SeoBlackhat.co.uk

Verifying Your PAGE is the Right Theme
Okay, this is a quick update today. We know how vital Theme-based sites can be for our rankings in Google. Calling them Silos, Themes, Sub-Themes, or whatever you wish, having the proper theme is one of the key components to top ranking. Too many Webmasters make the mistake of just looking at their overall site’s theme, instead of looking at the individual page’s theme.

I stumbled across this last week with Barry Byers and Michael Cloake of Sesimi and I have been testing hard on it and achieved some good results. By the way, if you are looking for a good partner to outsource your overflow SEO work to, Barry and Michael know their stuff.

Problem: You may think a page is a certain theme, but Google maybe scoring it differently. Therefore, your ranking isn’t as high as you know it should be and it is driving you nuts.

Solution: Ask Google direct what the theme is for the page in question.

Reality: My testing has shown that while a site may have a strong “theme” the individual pages are lacking certain elements or Google is scoring the sub-page in areas that were ONCE the intention of the page, but the focus has changed. However, because the page is being scored on the old theme, the page becomes a detriment instead of an asset in your SEO campaign. In other words, the content of the page doesn’t match how Google has scored the page’s theme, therefore, the page is hurting your SEO efforts rather than helping.

What to Do:

First we will check the theme of your home page, then the theme of a sub-page and then we will analyze the results.

Step One: Open the Google External Keyword Tool.

Note: Please understand that this information is for Google AdWords Landing Pages – not Landing Pages in general.

Affiliate marketers know that Landing Pages are the best weapon they have. Those who do not use it either do not understand the concept or are just plain lazy. More often than not, it is the latter. Affiliate Marketers see that others do not use it and so, they dont bother with it too. You see, laziness is contagious.

To have an effective Landing Page, we need to understand what the Landing Page is for. A Landing Page is not just a duplicate of your sales page. It is not a page renamed to run a PPC campaign. It is, on the other hand, a page that focuses on selling the product or service. This is why all the elements of effective design are usually stripped out on this page.

When visitors come to your site, your Landing Page should give them only two options: To Buy or To Leave. There shouldnt be any other option aside from that. Do not distract them and make the mistake of giving more options to choose from. If you want them to subscribe for more information, create a name squeeze page. Keep your focus and remember that Landing Pages exists for only one reason to make a sale.

Below is a list of what I do when I create a Landing Page:

Webserver/Configuration – You do have a good host, right? The domain has its down IP address? A clean domain, clean IP address, with no ties with link farms, spamming, etc. is vital to your success.

Headline – This aspect is often greatly misused. The thought of, I must cram as many keywords as possible into my Headline for maximum performance is a thought process hooked on failure. Here is a tip that makes absolute sense, but so many people do not do it. The headline on the page should match (somewhat) to the keyword phrase being targeted.

Example: The keyword discount widgets could have a headline of: This is the Place for Discount Widgets. That alerts the visitor that they are indeed in the right place. Just by changing the headline to one that is relevant to the search causes a drop in CPC and can cause an increase in CTR. Or worse, you can get Google Slapped.

Font Face, Color & Size - Avoid having a distracting and cluttered look on your Landing Page. Having four to five different fonts on your page create a messy look that people would love to hate. While having different fonts for your headlines are fine, having different fonts in your body text is distracting. Do not even think about doing this. Use only one font for your body text.

Test results show that Times New Roman is the best offline print font and because of this, it has become the default font on the internet. This, unfortunately, is a big mistake. It turns out that Times New Roman causes rapid eye fatigue which makes it one of the worst fonts online.

The best fonts for online use are Verdana and Arial. Of the two, I would recommend that you use Verdana as it consistently outperforms every font. It reduces eye strain and increases readability. Remember to use a standard font at all times. Also keep in mind that not all computers may have the font that you use. If you want a standard headline font, it is best to create it as a graphic so it will look constant on every computer. You definitely want your message to have the look that you intend it to have.

You should always aim to make your text readable. The standard size for text is 2 and it is advisable to put dark text on white background. In fact, black text on a white background is preferred. Landing pages arent supposed to show off how cute you can be. Landing pages are supposed to sell. This is serious stuff and requires you to put on your best face.

There is a reason that the top companies choose dark text on a light background. It isnt by accident, it is by design. Follow their lead.

Dont Let Search Engines Crawl Your Landing Pages – Many marketers want as many pages in the search engine indexes as possible. Dont do this as I mentioned above.

Amit Singhal, from Google, did a 50 slide presentation back in 2004, regarding the Challenges in Running a Commercial Web Search Engine.

Why am I covering it now? First, a member sent this to me to comment on, and I think it is rather interesting to see where things were then compared to five years later. Heres a hint: Not much has changed.

Question: How many queries are unique?
Answer: Over half

At first glance, you would look at that and think I have to do a better job of getting more keywords since users search patterns are not consistent.

Wait. After looking at the data from about 60 sites, here is an example from one of my typical sites.

108k visits from 28k keyword queries. Looking at it this way, it looks quite diverse, however, looking at the Top 100 queries, 56,656 visits came through. Which means about 52,000 visits came through the remaining 27,900 queries.

Am I optimizing for 28,000 keywords? Not even close. So how do you improve your chances of coming up for many of the phrases which may never come up on an analytics report or during keyword research.

If I can quote Dan Thies, Use modifiers aggressively.

What are modifiers? You already know them, but probably by a different name.

Examples of common modifiers are:

• best
• buy
• cheap
• discount
• wholesale
• online
• accessories

Modifiers allow you to expand your keyword set. So instead of having just blue widgets, you would have discount blue widgets, blue widget accessories etc. Geo Targeted (San Francisco, bay area, Chicago, etc.) would also be classified as a modifier.

First things first – lets define the Supplemental Index. The best way is to take it straight from Google

A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that its pulled from our supplemental index. Were able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If youre a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; theres no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesnt affect its PageRank. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly site, please visit our webmaster guidelines.

Reference: Googles Webmaster Help Center

1) If youre an affiliate, and you are directly linking to the merchants page with your affiliate code, change the CTA to /yourdomain.com/buy/ and do a 301 redirect to the merchant.
2) Make sure your Title tag is unique and contains the targeted keyword phrase.
3) Ditto with the Meta Description.
4) Ditto with the H1 tag.
5) Get the Privacy, Contact Us, About Us, Terms, etc. on the page if they arent already there.
6) Put the keyword phrase at the bottom of the page, just above the footer links. But dont link it to anything.
7) Use it at least twice in the body of the page.
Get some good solid links 5-10 or so to your landing page. As strange as it sounds, getting links from pages that are cached and it gets spidered by GoogleBot has helped in the slap – but not consistently.