Online PR UK & Expert SEO

In case you ever wondered - yes Google do use humans to augment their search index. From what I gather its about 10,000 in total. Obviously, thats a speculative number, but the point is that your site will be human checked if you rank for anything meaningful.

This doesnt mean Google human rank the index, it just means that the algo they use is augmented by humans . Occasionally of course a spam site is identified and blown out f the index, but generally G like to let the algo do the vast majority of sorting.

So what do these human reviewers look for ? Well now thanks to a very, very helpful person, the human reviewer document has been outed and I have uploaded a copy for you to read. Its 43 pages of SEO heaven!

Download it here (2mb)

Yes ! every SEO’er needs to be on the ball! and to do that you will need to read HUUUUUGGGGEE numbers of relevant blog posts. So I thought I would share my RSS list with you and share this very useful site to help you read them faster !

Speed reading - tips and tutorials on speed reading HERE

For my own part I can get through a 350 page book in about 1 hour. I find the trick is to just let it subconsciously ’soak in’ and as by magic I know what the book was about and I can recycle the ‘learnings’ from it

My OPML file for your RSS reader | My RSS list:

You are probably familiar with ‘power using’ Google, but in case you’re not:

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

and here is an article from an online pr site which explains why these are useful for understand keyword competition.

I really like Todd Malicott and his site stuntdubl, so much so hes on my RSS list. Anyway hes done the most awesome post on the core issues surrounding SEO -  you should read it

http://www.stuntdubl.com

As some of you may remember Aol accidently let a load of data loose on to the internet ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5255732.stm ) and some SEO’ers have made some good use of this - including me !
I would love to say that I crunched the original data, but that credit goes to http://www.jimboykin.com/click-rate-for-top-10-search-results/

However I have done a little data manipulation of my own….the reason is becasue i use a programme called web ceo, which has a ‘ranking score’ formula whicih helps me get ‘clean metric’ for how one web site is doing against anotehr for a standard set of keywords. In many cases this is not important, but when you are putting business cases together, or your trying to make things simple for decision makers, having a simple number makes thing far simpler.

the other point about this data is that ‘winner takes all’ - as you can see from this pie chart !

Formula adjustment for top 20 rankings - their importance is based on the percentage of clickthroughs per position - so if 1 = 100%, then No 2 = 28% because it only gets a 3rd of the trafic of No1.

Where I find this data extremely useful is when i’m building a business case, so I would use overture, pick my keywords, multiply them by 3.5 to get the complete UK search volume per month and then run these numbers through my percentages to work out how much traffic we can expect per position on the rankings.

Pie chart showing relative amount of clickthrough per position on a typical search engine rankings page

I have long advocated the idea of keyword clustering, simply because its a clever way for searh engines to understand ‘context’. On a basic level his means building a broad theme across a site and then building more focused themes on specific pages.

These themes originate from core keywords or keyword phrases which are promenent on the page or site. (this means a density of about 3% of keyword volume. The actual density isnt that important - the main thing is that these words are the primary words on the page. The importance of these words are highlighted by being in Alt tags, title tags and H1 tags and of course in the body content.

So when I was researching the ‘mechanics’ of search engines (page rank) I took some time out to watch a very interesting lecture fromJeff Dean, a google fellow (a worthy and important person from Google)

Apart from stuff about their information architecture, he gave a demonstration of the back end user interface of one of the modules they use in their ranking. You can clearly see that they have used ‘intelligent’ anlaysis to work out what words cluster with what so they can get a good idea as to the context of words and keyphrases. the better the contextual matching, generally the more relevant the search result.

You can see the movie HERE (images on the right are screengrabs from the movie)

So assuming you have got the idea, the next question is how to work out what those clusters might be.

Well, we are in luck, because there is a small search engine called Clusty and it appears to do the work for you !

Try it yourself: http://cloud.clusty.com/

As you can see its interesting - but is it any good ?

Well I have done a few small tests. My main methodology is to pick a search term i.e SEO and go into the top 6 sites in Google and using a tool called a keyword density cloud See HERE ( it shows the more important keywords in a larger font) just do a basic review of what keywords are prominent. This way you can get a pretty good idea as to what words associate with what.

So after doing this random set of tests it seems there is a high degree of correlation between Clusty and my method.

So in summary, here is a tool (clusty) which helps you build web pages around certain keywords, therefore taking search engine optimization to another level.

As a final pointer. When you have published a page, run it through the google adsense tester HERE - if the adverts follow the theme of the page, then you know how Google sees the theme of you your page.