<title>Organic SEO Consultant | Professional SEO Consultant</title>

As of today I am ranking #1 & 2 for Organic SEO Consultant and #1 for Professional SEO Consultant if that tells you anything!

Well the same holds true for your URLs, you should not have too many words in them. In fact Matt Cutts has noted that any more than 5 words in a URL starts to dilute the weight.

[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

So I would advise against using more than 3-5 words in your URLs. It all really boils down to not being greedy. If you try to keyword stuff Google will not like it and they have added measures over the years to combat keyword stuffing. And to boot, there has been recent study that shows short URLs get clicked on twice as much as long URLs! And there you have it, a double whammy, Google does not like long URLs and neither do users.

Now I have never advertised on Facebook or MySpace before, but I would imagine that the conversions are pretty bad. I don’t think that many people would be looking at or clicking on any banner ads. People are just too engaged in their social networks. I know that I completely tune out all ads when I am on MySpace. But, anyways, this is a good chance to test the waters!

I sphunn across a wonderful new site, well new to me, called SEOname. The site seems to have a blackhat vibe to it but claims that it does not promote blackhat techniques but that it provides awareness in hopes that the exploits will someday be patched. But back to the tools! My favorite is the “Rank” tab which contains a bucket of tools that include a Fake PageRank Checker, Alexa Rank Checker, Google PageRank Checker, Ranking Checker, Multi-Site Google PR/Alexa Rank Checker, and more. Wow, and that is only from one of the tabs on their site. They also have a slew of tools under Header/Tag Tools, Keyword Tools, Link Tools, and Source Code tools.

I want to also give SEOname some props on their development skills. I like their text resizing and fluid width buttons, along with their RSS button, at the top right of the site. It shows some great functionality.

And you gotta love their statement on CSS and 2.0 design at the bottom of their site!

If you look at the sites ranking for most competitive keywords and look into the backlink profiles using a tool like Yahoo! Siteexplorer you can easily see that they are most likely buying links. Whether it be a paid directory link from Yahoo! Directory or an internal page link on Forbes.com, they are buying links. I have seen the power of the paid link and I am a believer! Ahhh, that felt good too. I have seen paid links work really really well for people and I know their power. But you must do a good amount of research in order to determine what is a good paid link and what is not. I may reveal my honored and time tested paid link analysis techniques in a later post for you, so sign up for my RSS feed, or you might miss out on some really great advice!

TLDs are the extensions on domains, like .com, .net, .uk, etc. Since the price will be so high to get one of these custom TLDs only the big fish will be able to take advantage of them. And this is something that I do not particularly like. Whenever there is a situation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer it rubs me the wrong way. But Barry suggests that the Internet marketing community ban together and all chip in to secure the .SEO, .SEM, and .SMO TLDs. He offers up that we should do this through a large industry organization like SEMPO. But my guess is that there will be many people who will want these TLDs and that with the bidding process the price will get VERY high!

The results are staggering. But this organic SEO consultant already knew that the difference between #1 and #2 was gigagntic. I had a client that commanded the #1 spot for his main keyword for a very long time. Well he dropped to #2 and called me up freaking out, he said that he had lost about 40% of his business! Of course I got him back up there right away and he has been back at #1 since. I have many other stories from clients of just how much their business is affected. This study just solidifies, scientifically, what I have been preaching to clients all along. You can view the full story from SEO Researcher.

There are some valuable lessons to learn from this research and its results. When running an SEO campaign it is important to have focus. If the site you are working on has some existing rankings on pages1, 2, or even 3 and some of those terms carry some trafic with them then you need to work hard to get those terms to the top 3. Those terms are just on the cusp of seeing huge traffic gains. And it is much more reasonable to expect to move those terms to page 1 from 2 or 3 than it is to rank a term that the site is not even in the top 100 for. Focus on the terms that will bring good traffic that you can rank in the sortest amount of time. Then, once you have proven your self and provided the client with some gains and ROI, you can start to focus on the other terms.

ICANN noted that they have spent $10 million in studying the new domain names and will spend another $10 million to implement them. Hey, why not, while you’re at it tack on a few extra mil for the organic SEO consultant! How the heck do you waste so much money researching a concept that is so obviously a good idea. It is a good idea because it will allow marketers and business people to better brand their domains. And it is good for ICANN and the rest of the domain registrars because it will net them an exponential amount of CASH. Of course the cost for registering one of these new custom TLDs will start at about $100,000 and will probably be a huge bidding war. I wonder who will get .searchengineoptimization?

There was a point, number 7, which dealt with the idea that you must hold on to the 301′d domain in order for it to continue to pass authority. This is an important note because as soon as the domain expires you lose all of the authority that it was passing. I knew this, but I was not aware that Google recommends that you keep the domain for at least 180 days after the 301. I will have to agree with Stoney here and say that I suggest you keep it going for life! I believe that most people out there already knew or assumed this idea, but I am also sure that there are people that do not. The 301 redirect is a powerful tool of a professional SEO, but you must know all of the little nuances to take full advantage of it. And you have to do a lot of due diligence in finding and making the purchase of a good domain. I will get into that in our next SEO 301 class.

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-coffee-machine-blender-juicer-channel7-sunrise-australia-42.html

Now using descriptive URLs is typically a good thing, and I say typically because in this case it is overkill. And if the page that the URL goes to is not relevant to the URL then that is definitely not a good thing. The question that we all ask ourselves is will this trigger an algorithmic filter/flag, or will it simply be something that only a manual review would be able to notice?
photo credit: YoungBlog

He is sad because your URLs are too long.

But first, here is the basic theory of how link equity is distributed throughout your site:

Say you have 10 links on your homepage that go to internal pages in your site. That means that the link equity (juice) is divided in ten and only 10% of the authority from the homepage (which is almost always your strongest page) is sent to each of those pages equally. Now if you used the no follow tag on five of those links off the homepage that were going to pages you don’t care as much about ranking then each of the remaining five links that are followed would get 20% of the link juice! My good friend Ricardo, from eVisibility, has an excellent post with visuals to explain this (those buckets are now famous and have gotten that blog many reputable backlinks!).

This is why people use the follow tag to sculpt page rank throughout their sites. It is a a wonderful technique that has worked great for myself and for clients. However, there are people out there who feel that using the nofollow tag to sculpt your pagerank can set off some sort of red flag to Google and you can get penalized. People have even claimed that this is the reason they lost their rankings! Poppycock! Everytime a site owner loses rankings they look to place the blame on their SEO right away. When this happens to someone, they become VERY emotional and upset because losing rankings can kill your business. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” people cryout, ” that Google has so much power over my situation.” Hey everyone, Google giveth, and Google taketh away. But Google does not penalize or flag your site for using the nofollow tag. They have said repeatedly, and Matt Cutts too, that it is OK to use.

Now I believe that you should not use the nofollow tag excessively, but use it in ways that make sense. Its all about common sense folks! Use it to block Privacy Policy, Sign In, and other useless pages or links. And I only like to use it on the homepage and MAYBE some internal product/service pages. But you must always leave a link to the sitemap or the rest of your internal pages somewhere so that the spiders can index all of your pages.

In part two of this post I will discuss my findings, from stringent testing, on how Google really treats your internal links. I will debunk all of the myths and finally set things straight. I cannot divulge that info just yet as I have made and agreement to withhold our findings until we formally announce them at the San Diego Ad Club Interactive Marketing Day this coming week. Steve Peron, aka imnotadoctor, will be presenting our findings during this event and will be blogging about it over at eVisibility Insider blog as well as our own blogs.