Then I started thinking about SEO research and how it can be a pain to insert and format data into an excel sheet from a website. This is tradionally a fairly manual task as it is usually not just a matter of cutting and pasting.

As an example of one use, I played around with importing keyword data from Digitalpoint. Sometimes we use this data to send reports to clients and to create proposals/strategies. There are some other tools out there like wordtracker that will send you formatted keyword lists, but the method of pulling the data for yourself into an excel sheet is very convenient and can save you time and money.

So here are the basics of it.

If you open up excel and go to DATA > IMPORT EXTERNAL DATA > NEW WEB QUERY

The Web Query window will pop up. You then need to browse to the page that you want to pull the data from. In this case I am going to DigitalPoints Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Once you are see the data you want to import you simply checkmark which sections you want to include. Excel makes it pretty easy since it puts most of the sections into blocks. One problem though is that on some tools it cannot determine which sections to pull. I tried a few different tools and Excel had problems with about half of them.

Once you select the sections you want to import and hit execute, excel will pull the data into nice clean text, right into your excel sheet. You can then clean it up however you need to.

A couple important things. You can select how you want excel to pull the data in. You can have it as straight text, rich text, or with full html.

There is also one other important setting. Excel automatically assumes that you want to refresh the data every so often and will do so. Since you only want to pull the data once, you will want to disable that feature, so that your data doesnt change. Of course, there may be times that you might want the data to refresh. One example might be if you are using it to pull current rankings in google. You could set excel up to pull the data for the top 10 sites for a specific keyword.

Here are some other uses right off the top of my head.

- Collecting backlinks data from backlinks tools.
- Collecting lists of potential link partners.
etc.. etc.. etc..

What uses can you think of?

He would then use 301 redirects found in his .htaccess file to point visitors at the subfolder on the same site. The idea he had was that the subdomains are worth more to search engines and therefore the subdomain’s influence over the link popularity of the rest of the site would be positive.

In this article I address this common question:

Are subdomains better than subfolders?

One thing you hear often in the search engine optimization and marketing industry is, “it depends.” I think it’s the SEO’s favorite phrase.

This is because there are so many factors which influence a site’s ability to rank that it is difficult, if not impossible to say with 100% certainty what effect a single tactic will have on the outcome of a campaign.

That’s because there is no single tactic that is the be all and end all of SEO. There is just no way to know for certain that one tactic will outperform another.

Therefore, my answer to the question “are subdomains better than subdirectories” has to be ‘it depends.’

Subdomains can be more effective than folders in certain instances, while in others they are less effective.

For example, if you have a 100 page site that is organized into subfolders, investing the time and money into migrating it to a subdomain structure likely won’t help unless you have plans to grow your site.

This is because, in my experience, the only sites that seem to benefit from subdomains are larger sites.

A good example of just such a site is Ebay. It is organized into subdomains and it does quite well. That is because the subdomains are large enough to exist on their own.

For example, stores.ebay.com has over 1 million indexed pages. This subdomain can easily survive on its own because of its size.

But Ebay is just one example of the types of sites which have used subdomains to logically organize their sites.

And this is another key to the whole subdomain strategy – logically ordering your site so that the subdomain is topical.

I recently consulted with a large legal website and they felt that they weren’t getting the traffic or exposure they should. Upon my analysis, I determined that this site, while organized into subfolders, was actually causing itself harm in the search engines. This is because there was so much information available on the site on a variety of topics that the engines were having problems categorizing it.

So we devised a subdomain strategy that would help focus certain areas of the site to help them compete individually with their competitors.

Hot topics such as Bankrupcty and Divorce became their own subdomains because a) there was sufficient content (tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages) to support the subdomains and b) because they are highly searched for topics.

Through this strategy they created various subdomains and then used the .htaccess 301 rewrite rules to make it appear that the content had moved.

And such a strategy will work if you have a similar situation. If you have an area of your site which is topical in nature and either has hundreds of pages or will continue to grow in the future, then you have a good candidate for a subdomain.

But why would you want to split your site up like that?

Often the first question is, “But if I move that content off my main domain, won’t that hurt it?

Well again, it depends.

If you properly link the two domains so that link popularity can flow between them you can actually help your main domain improve.

This is because, as the subdomain becomes established in its own right, it will begin to rank higher and higher. Over time, it will build more and more links, boosting its link popularity which would then transfer through to the main domain.

Therefore, over the long term the subdomain is actually a benefit to the main domain.

What else can a subdomain be used for?

A subdomain doesn’t only have to be used for existing content. It can be used for a new section of the site as well.

For example, if you’ve recently hired a blogger or content development team, why not split that content into its own subdomain?

If you’ve recently expanded into a new product line, these pages could also reside in their own subdomain.

Even if you wanted to segregate your corporate information from your storefront you could employ the subdomain strategy.

For example, if you are a full service web shop offering design, hosting and SEO, you could subdomain each of these services. This way each subdomain could attempt to compete online on its own merits.

So as you can see, you first need to answer a few questions. You must treat the subdomain as its own site. And since we know you generally need a larger site to compete, is it realistic at this point to have a subdomain?

In other words, is the subdomain going to be large enough to stand on its own?

Second, even if you have the size, is the subdomain themed enough? Is it about a single topic, or a handful of topics? Remember, creating a subdomain for the sake of doing so isn’t a good enough reason.

You must make the subdomain worthy of existing otherwise you are just wasting your time.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

While it’s true that most web users still haven’t caught on to RSS, some online retailers have found an innovative use for it. One that doesn’t involve syndicating news or blogs but still gets their message across.

In this article I look at some of the alternative uses of RSS and how almost any website can take advantage of them even if they don’t regularly publish fresh web content.

I think the first time I saw a non-news related RSS feed was on MSN.

It was shortly after they launched their own search engine. I was reviewing the HTML source of the page (as I commonly do when an engine launches a new feature. You’d be surprised at the secrets the HTML source holds) and noticed a line in the head tag of the page which is common to a lot of blogs:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/xml” title=”XML” href=”http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=rob+sullivan&format=rss” /><link>

For those who are unaware, this is the code which a browser uses to automatically detect if there is a feed associated with that page.

That’s right, MSN is feeding search engine results via XML to any browser which is capable of detecting and reading the feed. Since then, MSN has added the familiar orange “RSS” link to the bottom of the page.

So what does this really mean?

In the case of MSN, it means that you can use the feed to monitor search results. This is what I use it for.

For example, my browser of choice is Firefox, and within Firefox I have a feed reader extension called Sage. I can take the Feed URL from the MSN search results page, store it in Sage, and every time the search results change for my chosen keyword, Sage highlights the updated feed. This way I can quickly scan my feeds to see which have changed (via the highlighting) and then choose the feed to see what changed.

Yahoo! has since also added feeds to their search results, making it easy to monitor results there as well.

But that’s not the only place I’ve seen feeds in non-news/blog related sites.

I was recently consulting on the design of a new site for a marketing company and they have a flash compontent to their site. The flash used is to highlight and emphasize the marketing company’s portfolio.

Obviously, as with any company, the portfolio will change from time to time. In order to make the Flash movie flexible enough that the site owner could update it as the portfolio changed, the flash designer built in an RSS component.

Now, when the portfolio is updated, the site owner merely has to update the contents of the RSS feed and the flash movie is automatically changed to reflect the new content.

These are two good examples of how feeds are being used in a non-news fashion; but there are more.

If you have a Google custom home page and subscribe to any of their widgets, you may have also noticed that they utilize XML to render the content. This means that anyone can build a widget for the Google homepage, and many people have.

In my opinion, the format I read about today is the one which has the most potential impact on SEM.

According to this article in the New York Times retailers are now starting to harness the power of RSS.

Many online retailers like eBags, ICE.com, TowerRecords.com and others are providing their customers with product updates via RSS.

What they are doing in some cases is integrating feeds into the product pages so that when the page changes and the corresponding feed is updated, the client can be automatically notified.

For example, let’s say you saw a pair of shoes you just have to have. But they are a little out of your price range, or the colors are wrong.

With the new system used by these retailers, you could subscribe to the feed for this product and just plug it into your favorite news reader. When the retailer updates the product page, the feed reader would notify you and you could check out the updates to see if it affects the pricing or colors of the shoes.

And if it did, then you could click on a link in the feed and be taken right to the product page where you could then proceed to purchase the shoes online.

To me, this is one of the real powers of RSS – people choose what they want to see and if they are really interested, they subscribe to the content. They only have to view the content if and when it changes. Until then, they don’t need to even think about it because the feed reader does the work for them.

It monitors the website on regular intervals and notifies them of changes to the website.

What an incredibly powerful tool for retailers! The user can subscribe to the feed anonymously yet the retailer still can maintain that contact with them. Providing product feeds in this manner is probably one of the best ways for the retailer and the customer to stay in contact without fear of crossing the anonymity threshold.

So if you are an online retailer, may I suggest you look at incorporating these types of product feeds into your site? You may be surprised at the results.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

But the truth is, you don’t need a blog to use these services.

In fact, in this article I’m going to explain how you can use sites like Technorati and Del.icio.us to build buzz for your site without the use of a blog.

There has been a great rise in the adoption and use of social web services. These services fall under the banner of “Web 2.0,” which is what they are calling the next version of the internet – the more interactive version, because they allow greater control of the web to fall into the hands of users.

In reality, blogs were the reason Web 2.0 emerged. This is because, for the first time web users had a voice on the web. This is because they were able to create and manage their own websites without the need for HTML knowledge. Most blog software then (and now) managed the content by creating pages, updating navigation and more.

Since then, other services have sprung up to allow even more people a voice. Even if they don’t blog they can express themselves through sharing their web experiences.

One of the most common forms of sharing web experiences is through bookmarking or tagging web pages.

The idea behind this type of social networking is that you will find something that interests you and you will share it with others via a bookmark stored publicly.

But, what I’m about to show you today is how you can take advantage of this system to build buzz (and links) for your site.

There is some groundwork you have to do, however, but it is relatively minor. The technique I’m going to explain will work with any social networking site, not just the two I mention here today.

For this to work you will first need to sign up for free accounts at both Technorati and Del.icio.us.

From this point forward, these sites are going to become your best friends.

This is because you are going to do some significant research here before you even put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Now that you’ve got your accounts set up, it’s time to research.

Let’s say I’m going to write an article about link building, but I also want to create some buzz on the web about my link building article.

The first thing I’m going to do is perform a search for “link building” on both Technorati and Del.icio.us.

I’m going to do this because I want to gather some information.

First, I’ll look at the results presented on both sites. What are the things people are bookmarking in Del.icio.us? Also, what are some of the words they are using to bookmark them with? Make note of these terms as you will need them later.

Second, look at the tags Technorati provides you. For example, when I search for “Link Building” Technorati is kind enough to provide me with a list of related tags such as link-building, SEO, Google, Search Engine Optimization and Linking. You will want to keep track of these as well.

What you are doing by gathering these terms is understanding where your new article is going to fit within the social networking scene.

Now that you’ve gathered your terms (you should have a list of 10-20), it’s time to start writing.

Consider these terms as keywords. You’ll want to work them into your text as you are writing. From here you can write your article as normal.

When you have your article written, it’s time to tag it for Technorati. Doing this is quite simple.

What I do is add a section at the bottom of the article stating that the article is tagged.

So how do you tag your articles?

It’s quite simple really. All you need to do is add the code for the Technorati tag to your page. To tag my link building article, for example, I would add the following tags:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/Link+Building” rel=”tag”>Link Building</a>

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/Link-Building” rel=”tag”>Link Building</a>

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/SEO” rel=”tag”>Link Building</a>

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/Google” rel=”tag”>Link Building</a>

And so on. Remember the list of related tags that Technorati gave me? That’s the list of tags I’m going to add to my link building article.

In the end, your tags should look something like this:

tags: Link+ Building Link-Building SEO Google

After your tagging is complete, all you need to do is submit a ping to Technorati to let them know of the article. This can be done here.

That takes care of Technorati. What about Del.icio.us?

Once you’ve published your new article and pinged Technorati, it’s time to add it to Del.icio.us.

To do so, simply go to the site and log into your page and select the “post” link.

From here you can add your URL and any tags you want associated with the bookmark. It is here where you will add the list of Del.icio.us tags.

The reason you want to add your site to Del.icio.us via the bookmark is because the new bookmark will appear on the home page of the site which allows others to see it.

Not to mention there are lots of services out there which aggregate new bookmarks. That means your newly bookmarked page will be instantly available to the tens of thousands of Del.icio.us users.

So if you’ve ever thought that you need a blog to take advantage of these services, think again. While it is much easier to do what I’ve explained here with a blog service (because much of the tagging and pinging can be controlled by the blog software) it doesn’t mean that it is limited to blogs.

One other thing to mention: In order for this to be effective, it is best to write articles (and submit via pings) on a regular basis. Ensure that you follow these steps consistently and soon you should be able to measure the buzz being built around your site.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

One way to do that is to ensure others know what you are doing but sometimes this can be difficult especially in today’s fiercely competitive online market.

There are areas of the web which are geared towards helping some of those sites and if your site is a technology or tech related site then this article is for you.

The web is all about Buzz. Those who can generate the most buzz about themselves through press releases, link baiting, blogging, social networking or whatever other tactic they use generally will reap the rewards.

But for some sites in some industries it can be extremely difficult to generate buzz about themselves that the rest of the web will notice.

After all, not many people even know what an ice worm is, or how scientists recently discovered a huge cave full of poisonous frogs. In fact, most people could care less even if it is a significant scientific breakthrough or discovery.

So just how does a science or technology site build buzz?

There is a way to generate buzz about your new scientific achievement or breakthrough. It is done through a site called Digg.

From Digg’s FAQ:

”Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With Digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.”

In other words, Digg is a place where technology stories go and get found by users who then vote on them. The more votes a story receives, the better it does on Digg.

For example, the two stories I referenced above came from Digg. They were voted on by readers and selected as two of the more important science stories.

The really great buzz comes from the stories which get promoted to the homepage of the site. So the obvious question becomes: How do I get my technology story on the front page of Digg?

Well, the first thing is to submit it to the Digg queue. From there it gets reviewed, or “digged” by Digg users. The more “diggs” it receives the higher it moves up. The sites with the most diggs move to the home page. And it is from this home page where most of the real traffic happens.

But wait, it gets better.

If you do happen to get your story on the front page it can even grow beyond Digg.

That’s right, Digg becomes the launching point to the next level of technology promotion: Slashdot.

Now, Slashdot isn’t just for technology stories, but having it first appear in Digg helps improve the chances of your story or article being slashdotted (as it’s called).

According to Wikipedia, the “Slashdot Effect” ”Is the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic.”

That is correct: There have been documented cases where a website has slowed down or gone offline altogether because of the huge influx of traffic generated by being Slashdotted.

But, on the other hand, if you can keep your site running through the Digg phase and the slashdotting phase your site could come out smelling like roses.

This is because over the course of those couple days when everyone is reading about your site, they are also blogging about it and linking to it.

Consider this Digg/Slashdot tactic as the most extreme form of link baiting. Instead of getting a few dozen sites to link to you for something you wrote you could have a few hundred or thousand sites link to you over the course of a few days.

And you thought promoting your technology site would be difficult.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

In light of this research it is important for website owners to realize how big an impact that initial response is.

Therefore in this article we dig a little deeper into the research and provide some thoughts on what the findings could mean for you.

The research, which was performed by Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario tells us that our first impressions of a website influence how we react to that site from that point forward. In other words, our initial responses to a site, our “gut feelings” will impact how we feel about that site now and in the future.

In the research, three studies were conducted to determine how quickly people form an opinion about web page visual appeal.

In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web pages presented for 500 milliseconds each. The second study replicated the first, but participants also rated each web page on seven specific design dimension while in the third study participants rated the visual appeal of pages at both the 50 millisecond and 500 millisecond exposure.

They were first introduced to the site for 50 milliseconds and then asked to revisit it later. What researchers found was that the site visitors had much the same impressions at 500 milliseconds as 50 milliseconds.

In other words, web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression.

The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the ‘halo effect’ That means that if you can impress them initially with a compelling design, users may actually forgive the site for other faults.

So what does this mean?

Well, flashy sites are out. The study suggests that people are turned off of sites with too many images or moving parts. However, too much text also can cause problems. Therefore one needs a balance of flair and content to impress most people.

I recently talked about customer segmentation in a previous article and I think that commentary is directly related to this.

You see, we already know that men and women search differently, as do people of different ages and income levels. So in reality, your website isn’t going to be all things to all people.

Therefore if your product reaches a wide customer base then your site should as well. However if your customer base is narrow (for example you sell knitting supplies) then you must target your site to the user.

Again, the need for detailed research into your target customer is needed. Because if they can make a snap assessment of your site in the time it takes to flash a single frame of of your favorite TV show, then you know they will hit that “back” button almost as quickly.

So before you go rushing out to hire a designer, take some time to check with your customers. What do they like? What don’t they like? Perhaps consider hiring a research company to hold a focus group or eye tracking study to determine what are the things you should keep and what you should throw away.

I can tell you from experience that such intimate knowledge of your customers can go a long way to improving your relationship with them ultimately increasing your sales and bottom line.

Let me give you an example:

We recently held a focus group and eye tracking study for a client of mine. What we found wasn’t terribly surprising however there was a fair bit of feedback on the design of the site. So much so that it actually has influenced the look and feel of the site.

Now, the site looks more like people expect it should and early results suggest that people are happier with it. Visitor durations are going up, as are page views, and abandonments are going down.

There are many firms out there that do this type of research so if your company depends on business online you should consider these as options.

But what if you can’t afford expensive eye tracking or focus groups?

Well, there’s always the feedback loop – on every page of your site place an email link or form or rating box or some other way to get your visitors engaged in the site so they can leave feedback. That way your customers can tell you what they like or don’t like.

And if you do have some budget to allow for testing there are services like Optimost which can help you do landing page testing to find the best converting landing page.

This system I find is pretty interesting. It can manipulate pages on the fly and capture conversions. Then they tie the conversion rates to the best performing page and ultimately that would become your ideal landing page.

My only concern is (and I don’t know if this has been changed) that they use Javascript to manipulate the page layout making much of the page non search engine friendly.

So, now that you know that we are all hyper-channel changers, and that people search differently, do you think it is time to review your site to make sure it is the most compelling user friendly site it could be?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

This same Long Tail theory has been applied to search in that a handful of queries drive a lot of clicks to a site but in reality there are sometimes tens of thousands of other terms which actually convert at a higher rate.

In this article I explore the Long Tail of search and how analytics impact it.

There was a great article by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch relating to The Long Tail and Search and how the top 50% of searches generated 80% of the search volume.

However there is also the argument that the bottom 20% of searches also generate 60% of the sales. In other words, those terms which are more focused and specific are more likely to convert. For example, a search for a generic term like “lawyer” is less likely to convert that “New Jersey divorce lawyer.”

Therefore, as a search engine marketer we need to not only focus on those high traffic more generic words, but also put some effort towards lower traffic, but more than likely higher converting keywords.

This is a common tactic in todays SEM. In fact it’s the norm for PPC marketers – to have exposure on high traffic (and high cost terms) even if they don’t get clicks. This helps build brand awareness. Then the budget is more focused on focused terms that generally cost less but convert at a higher rate.

Or organic search marketers we see this every day. My large clients get tons of clicks from more generic phrases but the conversions happen on the more specific terms.

And my biggest problem with this right now is that I have no easy way to measure those thousands (And sometimes tens of thousands) of individual conversions effectively.

I feel today’s analytics packages need to be more flexible and automatically group referrals into keyword baskets, much like today’s modern PPC programs.

This way you could easily determine if a Geographic referral (for example) is “worth” more than a product specific referral.

Through grouping of keywords much better analysis of traffic, both paid and organic, could be completed to determine where tactics and strategy could better be applied.

For example, using the above situation, if my site is positioned well organically for both geographic and product specific terms, yet I am seeing more geographic referrals which lead to conversions, then I will want to develop a strategy to enhance this. I would want to emphasize my organic geographic placement and try to further increase my rankings here.

But without the grouped analytics I’ve mentioned this is difficult to do at this time.

For example, one of my clients is a high profile legal site which gets millions of search referrals from hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. Of the hundred thousand or so Google referrals, I know that about 75% are more generic terms, but what I really want to know is whether the other 25% – the better converting terms – are primarily geographic terms (like New Jersey Lawyer) or searches for specific types of lawyers (like divorce lawyer).

However, because there are so many terms in the Long Tail I can’t easily determine this.

Therefore I am calling on Analytics vendors to address this situation. I NEED to know what terms are better for my clients. Sure I can guess that geographic terms are likely better in this case, but I need proof and I can’t easily get it.

Analytics should be more like search engines in a sense. Rather than showing me all the referrals, show my the organic referrals from Google which may contain a location. And don’t make my have to type in the location (although make it an option), the analytics should be smart enough to group keywords, with some guidance.

Why can’t Hitbox, Urchin and Webtrends understand that bankruptcy terms and financial terms may be related, or that Paris and Europe terms are related.

There needs to be more intuition programmed into the analytics to help the average user be able to determine where to focus.

That being said, if there was such functionality in an Analytics package I would think it would become one of the most used features. Because if I could slice and dice the data umpteen different ways to find out if New York is more popular than New Jersey (in terms of search) then i would be able to better target both my paid and organic campaigns.

That’s because I could see that if I’m paying higher PPC costs for New York terms, but find that New Jersey actually converts better then I will shift budget to New Jersey terms.

Conversely, if I find New Jersey terms convert better and I’m doing paid campaigns for both NY and NJ even though I’m ranking highly for both, why wouldn’t I try moving some budget to other areas which could do better?

Also, having such intuitive analytics could help find those organic terms which have lower PPC costs because others haven’t considered them yet conversions are good.

As you can see, there could be many different ways to use an analytics package that was able to more effectively allow you to use the data.

Because if you can increase the occurrence of higher converting keywords in both your organic and paid campaigns you will increase your sales. Even if your total search volume drops because less emphasis is placed on generic terms, as long as there’s a positive ROI in the end, does it matter?

Consider it another way: My experience has shown me that more specific terms have higher conversion rates than more general terms. Even if the general terms gets more traffic, there are a greater earnings from the specific term.

The point I’m trying to make is that even though a term has high referrals, it isn’t likely as highly converting as other terms. Therefore one needs to be able to see the whole picture and with today’s analytics this is extremely difficult without lots of manual intervention (exporting to a spreadsheet or database and performing complex analysis).

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

In this article I look at why segmentation is going to be so important in the new year.

As our industry grows up we begin to apply more and more traditional marketing tactics to SEM. In 2006 I think this trend will continue and the biggest tactic that will need to be applied will be profiling and segmentation of the market.

I am already steering some of my own clients down this path – trying to devise strategies which will help get their sites found by the right audience at the right time. This is because I see the ability to properly target their clients will mean much more to them than a broad approach.

Consider SEM like fishing. A fisherman can cover a larger area with a bigger net, but many times the large net leaves just as large holes which smaller fish can get out of. This is the way the web used to work – simply placing a website up meant there was a good chance that everyone – old or young, male or female, rich or poor – would see your site.

But in todays market, we as online marketers have to get smarter. We need to have smaller nets which, while they catch less fish, catch the right ones.

This is because the search engines are evolving yet again to consider these things. They realize that no site can be all things to all people and are adjusting the results to reflect this.

Granted there are exceptions to this, but in most cases that I’ve seen, search engines are getting better at returning results which are more tailored to the searcher.

That means when you search for a “New Jersey Bankruptcy Attorney” you don’t see a big site like Findlaw.com or Lawyers.com at the top of the results. Instead you see a New Jersey Bankruptcy Attorney’s website.

We’ve been seeing this geographic segmentation happening for some time – where engines are assuming that if you are using a geographic qualifier then you must want geographic results.

But as time goes on, we’ll see a further refinement of these qualifiers.

We already know that men and women search differently, as do people of different ethnicities and income levels. Even boys and men, or girls and women tend to search differently. So wouldn’t it make sense that the engines will want to tap into that diversity?

Let me give you a practical example. We have a client which has a large site devoted to children – from games to hobbies and more. They also have a parent oriented portal coving topics such as health to family travel. This client would like to roll the 2 sites into one and phase out the children’s site.

I am recommending against this course of action mostly because such a site would be too broad and not able to effectively target any group of web searchers.

Instead I’m proposing they keep the kids site and instead move any non-kid related content off the kids site and into the parents site.

Similarly, move any kid related content off the parents site onto the kids site. This way each site has a theme and a target audience.

Then, we can more effectively attempt to position the sites where they are most likely going to receive the most traffic.

For example, we will probably want to look closely at Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! For the kids site as these engines have larger kid audiences. I know from my own experience that my 10 year old son prefers Yahoo! To any other engine out there. He does use Google from time to time but only to find desktop wallpaper for his current favorite band. Otherwise he searches with Yahoo!

For the parent portal we’ll want to focus on Google and MSN as there’s a greater chance of intercepting the parents here than on Ask or Yahoo!

So you can see here how profiling their target audiences – in this case 2 different groups with different search habits – will benefit them in the long run.

But profiling can (and should) go even further than this.

As a website owner, it is helpful, no necessary, that you you know who your target is. And I don’t just mean “female aged 25-34 with a 35,000-42,000 annual income.” I mean get specific. Get an image in your mind of who this female is. Is she married? With Children? Where do they live? What color hair and eyes does she have?

The better idea you have of this target audience the better job you will do at positioning your site in front of her eyes.

Because once you know who she is, you can begin to develop a persona about her. When does she use a search engine? What does she search for? What factors motivate her to click on a listing? These are the questions you must be able to answer in order to define your SEM campaign. And the only way to properly answer these questions is to have that picture in your mind of what she looks like.

You can also use this persona for competitive intelligence gathering. If you can place yourself in the persona’s shoes and act as they would, why not take a tour through your competitors sites. What do you like about them? What don’t you like? Perform some searches on their sites as well as a search engine. Did you find what you were looking for? What were you looking for?

The more able you are to make yourself act like your target audience the better you can position your site in front of them.

This leads to the point I made earlier when dealing with my client – how much easier do you think it will be to position a kid friendly site in front of kids than a more general site dealing with a much broader range of topics?

I hope that you can see what power you will have if you take the time early on to properly identify your target audience. And I also hope I’ve illustrated just how important it is to get as much detail about this person as possible. If you can put a face to the persona then you’ve successfully determined who your target is. And once you’ve done that you can more effectively position your website so that it attracts that audience at the right time.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

While I highly recommend you stay away from anything which is automatically generated I also understand that many people don’t feel comfortable writing.

Therefore, in this article I look at another way to make your site appear as if its changing. That is, incorporating feeds into your site to improve return visits and build your brand.

Feeds have been growing in popularity for some time. In fact, there are people who measure such popularity.

While feeds are not the sole property of blogs, we can gauge how popular feeds are simply by looking at the “state of the blogosphere.”

According to Technorati, the blogosphere is doubling every 5 months or so. That means that 5 months from now there will be twice as many blogs (and feeds) as there are now.

In many cases, the only way to access that content, aside from regularly visiting a site, is through their feeds.

But that’s not the only use for feeds. Many services have sprung up which allow you to search and aggregate those feeds. Services such as Feedster and even Google News allow you to search for phrases and output an RSS feed which could then be imported into a feed reader.

In other words, if you wanted to get the most recent news about Google from Google News you could search for “Textlinkbrokers” in Google News and then copy the RSS feed URL into your favorite news reader.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Well that’s great news, but how does that help with my site?”

Well now that you know how to auto generate feeds for virtually any topic you want, you can then import the feeds into your site using various methods.

Inserting Feeds into your site

Obviously you can’t just link to the feed, or paste the XML output into your pages. It wouldn’t be readable. What you need is some tool to convert the feed into something that is readable. And there are many out there to do just that.

So let’s look at the easiest – a Javascript from a hosted service like FeedRoll.

Using a service like FeedRoll you can input the URL of the feed you want, make some basic style changes and it will provide you with a Javascript you can then install on your site pages that will display the feed within your page content. One problem I have with FeedRoll is that you are limited to the list of feeds they provide. There was a time when you could use any feed URL but they’ve since changed it.

The only other way to use FeedRoll with your own feed is to buy their software package which will allow you to export the feed into HTML code that you can paste on your site.

However, if the feed you do like is in the list, then you could simply make the style changes you want, copy the Javascript code onto your page(s) and you are done. Once you’ve saved the page, load it in your browser and voila – you have regularly updating news headlines on the page.

But what if you want something a little more sophisticated?

Well there are options here as well including ASP and PHP based code which can take a live feed and format it on the fly.

Therefore, if you have a dynamic site and don’t mind monkeying around in the code this may be the solution for you.

Using PHP to display feeds

The benefit of using PHP to display RSS is that the contents of the feed displayed on the page can be spidered and indexed by search engines. That means links can be followed. That also means that if you have your own feed, you can place it on your home page (for example) to offer crawlers quick and easy access to your latest new content.

One of my favorite PHP based converters is called CaRP. There are both free and commercial versions which allow you to not only display the feed as HTML but also customize it any way you want with style formatting and even images displayed in feeds (much like you see on Google News now).

It can be a little tricky to set up at first as it isn’t strictly PHP but once you start playing around with the values you begin to realize just how flexible it is.

I know I use it on a personal site to display no only latest industry news but also my most recent blog posts and forum entries. This way crawlers can get into that new content quickly through direct links on the home page.

Using ASP to display feeds

Just like the PHP example above there is also an ASP script which will take an RSS feed and output it as static HTML.

My favorite is this feed converter which also allows you some leeway in outputting the feed the way you see fit.

If you are comfortable with ASP you will see how easy it is to manipulate the script to suit you. Even if you aren’t an ASP guru you’ll find the script fairly easy to implement with commented prompts throughout the script telling you how to make it work.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many ways to display feeds on sites – from hosted services to scripts embedded in ASP or PHP. Really the only thing limiting you is your ability and imagination.

I can tell you from experience that I’ve used all the above versions and I’m happy with each of them.

Also, because they will take any feed, your options for what you want to show are also only limited by your ability and imagination.

For example, I use the ASP one on an ASP site to display recent news from Google News. I have pages set up that pull Google news into a Google page, Yahoo! News into a Yahoo! Page and so on.

With the PHP (CaRP) script, I have the most recent blog posts and forum entries displayed on the home page of my site to help crawlers find the new content quickly.

With clients who have limited abilities or technical support I’ve implemented hosted versions as they are much easier to do.

So my recommendation to you is try them out and find the one that best suits you. If you don’t like the ones I’ve suggested here a simple search on your favorite search engine should return you lots of different options.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

In this article I explain what this technique is and how to use it.

There was apparently some talk at SES Chicago on getting a site indexed in regular results a lot quicker. This involved the use of an existing established similar domain (either one you own or one you bought) and use it to help you get a site out of the “sandbox.” The full forum post can be found here.

The technique is in the gray-to-black range. I wanted to mention that first, however if your site has been boxed for a while, this may be an alternative for you. It also requires some coding, and assumes your site is built in PHP although I would also guess there is similar ASP code out there.

First lets look at how this works: You have an established related domain and a new domain which is ‘boxed. By establishing a subdomain on the established site and mirroring the content of the new domain there you will get the new subdomain indexed more quickly because it would inherit some of the trust of the main domain.

Once it has established itself you would use some form of redirect (likely a 301) to redirect crawlers to the new domain. The new domain then inherits whatever the subdomain gained in terms of link popularity transferred from the established, trusted domain.

Sounds simple, but there are a few things you need to do.

First, obviously, is to find an established domain. If you need to buy an expired but still relevant site (and it’s in your budget) the author recommends you do so. You would also not change the registrar information, according to the author (this would be considered in that dark gray range).

You don’t want to change the registrar information because there is a chance that Google will notice the change in ownership and any trust the domain you just bought has previously earned would likely be lost.

So lets say you just bought a related domain that’s been around for a couple years and has a PageRank 5. by leaving the site intact and not changing the registrar information you are essentially ensuring the site maintains its existing stature in the engines.

Then you will create a subdomain on the site. Here you will place a mirrored copy of all your content navigation, etc. from your new site. Since the new site hasn’t been added to the index yet there will not be a duplicate content penalty.

You will also use some PHP coding to change the page header information to fool the webserver into thinking the page was created earlier than it was (the suggested PHP code is found in the forum post linked above). By telling the webserver the pages are old, you are informing the crawler that the pages are old as well.

This is because the crawler requests this information from the webserver at the time of indexing.

Because you’ve established a completely new section within an established domain the new section will get indexed sooner than the new domain.

It will inherit link popularity and trust from the parent domain allowing it to establish itself more quickly than the new site.

Once the subdomain has been fully indexed by Google you will want to redirect it to the new domain.

By doing this you have allowed the content to be found by Google which then assumes the pages are properly aged because it has been told by the webserver that the pages are in fact old (even though in reality you’ve recently created them).

By redirecting the subdomain you are then passing the inheritance and trust given to the subdomain by the main domain to the new site.

The reason this works is because the established site is already trusted by Google. Therefore the vote from the trusted site helps illustrate to Google that the new site is also trusted.

There are some things to consider with this tactic however:

Now that it’s been widely publicized I wouldn’t expect it will take that long for Google to realize the hole and patch it.

Also, the whole trustbox patent is based partly on authority but also on age. So while a page may appear old (because you’ve altered the page header served) Google may opt to instead consider the page’s age from the time it found the page.

In other words, even if the page is a year old, if Googlebot just found the page yesterday then it’s only 1 day old. While the patent does say that “scoring the document based, at least in part, on the inception date corresponding to the document,” it also goes on to say that Google could determine that age to be not the page date, but the date when it found the page.

And remember that like any type of blatant manipulation you risk being penalized by Google. Google engineers also visit these forums, don’t forget, so they are also keenly aware when new tactics are shared which are designed to circumvent the current algorithms.

Therefore it is their job to fix those holes, and likely also find ways to penalize the sites taking advantage of the holes. While no one can prove or disprove this theory, I’ve heard of enough sites which have been removed from the index for doing something they weren’t supposed to.

Therefore, while this may sound like a great way to get yourself out of the ‘box early, consider the alternatives. What if you do get out of the index early but Google catches on in 3 months, 6 months or more? Do you think they may decide to “backdate” any changes to your site if they determine that you participated in such a tactic? Then, not only are you back where you started, you could be worse off than if you had just taken your lumps and done things properly.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com