Weekly DS SEO 2010-04-30

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April 30, 2010 Welcome to the SEO Chat newsletter. If you've been following Google's efforts in spheres other than search, you know that it recently backed away from an agreement to put its Nexus One smart phone on the Verizon network. What's up with that? eWeek has the full story for you; feel free to check it out. Now let's get back to search engine optimization. Many of us started out with a simple free blog, from Blogspot or a similar site, and then wanted to grow. The next step is to buy your own domain. So how do you switch over your content to the new domain and web host without risking a duplicate content penalty and the lost of all that link juice? Check out the two-part series we ran this week on SEO Chat for the details. If you're just getting ready to do SEO on your site or wondering why it isn't working as well as you think it should the article we ran on Monday may answer your questions. It covers what you need to do to prepare your site for SEO. Once you've been doing SEO for a while, you may decide that you want to try to grab more than one spot at the top of the SERPs for your keyword. Is that best done with one site or several sites? This week's thread considers the question of whether three sites are better than one. Why not stop by the thread and add your experience? And while you're checking out our sites and forums, you might enjoy paying a visit to Tutorialized. You'd find tons of content related to website design and development, including more than 120 tutorials on SEO. Learn how to get more traffic, how to recover a fallen ranking in the search engines, how to do keyword research, and much more. If you're feeling generous and want to share your expertise, it's easy to submit your own tutorial. Our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, ponders what is more important: onsite SEO or offsite SEO. The answer might surprise you. Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. . As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES Finish Moving Your Blogspot Blog to Another Host with Link Rel Canonical Tags Move a Blogspot Blog to Another Host using Link Rel Canonical Tags Prepare Your Site for SEO SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail

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Finish Moving Your Blogspot Blog to Another Host with Link Rel Canonical Tags by Codex-M 2010-04-28 In the first part of this two-part article, you created the complete list of equivalent URLs between your Blogger-hosted blog and your new domain. In this part, we will continue with the rest of the steps we need to take to move the blog, and you will learn how to dynamically add a link rel canonical element to your Blogger template source code in such a way that it conforms specifically to the standard set in part one. Third Step: Convert your Blogger Classic Template to be XML-based (optional) Later, you will implement Blogger scripting codes that won't work with the classic Blogger templates. So if you are using a classic-based Blogger template, you will need to convert it to an XML-based template using the following procedure... Read Finish Moving Your Blogspot Blog to Another Host with Link Rel Canonical Tags

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Move a Blogspot Blog to Another Host using Link Rel Canonical Tags by Codex-M 2010-04-27 Switching to a new web host and transferring Blogger content to your newly established domain is not that difficult. You can simply export your Blogger posts and import them to the new publishing software you use in your new hosting environment (WordPress, for example). But not doing it correctly can lead to Google penalties from duplicate content and not getting link juice passed appropriately. This article will help you avoid those problems. Statement of the Problem As mentioned in the introduction, the trickiest thing to do is avoid duplicate content and successfully transfer the link juices you have earned from your Blogspot address to your new domain. Suppose your Blogspot front page URL is: http://webdevelopmentexperts.blogspot.com/ and has 200 backlinks pointing to it from other domains. Note: Domain URLs used in this article are hypothetical examples only for illustration purposes. Read Move a Blogspot Blog to Another Host using Link Rel Canonical Tags

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Prepare Your Site for SEO by Terri Wells 2010-04-26 Your web site looks good. You've given it all the things you've been told it needs: great titles; H1-H3 tags, meta tags, good quality unique content, and easy navigation. But you're still not getting the traffic you deserve. What should you do next? Perhaps your site isn't quite as ready to fully benefit from your SEO efforts as you thought. Just as you need a good foundation in place before you build a house, there are certain basic things you need to have in place if you want to get the most out of your SEO efforts. This article will walk you through that preparation. First, let me give credit where it's due. This advice comes from Gary Beal, also known as GarytheScubaGuy in the SEO Chat forums. Every year for the past three years, he's been giving out sets of tips for improving web site optimization. This article is adapted from his latest set, which actually forms a step-by-step strategy ⤽that most anyone with a bit of knowledge can implement,⤝ according to Beal. I'm going to cover as many as I can here, in some depth (I may only get through a few this time, but you can be sure I'll cover the rest in future articles). Read Prepare Your Site for SEO

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! Tips for SEO Friendly Websites Form follows function. Before designing a website there are quite a few important factors to consider. Read the tutorial. What Does Seo Stand For? What does seo stand for? Simply put SEO stands for search engine optimization. Read the tutorial. Submit Your Sitemap to Google Techniques you can use to submit your sitemap to Google. An imperative step to get good rank! Read the tutorial. 30 SEO Tips for Web Designers & Small Business Owners 30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. How to Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Crowd Quick tips to improve your blog from every aspects! Read the tutorial.

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How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.

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What's the best way to dominate the SERPs for your keyword: multiple sites or just one? That's the question being considered in this week's thread. Check it out! packbacker79 Multiple URLs with Basically Same Content...SPAM? I have been reading putting your keyword in the URL can help with page rank as well as how I title the pages etc. So here is my question..... let's say I am selling plasma tvs and the top 3 keywords for this are: plasma tv plasma television tv plasma and let's say I buy plasmatv.com plasmatelevision.com tvplasma.com They are completely separate sites..there is no forwarding or redirect. Each of the sites is titled and tagged differently but I am using the same website template with basically all of the same information. Maybe some different language based on the keyword the person searched for... Would this be spamdexing? Would I get penalized for this? Robertomac Sounds long-winded to me and a definite spam and trust issue. If, like the TV example quoted, your terms are that similar you could build and optimise one site for all those phrases. This would take you a third of the time, and would mean you're concentrating on optimising one site and not three. My advice is buy the domains to protect your brand, but only set up one website. gazzahk The problem with this approach is even wining the SERPs with one of those domains would be super hard. The keyword in domain name is only a small help in rankings. You need better quality links than the sites you are trying to beat. A person is normally best served making one kicka$$ site than many weak sites... Think quality not quantity; this normally gives the best ROI in SEO... Good luck Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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What's More Important, Onsite or Offsite SEO? From the very beginning, Google's algorithm looked first and foremost at a site's links. It still does. While the search engine considers tens of factors in its algorithm, experts and observers note that links deliver 70 percent of the weight that goes into awarding a web page its particular position in the SERPs. By those lights, any sane SEO should spend most of his or her time working on link building. After all, that's where one earns the greatest benefit, right? Yes and no. If you rank high enough in the SERPs, the searchers will find you. They might even be persuaded to visit. But what will they find when they visit your site? With votes in the form of links rated so high in Google's algorithm, it's still possible, according to SEO Chat forum member eddyf, to get a site to rank high even if doesn't have any useful content; he's seen it happen. But he doesn't pursue that kind of strategy himself. ...I don't measure success by rankings alone. What I care about is how many people hit the Buy Button, eddyf explained. Links will drive traffic, but you need to convert that traffic. The easiest way to convert traffic is to give visitors what they want. They went to Google because they were looking for content, whether it's the best digital camera or the funniest LOLcat pictures. They'll visit if you're high in the SERPs, but they won't stay unless you give them content. And content, of course, is strictly an onsite issue. Respected SEO Chat forum member himanshu160 notes that people do onsite SEO for any number of reasons, but he personally does it to create pages that can sell. While many who do SEO see gaining high rankings as their goal, the real point of SEO is to generate revenue for a website and not to get back links or rankings, himanshu160 explains. Ignoring the onsite factors completely and spending all of your time pursuing back links, according to him, is like running a shop in a jam-packed mall but without any salesmen. Your content is both your product and your salesman; neglect it at your peril. Read the relevant forum thread.

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