Sometimes clients can often have unrealistic expectations when it comes to SEO work. The market has become saturated with "Guaranteed top 10 placement - get listed overnight!" fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants SEO companies. Those who are familiar with good, solid SEO techniques are all too aware that these companies almost always fail to deliver. And if they do deliver results, the outcome is usually temporary, because they most likely used Black Hat methods — making it only a matter of time before the site is penalized or thrown out of the index.
To address these issues, an SEO specialist may want to educate their client with the following five myths about SEO:
- Overnight Results
- Placement Can be Guaranteed
- Meta Tags
- Submitting to Search Engines
- More Links > Good Links
Modern Life goes into more detail in their article, 5 Myths in SEO. This old adage continues to ring true, even in SEO — if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
We've all experienced it. You search for that perfect plugin to complete your project, only to find that it's no longer available. Either the site is no longer up, the file has been removed or it's been taken over by pr0n. The next step is to fire up search engines you hardly ever use. That's right, I'm talking about you Live and Ask.com. But still, no luck. Every page you find that mentions the download file you need has a broken link. Arrghh, stupid Internet!
But wait! There's still hope! There's a tremendous resource on the Internet that people often forget about. It's so powerful, that even though you've forgotten about it, it never forgets about you. It's been stalking you for all of these years. It actually has the first website you ever made. You know, the one you deleted every trace of — the one that could ruin your career if anyone ever found out. That most excellent resource is called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It has a memory more powerful than your old girlfriend and can remember everything, exactly the way it happened, blinking text and all.
I recently used this powerful time traveller to find a Textpattern plugin that was no longer available for download. The site that hosted the file had fallen victim to some hardcore pr0n action and I was left with the broken-link-download-blues. Fortunately, I was able to copy the broken link and paste it into the Wayback Machine, which miraculously offered me the file that I needed. So next time, when you hit a broken download link and you can't find that file, be sure to check the Wayback Machine before you completely give up.
SEO Opportunity
In addition to being helpful to yourself, this resource could also be helpful to many other people. Although I'm too busy and focused on other projects to do what I'm about to suggest, if you have the time and resources, here's an opportunity for an excellent online resource. You could scour the Internet for dead/broken file download links and then check to see if they're available from the Wayback Machine. If they are, you can then add it to your website and either link to the Wayback Machine or better yet, download the files to Amazon S3 to make sure the files are always available. Furthermore, you can leave comments with links to the pages on software and plugin directories that contain those broken links. And if you're really smart, you'll automate the entire thing!
Thanks to the excellent feedback from our beta testers, we've enhanced the Link Manager and created an entirely new tool called the Persona Manager.
Link Manager Enhancement
We included the ability to add multiple links to one page. Before, when you wanted to add a new link to the Link Manager, you could only create one link (anchor text and URL) per page. If you had more than one link — in particular, multiple unique links — you would have to repeat the process of adding a link several times. Now, all you have to do is click on the Add New link to add additional keywords and URLs to a page.
Persona (Alias/Identity) Manager for Social Networks
A key technique for conducting effective search marketing campaigns is to participate in social networks. One of the best ways to approach social networks is to create and use different accounts — what we like to call personas. However, managing multiple personas can be tedious, and if you're not using a tool like 1Password (only available for Mac), it can be even more tedious having to enter the login info each time you want to access a site. That's why we created the Persona Manager for Social Media.
The Persona Manager allows you to add multiple identities and then associate social networking websites, like Digg and Twitter, to that identity. After you've setup a persona, you can click on the Login button next to the site you want to login to, and Raven will automatically log you into the website with that identity.
If you're on the Internet all day like myself, then you probably come across hundreds of websites, files, music collections, historical archives, images, etc, that you would like to keep track of. Let me introduce you to Zotero.
Zotero is a free Firefox 2.x add on — compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux — that makes the collection of data effortless. By default, Zotero makes itself accessible from the status bar, but you can also display it above the Web page content at the top of your browser. It can be used to archive almost anything that you come across on the Internet. However, for our purpose at Sitening, we're using it for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.
Zotero allows you to collect your data and then categorize it, tag it, archive it and link to it. It even has an import/export feature to share your collection with others (and for them to do likewise). I have several sites that I rely on every day and they each serve their own purpose. Some of them are social networking sites like Digg, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon and some of them are bookmarking sites like reddit or technorati.
So, let's say that you have a list of 100+ websites that you know you're going to be visiting frequently. How would you add them to Zotero? Once you have Zotero installed, there are several options that allow you to easily add the data you want.
My preference is to use the add-link option, because it helps me streamline my collection process — tagging it, writing a description and then categorizing it. Those three tasks help me sort through the data with a minimum amount of fuss. To add a link you click on the link icon (circled in blue) and Zotero will automatically add the website you're currently viewing to the Library. Once you start adding links on a regular basis, you'll grow your Library in no time at all. As you see from the image below, the entire Library list is nicely sorted in alphabetical order.
Before you assign any information to your Library entries, it's probably a good idea to assign categories that you're going to be using frequently. For instance, I have six different categories which you can see in the image.
When you click on a Library entry you get the option to assign some information to it. It is here where I think Zotero excels. So lets say I click on my Good for SEO category. My Zotero Library will then display all the websites I have assigned to it.
If I click on one of those entries, I will then be able to assign information to it. I can view the page, see when I added it to my Library, add a note or a description about the site and tag it with any appropriate words that I think best fits the website. I can also relate it to other similar pages, should I wish.
I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface of what Zotero can do, but even if you're remotely interested in archiving or storing the data that you come across on the Internet, I highly recommend it. It's free, easy to use and lives right in your browser where you need it most.
Zotero Article Distribution List for SEO
To help get you started using Zotero — for SEO purposes — you can download and import the article distribution website list we use here at Sitening.
Zotero Import Instructions
- Download the Zotero Article Distribution List
- Open Zotero in Firefox and click on the gear icon and then select import
- Find the file your downloaded and import it
- After you successfully import the file, rename the folder to your liking
del.icio.us has become an essential component to most SEO specialists' lives. On one hand, del.icio.us represents an opportunity for website exposure. Getting on del.icio.us' popular list can drive a tremendous amount of traffic. In fact, just creating simple bookmarks on their system can provide moderate exposure and traffic for just about any website. On the other hand, del.icio.us is an indispensable tool for easily and quickly keeping track of the thousands of sites that a person encounters on a daily basis.
Since del.icio.us is so important to a specialists' daily work (and leisurely browsing), it makes sense to learn how to become a power user of their system. The Web Worker Daily recently compiled an excellent list of power user tips for del.icio.us.
del.icio.us Power User Tips
- Tag, Tag, and Tag Some More
- Bundle Your Tags
- Use the Browser Add-on
- Prune the Plant
- Build Your Network
- Use Subscriptions to Find More Links
You can read Become a del.icio.us Power User to get a more detailed description of each tip.
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