Mobile SEO: Create, Post, and Track Content on the Go

March 19th, 2010 Welcome to the SEO Chat newsletter. If you're trying to reach visitors with a newsletter, you know that one of the challenges can be getting past the spam filter. Having a double opt-in helps, and so does not sounding like a spammer. That's where the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek comes in. Symantec did an analysis of the language used by some of the busiest spam botnets on the web. Check it out to discover some of their favorite words...and learn which words and habits you may want to avoid. You'll find a slate of useful and educational articles this week on SEO Chat. You may know your website can be hacked and loaded with malware without your knowledge; Monday's article shows you how to detect whether your website has been hacked. That's a security issue, of course, and Tuesday's article continues the security theme with the second part of a two-part article on CrawlTrack. This software lets you get analytics information from your website as well as protect it from hacking attacks. If you've ever wanted to be able to do SEO while on the go, Wednesday's article is for you. It lists a variety of applications you can use to update and track your website right from your smart phone! Can you believe that some clients still want to use meta keywords in their websites? Commiserate along with our original poster of this week's thread, and learn how to answer such a request. Don't forget to stop by the thread and share your experience. While you're checking out our sites, click on over to Tutorialized. With more than 100 tutorials on SEO-related topics (and tons more on other technology topics), you're sure to find something to help you further your knowledge of the field. And if you'd like to help others and share your expertise, you can always submit your own tutorials. It's fun, it's free, and it gets your work in front of a huge global readership. Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, talks about a few things you can do to increase your site's conversions that don't involve labor-intensive testing. What are they? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES Mobile SEO: Create, Post, and Track Content on the Go More CrawlTrack Tips and Techniques for Webmasters Has Your Website Been Hacked? SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail

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Mobile SEO: Create, Post, and Track Content on the Go by Katie Gatto 2010-03-17 Who says you have to do all of your SEO in the office? You've probably considered getting some work done on the road, but blanched if you own a laptop with the power to do it; it seems to be a truism that the better the performance you get, the heavier the laptop. Is there a way to get all the applications you need onto a device that fits in your pocket? Yes indeed; this article will introduce you to SEO applications that work just fine on your smart phone! In a lot of ways the world of search engine optimization is about being able to be responsive to the needs of the market. Or at least responsive to the needs of the viewers for your site. This endeavor, as you can imagine, requires a certain amount of timeliness. Unless you are creating a site around all evergreen content, getting something out fast can be the difference between your next 10,000 view article and a languishing piece. Since no one wants to be the last one to post on a hot topic or capitalize on its potential to bring viewers to your site, you're going to have to find ways to be the first to post. One possibility would be to put all of your desktop tools into your your laptop, and lug it (and blog) everywhere. While that would give you access to all the tools you need to post, it wouldn't give you much time have a life; it would give you no time to do field reporting and for most of us simply isn't practical option. We all have things to do besides blog, and there are some situations in which it simply isn't appropriate, or allowed, for you to bring your laptop. Read Mobile SEO: Create, Post, and Track Content on the Go

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More CrawlTrack Tips and Techniques for Webmasters by Codex-M 2010-03-16 In part one, you learned the important concepts and steps for installing and integrating CrawlTrack into your website. In this part you will learn how to maximize the use of CrawlTrack in dealing with website statistics. You will also learn how to maximize the security of your website. Before you read this tutorial, make sure you have read the first part and that you already have CrawlTrack fully integrated into your website. This is required for you to understand this part. Interpreting and Gathering Website Statistics Data First, you need to log on to your CrawlTrack account. To log on, since CrawlTrack will be installed in the root directory of your website (for example, http://www.thisisyourwebsite.com/crawltrack3-1-1/), type the URL address into the browser and press enter. You will then need to enter your username and password. After a successful log-in, you will see the CrawlTrack Dashboard. In the Dashboard, you will see 8 major sections of web statistics data with the three most important parts. Read More CrawlTrack Tips and Techniques for Webmasters

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Has Your Website Been Hacked? by Joe Eitel 2010-03-15 Traffic is one of a site's most important assets, because it is the primary element of conversions leading to sales. The number one source of website traffic is primarily search engines, led by Google. However, search engines do aim to provide the best results for their users, so they will seriously penalize websites which are known to be hacked and hosting malware in their domains. Unfortunately, it's possible for a site to be hacked without the owner or webmaster knowing about it. It has been stated very clearly under Google's search quality guidelines : "Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware." Of course, what really happens today is that it is not you who is responsible for putting malware in your website ; it is usually the result of successful hacking activity. This tutorial will show you the most important ways of detecting the presence of malware in your website as early as possible. If malware is detected very early, it will not cause serious damage to both your websites and your visitors. Also, this tutorial is aimed at online entrepreneurs and website owners who are not technically inclined or do not have wide experience in online security . Read Has Your Website Been Hacked?

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Sometimes a client with a little SEO knowledge requests that you use an obsolete practice – such as adding META keywords. You don't want to waste your effort, so it can help to gather a little extra ammunition for your explanation, as the original poster is trying to do in this week's thread. Mookamoo Keywords – when did they die out? Hi I have a client who wants me to revamp his CMS to enable him to add keywords and a META description. My understanding was both of these are pointless for Google rankings. So I know what to tell him, but when did keywords become a thing of the past for Google? Was it this year/ 2 years ago? davidthemavin Don't quote me on this, but I think that Yahoo PPC might still use them as part of their quality score. Edit: ok found it, Yahoo might still use the tag in their algorithm: [link to reference omitted] What changed with Yahoo's ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system. Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page's recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section. However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents. tstolber From my recollection it was around 2004. Regardless of when the actual date was, if something has been identified as being ineffective and doesn't pass the usual rational tests of “does this make sense?” then it is not worth continuing with. Meta descriptions are still important, perhaps not algorithmically but they do offer the potential to influence your SERP - CTR and that has some effect on your organic positioning. I get a lot of flack for suggesting this, but there is some evidence to support it and it stands to reason. So my summation is meta keywords are pointless, meta description is useful but don't get too hung up on either. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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Simple Ways to Improve Your Conversion Rate Tom Critchlow wrote a nice piece this week for Search Engine Land that related a few ways you can increase the conversions on your site without even testing. Not all of them will apply to everyone, but at least one of them will more than likely apply to you. Some of them qualify as basic housekeeping (which is embarrassing enough if you haven't been doing it), but all of them, in one way or another, boil down to knowing your site and knowing your visitors. Knowledge is power, especially online. For example, do you know where your visitors are coming from? I don't mean which sites they're visiting before they reach yours; I mean what geographical location. That can tell you what language they speak. This may not be too much of an issue if you're building a site for an English-speaking audience in the US...then again, it might, if a lot of your visitors hail from certain parts of South Florida. Critchlow suggests that if you maintain versions of your site in different languages, don't rely solely on tabs at the top of your page for visitors to click to get to the right site; instead, “consider investing in some geo-based redirection technology to take your non-English users straight to the correct language content.” If you run a website that invites users to register and asks them to interact with it, the services you're offering might be obvious to you, but not to them. Critchlow uses Pingdom as an example of a site that helps users in this regard. They send out an e-mail about a week or so after a new user registers for a free trial of their tool, asking if the user has any questions and whether they're happy with the tool and their service. Obviously, this kind of auto-mail can be customized based on what your site offers, and it definitely should not carry any aroma of spam with it. Critchlow recommends setting up an automatic schedule of e-mails for new users that sign up, above and beyond the first one and aside from any newsletter you send. He's not the only one I've seen making this suggestion. Depending on your products or services, you might include special discounts and/or upselling in these e-mails. Consider carefully what a new user might want – and request feedback. If and when you get it, treat it like gold. The other two items Critchlow cites are the sorts of things you should already be doing. First, get any site issues such as 404s under control. A page that isn't served correctly can't and won't make your visitor convert; it might even make them leave your site entirely rather than try to continue their search on your site. And second, gather more information; watching how visitors go through web forms, and where they leave the conversion funnel, is a good start. Figure out what's happening and why. You need that information if you want to make something different – and better – happen for you. Good luck! Read the relevant forum thread.