If you’ve got 6 minutes and 31 seconds, give this a shot from my friend Alex, who has the most popular paper airplanes site on the web.  If you’re one of those folks who likes to watch cooking shows, but doesn’t actually get around to following along– don’t worry, you can do this no sweat.  The plane is called the Cobra– and it took me only one sheet of paper (proof below) to do it, although I had to pause and rewind a couple times.  Flies perfectly as claimed– like a dart.

Check out Alex’s personal blog, as well as his cocktail making site.  If you’re really brave, try making the sweaty bollock recipe, which has 3 shots of absinthe.  If you don’t know what bollock are– look it up.  Perhaps making cocktails and paper airplanes don’t mix!

Some pages on his site, such as the types of paper airplanes, don’t have page titles  (SEO ooops!)– but all is forgiven for the man who is in charge of Facebook’s own SEO and online marketing. You can learn a lot from this man– not just about paper airplanes and cocktails.

Recently seen and heard again, starting anything with the words: “Do you need” or “Do you want” are big spam flags.  It’s mostly applicable to email, but also on web pages.  This will affect you in organic search and possibly paid search Quality Scores.

A lot of the rules that trigger spam flags in email will work for web, too.  Think about it.

This is a guest blog post by Ahteram Uddin, who runs online marketing for the Times of India, the largest newspaper in the world. Yes– bigger than New York Times.

If you are into News aggregating business or your website has an industry specific News section you stand a chance to drive additional traffic from the Google News Search, which is very powerful yet simple tool to make it work for you.

I am going to tell you how to invite Google News Bot and rank your news in the Google News Search. I will try to talk about all ranking factors, best practices for the News optimization and answers to some frequently asked questions.

SEO for News

All right, so where do you find your News listed – On Google.com (or .co.in) like the one below

And on the Google News

I am sure you must have wondered at some point of time – how do these articles appear on Google and how does this work?

Well in one line I can say “Google crawls it, groups it and then rank it here” but this isn’t fair if I don’t tell you what exactly helps your News qualify for the listing and get that Free traffic and audience base. I am going to make an attempt to cover each factor in as much depth as possible.

How does Google discover my News articles?

CRAWLING- Much like Search bot, Google has these News Bots who are gonna go out to the news sites to look for the news articles. There are two ways Google retrieves these articles

1. Discovery crawl – Google sees new URLs and makes a crawl and indexes it.
2. News SiteMaps – This is a unique method of telling a News bot about your new content by including all your new URLs

If there are some articles or content that you don’t want Google to index and crawl you can always use a robots.txt file to ask them not to do so. Google respects the protocol, alternatively you can also use header tags for the same.

GROUPING- Once the articles are crawled they are brought back to the Google’s database for the grouping phase. Google has its own content classification idea, if you look at the below articles from TimesofIndia.com

In case of the above news Google looks at “Business, Sensex, BSE and Nifty” words and determines that this article belongs to business section and similarly looking at “India, Mumbai and Bombay” it makes out that this is geographically targeted to India. That’s how Google populates different editions like US, UK and India. The sections in Google News like entertainment, politics and health are also populated in the same fashion.

NEWS CLUSTER RANKING- The story ranking algorithm decides which story to place higher and then on the subsequent ranks. Once the Google is ready with the news clusters (group) it ranks them basis “Aggregated Editorial Interest”.

What (t.f.) do you mean by Aggregated Editorial Interest?

In the upper diagram what you see is small news that makes an impact on the smaller region or group of people. For example an N.G.O. is distributing free umbrellas to the poor people in New Delhi. This is a great human interest story this might be covered in a few local newspapers and a few news agencies might pick up.  This is still a small story and not showing much aggregated editorial interest as compared to the announcement of Congress (I) forming government in the center, this will not only be covered in the local newspapers, will be covered by many news agencies globally, picked up by op-ed and there will be loads of follow up articles.

Therefore due to the larger aggregated editorial interest this news cluster will be picked up the Google to be placed above the news about NGO distributing umbrellas in Delhi.

ARTICLE RANKING- Article ranking helps Google post a cluster of news articles, so let’s say if there are around 300 articles about “new government in Delhi” Google has a way to determine which one to rank first and which one to second and so within the cluster. There are several factors for an article ranking but I am going to talk about the few most critical ones-

• Fresh and new – It’s essential for the article to be recent, substantial, and original and focused to the topic. Op-ed, satire, press releases and subscription are not eligible to lead the cluster.

• Duplication and novelty detection – Google always tries to give credit to the original and the novel content. Let’s say there was an article originally done by the economictimes.com and later another article on the same topic gets published by financialtimes.com with a reference to economictimes.com original article saying this story was broken by ET and mention it as their source of information.  So now this article from ET might start ranking higher now because other people are sending reference to it quoting it as the original story.

• Local and personal relevancy – It is given weightage by section and story and more credit is given to the local sources which are likely more relevant to the news article. For example the news about NGO distributing umbrellas Google would prefer to choose Delhitimes.com rather than expressIndia.com which has all India reports.

• Trusted source – Google uses its historic data to decide what type of source works best for which section or geography. So if there are 5 stories published in a particular section and most of the people clicked the 4^th one then Google records it in its database as the most relevant source for that type of news.  Therefore over a period Google starts building a database of what type of news from what publication work best for which geography. This must be kept in mind that the trust weightage is allocated at the section level at not for the entire news source. For example economictimes.com may be more reliable source for Google news when it comes to the breaking business news but moneycontrol.com may be its favorite for the stock related searches. Similarly, WSJ could be a reliable source for the finance related news in the USA but not in India.

Q. What about News SiteMaps? What the advantage of submitting one?

Well, Google says they are not only useful to News Bot but to the webmasters as well for the following reasons:

• Provides greater control over which of your articles get publish over Google news that’s because as I mentioned above also they compliment discovery search. It tells Google exactly which articles are new and the ones to crawl.

• It helps you give Meta information about your each individual article. You can provide things like:

1. Publication date
2. Keywords – which help target your article both geographically and section-wise

This is very beneficial to large News publishers.

Q. Can Google bots visit our News URLs more than once?

The answer is YES!

Google Bot comes back to the article to find any updates, there are different crawl rates allocated to different websites depending upon their reliability, audience size, genre and geography. Google has confirmed this that they come back to find any update to the article within 12 Hrs of the first discovery.

Q. I have News content which is not just the text. I have videos and images too. How do I optimize them to appear in the News section?

Optimizing multimedia content:

Video content – You can create a Youtube video channel. Google says that they are in the process of supporting other platform like Metacafe etc. but it may take a while. Youtube is a trusted source therefore if you get visitors your videos would rank on top of the Google news as well.  Remember to include rich textual description and transcripts every time you submit a video to Google as it helps them identify the category and geography of the video.

Images – There are five tips Google gave for the image optimization to get them included in the News Search

1. Use a large size image with good aspect ratio
2. Descriptive captions and alt text
3. Keep the image as close as possible to the title
4. Keep it Inline, don’t make it a clickable one
5. Google prefers JPEG

Q. Does it help to achieve better ranking in news searches if I have higher PageRank?

Google says PR plays a very small role in deciding the rank for a news article as compared to what it does for the regular web search. There is a simple reason for this – it really doesn’t make sense to compare the linking structure an article which was published minutes ago with the one which has been floating for years. PageRank has been used in determining a news rank but very delicately. These are those other factors we spoke about earlier like timeliness, freshness and relevancy to a category etc.

BEST PRACTICES – Here are couple of best practices indicated by the Google

1. Keep unique permanent URLs with at least 3 digits
2. Do not break up the article body, keep the entire news on a single page
3. Put date between the article and body
4. Titles matter, always keep an extremely indicative title of the story
5. Separate News articles from the press release by using a directory structure
6. Publish unique and informative content, if you get news from an agency try re-writing in your own words

Guest Post By Gerald Neo, Who runs  GeraldsHeralds.com

SEM in Singapore is just starting out. Lots of companies have just started to realise the importance of SEM. For those, that have started for a few years, are only covering the surface. They have not fully explore the full potential of SEM.

To many SEM specialists, this is a golden opportunity. But then, they have to realise that Singapore is a small market. And it cannot sustain their ROI, just by focusing on one market alone.

In many brick and mortar industries, companies are using Singapore as a gateway to penetrate Asia market (i.e Malaysia, Philippine, Thailand, Indonesia, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong). I have only named those countries which have the most potential.

So SEM specialist’s should also do the same. Look at Singapore as a bigger picture to capture the S.E Asia’s market.

But before they do that, there are 2 main areas, which the specialist need to consider before he/she can be successful in S.E Asia. Of course, there are many other key success factors but in this article, let’s discuss about the most basic element.

1. Multi Languages

It will not be as simple as just looking at English keywords. There are Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Malay e.t.c. So your keywords need to be in local languages.

1. Cultural Difference

By understanding culture of the countries, the specialist will be able to understand how they behave online and how they search.

But don’t assume that by understanding one culture (e.g Chinese), one can apply that understanding to another culture ( e.g Malay). Each culture has their uniqueness and every one of them need a certain level of understanding before the specialist can have some success predicting their behavior online.

Most companies will ignore the 2 areas, thinking their previous success in SEM will ensure success even in Asia. But they will be wrong.

So how can the 2 areas be overcome?

The specialist’s strength is their expertise in SEM. And he/she has tons of experience in managing SEM across different industries.

And what they lack is the understanding of the market. Instead of going into the market and try to figure everything out themselves, and get local help. They employ local digital marketing people who have experience in online media but may not have experience in SEM.

The specialist might not be able to find the kind of experienced marketer in SEM. So the key is to find passionate digital marketer who have managed digital advertising across multiple regions in Asia and also interested in SEM.

Impart knowledge and experience to them. This can also be the specialist’s contribution to the local online industry by increasing the number skilled people in SEM.

When it comes to multi languages, there is always translation house which can help to translate the keywords to local languages. But the local digital marketer are required to look through the translation to make sure it’s in the right context.

There will be challenge but no doubt that with the right people, SEM specialists can achieve success. But do take note that is no over-night success, it still needs time and some form of testing to really understand the market. Good luck!

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 article was written by Leigh Hanney of SEMSamurai.com

In any structured system the introduction of a new variable will have a lasting influence on that structure. In short, nothing will remain the same.

Take a typical family unit of two parents and one child… When a second child is born the dynamic shifts and sibling relationships become one of older versus younger. Parental influences and guidance may also differ and thus the potential for psychological differences between the siblings also emerges. Then however we have the appearance of a third child, and as a result the ensuing ‘middle child syndrome’ emerges. Now I‘m no psychologist, so that’s as deep as I’ll go, but I find it interesting to view the ‘landing page’ as the often ignored and over looked, ‘middle child’ in many online marketing campaigns.  

Too many marketers devote all their attention to the ‘first child’, the Campaign itself (PPC, SEO, CMP, Facebook Ads), and the remainder of their focus goes to third child, ‘the sale’. But   the third child is often looked at questioningly, asked ‘Why can’t you do more?’ And the question that should be asked, ‘How can you do more?’ is never asked of the middle child – the landing page – at al l. Instead this key part of the structure and campaign is entirely ignored.  

As online marketers we cannot afford not to focus on the entire conversion funnel, and we must never underestimate the gains to be found in optimizing the landing pages used in our campaigns.

At no time is this more pertinent than now faced with the current economic crisis.  

What would the marketer who ignores the landing page do if her budget was cut in two? Panic certainly, knowing that her effectiveness will surely drop by 50% too. ‘I’ll lose my job!’  

Yet the marketer who understands the importance of the landing page and conversion optimization, should see this as yet another challenge. For now he can focus even more on how to squeeze additional conversions out of every 100 clicks.

In short, the marketer who understands the whole picture and the complete conversion funnel has many more levers to pull when the dynamic shifts.

Ignore your landing pages at your own peril.