A few days ago, I offered to perform a SEO analysis on the website of one lucky winner– something at BlitzLocal that we normally charge between $6k-10k to do.  There were 23 responses and I’m choosing BusSongs.com, which is by Keith Mander, a current Facebook employee and ex-Googler (not to be confused with the other Keith that blogs here).

Let’s first start with an assumed goal of the site– to make money from ads, as there are no products to be found.  Keith is using 4 cleverly-placed Google AdSense units on each page, in addition to serving ads via Google Ad Manager (GAM)– a product that kills OpenAds and will be merged into DART DoubleClick (that’s the subject of another post). Notice how the links on the left blend in well with the orange.

The site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 and a MozRank of 4.58– moderate juice is flowing to the site. The MozRank, as developed by SEOMoz is a more accurate view of link juice that is flowing, as the toolbar PR is rarely updated, plus there’s a huge difference between a low 4 and a high 4.

This nice level of juice flows through the rest of the site nicely, allowing 3,130 pages to be reported indexed by Google, such that even lower level pages are getting crawled and are ranking.  Site that have a low homepage PR peter out quickly– there’s not enough juice left by the time the bot gets to the pages that are 3-4 links away from the homepage, so they don’t get indexed. To validate, just go to one of the lower level pages, grab a paragraph of text (maybe 15-20 words) and paste the whole thing right into the search box.  That will let you know what’s being indexed.

Also try some of the terms the site wants to rank on.  In this case, I searched on “99 bottles of pop on the wall” and see his site taking the first position.

Of course, search on just the domain and you see him first– if you’re not first on your own name, something is quite wrong or you have a generic name.

Not only does Keith rank #1 on his name, but he has 8 sitelinks, the maximum number of sitelinks you can have. While you can’t choose which links are sitelinks, it’s great to have them anyway.  You have to be in the #1 spot for a search and also have enough “authority”.

I’d guess that Keith wants to rank on “children’s songs”, as that is the first searchphrase in his home page title.  He’s #2 from my search here in the US, and the #1 result is PR5.  Let’s go to SEOmoz’s LinkScape tool (requires a subscription, but well worth it) to dig deeper….

While some SEO pundits like to wax on about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and how search engine theming can help you rank on terms that you don’t even have on your page– the more practical reality is that you want to have these terms on your page and for anchor text in sites that link to you.  Note that in the above seoMOZ LinkScape report, that the #1 anchor text is “bus songs”.  No surprise there, but “nursery rhymes” is #2 and “children’s songs” isn’t until #10, passing a piddly amount of juice from only a few domains.

Thus, Keith will have to decide whether it’s more important to go from #2 to to #1 on “children’s song” or try to get to the first page on “nursery rhymes”. It’s a question of big dwarf or little giant– which is bigger? Let’s find out how much volume is available:

For every 19 searches on “children’s songs”, there are 68 searches on “nursery rhymes”. Further, for every 19 searches on “children’s song”, there are 100 searches on “nursery songs”– the term you’d want to own if it were no extra effort.  Note that Google’s Insights for Search tool doesn’t tell you the exact number of searches on each term– rather, they give you a relative figure, with the most popular term being indexed at 100 and every other term scaled against that term.

So how do you decide what term to go after?  Let’s say that I was ranked #8 on “nursery rhymes” and #2 on “children’s songs”– good rankings on a highly popular term and great rankings on an okay term.  Moving from #8 to #3 on the popular term would produce about as much increase as going from #2 to #1 on the okay term.  As you get towards the top of the page, your CTR will go way up.  I wouldn’t be surprised if moving from #2 to #1 yielded a 3x increase in clicks.

Of course, you wouldn’t do this in a spammy way, where overnight all your inbound links suddenly have identical anchor text of “children’s songs”. But you could kindly ask the 70 sites who gave you 81 links with anchor of “bus songs” to switch to something else. If you add “bus songs” to the list in Google Insights for Search, you’ll see it has a paltry 4 versus the 100 for “nursery songs”.  I doubt you’d lose the #1 ranking on your name, largely because you get a boost from that being your domain, it’s not that competitive, and so many folks have already linked to you on that phrase.

Oh, and there are 26 inbound links that have BLANK anchor text– probably want to do something about that.

Finally, let’s take a look at bussongs.com through the eyes of a search engine spider, which reads text, not images.  It looks like this:

• The 32% text to code ratio is excellent– we like to see over 25%.
• The 301 redirects from the www homepage and index.php to non-www is smart– it solves the most common SEO problem, called the canonical domain issue. Most people redirect to www, but as long as you choose one, it doesn’t matter.
• missing meta information– you should at least have the meta description, since you’ll want to persuade the engines to use your description when your results show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).  Don’t worry about other meta tags– keywords, gaming H1 tags, and so forth.
• The alt text on images does very little, but while you’re at it, you should put your domain name at the END versus the beginning– change:

One word of caution, a few months ago, Google started changing search results to biased by whether you’re logged in, where you are geographically, and what you’ve searched on before.  Thus, check your rankings when you’re NOT logged in and also via proxies.  Every is getting different search results, so you don’t want to be led down the garden path.

And a few non-SEO items

• Funny that the #9 song is the Diarrhea Song– Kids…. what a sense of humor.
• If kids (and parents) like the site so much, where is your email auto-responder and newsletter subscription box?
• You should do the same on your Facebook page, which has 550 fans (of which I am one).  Use the Facebook static HTML plug-in to put in that email box, a poll, and other interactive stuff.
• Maybe even install Facebook connect and Facebook Fan boxes– you do work at Facebook now, right?
• Leaderboards are a powerful concept– People are driven to do silly things in the name of popularity.  Why not allow folks to submit songs, earn points as part of a community (provided they are old enough), and have “name that tune” games?  On your top visited page, you show pageviews per day.  If you shown total cumulative pageviews, the numbers would appear a lot more impressive.
• If I can nit-pick, you have some typos.  “Angles” should be “Angels” here in the page title and text.  By the way, I did that as an excuse to give you another PR5 link from my blog.

Keith, I hope you have enjoyed our SEO review today– congratulations on winning!  You have a great site, as we’d expect from a former Google employee.

Readers, I’m considering making this a weekly review, so if you’re interested in seeing more of this, let me know by posting to my Facebook fan page at facebook.com/dennisyu.

This morning, Shoemoney put up a guest post by me covering Facebook Quality Score. Because we manage a few dozen fan pages, as large as a quarter million fans, I wanted to lend insight into what the metric is and what it may mean to advertisers and affiliates in the future.  Let me clarify a few points:

• As far as we know, Facebook isn’t using the Quality Score to ding or help you in any way– but they may later.
• They’ve stated the score is based on percentage of fans who have interacted in the last 7 days. I’m guessing that the Post Quality score is like a batting average: the number of fans who have interacted in the last 7 days versus the total.  Therefore, the theoretical max should be 1,000.  Using this calculation across most of our pages gets us close, but not exactly to the number Facebook lists.
• Keith Wilcox’s score is now 250, which is the highest I’ve seen yet– it will be easier to get a high quality score on a smaller fan base. Getting 25% of 30 fans to participate over 7 days is easier than 25% of 3,000 fans.  Someone should experiment here.  Because of his Facebook page– his top source of traffic– he is now ranking on Google for “getting fit setting goals“.

If you have any questions about Facebook promotion, whether their self-serve PPC platform, creation of pages/groups, building/monetizing applications, just put your question in the comments and I may write a post about it.

Facebook keeps releasing new features to their self-serve PPC platform. It feels like Google from 2003– are you keeping up?

Did you see that you can target people on their birthdays, in addition to your existing fans, as well as being able to select multiple countries?

• If you’re selling gifts of any type– this is your chance to do something.  Cards, flowers, T-shirts, silly items… Doesn’t even have to be birthday related– you could even promote a little cosmetic surgery to older women– Imagine this ad:

• If you’re a brand, you can pay to hit your fans when they’re elsewhere on Facebook– think of this like the old days of Paid Inclusion on Yahoo! or perhaps like today’s brand bidding.  The point is there is some level of cannibalization to pay for people that you already “have” as fans.  Yet if this drives incremental traffic, you can price in that overlap to make sure it backs out.  And if you have less than 100 fans, who cares.  But if you’re a brand like WWE and have over 250,000 fans, it would be a great way to drive marginal revenue. Now it’s too bad you can’t target OTHER people’s brands and fan pages.  That would be like Coke bidding on Pepsi.  What would you pay to be able to target your competitors?  Oh, wait– I forgot.  You can do that all day long on PPC.
• If you just want to be a pimp: Some people just don’t have a good reason to market.  But maybe if you get to 100 fans on your page, you can then register your page’s vanity url here.  Even if you have no fans to start with, if you’re paying 30 cents a fan, it’s only $30 to get to 100 fans, and then you can grab a name like facebook.com/toiletpaper or whatever you fancy. Many generic names are still free.
  

If you’re making profits via these new tactics, however small, it’s time to scale them up. If you are a non-spammy advertiser, then I welcome you to sign up for our automated Facebook ad posting platform, which automatically multiples variations of ad creatives and landing pages, then reports back with the best performers.  If you’re selling weight loss, get rich quick scams (also euphemistically called “BizOpps”) or products that auto-renew at insane rates (called “negative option”), then don’t bother, since your ads won’t get approved by us or by Facebook.

But maybe you’re a stay at home dad filming how to home school videos or perhaps reviewing top 10 kids movies, in preparation for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.  Don’t laugh– if you’re an affiliate and you aren’t starting now, you’re late to the game.  Then it makes sense to start promoting your wares.

I’m presenting on Facebook advertising at Affiliate Summit East in 2 weeks, and again, at HostingCon 2 days later.  Come join me!

Do a search for “hooked on phonics” and you’ll see 869,000 results on Google.  If you’re an affiliate pushing this program, you know how much it costs per click on paid search, plus what the payouts are if you promote via Commission Junction or Amazon.com (if you’re not in certain states)– generally 15% or around $20 a sale.  As an affiliate, you’re not allowed to bid on the term “hooked on phonics”, “hooked on fonics”, “hooked on phonix” or related terms– they’re branded terms reserved for the advertiser. So the most popular search is off limits to you if you are just a PPC affiliate.

Incidentally, I think it’s hilarious that so many people who want to learn how to read are misspelling the brand like crazy.  It’s like those people who bought time management books, but never had the time to get around to reading them.

Now consider my friend Keith Wilcox who bought Hooked on Phonics for his kids.  He’s been blogging for 3 weeks now– never blogged before– and his site is now Google PR2 and is starting to rank for commercial terms. The site gets only a few hundred hits a day– but not bad for a site only a month old and with less than 50 posts.

The key point here is that he’s blogging about what he likes and knows a lot about– how to home school kids.  You can see his video, where his 5 year old is reading at the 2nd grade level and is a month away from starting 3rd grade.  The post has 923 words and doesn’t use any formulas for keyword density, page title stuffing, hidden divs, cloaking, or any SEO tricks to get traffic.  Rather, he’s just writing passionately about homeschooling his two children.  I’ll bet you could come up with some ways that he could get more traffic and make more money here.  I’ll list a couple:

• Title his youtube video: “hooked on phonics: teaching my kids“ instead of “reading 06292009″.  Also add a description that says something like “Actual lesson with Hooked on Phonics. My 5 year old is reading at the second grade level. I am proud to home school my two boys.”  YouTube is the 4th largest search engine on the planet, based on a recent Google seminar we attended, but there are only 320 videos competing on “hooked on phonics”.
• Link to the Hooked on Phonics site with your affiliate code: No tracking code, no commission earned.  Name a product you like– odds are there’s an affiliate program for it.
• Mix up the keywords: Jam in too many reading related terms and it won’t sound natural.  Use Google Suggest and Wonder Wheel to see what the popular terms are.

All this to show that a person who is not an affiliate by any stretch can get traffic from just writing good content and getting a couple good links here and there.

//

Update: He now has a top Daddy Bloggers list, with 115 sites carefully chosen and reviewed.  Already, he is building links from sites that are topically relevant and already trusted by Google.

Keith Wilcox is a stay-at-home dad blogging about his two kids and family life– providing a distinctly male perspective and quite outspoken.  Some examples: four exercises that will make you a better parent, busting your child out of a locked car, why talking to your kid in baby talk just infantilizes them, what to do with too many toys, and being a revolutionary parent.

There are tie-in’s to general psychology.  For instance, lavish praise doesn’t spoil a child. Studies show that the childhoods of successful leaders are absurdly full of encouragement– you just can’t encourage them too much, odd as that may seem.

Update:

For a list of top daddy bloggers on the web– check out this comprehensive list of 115 sites.

July 20, 2009:

• Keith is now ranking #4 on google for “unnecessary baby products“. And he has 467 pages indexed by Google, while my blog has only only 398 pages.
• For “cell phones suck“, Keith is now ranking #2.
• For “unpronounceable names“, #7.
• #4 on “avoiding cliques“.