Patrick McDowell's Blog

Trust is everything. If major search engines do not trust your website, it will not rank. If your visitors/customers do not feel your website is legitimate, they won’t come back. It is as simple as that. Here are a few quick tips that will help you score points with both:

Structure Your Website Properly – A bit basic? Ya, but you would be surprised how many webmasters I come across that neglect a well organized and SEO optimized structure. Make sure your website is free of any broken links, use structured URL’s, 301 redirects, etc. How to do this all beyond the scope of this article (perhaps I’ll go over this soon), however a quick Google reveals quite a bit.

Create a “Company” Info Page – This is a nice little trick I learned last year that has helped me a lot. Even if your website isn’t a real company, you should still do it.  A nice little “About Us” or “Company Information” page can go a long ways in making your site look legitimate. In fact, most SEO experts believe that a many search engine robots crawling your website are looking for it. Statistically this page is one of the most visited of your entire site.  Here are a few tips to maximize your legitimacy:

• Make sure there is a link to this page from your websites home page.
• You can include a mission statement, company bio, history, what exactly your business/website/blog does, a quick biography about yourself (as owner/webmaster), a paragraph about each employee/staff member, etc.
• Have some kind of contact info, such as an email address or phone number.
• Photos are a good thing! Visitors are much more likely to come back to your site if they can see it is being run by “real” people.

Don’t be afraid to put some work into this page, remember on the web your image and reputation are the only things you have.

Publish a Privacy Policy – This is another area where SEO experts agree, robots look for privacy policy pages. It is generally good practice to have these anyway, but many people leave this out. Unless you are dealing with a whole bunch of legal business, keep your privacy policy simple, easy to understand, and accessible. Visitors tend to feel better seeing one, even though 99% of them will never read it. If you don’t want to do it yourself, here is a great free tool to help you:

http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/

Design a Sitemap – Again this is a bit basic, however newbies may have skipped it. Sitemaps are important to both search engines and some users. They provide a very simple and organized overview of your website. Sitemaps also help search engines find pages that are usually overlooked, such as standalone pages (a webpage contained within a site that is not linked to) .

If you would like to see a quick example, you needn’t look farther than this blog:

http://crims0n.us/sitemap

If you are using WordPress, I recommend Google (XML) Sitemap Generator, which is what I use personally. For normal sites I would recommend XML-Sitemaps.com

Link Directly, but Thematically – Try not to link to something within your site that is not directly related to what you are trying to rank for. For example, lets say you own a website selling used books, all under different categories. It would not be in your best interest to have a link from your romance novels to you science fiction ones. Although technically they are all “used books”, by doing this you are diluting your rankings for both “used romance books” and “used science fiction books” respectively. If you absolutely must link, consider using the nofollow tag so search engines know you are not passing any relevance. That is just one example, but hopefully that puts it into perspective for you.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have below in the comments section

Using latent semantic content in your posts can help you rank for the terms you want using less keyword density, and still being just as effective. As search engine algorithms become more and more complex, latent semantic indexing is going to become more and more popular.

What is Latent Semantic Content?

Say the keyword you are trying to rank for is public school funding. In the old days you could just repeat that ten times, drop some links and you were good to go. Obviously it is not that easy anymore, and we can really only use the keywords a handful of times before it becomes spammy.

We can use the keywords as little as once or twice and still rank just as high, if we use words that are related to the subject throughout our content. Look at the chart below:

Google sees all of these keywords as related. Thus using any of these keywords is just as good as using the keyword itself. In reality you should use latent semantic content as much as possible, simply because it looks all the more natural. Remember if your are wearing the white hat, you are writing for people, not search engines.

How Do I Know What Google Considers Latent Semantic?

Luckily, the big G made that easy for us. Check out this link, and look at the search box. All you need to do is put a simple tilde (~) before your keywords, and any word in bold under your results is considered latent semantic.

I wrote a nice little php script that verifies links for you and returns one of three values:

• Good!
• nofollow Tag Detected!
• Link Not Found!

The only quirk is that the link you enter needs to be exactly how the code calls it on each site. For example, http://google.com/ not http://google.com or google.com

Download it here or try it out here. I will be giving support in the comments section, if you need it.