The question is, where are the statistical techniques and terms in SEO? Where is the science behind looking for keywords? Here we will look at how search engine optimization stands a lot to learn from investment bankers, and how some of the same principles could theoretically be applied.

What is Quantitative Analysis?

The main idea behind quantitative analysis is simple – looking at the numbers surrounding the trajectories of stocks and shares and using these to calculate where they are going to be in a certain amount of time. The alternative when investing in stocks and shares is to base it more on impulse, emotion and hearsay. For instance you might invest in a company because ‘you like it’ or because you read in the paper that they are inventing a new technology. This may be a relatively sound system, but if you consider how many confounding factors are involved – competing companies, natural disasters and more – then it becomes obvious that unless you have all the information, you won’t be able to predict precisely what’s around the corner.

With quantitative analysis you are doing the opposite thing. Here you don’t see companies, rather you just see numbers and that’s what you base your movements on. In other words you look at past performance – whether a keyword has gone up or down, what patterns it has exhibited in the past, what similar stocks and shares are doing etc, and then you use that to choose the best stocks. Of course there is still a big element of chance and luck, but ultimately this is taking the ‘art’ of investing and turning it into something more like a science.

How Can This be Applied to SEO?

With SEO people don’t tend to do this unfortunately. Rather they will simply use Google’s keyword tool and look at what people are searching for right now and then choose that to write their articles. Wouldn’t it be much better to be able to think not of what’s being searched for now but to be able to see what’s going to be searched for? Or what’s consistently been popular for years?

This way you could avoid having a brief hit, and you could start writing keywords before the competition. To do this you’d have to watch keywords and see how they progress over time, and you’d have to search the same terms on a relatively frequent basis.

This way though you can collect more data and you can understand more about the keywords you’re looking at. You can find the next big thing, and you can avoid ‘flash in the pan’ keywords. SO the moral of this story is this: be more imaginative and more mathematical in your keyword research, and think about how you can ‘beat the system’.

Jeet likes to devise new methods to make more money online. He gets a lot of support from his link building team in his online ventures.

How good is the SEOPressor WordPress plugin?  Chances are you arrived at this site after clicking a link to this page that appeared as a result of doing a Google search.  You probably typed in something like seopressor review or seopressor reviews.  You’re arrival at this webpage is no accident – in fact we deliberately planned to bring you to this blog at this specific time and to this specific product review.  Am I pulling you leg?  Nope.  That my friend, is the power of SEOpressor.  What is SEOPressor?  It’s a full featured, unique, and powerful SEO plugin for WordPress that helps you to write search engine optimized blog posts that Google, Yahoo, and Bing will eat up and rank you ahead of the competition.  Our writers additively use this plugin to make sure that each of our posts are optimized as best as possible before hitting the “publish” button.  In other words, if you found this review by clicking on a Google search result – you can thank SEOpressor for bringing you to this site.

Why use SEOPressor As Your SEO Blogging Tool?

SEO consultants can be costly and if you want to learn how to do SEO yourself, well, you should be aware that really developing a deep understanding of how to optimize a website to rank competitively and consistently in the search engines can take months, if not years, of training.   SEOpressor gives website owners the best of both worlds.  It provides blog writers with clear guidance that is specific to the content being written in the same way that an SEO consultant would if one were standing right over your shoulder.  But it doesn’t just stop there – SEOpressor also gives you instant feedback and optimization recommendations that update as you type.  The SEOpressor plugin is dead simple to use and is ready to go right out of the box requiring minimal configuration.  In other words, SEOpressor tells web content writers step-by-step how to write a blog post that is optimized for Google.  Now that’s one powerful plugin!

Advantages of SEOPressor

SEOpressor works by creating a dashboard within your post creation screen of your WordPress admin area.  The plugin automatically calculates your overall SEO score which is based on what SEO experts have been able to backward engineer about Google’s search engine ranking algorithm.  It then provides intelligent, easy to implement suggestions about how to make your post more search engine compliant.  As you create your post, SEOpressor does the following:

• Analyzes title tags and header tags for keyword usage
• Detects keyword density and content length
• Analyzes placement of keyphrase to ensure it is placed strategically throughout the post for maximum effect
• optimizes images alt attributes and title attributes
• automatically underlines, bolds and italicizes in-copy usage of keywords

Installation of SEOPressor is simple.  Plus, you try it out using their 60-DAY Iron-Clad 100% MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. If for some reason, you’re not satisfied with the performance of this plugin, just get your money back.  Also, I encourage you to learn more about SEOpressor –> check out this video demonstration.

Disadvantages of SEOPressor

SEOpressor is not an all-in-one SEO solution.  This plugin is strictly designed to help you to optimize your individual posts by ensuring your keywords and links are placed in prime areas that help the search engines understand what your blog post is about.  Search engine optimization covers many areas including – keyword research, website architecture, coding, sever optimization, SEO site auditing, and linkbuilding.   SEOpressor won’t aid you with these things.  However, in terms of creating posts that are aligned to Google’s ranking algorithm there is no plugin available on the market today that does a better job. The plugin effectively guides you toward writing search optimize content to drive more traffic to your blog in a way that even the most novice content writers can understand.

SEOPressor Review Conclusion

While SEOPressor is not a free WordPress plugin, you can test it out for 60 days.  At only $47 for a single site license this plug is a steal when you consider not only what it does but also the amount of targeted traffic it has the potential of attracting to your website.  I’d highly recommend this WordPress plugin to any blog writer who is serious about improving the Google rankings of their articles.

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There are two courses I believe to be particularly relevant to internet marketers are the Bits course and the Intensive Introduction to Computer Science. According to the course description, the course “focuses on information as quantity, resource, and property. We study the application of quantitative methods to understanding how information technologies inform issues of public policy, regulation, and law.” The Bits course also offers an extensive lecture series on web search, doing business on the web, and internet infrastructure. The course is arranged in an a-la-carte lecture format, so if you can just click the lecture you’re interested in and sit back and listen.

The second class, Intensive Introduction to Computer Science, I’d recommend for students who want to obtain a more solid computer science foundation. I think this course is a great starter class for new programmers and search engine optimizers. Intensive Introduction to Computer Science is a 12 week lecture series that discusses algorithms, software development, computer systems, and network security. In Week 8, the course covers TCP/IP, HTTP, XHTML, PHP and SQL. In Week 9 you’ll learn about DOM, CSS, Inheritance, JavaScript events, and Ajax. If you’re an SEO, I’d highly recommend that you go up to at least Week 9 of this course to be exposed to the material most immediately applicable to the SEO discipline. Check out the accompanying website for this course.

With either course, I think if you were to just watch the lectures while taking notes, you’d advanced your technical knowledge noticeably. And remember, both of these courses (plus several others) are free.

Modern blogs have to perform a lot of different functions that are not native to WordPress.  Over the years, I have tried literally hundreds of different plugins in order to extend the functionality of my own blog, promote better search engine optimization, and to extend value to my visitors.  Since WordPress’s inception, there have literally been thousands of “top free WordPress plugin” post published in the blogosphere.  So today, in that tradition, I’m going to tell you about the best free WordPress plugins I have encountered.  Be warned: a few of these plugins require some level of technical proficiency to use.  Enjoy!

Post,  Page and Sidebar Customization WordPress Plugins

• Add Widgets to Page – This plugin allows you to add widgets to pages or posts using an easy to insert shortcode.  This is handy when you want to add the same images, text, and other elements to a group of pages or posts to create a uniform look.
• AVH Extended Categories Widget – Sometimes you need more power than WordPress’s standard category widgets can provide.  This plugin gives you just that in a way that is highly customizable.  AVH Extended Categories Widget plugin also has advanced features that allow to designate “category” groups for better fine-tuning of the display of categories in your sidebar.
• Flash Video Player with HTML5 – This allows you to add a highly configurable video player to your blog. It’s easy to use once you get the hang of using the different shortcode parameters.
• Flexi Pages Widget – Another highly configurable WordPress widget that allows you to lists pages and subpages in the sidebar of your blog.
• Simple Post Template – WordPress allows webmasters to specify a template for a page but not for a post. This plugin allows you to assign a template to a post. It takes technical knowledge to use it properly, but if you want to do some advance things such as create a landing page or squeeze page without a sidebar then you should give this a try.
• Subheading – This plugin gives you the ability to add a subtitle to your posts and pages. You’ll have to make some adjustments to your WordPress templates, but it’s an easy way to add an engaging subhead or SEO keywords to the start of your blog post. Moderate WordPress and HTML knowledge is required to set this one up.
• WP Hide Posts – Sometimes you need to create a post or a page that you just don’t won’t users finding. This plugin adds itself to the post editor page. If you wish to conceal your post or page, simply check the “hide post” box and no one will be able to find it unless they have a direct link to the page.
• Frontpage-Slideshow – If you are looking to add a professional looking slideshow to your homepage, consider using this WordPress plugin. This Frontpage Slideshow allows you to designate images from posts and pages to display in a dazzling interactive slideshow. The blogmaster is given full control over the buttons, colors, size, and timing of the slideshow.

Search Engine Optimization WordPress Plugins

• Dragon Design Sitemap Generator – this is by far the easiest way to create an HTML sitemap that will enhance your SEO by helping all your pages and posts to get indexed by Google and other search engine.  It packs a ton of great features, yet remains easy to use.  This is highly recommended for all blogs.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Google, Yahoo, and Bing allows webmaster to report the location of new pages through the use of a feed called the XML sitemap.  The Google XML Sitemaps plugin allows you to establish this feed and to connect it with your Webmaster account.  This plugin is recommended for all WordPress blogs.
• Plus One – In June 2011, Google announced it’s answer to the ubiquitous Facebook Like button – called the Plus One button. Plus One has an impact on your blog’s search engine optimization. When a user clicks the Plus One button on your site, people within the voter’s Google social network see it as a vote for the webpage’s content, just like on Facebook. This plugin allows you to add this feature to your blog with ease.
• HeadSpace2 – Now this is the mother of all SEO meta data management plugins.  This is free plugin, but like many of this list, it’s probably shouldn’t be.  First of all, it integrates with most major SEO WordPress plugins like All-In-One-SEO and pulls in the customizations to your post’s meta tags that you’ve already made.  It then uses a highly sophisticated command console to allow you to set meta tag information at the global, group, and post/page level.  HeadSpace2 also has a rich lists of other features that lets you get greater control of your WordPress SEO.  INSTALL THIS PLUGIN RIGHT AWAY AND RID YOURSELF OF BULK ALL-IN-ONE-SEO.
• SEO Friendly Images – This plugin automatically adds alt and title attributes to images in your post/pages so that you can be more productive and do more critical tasks. This plugin allows for the placement of several variables to assist your image optimization efforts.
• SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 – Here’s another free SEO WordPress plugin that is a bit out-of-the-box. When a visitors comes to your blog using a search engine this plugin records the referring keyword and adds it to the bottom of your post page automatically. SEO SearchTerm Tagging 2 also has the ability to add the search term to your post tags. Going one step further, this plugin installs widgets that allow you to display your top search engine keywords with a link back to the post at the category level. Webmasters can set their own filters to guard against profane search terms. This plugin gives you a great way to add keywords to your post pages… just don’t overdo it.
• Redirection – Time to get some real control over the SEO of your WordPress blog with the free Redirection plugin. Redirection allows you to set up 301, 302, 307 HTTP redirects fast. Additionally, it has modules for monitoring 404 errors, reporting, and managing your .htaccess file. This plugin takes some getting use to, but just reference the documentation. Once you get the hang of it you’ll be ready to install redirects and resolve 404 errors without hesitation. The Redirection plugin was engineered by the same folks who gave us Headspace2. I encourage you to donate to the developer of this plugin.
• SEO Smart Links – Don’t attempt to do SEO on your blog posts without this free plugin handy. SEO Smart Links saves you the haste of having to manually create links within your blog posts and pages by doing it automatically based on options you set. In other words, you can use it to quickly link every instance of a keyword in your blog posts to any location you desire across your entire WordPress blog. It has a lot of options you can toggle to get the desired results.

Social Networking WordPress Plugins

• Feedburner Feedsmith – Chances are if you’re using Feedburner than you’re already using this plugin. If you’re not using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds then you may want to take a look at it. Anyway, this plugin detects all the ways to access your original WordPress feed and redirects it through Feedburner.
• BlogGlue Related Posts Network Plugin – This plugin is designed to be used with a blog traffic exchange network called BlogGlue. At the end of your blog posts (and optionally, pages) it suggests related posts on your blog. It then connects your website to the BlogGlue network and syndicates links to your blog posts on other people’s blogs in exchange for allowing other people to place links to their posts on your blog. The technology is a little clumpy and it takes you about 72 hours for your posts to get indexed and begin appearing on the network but nevertheless it does send an appreciable amount of referral traffic to your blog.
• RSS Footer – Use this plugin to amend a message to the top or bottom of your RSS feed. It’s a straightforward plugin that can be used to encourage readers who may be signed up for your RSS feed to register for your website and become a lead. The plugin also allows the use of variables such as “postname” – so you can do some pretty creative things with your feed. This plugin is free.
• Odiogo Listen Button – The Odiogo plugin is nothing short of amazing. After you register for a free account install the Odiogo plugin and listen in awe as this plugin translates your blog post from text to speech and reads itself to you. Your blog post is also made downloadable as a podcast.
• Simple Facebook Connect – I give high praise to this free plugin.  Simple Facebook Connect takes the agony out of trying to connect with Facebook.  It’s actually a package of 20 or so mini-plugins that help you to easily do things like add a facebook “like” button, allow users to register for your blog using Facebook Connect, add a user status widget, and lot’s more.

Administration WordPress Plugins

• Header and Footer – Stop downloading plugins to allow you to install Google Analytics, conversion optimization code, CSS, Javascript and all the other types of code that need to be inserted between the <head> and <body> tags of your webpage. This plugin is all you need. It’s clean and highly effective.
• My FTP – This free WordPress plugin adds FTP capabilities right inside the admin area of your WordPress installation.  No more downloading desktop FTP programs to upload and download items to your server,  My FTP provides an easy-to-use interface that lets you do just that as well as to edit files right inside WordPress.
• Exec – PHP – This is a simple yet robust plugin that allows for the execution of PHP code in your posts, pages, and text widgets. If you’re looking to do more advanced things on your website with PHP then you’ll need to install this one.
• Crony Cronjob Manager – If you need to schedule regular maintenance for your blog, I’d recommend using this plugin. There are several extremely powerful membership management platforms that require to set-up of cron-jobs as part of their installation. Rather than going through the trouble of setting up the cron-job using SSH, you may be able to use this plugin to simulate a cron-job at the WordPress level rather than on the server level. One of the set back of this plugin is that it appears to be a bit server intensive and there doesn’t seem to be any identifiable way to disable event reporting.
• Users to CSV – Need to get a quick export of the people who have registered for your blog or left a comment but don’t want to mess with your WordPress database?  Download this handy little plugin and export your members in a handy CSV or TSV file.
• WordPress HTTPs – Adding HTTP to your WordPress installation can be a bit tricky.  That’s why you should download WordPress HTTPS.  This free plugin helps you to adjust your blog so that you can use SSL on your website.
• Contact Form 7 – Form creation used to be tedious and difficult.  Contact Form 7 is the go-to form creation plugin.  This plugin utilizes a powerful administration console that allows you to easily create rich HTML forms.  After you save the form, you then add the resulting shortcode to the post or page of your choice.  And just like that you have an instant contact form.  You can have the plugin email the form information to the address of your choice.  The list of possible things you can do with this plugin is virtually endless.  Contact Form 7 is another plugin that we should all be thankful is available for free.

Other Plugins

• Quick Adsense – Right now should uninstall whatever your using to manage your Google Adsense placement because I’m confident it has nowhere near the power of the Quick Adsense plugin. This plugin is highly versatile and it allows you to rotate Adsense code, precisely control where your ad code should be placed, as well as the number of ad units to be placed on the page. It says it’s designed for Adsense, but you can plug code from any ad network you wish in there. INSTALLING THIS PLUGIN WILL LIKELY BOOST YOUR ADSENSE REVENUE.

*Bonus Paid Plugin

• PopUp Domination – This is a paid plugin that allows you to great visitors to your blog with professional designed pop-ups that encourage them to sign up for your newsletter. PopUp Domination comes with about a dozen templates that blend seamlessly with the look and feel of your blog. When and how often the popup appears is up to you. This plugin is great for building your email list and works flawlessly with major email list management services like Aweber.

Question
“Hi Everett. What tools should I use to do as SEO assessment for my clients? How should I present my findings to my clients?”

My Response
Here’s a brief answer to get you started. First and foremost, the person doing the assessment is the most important tool in the toolkit. This person should have knowledge of internet marketing, an understanding of how content management systems (CMS) work, a basic understanding of server platforms (Apache, IIS).  Add to that list proficiency of web coding languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  This person also needs to have an advanced understanding of search engine technology (including best practices, advanced search operators, Google webmaster tools, etc.).

Now that we’ve covered the assessor’s requirements, here are a few tools you should use to aid in the evaluation of your client’s site:

• Xenu, Screaming Frog SEO crawler, or other website crawler to quickly scan your site and summarize critical SEO data
• Firefox plugins like liveHTTPheaders to show server responses.
• The Firefox Developers Toolbar to further analyze the site
• http://seo-browser.com can yield some insights into how a search engine may view content on your site.

There’s a new book called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Secrets from the good people at SEOMoz that contains a sample SEO assessment that might help you out.

Put your findings in a clearly written, professional looking Word document and send it over to your client. If presenting, you might want to create a PowerPoint out of the larger SEO assessment document. Be sure to bring the client’s IT folks, content writers, and marketing stakeholders together to review the assessment with you.  Go over each item carefully, answering questions as they arise.  Remember – It’s as much about the person doing the assessment than the actual tools being used.  Ain’t really much more to it then that.  Good luck.

In early December, Danny Sullivan wrote the article What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count.  You should read it now to understand the context of Matt Cutts response in the video and this blog entry.

So I’ll let Matt Cutts speak for himself:

The Full Transcript of the Video Is Below.

Matt Cutts: Alright we’re back for another round of Webmaster questions. A lot of questions today, we got almost 500, so we won’t get to all of those, but there were a lot of really interesting ones. Let’s start off with the most popular one, which came from WebSEOAnalytics, they asked, “Hello Matt, a recent article of Danny Sullivan suggests that Google uses Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal. Can you confirm this? Can you elaborate a little bit more on this?”

Yes I can confirm it. We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or a creator on Twitter or Facebook. And let me just give you a little background on that, I filmed a video back in May 2010, where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal and at the time we did not use that as a signal, but now we’re taping this in December 2010 and we are using that as a signal. So the exhaustive place if you really want comprehensive information is to go look up Danny Sullivan’s article and we can leave that as a link in the description of the video.

But essentially, to give you a little more background, a little bit more color, the web search quality team has a lot of different groups and a lot of different offices so people, including the original blog search team, people who worked on real time search, have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal. So primarily it has been used a little bit more in the real time sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings.

Now there’s a few things to remember, number one is if we can’t crawl a page, if we can’t see a page, then we can’t really assign page rank to it and it doesn’t really count. So if we are able to obtain the data then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use that within our rankings. This is something that is used relatively lightly for now and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being.

The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, “Ah Ha! Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows and I’m going to get a ton of followers,” just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that page rank depends on not just the number of links but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality? Who are the people who are actually, are not just bots, or some software programmer, things like that.

So it is a signal that we’re starting to use a little bit more, you’ll see it most within our sort of real time search as it’s streaming through but we’re looking at it more broadly within web search as well.

– Matt Cutts
“Does Google Use Social Sites In Rankings“
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4

The New Search Engine Optimization Is Coming

In actually, it makes sense for Google to add social signals into the mix of ranking factors that it already uses.  It gives Google an additional set of information that can help it to return more accurate results in response to a user query.  I envision something like this: say, I tweet a link, Google will evaluate the reputation of my Twitter account; conduct some sort of sentiment analysis to understand how I feel about the content; and weight my overall social network influence.  From there Google, will aggregate my individual report with that of other individuals who have also tweeted the link in other to calculate an overall ‘social set score’.  The social set score is then combined with traditional SEO factors to compute a ranking for the page.  Of course, this is my own speculation.

Needless to say, this new plot twist presents a challenge to search engine optimization as we know it.  The future (or more correctly ‘modern’) SEO must be able to understand and influence social signals to affect search engine rankings.  It adds an entirely new dimension to our craft.

I leave with this question to website optimizers who may be reading this article.  Are you ready for such a radical change in how you practice SEO?

1. SEOmoz Linkscape is a backlink tracking tool. If you opt for the free version, you can see how many unique links you get to each page of your website, as well as the rank of the page and of the overall domain. The paid version allows you to analyze other websites as well, such as those of your competitors. You can see how many links they get, the quality of the links, and the keywords that they are targeting, all of which is very useful in your own campaign.

2. Yahoo Site Explorer is a well-known and popular free tool. It allows you to determine the number pages within a domain that are indexed by SLURP, Yahoo’s own search engine crawler, and analyze relevant data regarding inbound links. You can also export the results you find useful into a TSV file.

3. With Majestic-SEO, you can track link information for any domain, whether it be your own, or your competitors or other sites. If you do own the domain (and you can verify it), you can get more detailed data which includes aspects such as unique links and anchor text. Similar to SEOmoz, this comes at no cost if you are taking a look at your own site and you can purchase credits to get information from other websites. Some of the data provided is downloadable, and this tool offers a “daily update” feature with an updated journal of new inbound links.

4. Raven SEO supplies a complete set of link building tools including a Links Manager that helps you manage the link status, contacts and tasks related to each link. Another popular feature of Raven is that it automatically alerts you if any changes have occurred on an active link, for example, if the no-follow attribute was added, if the anchor text was changed, if the rank changed, or if the link was removed. Reports and data can be generated and downloaded.

5. BuzzStream Link Building is one of the costlier packages and its main focus is to supply tools that help automate redundant tasks in relationship building, not just link building. Distinguishable features include finding contact info, tracking email, Twitter automation, managing link prospects, monitoring backlinks for anchor text, no-follows, banned words and outbound links, general tracking activities, tracking conversions, and more. The management and conversion tracking elements of BuzzStream are what makes it unique in the list of link building tools.

There are many more such as these to be found, both free and paid, and the number available continues to rise.

“Hi,
I recently downloaded your script (asked if I could implement it as an addition to my own header.php) and this question is SEO related but not expressly related to your script. You stated earlier that you are an SEO-centric site builder and I have just a quick question that no one on either Warriorforum or here (Associate-o-matic forum) has been able to answer with much clarity.

I’m putting together a sitemap for my AOM site and was worried about getting hit with a duplicate content g-smack that others have related horror stories about. My site is already ranking around page 6-8 out of 4.5 million results with mostly just on-page SEO techniques and I’d hate to have to dig myself out of a pit should Google decide that I’m putting duplicate content up.

My site is not strictly a store as it also provides what I hope people will consider valuable informational content. I’ve written about 5-6 informational articles and 3 product reviews and am working on adding a new 1-2 every day or so.

Anyway enough with the background, I’ll get to the question. As a rule when using AOM should I deny spidering to my store with a robots.txt file and leave the product pages out of my sitemap, or should I allow Google to spider those pages and include the product pages in my sitemap?

Thanks for your time!
-Jake”

Jake,
You’re absolutely justified in your concern about hosting duplicate content from Amazon.com on your website.  Amazon’s product descriptions and product reviews are syndicated all over the web and therefore it can be difficult to get your AOM store to rank in the search engines without providing some unique content of your own.

However, this being said, I do not believe that you should use your robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing product pages.  The reason is that the major search engines do indeed return pages with duplicated content in search results.  For example, when I review the top referring organic keywords in my traffic logs for my Associate-O-Matic sites, I regularly find that users have found my stores by typing in ASIN numbers, product titles, product descriptions, and snippets from customer generated reviews as they are found on Amazon.com.  So, yes, allow your product pages to be discovered by Google and Yahoo by adding them to your HTML and XML sitemaps.

The thing to understand about duplicate content is that search engines look at how much of the overall page content is similar to a page found elsewhere.  If the amount of identical content exceeds a certain threshold, the page is considered to be a duplicate of one that was previously published and thus it will likely be “demoted” in the search engine listing.  I warn webmasters against allowing more than 25% of their page copy to be identical to other pages either on your site or that resides on another site.  This is a simplistic explanation and by no means a hard and fast rule but I think it’s enough to point you in the right direction.

Now, the second thing you want to do is to try to make the product page content that you port in from Amazon as unique as possible.  You can do this by creating original Title and Meta Description tags, Header tags, category introduction copy, custom boxes, and footer copy.  The good news is that you’re definitely on the right track when you talk about adding original articles to your site related to your store’s niche.  By creating your own original content and combining it with syndicated Amazon content you should be able to attract a wide variety of natural search queries.

Search engines use a secret algorithm, a set of rule-based actions, to determine the most relevant webpages (or other content) to return in response to a search query. Generally, the higher you rank in the search results for these terms, the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.

Search engine optimization or SEO is about getting your website to the top ranks in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing for specific keyword phrases related to your nonprofit’s services, events, issues, etc. In other words, the goal of SEO is to align your website with the search engine’s algorithm as best as possible in order to increase the probability of your site appearing in the search results for pertinent keyword searches. Top rankings can be accomplished by changing the structure, code, and content of your website in ways that facilitate search engines in discovering all the pages on your site and give it a clearer understanding of what your website is all about. SEO also seeks to increase the number of other sites linking to your website as this is an important factor search engines use in determining your rankings for keywords. Lastly, SEO is a long term online marketing strategy and it may take several weeks to see the payoff, but the return-on-investment can be very high. Below is an example of SEO at work for Amnesty International for the keyword “arms trade”.

SEO is designed to increase the volume and quality of organic traffic coming into your website.

The Opportunity for Nonprofits:

Search engines do not charge a fee to list your website among organic search results, so this is a great opportunity for nonprofit organizations to expand their reach online.

Many search engines incorporate images, videos, press releases, books and shopping feeds in their search results which may represent a tremendous opportunity to create an engaging user experience for your nonprofit within the search engine results.

How to get started:

1. Identify keywords that are related to your nonprofit using the Google Keyword Tool.

2. Assign a keyword to each page on your website. You will optimize the page for this keyword.

3. Add the keyword to the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, header tag, alt attributes, main site navigation, and URL to its respective allocated page when feasible, being careful not to overdo it and sacrifice user experience.

4. As best as possible, incorporate each keyword into the main body of content of its assigned webpage. The main page content should have between 300 – 500 words of copy.

5. Ask partners, donors, and members to link from their website to your nonprofit site using the keywords you selected as link text. Identify blogs, forums, and website directories and install links to your site using your keywords as link text according to any stated guidelines. In some cases, you may want to send a friendly email to the owner of related websites politely requesting a link to your site.

Are You A Nonprofit Organizations Who Wants To Know More About Internet Marketing?

The proceeding was an excerpt from A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit.  This is my FREE 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts.  Download it instantly by clicking the button below.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there.  If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.