommerce sites, to get you read for the holiday season. Look for that by the end of this month!

Note: Anyone contacting me (for consulting or anything else) through the Contact Form recently, please resend. I guess my funky Outlook spam filter thought anything with the “JenniferSlegg.com contact form” in the subject line was pretty darn suspicious and junked them all, even with the protection level set to low. Ah, the joys of Vista! And mini-rant: Why can’t I simply whitelist a particular subject line on the built-in spam fighter?

In the world of long-tail searches, chances are pretty good that visitors are having their initial contact on your site by landing on an internal page of your site rather than your user-friendly home page. But have you ever had a look at one of your internal pages from a “brand new visitor” perspective? Because if you did, chances are good that you might be surprised to see that you are not really giving those new visitors a very sticky experience. So try looking at one of your top internal entry pages through a new visitor’s eyes.

Okay, so we all are just a little biased when it comes to how we see our own sites, especially ones we have poured blood, sweat and tears into. And while doing an eyetracking study can be expensive, you can easily do a poor man’s version of something similar. Sit a friend, preferably one who has little knowledge of your money website, or perhaps a bit of knowledge of the market area without having been a visitor of your site previously.

But first, you need to pick which pages to test. You will need to have a look at any analytics or stats program to find out which pages are your top entry pages (meaning the pages that new visitors on your site visit first), and pick a couple of internal pages that have the highest % of entry page visitors. Then you want to pick a page with a high bounce rate. If you have two pages that each account for 20% of entry page views, but one has an 80% bounce rate while the other is only 25%, it makes sense to use the page with the 80% bounce rate, because for some reason, 80% of all people that visit that internal page will view just that one page before they leave the site. Obviously it makes the most sense for you to figure out why so many people leave after their first page view on your site! You will also want to do a quick check of the page to make sure there isn’t something obvious that is accounting for such a high bounce rate, such as a coding error breaking the page after the header or another equally obvious problem that you can attribute the high bounce rate to. Nothing is more embarassing than bleeding money from a website due to your own mistake! But also look to evaluate what you think of the page overall.

Each time you sit a tester down, instead of loading up your home page, use one of those internal entry pages. You can give a couple of hints, such as “pretend you found this page by searching for popular keyword phrase” or actually have them do that search and find your site that way. But avoid telling him or her everything about your site and what it does. After all, you want to see if your testers can figure that out for themselves.

Do they immediately focus on the content? Or are they lost just trying to find where the article starts because you have two large ad units and a huge header, pushing your article below the fold? Can they tell what the page is about? Are you actually offering up what the people searched for, or is it a slightly skewed version of their keyword search that your tester is having problems finding specifically?

When that mouse starts moving, look and see what it does…. is it heading to the navigation system (hopefully you have one!) or is it wandering all over the place as the person tries to figure out where to go next. Do they seem to be looking for something that is missing, such as a search box?

How to they leave the page? Click the logo to go to the home page (which hopefully is linked to the home page)? Click a breadcrumb link? Leave the page by using the search box? Select something from navigation? Click an ad (although be wary if they go to click AdSense from your own IP address!) Or, gasp, click the back button?

Seeing how new visitors interact with those pages will really help you find and resolve issues you may not have realized you had, simply because you know the site so well. You might also want to ask them questions after they have finished surfing through your site (more on that in List of questions to ask your usability testers) to alert you to thinks you might not have realized, since someone might not neccessarily say that they hate the color scheme as they navigate through, but is definitely something you can discover in a Q&A after the fact.

Think your internal pages are brilliant to begin with? Just go ahead and check your bounce rate on your top internal entry pages and make sure. If it is above 50%, you definitely have some work to do… unless you are an arbitrage site, then hopefully your bounce rate is offset with a high CTR rate!

If you are like me, you will inadvertantly be surfing along, click a link, then watch as everything grinds to a halt because that link you just clicked was actually linked to a PDF file. And worse, your Adobe Acrobat or Reader takes its sweet time as it loads all the extranous features, checks for updates, then lags horribly as Internet Explorer tries to crunch all 128 pages of PDF goodness it just loaded up.

That said, PDFs definitely have their place on the web… just be very careful about how you place them, so your visitors don’t feel the desire to leap through their computer screen and over to yours and strangle you for that poor placed PDF you just launched at them.

Label links as PDFs
You may think that people will actually notice when they mouse over the link and see the .pdf extension in their status bar. Well think again. Always ALWAYS label that link with some kind of notation that screams to people “Hey! Heads up! This is a PDF file!” That way people get the opportunity to save it to their hard drive before viewing, which cuts down the scrolling time considerably. I would argue that this is the most important usability tip for PDF files, but something a large number of websites just don’t do.

Give people some choices
Is the PDF only a page or two? Why not save the file also as an image, so people have the choice to view it as an image or a PDF. Or offer it in a Word or Excel document if applicable. There are some people who despise PDFs so much that they don’t even have Adobe Reader Installed on their computer. If you are concerned about theft, keep in mind that anyone can turn a PDF document into a Word document quite easily.

What the heck is a PDF and where do I get this reader thing?
And speaking of the Adobe Reader uninitiated types, don’t forget to include a link to Adobe Reader. And if your PDF needs to be opened in the latest (and supposedly greatest) version of Adobe, never assume that everyone has installed or upgraded their reader to the most recent version. While your SEO help site can probably get away with not having a link to reader, your site on collecting hockey jerseys probably cannot.

Help!
Are you serving up a 200 page Acrobat document? Keep in mind that most people don’t have a brand new computer with 4 GB of RAM and loading it through Firefox. So hit up a friend’s house with a far less powerful computer and click your PDF link and see what happens. Yep, it would appear your site crashes their browser… if it doesn’t actually crash it. This is because it takes so long to load a 200 page PDF file in an older and slower computer. So give instructions on how to save it to a hard drive, even being as bold as labelling part of the link as “RIGHT click to download this PDF”. This will save you the headache of the inevitable emails consisting of “I want to download your Really Cool PDF but it keeps crashing my browser”. Trust me, they will come, and they can come for PDFs with a smaller number of pages, especially those that make heavy use of varied fonts and images.

Link to a specific page within a PDF document
Want to highlight a certain page in a multiple page PDF document? You can link to a specific page within the PDF by using “http://www.example.com/document.pdf#page=3″ format, similar to how we link to a specific part of a webpage. Otherwise, the usual first page will show.

Link within the PDF too
Did you know PDF files show as backlinks when there is a link to your site within the document? Definitely use the web links tool in Acrobat to ensure all your URLs turn into links. And want to link keywords to specific webpages? You can do this too by selecting Tools then Link Tools. Highlight the text you want linked, select Link Action then Open a Web Page and enter the URL you want those keywords linked to. So yes, this does mean that all three major search engines index PDF files, as well as those imbedded backlinks.

Optimize your PDF
The past couple of years, Adobe Acrobat (full version) gives users the tools to self-otpimize PDFs when you create or edit them. So before you do your final save and upload it to your server for visitors. With the document open in Acrobat, select Edit, then Preferences. Select General on the left, then select “Save as Optimizes for Fast Web View”, click OK. Then save as usual. You can also reduce the size of your PDF by reducing the compatibility on it (such as the PDF only being compatible with the latest version and the one previous) however proceed with caution unless your site is in a high tech space, because most people who download Adobe Reader rarely upgrade it, so you could easily have people using versions 4 or 5 (or older!) and your PDF will not load or will load with errors in the versions your PDF is not compatible with.

Next time you decide to upload a PDF to your server, ensure that you are following these usability tips so that you aren’t alienating your visitors by throwing up PDF roadblocks in their way. And it is probably not a bad idea to go back and see how your sites are handling PDFs that are already in place… there are many, many websites out there that don’t follow many (or any!) of these rules!

Every so often, someone comes up with the idea that Google should offer a service that would allow webmasters to pay a fee to get specific information on ranking issues on a website, primarily for those sites that the owners feel should be ranking much better than it actually is. Because oftentimes, webmasters – particularly the “mom and pop” do it yourselfers who are not as in-tune to the latest algo changes and ranking updates – are at a loss for why their site can’t be found in Google or why they rank so far below their competitors.

While many webmasters would love to see this kind of service, the reality is that Google would never do this, at least not in my opinion. And here’s why

1. Catering to those with money. Not all webmasters would have the money to pay for the service. And suddenly Google is helping only those who can afford to pay, and too bad for those who can’t. And you know someone will raise the argument that it is the spammers who can most afford to pay Google for this kind of service

2. SEOs would be upset. Why? While they could utilize the service themselves, this would also mean that many of those people who might employ an SEO for ranking issues suddenly they wouldn’t have to since they could simply pay Google to tell them how to fix it themselves. End result, fewer businesses hiring SEOs for help, since now they can just pay Google to get that same info straight from the horse’s mouth.

3. Influencing the search rankings. Google could be accused of their organic listings suddenly being tainted by those who pay Google to help them rank better. And this certainly blurs the lines of the whole paid vs. unpaid listings in Google (although it certainly doesn’t stop Yahoo).

4. It’s just not very Google-y. Yes, they say they don’t do evil (although granted, some clearly disagree) but no matter how you slice or dice it, offering paid support to webmasters for their unpaid search listings is just a little bit on the evil side.

5. Google Webmaster Central. GWC has come a long way since the days it was originally a sitemaps tool. And fortunately for webmasters, they update it regularly adding new tools that webmasters can use to self-diagnose problems and issues Google could be having with their site. And there is no reason to believe that GWC has reached an end point for what they will make available to webmasters. However, perhaps some more documentation on not just how to use the tools, but why they are useful to site owners, would be good.

6. And there are, of course, those who would use it for evil, to see just how far various optimization techniques could be pushed and what exactly gets caught when an “innocent webmaster” pays for Google ranking support. And yes, we all know you would

So while a paid service offering help to webmasters would be nice, I just can’t see them doing it, at least not anytime in the near future. So webmasters will have to keep cornering Matt Cutts & the many other Googlers in an attempt to get personalized help for their sites at one of the industry conferences.

We have all been a newbie SEO at one time or another. But if you are new to the industry… or just need a refresher that you aren’t making a cardinal newbie error when it comes to your site’s optimization, here are some of the top and most frequent mistakes and how to fix them. And yes, I did one of these back in 1999… although fortunately it wasn’t one of the ones that would get me banned, either back then or now!

My site ranks for “some really obscure multi-keyword phrase”.

Wow, you rank number one for “search engine optimization in Smalltown USA”. But who actually searches for that? You can be number one for tens of thousands of obscure keyword combinations, but if no one is actually searching for any of them, you have just wasted your time and effort optimizing for them (but hopefully it was sheer coincidence that you rank for them, and not actual effort on your part!)

Instead, use one of the many tools on the market that can give you some idea of how many people are searching for various keyword combinations related to your industry and focus on the ones that can actually bring you traffic rather than the unusual or obscure ones that no one ever searches for except you when you check your rankings.

Only focusing on the homepage

In the short tail world, one would only need to focus on the homepage. But in the world where long tail is not only king but queen too, you cannot afford to let your internal pages go neglected while your homepage gets the royal treatment.

Consider your internal pages just as important as your homepage, and don’t forget that a large percentage of your visitors will actually enter your site through an internal page, and not the homepage, so ensure that you have suitable navigation in place so that the visitor won’t get lost if they didn’t happen to get to your site via your homepage.

Too much time and effort on the meta tags

Yes, once upon a time meta tags were a very important part of any search engine optimization campaign. But the fairy tale is over and while you definitely shouldn’t ignore the value of meta tags, they aren’t so much relevant nowadays for rankings as they are for displaying what shows in the search engine results page.

The robots.txt oops

I am still a person that triple checks any robots.txt file I do. And while I fortunately (knock on wood) have never had any problems by accidentally disallowing all bots from visiting any of my sites via a robots.txt-gone-bad, I have seen the results of newbie webmasters who think they are telling Googlebot and Slurp to visit their site, when they are actually disallowing them from visiting and indexing the entire site. Ooops.

If you too live in fear, run any robots.txt file through a validator the moment it goes up (to reduce the window of opportunity of a bot happening to visit when you have a messed up robots.txt file live on the site). And it is worth double checking Google Webmaster Central to make sure Googlebot doesn’t have any indexing problems stemming from robots.txt, or any other reason.

Focusing on the traffic numbers without checking the follow through

Wow, so you had ten thousand visitors today. That traffic is pretty decent, depending on your goals, but the most important figure is page views… and the bounce rate. If those ten thousand visitors have a bounce rate of 98% (meaning only 2% of those ten thousand actually stuck around to click a second page) you need to figure out why so many leave after their first page view. Reduce your bounce rate and your page views will go up, and you can turn the slightly over 10,000 page views into 20,000 or 30,000, simply by figuring out why 98% of your traffic leaves immediately and what you can do to ensure they stick around for at least another page or two.

Don’t forget it is much easier to make some changes to a page or website to keep a visitor on your site for a few additional page views than it is to optimize to get entirely new visitors.

It’s only about the links

There is no doubt that inbound links are very important to any website. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it is the only important thing about your site. Sure, throw enough links at even the crappiest site and it will probably rank… however it will also probably tank in the serps shortly after. For your site to live a happy and healthy existence in the search engine results, you need to include links in your SEO strategy, but we aware that it is only one piece of the entire SEO pie.

While there are also many other newbie SEO mistakes (hidden text, keyword stuffing and spammy linking strategies, just to name a few) these are some of the common ones that I am sure some of you can admit you just might have done in the past before you knew better!