Archive for June, 2008

Simply put, Siloing is architectually structuring your website to get the Search Engines to recognize your site is about your targeted keywords. You want the Search Engines to consider you as the subject matter expert.

What exactly is a Silo?
“A silo is a vertical page linking design. You have your landing page, or your main page, at the top of the silo and underneath this page you have pages which support your main landing page theme.”

Siloing is a very powerful method to get ranked on Google. There are a lot of things to do that by themselves have little weighting, and all those little things add up for a powerful punch. But, siloing is a power punch all by itself. It’s an advanced SEO technique that is a heavyweight amongst SEO techniques.

What’s the problem?:
For example, lets say you have an ecommerce site selling widgets. And, you want to optimize for “red widgets”. But, you also sell white, black, green, purple, and 200 other types of widgets. So, the multitude of all those other 199 types of colored widgets are diluting the “red widgets” on your website. By selling 199 other types of widgets, your site might not be recognized as a subject matter expert on “red widgets”.

The answer is, you want to create themes (silos of content) within your website. The question is, how do you delineate themes, instead of bleeding them all together?

Whether you use Directory or Virtual Silos, keep in mind that cross-linking between subjects dilutes your theme.

There are several ways to create silos:
1) Tagging
2) Categories
3) Directories
4) Related pages plugin
5) ONLY link to landing pages using your Target keyword.
6) Create a mini-sitemap on each page within your silo.

Note: Many websites will find the need to increase the amount of their content by creating additional webpages.

Expected Outcomes:
1) Higher rankings
2) Increase in overall traffic
3) More unique visitors
4) More traffic from long tail keywords.

An added benefit is that Siloing will appeal to both your users and bots.

Additional Resources:
PageRank sculpting
Siloing WordPress: video presentations
Siloing Revisited
Building a Web Site Theme with Silos
Theming Through Siloing

Let’s start with the an overview of the basics. When you go to a web page, say, cnn.com , there is a lot going on behind the scenes to make that page show up in your browser. Remember, before anything can happen, a TCP/IP connection is established between your computer and the cnn.com webserver through port 80. Your browser will then start requesting “assets” to build the page. Some of these assets include HTML, CSS, Javascript and Image files, etc. They allow the browser to render the web page visible to you.

The Webserver and your browser talk to each other in a protocol called HTTP (over TCP/IP). The two most common ways of communicating over HTTP are GET and POST. Without going into the gory technical details, the difference between a “GET” and a “POST” is that the “GET” method passes form data on the URL which is visible in the browser location window. In the POST method, the form data is sent along with the body of the request and is not visible in the URL. The following is an example of HTTP communication showing a GET request for the cnn.com logo which was sent to the Webserver by my browser.

GET /cnn/.element/img/2.0/nav/header_cnn_com_logo.gif HTTP/1.1
Host: i.cdn.turner.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Accept: image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.cnn.com/

Below is the response that is sent back by the Webserver to my browser.

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:21:24 GMT
Content-Type: image/gif
Expires: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:21:24 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 09:29:49 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 1607
Cache-Control: max-age=3600, proxy-revalidate
Age: 0

Notice how the Webserver responded to the request from my browser with a status code of 200. This means my request has been granted and it gives me the image. My browser received the CNN logo along with other files. For each of the assets there is a request sent and a response received. You can learn more about the HTTP status codes at the official w3.org site. If you use the Internet you most likely have come across the status code 404, which means the request can’t be found. In this post I’d like to discuss the status code 301.

A 301 status code returned by the Webserver my the browser that the requested URL has moved and passes a parameter containing the new location back to my server. So, included in the response is a “Location header” with the new location. My browser then makes another request for the new URL.

Here is an example of a status code 301 sent by the Webserver:

HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:42:26 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Location: http://www.somehost.com/thenewpage.php
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=98
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/plain

Note that the browser makes 2 requests for the desired URL with the 301 redirect. The new URL can also be 301 redirected, this is called chaining and should be avoided if you want play nice with the search engine spiders.

The 301 redirect is search engine friendly to some extent. This means that if a particular URL has “link juice” (it’s a popular link for some keywords) a 301 redirect should transfer the popularity to the new URL. From what I read in Search Engine Optimization with PHP (a fantastic SEO book for the technically savvy) this can take some time for the transfer to occur, so 301 redirects should be applied with caution to high ranking URL’s.

PHP:
<?php
header(’http/1.1 301 Moved Permanently)’
header(’Location: http://www.mydomain.com/seo_consultant.php’);
?>

JSP:
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.mydomain.com/seo_consultant.php’ );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

Javascript:
<Javascript (client side):
script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “http://www.mydomain.com/seo_consultant.php”
//–>
</script>

The Javascript method is not a recommended. At some point spammers were using this method and, as a result, search engines are not in favor of client side redirection using Javascript.

The other methods for redirecting traffic is to use the .htaccess file. The nice thing about the .htaccess file is that you can use regular expressions when creating your redirection rules. With regular expressions you can do a mass 301 redirect if certain conditions are met. Here is a good .htaccess file tutorial.

Here is an example for redirecting a single page in your .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 oldpage.html to http://www.mydomain.com/newpage.html

The following lines show canonical redirecting; that is when someone requests your domain without the www, they will be 301 redirected with the www.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$

Thank you, Shimon for giving me the opportunity to post here. I hope to share additional SEO posts here with a technical twist.

Ron Tovbin is a senior-level programmer. Read more of his writing on his blog ITsecPackets.

If you’re conducting a PPC campaign that is internationally geo-targeted to specific countries, then this post is for you. Especially, if you are unfamiliar with their native language.

Let’s take a PPC campaign geo-targeting Germany. Obviously you’d want to build a keyword list in German, and run it on Google.de.

First, I tried using Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. They don’t work for building a foreign language keyword list. I generated the top 1000 search terms related to the word, “music“. The german word for music is, musik. It wasn’t listed at all. As a matter of fact, no foreign language was on the list. Just try generating a German language keywords. Or, try japanese. It’s just not happening with Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker.

Which led me to use the German Google Keyword Tool (Notice the .de extension on the url). My Google team told me within the Google Keyword Tool in Adwords, the default is United States only. “If you use the geo-targeting settings, you will be able to pull keyword data for the countries that are available. If you’d like additional ideas to the keywords that you’ve inputted, this can be done by clicking on the “Use Synonyms” option.”.

However, the Google Keyword Tool doesn’t seem to work.
I went to German Google Keyword Tool and logged in with my adwords login. Type in “music”, and “Use Synonyms” option. Surprisingly, there isn’t one german language word on the list! Google will not translate the words that are generated!

So, here’s 3 methods to generate a foreign language international keyword list.

Method #1:
You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to generate foreign language keyword lists by entering a website URL into the Keyword Tool to crawl for similar words. As a test, I used http://www.musik-service.de.

Although I have to admit, I can’t speak German, so I don’t know which of those keywords I want to bid on. Even though I can’t speak German, I’m lucky that my co-worker Carmen speaks German fluently. And, besides speaking German she is my queen of Google Analytics.

Within the tool, you can see how Google automatically groups the terms into adgroups for you. I inputted this URL into the Google Tool: http://www.realbeatz.de

Method #2:
Quantcast for “Similar sites”, then use Spyfu to mine the keywords.

Method #3:
Generate your keyword list in English, then use Yahoo Babelfish to translate all the terms.

Bottomline:
I have not been able to find a Keyword Volume Tool, similar to Wordtracker for foreign language countries. But following the above methods, you should get off to a good start.

Even after you’ve built your foreign language keyword list, unless you speak the language you won’t know how to group them into adgroups. At that point, you should make a connection with somebody who speaks the foreign language fluently.