Dear Readers,

We’re glad to tell you that our newsletter archive has been updated and we hope you will like its new stylish looks. We’ve also added technical facilities for rating, bookmarking, and commenting to get your feedback! :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Web CEO Editorial Team

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Secondhand SEO: How to Optimize a Site Already “Optimized” by Someone Else. Part 2

In the previous issue of SEO MixTour we’ve touched upon the technical obstacles preventing search engine robots from visiting your site and technical mistakes that may be costing you good site ranking.

In this issue you will learn how to understand if the site optimization has been done correctly.

Third, check if your former SEO has made smart SEO decisions for your site. How? Just ask yourself the following questions:

• Does your site target the right keywords? The task of optimizing sites for extremely popular phrases is often impracticable, so SEOs tend to select less-popular keywords that make top rankings more easily achieved, but for which there is almost no traffic. Instead, re-evaluate your keyword policy to find the right keywords for your site. You can use Web CEO’s keyword suggestion tool to do so, which allows you to perform an accurate keyword popularity analysis.
• Is there enough text on your site pages? We can’t recommend any specific word count because the best word count is still a very speculative question, but you should be sure that you’ve communicated the purpose of your page existence effectively and in reasonably detailed elaboration—both to your human visitors and search engines.
• Do you find the key phrase that the page is optimized for in the page title, headings and body text? You can run a simple Web CEO Optimization report to evaluate all such SEO-critical areas of each of your pages.
• Is it easy to understand the Web site’s focus? Unfocused sites have no chance of outperforming sites that are clearly devoted to specific themes. Refer to an online tag-cloud generating tool for help (For instance, see: http://www.tocloud.com or http://tagcrowd.com/). This tool allows you to quickly see if your most frequently used words are devoted to the theme that you want to present on the site.
• Did you properly interlink your site pages? In other words, did your former SEO use links with keyword-rich anchor text on your most important pages? You can  check this perfectly with the help of Web CEO’s Link Popularity Analysis tool. To do so, run the Link Text Analysis report, set up a profile with Yahoo! and Exalead selected and your domain as a filter mask, and then move to the ‘By Page’ tab.
• Does your site have enough external links with keyword-rich anchor text? To answer this question, you can run the Web CEO Link Popularity Analysis tool (with Yahoo! and Exalead selected), obtain the Link Text Analysis report for your site and repeat the process for your competitors’ sites, and then compare them. (Of course, this type of analysis makes sense only if all of the sites you review are not large and long established).
• Even if you trust your ex-SEO, it’s better to be safe than sorry, so it’s not a bad idea to check your site for “bad neighborhood”. If your site is linking to sites with doubtful reputations, such as adult or casino sites, link farms, etc., you should remove these links. To examine external links, we recommend using Web CEO’s Auditor tool.

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for October 2009.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors. Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from August till October 2009.

Top 10 SEO Companies Trends

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Secondhand SEO: How to Optimize a Site Already “Optimized” by Someone Else. Part 1

As the manufacturer of a popular SEO software suite, from time to time we are asked how to best optimize a completed Web site that someone else has already attempted to optimize. Disappointed with the results of some self-proclaimed ‘SEO Specialists,’ Web site owners often decide to optimize and market their sites themselves.

That’s where we come in. In this issue of SEO MixTour, we offer you key recommendations as to which site aspects should be checked carefully for mistakes; mistakes that might be impeding your site’s search engine visibility.

First, check if your site is crawlable. In other words, you need to find out if search engine spiders can access all of your site pages that you want presented in search engine results. How?

• Open robots.txt (http://www.yoursitedomain.com/robots.txt) and see if there are any instructions for robots that are wrong (For example: User agent: * Disallow /). If your site has no robots.txt file, then all robots are able to crawl your entire site, which is OK unless you want certain specially protected site areas to be hidden from random visitors.
• On all important pages of your site, check for the presence and content of a Meta robots tag. A Meta robots tag should not use ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ commands.
• On all important pages of your site, check for the presence of a Meta refresh tag. Google doesn’t recommend them, so remove any Meta refresh tags and redirect visitors to a different URL with a server-side 301 redirect.
• Check if your site has a valid Sitemap. Typically, you can find your site map at: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, but may be placed in a different location. If you have no Sitemap, create one—see more details in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines . You can perform all of the above suggestions using your Web CEO Editor and Optimization tools.
• If you have a pure Flash-based site, you can’t hope for a good site ranking unless you have enough descriptive, keyword-rich text in your videos. Find more information about Flash site optimization on Adobe’s Site and in the previous issue of SEO Mix Tour. You might also want to create keyword-rich static alternatives of your most important pages.

Second, make sure there are no technical mistakes that may be costing you good site ranking.

• Ensure all your links have a consistent URL syntax, i.e. your links always begin only with http://www.yoursitedomain.com/ and never with http://yoursitedomain.com/. Make sure your server correctly translates requests for http://yoursitedomain.com or yoursitedomain.com to http://www.yoursitedomain.com  (Google names it ‘a canonical URL’) with the help of a server-side 301 redirect. You can also create a Google Webmaster account and use its tools to tell the preferred domain syntax specifically for Google.
• Check all of your important pages for repetitive titles. The content of your title tags should be unique and contain the key phrases for which each particular page is optimized. This is especially important if you have a CMS-based Web site. The same check can be performed to detect repetitive content in your Meta description tags, although this is not as critical these days as it was in the past.
• If your site pages are dynamically generated, make sure your site uses a solution for creating SEO-friendly page URLs that contain keywords. Typically, this task is completed using the .htaccess file, mod_rewrite or product/article/book/any meaningful name variables in the URL structure. If you have no idea of what kind of substitution for a dynamic URL would be a more readable static alternative, you can get a general understanding by reading the following Wikipedia article. With a static site, it is even easier for you to create keyword-rich page URLs.

SEO Experiment

This time we’ve requested from the most popular search engines the number of pages within specific domains that are included in their indices. As in our previous test, we took sites from Alexa’s top 1,000,000 popular sites.

Google indexes sites of all sizes best of all with a definite preference for the most popular sites (does the site authority come into play?) None of the other search engines comes even close to the results Google reports.

However, comparing the shares of specific search engines, we can see that Yahoo! indexes the middle and the end of the Alexa list better, and Bing does the best job of indexing the least popular sites.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines. Innovations take their own: Bing has increased its market share. And it seems, in some cases it was increased at the expense of Yahoo’s fall.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites. It looks like people’s faith in organic optimization has been shaken a bit, so its share decreased in comparison to the October 2008 point. Webmasters resort to the help of backlinks and paid advertising more and more.

Web Marketing Tip:

Some people will say: “I’m in a very competitive industry, so top positions for my targeted keywords are just a dream”.

Get a new angle on SEO: it’s very important to have your site crawlable, logically structured, clearly focused, and keyword-rich. Even if you create it basically for PPC marketing – Google’s Quality Score depends on your site content. Let alone the fact that visitors will like it.