Tidbits and Advice 11.29.07 (Website Authority)

November 29, 2007

SEO QUICKSTART TIDBIT #1:

Some might say that banner advertising is dead. If you’re interesting in marketing on a specific niche site and only accepts banners or you possibly have ad positions on your site that are banners, consider making them look less like banners and more like text.

From an interview with Jason Lexell “I read once in a book about copy writing that many people thought that “print was dead.” No it’s not dead. I think people like to call things they don’t know how to use effectively dead. An example are the google ads. You might say… “but these are text ads in highly relevant positions… they aren’t banners!” Well, then make your banners occupy more relevant positions and make them look more like text. I’ve got banners that consistently pull 2-3%. Anyone will tell you that’s 10 times the average.”

This just reinforces the theory that you can use links throughout your site to get people around. You might actually be doing more harm than good if you try to draw attention to something by making it a graphic. People might glaze over it and more importantly, the search engines might ignore it.

SEO QUICKSTART TIDBIT #2:

Arron Wall reports an interesting observation where he concludes why Wikipedia ranks well for a lot of big keywords but not on highly targeted and profitable keys. Here is a summary of his theory:

“Although Wikipedia ranks well for competitive phrases, they don’t belong to the associated topical communities. They rank primarily on site authority. While they have enough content to rank for said terms, they don’t have pages targeting those terms. In many cases the relevant content for the phrase is compressed as part of a broader related page. Their title tags target core keywords and lacks modifiers needed to rank well for popular terms that Wikipedia did not dedicate unique pages to.

To summarize the important observations as a Quick Start SEO Checklist:

1) Website authority is your general standing in the web community based on the amount of other relevant and important site that think you’re cool and useful. This is comprised of Relevant Content, Consistent Updates to Your Pages and Deep Linking from Authoritative Sources.

2) You must have this to rank well among your competitors. You must build individual pages that target your specific keywords. There is a very large difference between the act of targeting a page revolving around Bee Hives and a page about Properly managing bee hives.

3) The individual keywords that are a focus on your pages, including your page title, subject matter and keywords need to be highly specific and targeted to attract links and to rank well for those specific searches.