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First of all, what is a viral clip? According to Wikipedia,

A viral video is one that becomes popular through the process of internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites and email.
[...]
Humor is often a characteristic of viral videos, but not a defining one. A viral video is any video that’s passed electronically, from person to person, regardless of its content.

A video can be shared in the following ways:
a. Organic seeding: your target audience will help you promote the video on various networks;
b. Paid seeding: you pay for the distribution of your content;
c. Syndication: you create a mini site with RSS buttons to enable the video to be easily shared.

1. A bit unethical, yet you can pay bloggers to post the embedded video;
2. Other than that, you should ask bloggers to write about your video; invite them to participate in the spreading of the message; you should only do this if the clip is relevant to the blogger;
3. You can also promote a clip on a forum; if you control multiple accounts on a forum, you can use them to spice the conversation;
4. If you have an engaged Facebook auditorium, ask them to help you promote your videos; this can have a huge impact;
5. Sending an email to mailing lists dedicated to YouTube videos can also be helpful; see this guide I’ve written in Romanian;
6. Make your video easy to embed; a lot of the traffic YouTube has comes from those who put a video on their blog;
7. Putting a video on your homepage is always a good idea to have an increase in the traffic;
8. You should consider the timing whenever promoting a viral video; best time to promote a video are:
a. 8:30am-10:30am
b. 1:00pm-3:00pm
c. 4:00pm-6:00pm
d. 8:00pm-10:00pm
As for the days of the week to promote it, Sunday and Monday are the best choices; more details;
9. Your video should be easy to share: allow embeds, do use URL shorteners (such as tinyurl.com); people should have an easy life whenever trying to promote your video;
10. You should allow people to leave their mark; this implies both letting users to comment on your video and allowing people to download your video and make spoofs and memes after your video;

Extra readings: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

First of all, what is a viral clip? According to Wikipedia,

A viral video is one that becomes popular through the process of internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites and email.
[...]
Humor is often a characteristic of viral videos, but not a defining one. A viral video is any video that’s passed electronically, from person to person, regardless of its content.

So what are a few tips of mine for creating a viral video?
1. The clip should present something new, or exciting, or very interesting; it’s best to combine the three and create a clip that has all of these qualities.
2. Having an original idea, a fresh concept, helps a lot in creating a good video;
3. There are some risky methods for creating a good video: create a controversial clip, start a scandal, build on sensationalism, start conspiracy, play on taboos, use dark humor, have shocking material, use sexual references, include patriotism; it can be safer, though, to use general things such as: comedy, games, tools, services & information, artistic content, top ten lists, collections, celebrities;
4. When you create the clip, avoid making it specifically to look and feel like a linkbait; make your content look like a genuine useful content;
5. If you have an option to choose between a happy mood video and a sad mood video, pick, all the time, the happy video; make your audience enjoy themselves;
6. It’s best to create a sense of wonder; also useful are inspiration and surprise;
7. For best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices, you should have good metadata for the video; use tags and proper descriptions;
8. What human experiences tend to make a video go viral? Love, food, sex and laughter have a better chance of being sent over and over via Internet;
9. When creating the video, you should continuously ask yourself “Why would someone watch it?”; provide a good answer to this, otherwise don’t make a video;
10. People tend to close a video if they are not engaged in the first 20-30 seconds; give them a catch at the very beginning of the movie;
11. Try to make the clip short: 15-30 seconds is best; if you have a long story, slice into smaller clips;
12. Make a catchy title using words such as: “exclusive,” “behind the scenes”, “leaked video”;
13. You should note that YouTube offers you three choices for the thumbnail of the video, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video; so you should make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting;
14. How to choose a thumbnail? Make sure that the thumbnail is clear (this implies that the video is of good quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it;
15. If someone comments badly, with no arguments on the video, you can safely delete that comment;
16. If you have two options: release 5 videos all at once or release them each separately, it’s best to release all of your videos at once; the reason is simple: if someone likes your video, that person will look for other related videos on YouTube and will (probably) find the other videos you’ve made;
17. If you tag four videos at once, make sure that at least some tags are common to all of the four videos, since they will determine what shows up in the “Related videos” section;
18. Whenever possible, exaggerate things; if you made a funny video, make it hilarious; if you made it a bit strange, try and make it shocking; go off the beaten track;
19. A good idea to make a video go viral is to shoot in High Definition (HD) format; this will make your video look professional; also, you can use multiple cameras;
20. If you involve other people in your video, you can trigger a much better emotional response; have people participate in the creation of the video; if that’s not possible, at least use them for distribution;

Read more: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Olivian BREDA – submitting to web directories -why do it and why avoid doing it?

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Download the presentation “Introducere în directoare web. De ce da? De ce nu? Aspecte teoretice” as: PPT, PPTX, PDF.

Olivian BREDA – submitting to web directories via semi-automated methods – AutoFill Forms solution

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Download the presentation “Introducere în directoare web semi-automată la scară largă – soluția AutoFill Forms” as: PPT, PPTX, PDF.

Olivian BREDA – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in the business environment:

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Text of the recording (via):
Olivian Breda, an expert in search engine enhancement, also underwent little professional training, while showing a keen interest in the new field:

“I specialise in search engine enhancement and I work as a freelance consultant for several companies. I begin with an analysis of my customers’ websites, I then collect all links to my customers’ sites and modify the site structure and contents, so that search engines have the best net-surfing capacity. I also provide customers with postings on social networks and I carry out search engine enhancement training courses.”

Before embarking on his complex and challenging profession, 28-year-old Olivian Breda started off as an avid internet surfer in 2002. He now loves what he is doing and hopes to draw more people to this sector:

“My job consists in helping certain searches have very good returns. Customers need these services, but I believe that there are still very few service providers in Romania. This new sector still calls for a lot of development. There is customer demand, but the professionals’ offer is still low. I believe this job has great prospects and we could expect a boom on this market.”

You can see an online video at Trilulilu.
The online presentation is available at SlideShare.
You can download the presenation in the following formats: PPT, PPTX, PDF.

I want to share with you the blogs I constantly check out about Search Engine Optimization. If that’s not too much trouble, I’ll call this my gift for you for 2010.

If you wish to see other stuff I read on the Internet, see this blog post.

• Video podcast – RadioLynx;
• Audio web cast – RadioLynx;
• Audio web cast – Trilulilu.

For other appearances in 2009 in Romanian media, see my article on Fiieficient.com.

On 2009.11.19, I made a presentation regarding LinkJuice and Page Sculpting at Orange Concept Store.

You can see the presentation, in Romanian:
- Video (on Trilulilu);
- Online presentation (on SlideShare)
- Download PPT (PowerPoint 2003 and older);
- Download PPTX (PowerPoint for Office 2007);
- Download PDF (to be read with Acrobat Reader).

Also, you can check out this article of SEOmoz:  Tests Show PageRank Sculpting with Nofollow Still Works.

You can see the presentation, in Romanian:
- Video (on Trilulilu);
- Online presentation (on SlideShare)
- Download PPT (PowerPoint 2003 and older);
- Download PPTX (PowerPoint for Office 2007);
- Download PDF (to be read with Acrobat Reader).

Let’s take news: I read the news once a day, in the evening.

Let’s take articles: I read the blogs I follow through RSS feeds once a week when I’m not all that busy and less than once a month when I’m very busy.

Let’s take physical newspapers: I am the only person I know that can read newspapers from 2005 and see this as a perfectly natural thing. Magazines that are old? This is obvious, but I also read old newspapers.

Now let’s get back to Twitter.

An astronaut gets into space. We have two options:
a. I can read his Twitter to find out updates sent from space as-they-happen in less than 140 characters messages (CNN on this story);
b. I can wait until he gets back to Earth, and until he writes an article or a book on his experience; This can be detailed, with emphasis on analysis, rather than on-the-spot events.

If you think I prefer a., you are wrong. I’d much rather see an analysis in detail, even if it’s 3 months old, rather than some obscure as-it-happens list of events.

By the way, I also read my friends’ Twitter updates only once a week, so no news in here either.

I consider analysis to be with a lot of quality content, while “news” from Twitter has little relevance to me.

So – it’s not Twitter, it’s me.

I still like Twitter because it’s a great place to find out great resources, and if I wish to find out what’s buzzing the world, the Hot Trends thing is great.

How are your thoughts on this?

First of all, if you wish to see the presentations, they’re available both in English and Romanian.
English presentation:

You can view the Romanian presentation online.

You can download the English version (PPT, PDF, PPTX), or the Romanian version (PPT, PDF, PPTX).

There’s also a video record of the presentation, in Romanian. You can see it in here: “Optimizare pentru motoare de cautare – cuvinte cheie si structura pagini Olivian BREDA“.

Slide 1: Title of the presentation: Structure of a web site – keywords;
Olivian BREDA, Orange Concept Store, Bucharest, Romania, 2009.05.23.

Slide 2: Barrack OBAMA campaign
Let’s think of a great web site. I personally like Barrack OBAMA’s campaign web site, both for design and functionality. But could you give me an example on yet another web site to be optimized? I would say no to a web site like Google.com, because people usually don’t search for such a web site, they know exactly how is it like.

Slide 3: Question – What web site would you suggest for such a campaign?
From the audience, I got this suggestion: a web site called Young Entrepreneurs. So, we’ll focus on this one.

Slide 4: Let’s say that a prospect of the Young Entrepreneurs web site goes to Google and hopes to find the web site.

Slide 5: Question: What relevant keywords could you suggest for a web site such as Young Entrepreneurs?
From the audience I got the following replies: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, business, start-up, success, business ideas.

Slide 6: This is how the owner of the Young Entrepreneurs web sites looks like now.

Slide 7: Here comes my solution in making top ranking for the chosen keywords.
Obviously, a great strategy would imply a mix of:
a. External links to the homepage and to the other internal pages of the web site;
b. Internal optimization of the pages.
But it would also imply organization of the pages within the web site (the structure of the web site).

A typical web site is most likely structured into pages:
Homepage
About us
Products
Services
Shopping Cart
My account
Contact page
etc.

And this is where I want your help.
How can I structure the information on this web site?

Question – What could we do to improve things? What specific pages would the people find while looking for the web site? So, if a person types:
a. entrepreneur, he would go the homepage (or the entrepreneurs page), as suggested in the audience
b. business, this sends the person to either case studies or the homepage;
c. entrepreneuership should direct to homepage or about us;

My solution is this: pick one or two of the most important strings (one or two keywords per string) and put them on the homepage (the most important web page on the site; crucial to optimize it for top keywords, whenever possible). Then create a web page specific for each keyword in the list.

How can one create such pages? I think there are three solutions:
a. Rename an existing web page (so “About us” may become “About us – Young Entrepreneurs”; The “Services” page can become “Business Services” and so on);
b. Create a news worthy page dedicated to the subject (put it on News/Press Releases/Blog postings);
c. Create a Wikipedia-like informational page on the subject (this may fit well into Resources, Articles, General information).

You can read more on what are the factors that matter in optimizing a web page on the SEOmoz blog.

Meanwhile, I suggest you put a title dedicated to the subject (so, if you target “Romanian Entrepreneurs” keyword, you should create a web page with an identical title; If that’s too much to ask, you can add a few words; There are other solutions: bolding words, repeating words, using words at the beginning of the sentence, linking from other pages of the web site to the target page, linking from other sites to that web page and so on; See SEOmoz link above).

Returning to the example, a good structure would be:
Entrepreneur => Homepage of Young Entrepreneurs;
Entrepreneurship => Page dedicated to Entrepreneurship
Business => Dedicated page;
Start-up => A page on start-ups;
Success => Although this can be combined with other words, it’s good enough to have a page on its own;
Business ideas => A page on Business ideas.

Now, how much can you optimize a web page? I think the answer to this question is rather tricky:
a. you can over-optimize a web page (too much SEO involved); This might attract visitors, but will attract the engines; Example of an over optimized title: “Best online software download” – it’s hard to explain to an user why this is a text addressed to him; And if you use too many of the other factors (bolding words, repeating words), it would look bad;
b. You can under-optimized a web page (too little emphasis on SEO, too much on people); So a title like “Download a very good software online from X web site” might look good for humans, but not that good on engines;

Conclusions: you can have a web site greatly optimized for SEO by structuring it accordingly. Thus, I think you should create an individual web page for each keyword that you target.

You just have to find the right balance for your web site.

Slide 8: Now, returning to the person owning the web site, that person might actually feel better after we do all that;

Slide 9: Any other questions?

If you wish to see a few things I learned at the presentation, see this blog post:
What did I learned at a workshop held this week end at Orange Concept Store?

How do you feel about my presentation?

Now we’re in 2009 and Google brings up some great new options on Google Search.

What stroked me most about the difference between the two?
1. Google had merely improved on the software design; The graphics were much better on Human Brain Cloud;
2. The functionality and the structure behind the two are much different (Human Brain Cloud depended on human input, human associations, human thinking of the issue, while Google’s system is based on algorithmic comparison of human data);
3. Google’s data is obviously much larger;
4. I’m surprised that no one else saw the connection. After all, this is a mind connection by itself.

____________
Bottom line: I can’t say I like any of the two solutions better. I work on generating keywords in my Search Engine Optimization tasks, but both ideas seemed worthwhile. But I can say that I expect Google’s solution to grow, while the Human Brain Cloud stopped functioning sometime in 2008.

Let’s imagine we have three characters in a story:
a. John, who wants to find some things on [bread] via Google;
b. Mary, who’s an expert in SEO;
c. A search engine – let’s call this one Google, due to some statistics;

1. What is Search Engine Optimization?
Let’s imagine John, who wants to get some insights on bread. He goes to Google.com and types [bread]. What will he find in there?
a. He’ll find some general information on ‘bread’: Wikipedia page (always there for most generic terms), some recipes, various information on cooking bread; So this is an informative type of result that he’ll get (he’ll only get information);
b. He’ll also get some information on things to do; Most likely buy some bread online, buy some appliances (like an bread-making-machine, a cutting knife, an utility to store bread in), download things (download a brochure on bread); This would be a navigational query; He will do some actions (from buying online to downloading things on his PC).

What does Google do? Google will try his best to serve John best: he’ll deliver top results (based on some ever-changing mysterious algorithm), both informative and navigational. In this specific case, there are mostly informational results on top 100 results (Add [Buy] to the keywords searched and things may differ).

Here comes Mary. She has a client that sells bread online. That client wants to be as high as possible in the results page delivered to John (first top 10 positions? Why not?). I won’t tell you right now if the client has a relevant (to his business) objective for Mary to solve, but I will tell you that Mary has three interests for reaching those objectives:
a. Get her money from the client by delivering a top 10 result for [bread] query;
b. Make Google thing that her client deserves to get to top 10 pages (using SEO techniques);
c. Make John click on the result after he sees it (this would be an additional objective from the client).
That’s what, at a basic level, SEO is about.

So, how does Mary do all that? It’s time for part two of the presentation.

2. How is SEO done?
Now we’re getting a bit technical. SEO comes from “Search Engine Optimization”. A better-to-understand definition would be: “Optimization of web sites so that search engines love them”.

How does Mary manage (hopefully) to get a top 10 result for [bread] keyword for her client? She has two basic solutions at her side (and she should use them both with equal interest):
a. Modify the website of the client, so that Google loves the web site for the [bread] keyword; This implies quite a few things to be done:
i. Create a page on that web site (might even be the homepage) that is dedicated to the word [bread];
ii. Give the page the title and description related to the word [bread];
iii. Use [bread] word a few times in the page;
iv. Emphasize the word (bold, italic, underline);
v. Make links from other pages of the web site to that page;
… and some other things, which are best described at this page: SEOmoz | Google Search Engine Ranking Factors;

b. Get links from
i. Important web sites;
ii. A lot of web sites;
to her web site in general, and also to that particular page;

The links should be (at optimal level):
i. Contain the [bread] word;
ii. Be placed well in the page (so not in the footer, with small fonts);
… and follow other criteria, described, again, in here: SEOmoz | Google Search Engine Ranking Factors;

Mary should do a lot of things to optimize the site itself and to get the links from other web sites. But the basic two things she needs to do are said above: change the web site to be loved by Google and have links from other web sites.

3. How will SEO look like in 10 years’ time?
Let’s go back to John and imagine he’s 10 years older. He goes to a new version of Google, and let’s stay that, 10 years after today, he’ll still be looking for bread, instead for some magic future pill to digest and have no hunger.

How would Google look in 10 years time?
a. I think Google would be much more local; He’ll get the IP address of my computer and only provide me with local store selling bread;
b. Here goes personalization: if I search today for bread and find a good result on the fourth page of results, Google (in 10 years’ time, remember that) might remember this thing I just done and serve the result in the top positions next time I search for [bread]; Since I already clicked on it, and I stopped looking for other results (Google can already determine this easily), this means I’m satisfied and I shouldn’t spend the same time looking for it again and again; Google should learn from what I learn!
c. Social: Google should provide me with good links of my friends (what recipes do they like) or my neighbors (where do they buy bread from);
d. Semantic: in the year of 2019, I might go to Google and type the thing below and he should understand exactly what I mean:
“I want to see a bakery selling ecological bread in my area”;
Google should de-compose this into:
[show me images] AND
[of bread selling magazines] AND
[with ecological bread] AND
[in the geographical area where my IP is located]
(and decompose these even further into his language).

… and some other things you can follow on various blogs (even theirs).

Now these kinds of radical changes might also shape the way Mary will do SEO in 2019, wouldn’t you say?

Steps to take:
1. Set your basic things: from keywords to objectives
2. Modify the web site so that engines ‘see’ it right
3. Get links to your web site
4. What else can you do on a basic level?
5. What should advanced techniques of SEO imply?

Details

1. Set your basic things: from keywords to objectives

Ok, let’s start by defining the keywords. This is a very important thing for your business, and in most of the cases you are the one doing the research.

How do you create the keywords? Think of keywords by various methods:
a. Your industry (if you sell books, think of printing, of printing house, of selling books, of bookstores and libraries);
b. Your geographical area (if you’re in Berlin, Germany, use local keywords; also use acronyms like DE – country specific);
c. Your main activity (selling books, online stores, online shopping, shopping for books);
d. Use power words (words like free or expensive, now or today, join or get; find power words like these).

How to have brainstorming of ideas? A very good tool to use is Google’s Keyword Tool. You should clearly state the language and country you’re in, for accurate results. For brainstorming, Google Sets is also fine. Looking up words into a country-specific dictionary might also help.

Now we have a large list of random words.

You should now focus on generating a list of:
a. Two – three words for the title (but no more than 40 characters, with spaces) – hugely important; This should be the key phrase by which people get to your web site;
b. A list with very important strings for you (4-5 strings); You will create pages for each of these strings, so make them nice;
c. A nice-to-have-but-not-mandatory list of 10-15 words (let’s say 10 strings); Just a list of good-to-have words.

How to cut words from the large lists to get to the smaller lists?
a. Know the words that are used in your business; If you sell books, the word [book] is sort of mandatory;
b. Use earlier mentioned Google’s Keyword Tool to see what words do users search for; If you sell books on a lot of fields, and one field is backarapper (see the meaning of this word and other words on “Encyclopedia of Arda: Old and Rare Words”), you should avoid having backarapper; Currently there are 314 results on Google for this words; Clearly not a term you wish to be found for; So, focus on the most searched queries;
c. Do a search on your own for those keywords, to see the competition; So if search for [books] on Google.com I get more than a billion results. If I do a search for [books in uk] I get about 200M results. If I search for [books in uk online store history] I get 6M. So, the more specific my query is, the less competition is there; It’s best to find words that are searched for (see point b.), but in the same time there is little competition on them (see point c.);
d. Try to understand what will a certain word bring you; If one searches:
[book critics review],
I think we can agree that this term will bring you a person looking for texts; On the other hand, a person looking for:
[buy book on self-improvement]
will bring you a potential customer; Try and focus on words that bring you value;
e. Try to concatenate results; So, let’s say you have these three strings:
[books online] – 2 words
[online store] -  2 words
[books in UK] -  3 words
[cheap books online] -  3 words

In total, there are 10 words.

This query:
[cheap books online store in UK]
is just one string with 5 words, and contains all the words. I managed to get a 50% reduction in the number of words by concatenation. Use this tip.

Now let’s get to objectives. There are more results to a SEO campaign, but I will present just a few:
a. Reaching a Top 10, Top 20, Top 30 result for a string; This should be country-specific, with language-specific settings; Have a look at this query:
i. http://www.google.ro/search?q=books&hl=ro&num=10, then look at this:
ii. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=books&hl=en&num=10 and this:
iii. http://www.google.com/search?q=books&hl=en&num=10

You’ll see that the results differ. The only change in the URL is the language in which the Google messages are shown. So, the first observation: language matters (the URLs are all from Google, but showing different results). Now have a look at this:
i. http://www.google.com/search?q=bird&hl=en&num=10 then on the first 10 results for “bird” on this page:
ii. http://www.google.com/search?q=bird&hl=en&num=100

As you see, there are slight differences. So, showing 10 or 100 results per page changes the resulting page.

So, when setting a “Get to Top 10 results” objective, set clear the URL – establish right from the start how will the Google URL look like; It will save you some headaches later;
b. Getting an action from the user entering the site; What would such an example be? For a company an action might be getting a call, getting a form submission; For an NGO an action might be promoting the web site and carrying the message of a specific call-for-action; For a blogger an action might be subscribing to the blog’s feed via email or RSS; For a portal, an action might be setting the current page as homepage; For a Service provider, the action might be getting a call; For a company, an action might be increasing brand awareness;

Each of these actions have some way to measure (from number of downloads, to number of calls, emails, tweets, blog subscribers to increased of brand awareness measured via polls). What’s important to retain is to have a way to measure things prior and post SEO campaign;

A typical action is just visiting the web site (an increase in the number of visitors on the website, but this is more related to the point below). Anyhow, I suggest to install an traffic analytics solution on your web site. My favorite is Google Analytics.

c. Converting visitors into fans, customers and loyal promoters of your brand; This is a much better objective than the sheer number of visitors entering a web site; You’ll have something more important than a visitor, you’ll have a brand promoter; If only things were that simple; What can this bring you? A fan of your web site will promote your web site on the Internet for free, and that’s just great.

2. Modify the web site so that engines ‘see’ it right

a. A very first thing to do is check that your web site is in the index of a search engine; Typically, by typing [site:certainsite.com] you’ll get a situation in that search engine’s status; It’s best to type the URL without www. in front.

In my example, there are 167 indexed pages at the “Get a result now!” blog (another English blog of mine) which is quite good. This means, I probably have no worries on this matter. I probably needn’t continue on this step anymore. So check for yourself and if things are fine, skip the following.

But still, if I wish to make sure that I do things right, these are the things I want to check out so that I know that the web site is not blocked by engines:
i. If there is a robots.txt file on my server, I might want to read more about this on Robots.txt standard to be sure it’s properly set;
ii. If one page has a specific meta tag which ‘tells’ the engines not to scan my page, then that’s bad; See more on this thing on Wikipedia; Avoid using these meta tags if you know little about them;
iii. A nofollow attribute is also a bad thing to have on links; Read more on this again on Wikipedia;

b. Besides making sure you aren’t blocked, you should ‘invite’ the engines to your web site. Basic things you can do for this task include:
i. Reading on HTML sitemaps and implementing them to your web site (a HTML sitemap can be viewed great by users entering the site to find information fast);
ii. Reading on sitemap.xml file and implementing things you find out (this sitemap is for search engines only – you inform them via this file what is your site’s structure; you can also set some priorities – which page is most important);
iii. Join Google Webmasters’ Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer and use them effectively so that the Engines ‘know’ a lot about your web site;

Now you have made sure that the web crawlers aren’t blocked, and they are actually invited to your web site. What’s next?
c. Creating a site architecture that is aimed at the right keywords
On the basic theme, a web site architecture should look like this (click to enlarge):

A graphical example of how to structure information on a web site

What’s there to notice on this structure?
i. The homepage is, in most cases, the most important page of the whole web site; Optimize it for a few words that are crucial to your business; This page should be optimized for the top 2-3 words in your web site; Use the homepage for directing the best traffic to your web site (if possible, of course, it is not mandatory to do this, see point iii. for an alternative, even if less effective, solution);
ii. Don’t create a homepage optimized for a huge number of words; The homepage in my example has the maximum number words you can optimize a web site for (5 words); Try to keep it lower than that (or at most 5 words; oh, and in this case it’s words, not strings);
iii. For the less important keywords and strings, create an individual page; Each keyword string should have its very own page; Try to see the web site through the searcher’s eyes: if one searches for a certain word on Google, what page would it get to? Make it easy for the searcher to find a useful page on the web site;
iv. Try to link the pages one from another (when doing this pay attention to this factor: The link on the page should contain the keyword; Rather than having a link Click here, or a link like www.ysite.com, have a link that is similar to Buy books online – this link has keywords in it, real keywords!);

d. Getting a specific page optimized
There are a lot of factors to consider when analyzing a specific web page being optimized. For a start, have a look at this resource by SEOmoz: Google Search Engine Ranking Factors.

For a basic summary of the article (all the things in the SEOmoz’s list are important, but I selected the best bits, and bits that are really quite easy to implement):
i. Use the title of the page as a very important aspect; (the title is the text in top-left corner of the browser)
ii. Use the keyword in <h1> tag; Read more on <h1> tag on W3C; For a basic explanation, <h1> tag refers to a title in a document; To let the engines know that a certain text in a document is more important than the other you can of course use larger text, bolding, different fonts; But using <h1> is much better from engine’s perspective;
iii. Use the keyword in the URL of the page; (this web site’s URL is www.getseoideas.com -  see the bolded word and understand why I picked this title)
iv. Name the images right (there is a thing called ALT text; use it when inserting an image on your web site);
v. Emphasize a word by Bold, Italic or Underline; (each of these solutions informs the search engines that those words are considered important)
vi. Use check spelling to avoid typing errors;
vii. (be very careful with this) Avoid duplicate content; Don’t post content from other sites to your web site, try not to direct Google to pages that are very similar one to another, avoid having one page with different URLs (so if I go to either of www.site.com, site.com, www.site.com/index.html – I should be redirected to just one version of the web site; I don’t want visitors to have three different URLs for the same page).

So, for a basic thing, set the above things right, create a page for about 500 words of text related to that specific page. Work on the structure of the pages and you should be done.

e. Optimizing usability
If usability could be summarized in one sentence, that would be: “What is the perfect way in which a visitor on the web site should feel?” The visitor should find what he looks for fast. That’s your job and that’s usability: create a great human experience. It’s not easy.

Some examples of how this is done: The logo should link to the homepage, the size of the text should make it viewed easily, the links should be intuitive, the images should have ALT text, the web site should be seen properly in different browsers and resolution, the number of clicks to get to the information / contact / download page should be as low as possible, windows should not pop-up, Flash use should be reduced to a minimal, you should have always visible menu navigation, you should help the eyes find useful information fast, create a HTML sitemap for easy navigation, and don’t forget about a search button.

Some things to do right away: try to make the one action you wish your visitors do most as easy as possible. Put the phone visible (if contact is what you want), create a contact form that’s visible in any page (if you wish feed-back), create a link for download that doesn’t do a lot of redirects (if you think that’s the top action). The main action of the web site should be the easiest to find on any web page of your web site.

3. Get links to your web site

First of all, let’s establish one thing: there are links and there are links. For a look on how to get great links, see this SEOmoz clip: How to Get Awesome Links.

Great resource, I couldn’t have done it any better.

I will present you with two not-that-good solutions for getting links. Some poorer quality links, but nevertheless they give you some results.

a. Web directories
This is a good resource for viewing lots of free directories: Directory critic.

You should try your best on inserting your web site in relevant directories to your business.

Here’s how a SEO company might help you with the process:
i. Semi-automated process; The web directories have a lot of fields that can be filled in based on some patterns; Thus, there are more semi-automated means; They all help you insert your web site into web directories faster;
ii. The reciprocal links code; When you want to add your web site into a new directory, you are given a reciprocal code; You take the code, put it on the web site, and then you can insert your web site; This copy & paste, then saving the file to your web server might look simple for a few web directories; When we’re talking about hundreds of web directories, things get trickier; By having a list of reciprocal codes ready at will, a SEO company can help you do this task in a breeze; A SEO company already has the list of reciprocal codes for all the web sites, you get the code once, and then they insert it for you; Nice and simple. To give you an idea, I can typically insert a site in less than a minute per directory. In a typical day, I do about 700 web directory submission. It’s your call if use a SEO company for this. Don’t hire me, hire any SEO professional who can do this task easily and with better results. (and most of the time, it’s actually cheaper to externalize this process)

If time is not an issue for you, you can insert your web site on your own, and I’ll give you some tips on that:
i. (required for the next steps) Use FireFox web browser;
ii. Use Tab Mix Plus extension and configure it so that when you right click a set of links you can “Open links in all tabs”; (you should create lists of links that should be opened in tabs; an easy solution for this is self-sending you an email with loads of links in it; they will be made clickable by the email software; then open as many links as you like very fast)
iii. Use Secure Login add-on for better handling of login accounts (a SEO company will probably already have accounts created, but it’s your time);
iv. (ta-da!, the masterpiece) Use AutoFill forms add-on for fast inserting a web site into web directories;

Autofill is an extension difficult to master, but I’ll make your life easier. Below you’ll find the most used fields for adding web site into web directories. Learn how to implement them in AutoFill for FireFox, and you’re ready to go.

Title:
(?:title)|(?:site_name)|(?:sitename)|(?:linkname)|(?:linkcomment)

Description:
(?escription)|(?esc)|(?:site_profile)|(?:text)|(?:scont)|(?:message)|(?:subject)

Keywords:
(?:keyword)|(?:metatag)|(?:tag_list)|(?:keys)|(?:ks)|(?:metaw)|(?:slowa)|(?:keyw)|(?:kws)

Homepage URL:
(?:url)|(?:site)|(?:link)|(?:web)|(?:www)|(?:homepage)|(?:txtaddr)|(?:adres_strony)|(?s0)|(?:sajt)|(?:URL__req_url_max100)

URL of the reciprocal link:
(?:RECPR_URL)|(?:reciprcl)|(?:urlback)|(?g_exchange)|(?:recurl)|(?:link_back)|(?:return_url)|(?:linkrec)|(?:linkback)|(?:recip)|(?ubl)|(?:txtRecLinkURL)|(?:rlink)|(?:^rlu$)|(?:^tburl$)|(?:^txtLinkPage$)|(?ur_url$)|(?:^recip_url$)

I don’t say it will be easy learning how to use these tools to master directory submissions, but I consider I’ve helped you quite a lot in this process.

b. Blogs
Posting comments on blogs is at the limit of spamming. Is it spam? Not. Is it a real comment? Not. Somewhere in between.

Chose wisely if you wish to do this, read the blogs’ rules regarding comments (if there are such rules), and just read a few messages on the blog to see if you will be spamming or not.

On which blogs should you post? I estimate that 99% of blogs have a thing called “nofollow” on external links. So, if you post a comment on such a blog, the link in your comment will be ignored by search engines. But there are a few blogs (I’ll present them below) on which you can leave a comment and the “nofollow” is not present on those blogs. It’s thus safe to post comments on those blogs – the links will be counted by search engines.

How can you find if a blog has nofollow links in it? Install NoDoFollow FireFox extension which shows you this very thing.

How to easily find lists of blogs that are nofollow-free? I’ll present below three resources:
i. Over 160 Relevant Link Following Blogs;

ii. PageRank Guide – Do-Follow Blog List;

iii. The Ultimate DoFollow Blog List;

4. What else can you do on a basic level?

On a basic level, you can ask for a SEO expertise – ask for a web site audit, you’ll get a lot of help.

You can also read stuff on SEO – the SEO book is the best book on SEO I’ve read.

Read some blogs (see the blogroll of my site for these links, always updated).

You can put your signature in the footer of your emails so that the person you communicate with via email will know you have a great web site.

Ask your partners for some links – this might help you.

5. What should advanced techniques of SEO imply?

Advanced is just that – going deeply into SEO. You can go much deeper than the level I presented in here. There are a lot of things to learn, a lot of things to do. And if you join me on my quest of this blog, we just might grow together.

Materials for Romanians

I’ve written some extra information for my Romanian readers:
1. If you know Romanian, you might be interested in this article, written by me, for generating keywords: Cum afli care sunt cele mai cautate cuvinte cheie de catre o persoana referitor la afacerea ta?;
2. For Romanian blogs with dofollow, see this links: DoFollow Blogs – Bloguri NoFollow Free;
3. For a Romanian dictionary to help you find great words, see DEXonline;
4. For language-specific settings extra information: if you speak Romanian, have a look on this article on setting things right: De ce optimizarea pentru vizitatorii din Romania pentru cuvinte cheie in limba engleza este problematica?;
5. Also read about: Care sunt cele mai bune platforme sociale pe care sa iti promovezi un site?;
6. On Google Analytics: De ce ai folosi Google Analytics pe site-ul tau?;
7. About robots.txt standard: De ce sa pui pe site-ul tau un fisier robots.txt?;
8. HTML Sitemap: Care sunt functiile unui Sitemap general al site-ului?;
9. How to do SEO (some tips): Cum se face in mod corect optimizarea Google?;
10. About the Sitemap.xml file: Sitemap.xml: Care este utilitatea lui?;
11. How to structure information on a web site: Cum se poate structura informatia pe site?;
12. How to promote a contact page on your web site: Cum realizezi o pagina de contact excelenta?;
13. How to create a contact page: Cum arata o pagina cu date de contact bine realizata?‘.

________________________
Bottom line: I hope you’ll find some use of this blog post. In a way, this blog post represents a sum of basic things I do for each site I optimize. May you learn much more than me on SEO and the Internet becomes a better place.

Source of image. I found about about the stats via Alex Chitu’s Google Operating System.

This is the kind of blog post I’d show to any person interested in SEO link building.

Translation for the ad: Where is Pasarea Maiastra (a sculpture by famous Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi) exhibited? If you don't know, Google will tell you the answer.

I click on it. The ad led me to a search engine results page (SERP) by Google for the “unde este expusa pasarea maiastra” keywords. (translation – Where is Pasarea Maiastra exhibited) It is a search on Romanian pages, via the Romanian version of Google – Google.ro.

And here comes the trick: when looking on the results page, you can see that on the very first spot a company doing a trick. They have created a web page designed specifically for this query (a very low competition query, I might add), and they show no relevant results for the specified query:

The example snapshot for a tricky web site

Actually, the page lists right about every offer they have made regarding touristic attractions, but nothing on the query. The page has a huge listing of tourism-related results, but nothing useful for the searcher.

So, what can you learn from what they did?
1. Google sometimes chooses to show Social advertising made for free (if there are no relevant ads to show, it might do that by default);
2. Some of the ads are for Google itself;
3. Some ads for Google contain easy-to-fight-for-and-win queries (you can easily get on #1 spot in there); Google creates these ads so that the query they link to are, initially, full of worthy results;
4. (here’s were you come in) If traffic is all you’re interested in, you can get a good traffic for you web site by challenging the Google ads system.

So, what other queries for Google ads are there? I’ve found, using again the XF Forums, the following free ads (Google shows a free ad linking to a page out of these):
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=razboiul+de+independenta+al+romaniei&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=cromozomi+genomul+uman&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=de+ce+e+cerul+albastru&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=primul+avion+cu+reactie&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=rase+de+cai&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=reparatii+ceas+cu+cuc&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=helmuth+duckadam&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=unde+este+expusa+pasarea+maiastra&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=paparuda&btnG=Caut%C4%83&meta=lr%3Dlang_ro

Some words are easy to fight for (it’s easy to get a #1 positioning on “reparatii ceas cu cuc”), some are harder. But it’s pretty easy to get a top 10 results, and for some queries, even a #1 spot. Thus, you can get good traffic out of this.

This blog post is about Romanian ads. I’m sure there is a related program for other languages.

About the ethics: Google should check on the ads from time to time and change the ads if the results are obviously manipulated. It’s somewhat Google’s fault for this artificially-created and easily-manipulated traffic. Also, it’s unethical for a tourism company to get traffic for an unrelated phrase. It should at least say some words on the query, words to be useful. The users don’t get what they’ve searched for. But all-in-all, if traffic is all you care for, you don’t care about the value of the customers, the example above shows how can one make this thing work. All of this with Google’s help.

I don’t recommend it, you will surely get some users upset, perhaps you will even trigger set some Google alarms (exclusion?), some bloggers will give you as a bad example (me included), but your traffic goal will be reached. I must say, this is terrible for branding.

I just wanted to share with you a method in which some users get visits.