There are many theories that float around the SEO world, certain tactics that are now supposedly defunct, or are misunderstood. One of the most debated is Reciprocal Linking - you may as well have said a dirty word when you dare utter the phrase! Some now refer to it as a link exchange. I feel that there is still a very important place for this practice. I think if it makes sense, do it! There are many times when this is a perfectly acceptable practice.

Say for example, you are selling gourmet cookbooks on your Web site. It naturally makes sense to link out to a provider of gourmet cooking untensils, or pots and pans, especially if they are items recommended in your cookbooks. Asking for a link in return is also acceptable, especially if you have already placed a link to them on your site. This is beneficial for both parties, in that the sites are related, it makes sense to link to one another, it is only natural to do so. Your users will appreciate the ease with which they are able to find the cookware mentioned in your books. Their users will appreciate thier ability to buy great cookbooks to go with thier new cooking tools. A relationship is formed. This aspect is important, as you would not want to form this relationship with just anyone.

Linking to the wrong site is to be avoided. Because a link is viewed as a “vote” for that site, you want to avoid linking to the wrong kind of site. An example of this would be that your nephew Marvin has a site. His site is all about his pet cat, and he really wants you to exchange links. Don’t do it! Marvin’s cat has nothing to do with your gourmet cookbook business, it won’t benefit your users, and it will look questionable to the search engines, causing you to loose some of your standing. Now, if Marvin has a section of his site devoted to gourmet cooking, with some articles and other interesting tidbits, then it would be appropriate to link to that page, and to have him link to you from that page.

As for forming the wrong kind of relationship, be careful about whom you ask for a link. If they have a links page devoted to obscure, unrelated sites, you probably don’t want to be on that links page. The site is just trading links with anyone who is willing, and you are in the wrong neighborhood, get out!

As always, if you provide good information, some points of interest, and are willing to do some work, building links will come, slowly, but they will come.

So, how do you feel about granting link requests? Do you do it? Do you ask for a link in return?

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Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types.

The more pages that Google sees or indexes, the more opportunity your site has to appear in Google’s search results. For TKG.com, we have about 400 or so live pages; however Google is not seeing or indexing all of these pages because this newly purchased domain had been blacklisted and therefore removed from Google’s index altogether - so we’ve been reviewing Google Webmaster Tools, strategizing, implementing changes, etc. to ensure that Google indexes he majority of our new domain.

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The user interface is pretty clean and easy to navigate. Here is what the publishing section looks like.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land wrote a Knol already about SEO pluggins for Firefox that has some comments you can see, one being from Google’s own Matt Cutts.

Twitter has also been buzzing a little bit about the launch. Some people have tried to publish their Knols and they have ended up not working. It will be interesting to see how this social site grows and if it will become as mainstream as Wikipedia. I’m not very impressed with the site thus far. I know it’s a new site so it doesn’t have a lot of content, but it seems to just be a repeat of the other large social knowledge sites.

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The topic of interest that I found most fascinating was the overview of the Google Website Optimizer. The purpose of this program is to actually improve your website once it has been established. The Website Optimizer is built into the Google AdWords interface and it helps you find out which content will convert best on your landing pages. Newsletter sign-ups, contact forms and purchases are all examples of conversions that can be tracked. The key aspect of this is to do A/B testing. This type of testing allows you to compare and contrast ‘page A’ and ‘page B’. This program allows you to set up an A/B test on your site and it randomly assigns users to a test. For example, it will assign users to different versions of your homepage, and from the data that is collected, decide which version is more advantageous to your users. You may also want to set up an A/B test on a site if it has a large cart abandonment rate, or long cart process in order to see which cart process works best for the users to your site.

To me, this would be an extremely important tool to use if any of our clients are experiencing some difficulty in their cart process. The best part of the Google Website Optimizer is that it is free!

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His first suggestion for webmasters is to be creative. By being creative he means to target a particular niche or longer tail keyword phrase. It doesn’t make sense for a small site to that sells widgets to go after the term widgets. The site should be creative and go after a small niche within the widget industry. They could start targeting blue round widgets and have a lot of success with it. In targeting these niches, Matt’s advice is to become the authority. Google and users trust sites that show they know what they are talking about.

A final note Matt talks about is to leverage your speed. Big sites can take a long time to get things approved and implemented. Smaller sites are able to test out new things and make the changes quicker than the big players.

Small businesses have a great opportunity online. SEO is a must and can greatly improve a site’s visability and exposure. A lot of people over look the opportunities that the longer tail keywords have. When a user does a query for a term like “ipod”, they could simply be in the research stage of the buy cycle. If a site understands that, they could target a phrase like “black 30 gig ipod” that would signal this searcher could be looking to purchase since they are looking for a particular color and memory size. Small business should use SEO to their benefit and leverage their size and speed against their bigger competitors.

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I’m researching now & hoping this is just a fluke…

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Concentrating on the latter, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is typical to most SEO campaigns: increase natural results position and increase conversions for the site. AKA, getting qualified, interested users to where they need to be.

So, with that mission in mind, we have to start initial SEO keyword research to ensure that you are going after the correct phrases. This step is an extremely important in the overall process, so don’t be afraid to spend a little extra time on it. Here are a couple of keyword targeting guidelines that I try to follow:

1. The number of phrases you target should depend on the size of the site.  Obviously, the bigger the site the more opportunity you have to target more key phrases.
   
2. Spend some time on the site, putting yourself in the position of a potential visitor. What terms would you be using if you were looking for this information? Most of you will know your business fairly well, so it may be pretty easy for this initial run-through. Document your results in a separate document for tracking purposes.
3. Although there has been some recent debate on whether you should invest in long tail phrases, I wouldn’t be really quick to abandon the idea. For example, a client in the custom carpentry business,  may be interested in going after the term “legs” in association with a table part, but that may be just a little too general and way too competitive. While you may have the desire to go after some of these more general terms, unless your sole mission is to bring in traffic to your site with no regard for the visitors qualification to convert, it probably will not result in a ton of sales or contacts.
4. Consider the competition and popularity of sites you are trying to go after. Automated tools can help here, (including Trellian, Google AdWords tools, etc.). The goal is a popular (often searched), non-competitive phrases.
5. Target key phrases that can be currently supported on your site.
6. Document your findings, so in the future when you are adjusting your keyword strategy, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Once you have narrowed it down, do some benchmarking so that you can compare what impact your SEO efforts has had on the rankings for your core list.  As a general SEO strategy, TKG relies heavily on our ability to compare site trends through benchmarking, including a great post on benchmarking online conversions that may give you some ideas about the strategy.

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Today, Google is indexing 40% more pages! Google is still about 300 pages from indexing all of TKG.com, but this is trending in a positive way, so I’m not overly concerned at this point; I am getting a little anxious though…

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Guest Blogger: Chad Henderson
As it relates to the recent discussion about the use of the long tail theory,  I’m nowhere close to abandoning the strategy as an important component in keyword targeting.  I thought it might be helpful to spend a couple of minutes expanding on my “yes” vote for the continued use of  long tail keywords.

Web traffic is unlike typical business models where 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients.  Most qualified web traffic is the reverse of that, where 20% of your business comes from your “top” key words, with the remaining traffic being generated from the remaining 80% of your key phrases.  What it boils down to is trying to figure out the multiple variations of key phrases, and choosing key phrases that capture the market share.

To help illustrate this marketing point, the long-tail concept is demonstrated in the following graph utilized in some recent forum and blog threads concerning long tail theory.   Here,  Seth Godin discusses three “pockets” of the long tail and highlights three areas of importance on the curve.

Here are a couple of other examples of choosing long tail optimized keywords to give you a better idea about the concept:

• An online auto parts store choosing “ford mustang exhaust system” versus “auto parts”, or
• A dog training service choosing  “dog obedience classes” versus “dogs”

In both of these examples, the selection of the “longer” key phrases will most probably result in more targeted traffic to the site, and thus more conversions.  The moral of the story… don’t be afraid to use 2-4 word key phrases as your target key phrases, it may end helping your overall objective.

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