It was a short week with Thanksgiving, but there were lots of SEO blog posts out there. I continue to find the most useful information on the Sphinn site, but I like to follow specific bloggers instead of reading what goes ‘HOT’.

After ‘browsing’ (hard to get motivated on Black Friday) through over 200 blog posts, here are a few I would like to share through our SEO White Hats blog.

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/keyword-trends-google-analytics-greasemonkey/
Firefox add-on that shows referring and keywords trends in Google ANalytics

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience
Randfish SEO for footer links. There are some good SEO tips here including the use of nofollow and the fact that footers are de-valued by search engines, particularly Yahoo!

http://searchengineland.com/sempo-to-ring-nasdaqs-bell-15612.php

SEMPO will ring the NASDAQ bell on December 1st. Congrats SEMPO!

http://www.saadkamal.com/google/bloggers-best-practices-guide-by-google/
Google releases Best Practices for Blogs

http://searchenginewatch.com/3631829
I usually don’t read lists or follow web design threads, but here is 25 Design Best Practices for Your Small Business Web Site

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/searchwiki-power-to-the-people-great-news-for-seo-20

How GoogleSearchWiki and SEO2.0 might change the algorithm from links to people.

http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/2007/06/08/google-bounce-factor-research-data-is-in/

Does Bounce Rate affect SEO? Google Bounce Factor Research Data.

http://www.newedgemedia.com/blog/index.php/2008/11/seomoz-toolbar-a-review/
Review of seoMoz Toolbar. I did install it, but I am not currently running it. Randfish quickly responded to the review reminding everyone that LinkScape is in beta.

http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/2008-social-network-analysis-report/
A stats heavy review of leading social networks showing users and traffic of sites like Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Plaxo, and more. Good post if you are asked about current user and traffic levels of a particular social network platform.

Obtaining links to your web site on other sites is an important part of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Links help achieve the success of SEO efforts in several different ways, although the first two are most important:

1. The text used in links will help define relevant search keywords for your site or blog. This is why a link with anchor text (the visible, clickable text in the link) like “Read more” or “Click here” isn’t as valuable to SEO as one with less generic wording. For example, an inbound link titled “Seattle, WA Cleaning Service” would be especially beneficial, because it improves the linked web site’s ranking in search results for each of these words (and the entire phrase).

2. Regardless of their anchor text, links help SEO by improving the search engine rankings of a web site in general. Search engines consider linking to a site as an indication that it is more highly recommended and/or credible. Google’s PageRank (PR) system, which plays a major part in determining the position in results different sites receive, is largely based upon the quantity and type of links to each site. Other major engines use similar criteria in determining rankings.

3. Obtaining a link on a popular site often enables a web page to get indexed by search engines more quickly than it would otherwise. This will particularly help SEO efforts when time-sensitive material must be promoted, such as a news article or short term special pricing. One way this is accomplished is when a link is posted to a social bookmarking service, and is highly rated by users to the point that it appears on one of the main pages.

4. Links also help SEO indirectly by increasing traffic to web sites (when people click on them). As more people use a web site and see links to it elsewhere, there is a better chance that more voluntary linking to it will occur on other pages, directories, blogs, and social bookmarking systems. This will additionally help SEO efforts, reducing the need to buy links or manually request that they be added. This factor is more relevant to entertaining or informational sites.

Basically, links help SEO by increasing the speed of search engine indexing, defining keywords which are related to the sites they link to, improving search engine rankings in general, and encouraging the creation of additional links.

If you are considering moving your hosting from one country to another, you should definitely consider the impact it will have on your traffic. While search engines are becoming more knowledgeable about geography, the technology does have its flaws. This will most likely lead to some changes in terms of search engine traffic, especially when someone is using a country specific search option.

The reason behind this is that search engines work to direct you to your country’s version of that engine. For example, if you live in Denver, CO, you are taken to the USA’s version of Google, which is simply www.google.com. However, if you lived in Perth, Australia you would be directed to www.google.com.au – the Australian version of Google.

This also means that Google wants to return results to you from the same country you are searching from. So, Google tends to give more weight to sites that have either a domain name ending in the same country (.au in you’re in Australia for example) or are physically hosted on a server within that country. Google determines the hosting location via an IP address.

So, ultimately, if you’re going for more traffic in the U.S. then having your server hosted there may benefit you. But, if you are trying to drive traffic in another country, hosting your server in the U.S. could be a disadvantage. Overall, though your domain extension has the most impact on how traffic is channeled from various country specific Google search pages. And most experts believe the difference will be so small that it will be practically unnoticeable.

Being the model of consistency, I have already ‘broken’ from my plan of providing a Monday morning recap of the SEO blogsphere. I had a chance to catch up on my blog reading tonight and here are some interesting posts from the 15 SEO Blogs that I follow:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html
Google launces SearchWiki, the ability to make search your own.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/11/14-competitive-intelligence-tools.html
Competitve Intelligence slide deck Andy Beal including his Trackur.com tool.

http://www.shimonsandler.com/structuring-a-link-campaign/

Shimon Sandler is promoting his link building service.  Good insight into what is current working for effective link building.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/link-advertising-program-inlinkscom-text-link-ads/
Michael Gray discusses a new service from Text Link Ads and recaps his well known stance on paid link advertising.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/11/17/facebook-internally-seoing-brand-pages-wants-more-traffic-and-google-juice/

Facebook add new links on public profiles…this matters for SEO.

http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/is-pagerank-the-ultimate-measure-of-online-influence/
Vanessa Fox discusses Page Rank and Online Influence on her new website…I wonder what the significance of nine BY BLUE.  Vannessa provides an SEO overview blog post with her best SEO posts at http://www.ninebyblue.com/reference-articles/seach-engine-optimization/search-engine-optimization-the-beginning/

http://www.seobook.com/art-seo-proposal
Great post about SEO proposals, a follow-up to http://www.seobook.com/how-be-seo-service-provider. Follow-up post -> http://www.seobook.com/how-keep-seo-clients

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/must-have-seo-tools
A list of 6 must have tools for SEO…I can’t seem to pass up a SEO Tool list.

When it comes to build links targeted to specific keywords, you need to keep in mind the relevance of the overall keyword phrase.  For example, let’s talk about a keyword phrase like ‘Credit Card Offers”

The Google ranking algorithm does use relevancy for its search results.  There are 3 main components – Technical, Content, and Links.  The first two items – Technical and Content – are primarily based on your website.  The third – Links – is the basis for Google PageRank, which is collective the most dominant of the 3 components.

You can find more information regarding PageRank here – > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

In this example, I might build links for “Credit Cards” and “Credit Card Offers”, but not “Offers”  This is because you can build relevance for ‘Keyword Phrase 1′ and ‘Keyword Phrase 2′, if both are relevant to your website.  However, the content and the linking will be harder to establish relevancy for “Offers” as a stand-alone phrase.

In addition, once you rank for a particular keyword like “Credit Cards”…Google will watch the behavior of its users to see if they like to visit your site after typing this keyword and it if seems like a majority of users are happy with the result, this also confirms relevance.  All of this is done by algorithms, Google states in several public releases and their methodology supports that ‘hand-editing’ doesn’t occur for top rankings.