I am here at the SEO conference by SEOmoz in Seattle, and we have all been blown away by LDA and the results seen. People can apply this to SEO by using a brand new tool developed which located relevant content based on key terms to implement within your pages. This helps with content and ranking by targeting a specific subject or niche.

Link to Tool – http://www.seomoz.org/labs/lda

Brandon Swenson – UtahSEOpros.com

We have several different website packages depending on what you are looking for. Click Here for more information!

Most will instantly believe they have been penalized, and start to wonder what their boss is going to think. (Which is of course a very nice feeling, right… lol) – Your boss may wonder, what the !#%& happened to our rankings, what did you do for us to deserve a penalty, and so on. First off, don’t instantly blame it on a penalty from Google. There are several reasons why your site may have instantly fluctuated in the SERPS.

Double check your keywords and their ranking, see if it was just a few that dropped, and not most. Maybe it could be an indexing issue, this happens at times. Give it a week, and you could be back in business. Double check your traffic, see if it was just a PR drop and not a sudden change in traffic. Just be a little detective and see if you can pin point the source of your rank demise.

If you are certain that the Google gods have thrown a penalty your way, and you have pin pointed what it is for, fix it asap. Be honest with Google and your site. Don’t play black hat, these guys are smart. Also your penalty may be very minor if this is a first offense. Once you have fixed the issue, within a few months you could be right back to where you were. If you have been penalized before with a separate site, Google probably knows this and has penalized your further. The Google gods are very good at knowing how you are affiliate with other websites, its not worth testing their power, so to speak

In short, if you get a ranking drop, and it looks dramatic, don’t panic! Play detective, fix the problem, be honest, and don’t go about doing it again. Google is like an online court system, our first offense may have a minor consequence, so it’s not worth it to go for the 2nd. – Utah SEO Pros

The site is pretty new but is an extremely valuable resource for those of you who are ready to sit down and start a link building campaign. As a free member I noticed I could only access the community forums and a freebies section which contained a list of DoFollow blogs that I burned through pretty quickly, but as a premium member which cost me $9.99 I was given access to the full site and plenty of DoFollow blogs, websites, and social networks that I could drop links into.

Now to me, and knowing how valuable that is, seemed worth my 10 bucks lol. What is cool, is there is a forum where the premium members can request niche specific dofollow site lists that they can specifically work on. For Example: I want a list of sites based around “Website Marketing” – Apparently these guys will provide me with a list of DoFollow sites based around that niche for me to work on.

I was just impressed by the uniqueness of this site, and I know there are not many out there that do this, so take advantage of it if you feel it could be useful to you! – Utah SEO Pros

Would you believe that one day, most major corporations will maintain lifelong connections with their customers through a social media platform.  If you want to know why, ask yourself these questions:

• How many times did you change your phone number?
• How many times did you change your e-mail address?
• Now … can you envision changing your Facebook profile?
• Will you abandon all your friends and set a new one? NO of course not.

Lifelong connection with people, that’s what it’s about.

Many marketers think that doing a sponsorship on MySpace or posting a one-off campaign channel on YouTube is social media … that’s not true

Social media is about socializing, it’s about:

Weaving your content and messages into the social web

• Don’t focus on getting people to your website right away
• Join your customer conversation
• Talk about your brand and how many wonderful things it can do
• Befriend your customers and maintain regular communication with those friends
• Listening to what they have to say
• Reply and comment on it
• Measure and analyze the impact

A simple example:

• One person joins your group or fan page >> 60 (average number of Facebook friends per user) of his friends find out
• 40,000 people join in >> 2,400,000 find out (massive FREE advertising and brand recognition). Wow!

So what do you have to do?

1. Launch a brand platform
2. Start making brand impressions using press releases stating your Facebook presence
3. It will be a good idea to offer an incentive for joining you group (i.e.: discount code, helpful tools or applications, etc.)
4. Make as much friends as possible and chat with them as often as you can
5. Connect with bloggers and offer them free content about your brand (make them feel special!)
6. Push out relevant interesting content

Now you have created brand Impressions, what will happen next?

People will comment, post and share. Now you have created a very valuable peer-endorsed connection with your existing or potential costumers, and they’re spreading your message automatically to the people around them!

Creating the never-ending loop!
As your customers and friends comment on your posts, videos, status updates and twitter tweets, their friends are seeing that “my trusted friend” has commented on this product. They’re thinking, “Let’s check out this company profile. If my friend likes it, maybe I’ll become a fan too!”

Basic social media example:

1. Nancy logs in to Facebook and reads through her news feed
2. Nancy sees that her good friend Diane became a fan of ZARA
3. Nancy clicked on the ZARA fan page to check it out
4. Nancy also loves ZARA, so she became a fan too
5. well .. Because Nancy is so excited that she found ZARA’s fan page, she invits Lisa, Suzy and Cindy to join the fan group
6. oh guess what Lisa, Suzy and Cindy did?
7. ZARA has built up over 1,200,000 fans!

Again, if the average Facebook user has 60 friends on his account, that mean more than 72 million messages have been sent out to their friends about ZARA! We’re talking big numbers now!

The best part is that there are no expenses attached to the 72 million messages. It’s all free and it’s all automatic!

Written by: Bassem Ghali

We feature an SEO Services Marketplace where individuals can find by category, exactly what type of service they need. So if your a consultant or business that provides SEO, SEM, or SMM services to clients here in Utah or any other state in the USA, we invite you to submit your information for a FREE listing with a direct doFollow link to your website in our SEO Services Marketplace by Clicking Here!

Make sure you choose a category that best describes the types of services you offer. If your services fall under multiple categories, feel free to submit your listing more than once into a different category. Our team will manually check the services your site offers, and approve your listing.

www.UtahSEOpros.com

In the past (I’m sure some can relate) – I used to have 100 emails coming in each day from feeds, alerts, newletters, and updates all based around a specific niche that I was targeting. So much time was spent looking to related content and hoping for a back-link that the SEO campaign turned into just that.

Now with so many SEO tools that can automate processes and make life easier for the SEO specialist out there, we are able to use our time and balance out our favorite techniques in boosting a sites ranking in the SERPS. I just want to share a few of my favorites:

1. Start “Googling” Your Brand

A great way to get people to Google your brand or a specific keyword is to release an eBook or a niched guide with that word or brand playing a large role, but without a link to your site. In most cases, individuals are going to start to Google your brand and find your website. This in turn will start some social commotion, earn you back-links, and help your site grow. Keep in mind though, you better have a good eBook or guide that individuals are going to “want” to read – and maybe if it’s good enough it will go Viral! – Thank your rolling.

2. Use Linkscape from SEOmoz

Linkscape is a great tool used to obtain quality back-links which can tremendously help your site. Find your top competitors and find our where they get there links from and organize them by popularity and rank. By doing this, you are able to start a campaign for obtaining quality back-links through submission forms, email and direct contact with site owners.

3. Guest Blogging by Niche

If you have a niche in lets say, “debt consolidation” a great way to get some easy links is to guest blog. Find blogs based around debt consolidation and comment, become part of that blogging community and with each comment obtain a link to your site. Try to find blogs that don’t use the nofollow attribute so you can get some link juice as well. This is a popular method and has started to be abused, but as of right now is still a great way to help your SEO campaign.

4. Social Bookmarking

There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites popping up around the web, and to tell you the truth they actually work quite well. Sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon are all great ways to grab a few quick links to your sites. Just make sure to properly tag and provide unique descriptions with each of your bookmarks if you expect them to help at all.

These are just a few of my favorite methods and I know more are continuing to arise, but sometimes the best plan of action is to stick with what you know. If it works, and you see results, why change! SEO involves taking risks though, so if you come across a new method with promising results, don’t be afraid to tread the waters and see if it will work for you. – Utah SEO Pros

I just read a well written post on how Social Media has basically started to control our minds and business directions with new technology, innovative features, and attractive “so called” promises.

Social Media has taken the web like a storm and has provided plenty of new avenues for individuals and businesses to take in order to increase their amount of traffic and obtain a higher brand recognition. CEO’s have seen this and have pushed their companies to fully jump into MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and many others believing this is what is going to help them the most. By doing this they have lost focus on what matters the most to a visitor – The initial content that is supposed to attract, keep and perhaps push a customer to purchase on your site.

The facts are this, site owners need to develop a content strategy before jumping into the world of social media, because if they don’t, all that is happening is a bunch of irrelevant content is going to be continually pushed through different social channels, which in turn will most likely cause the eyes your wanting to simply shut. Create a web content strategy that is going to keep a visitor, than consider what social media, marketing methods could benefit the direction you are wanting to take.

To read the post that prompted me to write this click Here!  - Utah SEO Pros

The Open Site Explorer is a Link Popularity Checker and Backlink Analysis Tool! So if you’ve got a major competitor you are going up against, why not get all the link data you can about their site. Just enter their URL and check out where they are getting their links from with the highest authority.  Once you’ve got the list, you can go through one by one and use your own personal SEO tactics to try and obtain a link from the same site.

What I normally will do is first off see if there is a number I can call. Getting a-hold of the site owner or webmaster is always the best route to take. You can directly negotiate with them, and explain why your site would be a great resource to his or her sites visitors. If there is no phone number, see if you can find an email address. Send them an email, but make it look catchy and not spammy. We all know what to do with those random emails we call crap, so make the subject line look good, and your body not just another “link request”.

If there is no contact information for the site, and you really want a link up there, you can always try to entice the site to look at you. Post on your personal blog about them, or use some social sites like Twitter or Facebook to attract their attention. If they are an active site, you can be pretty sure someone will notice. – Almost like I am trying to get the attention of SEOmoz by writing a post about their super amazing Open Site Explorer tool. Maybe I will get randfish to post a comment lol.

Now there is a Free and Pro edition, so if your aim is to just get links and not care the authority or value of those links, than go with the free version which is available to anyone who visits the site. However, for those of us that focus on high quality back-links, you more than likely want to know some authority statistics and link data about each site, so to have it all in one place is pretty ideal for pro users. -> Go Pro!

Hope this helps a few people out by introducing a great tool if you did not already know about it! All your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated! – Utah SEO Pros

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

• Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few “clicks” as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
• Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

When is Pagination Necessary?

When a site grows beyond a few dozen pages of content in a specific category or subcategory, listing all of the links on a single page of results can make for unwieldly, hard-to-use pages that seem to scroll indefinitely (and can cause long load times as well).

Clearly, I need to log into Facebook more often…

But, usability isn’t the only reason pagination exists. For many years, Google’s recommended that pages contain no more than 100 links (internal or external) in order to make it easy for spiders to reach down deep into a site’s architecture. Many SEOs have found that this “limit” isn’t hard and fast, but staying within that general range remains a best practice. Hence, pages that contain many hundreds or thousands of links may inadvertently be hurting the access of search engines to the content-rich pages in the list making pagination essential.

Numbers of Links & Pages

We know that sometimes pagination is essential – one page of results just doesn’t cut it in every situation. But just how many links to content should the average category/results page show? And how many pages of results should display in the pagination?

There are a lot of options here, but there’s serious danger in using the wrong structures. Let’s take a look at the right (and wrong) ways to determine link numbers.

In some cases, there’s simply too many pages of results to list them all. When this happens, the very best thing you can do is to work around the problem by… creating more subcategories! It may seem challenging or even counter-intuitive, but adding either an extra layer of classification or a greater number of subcategories can have a dramatically positive impact on both SEO and usability.

There are times, however, when even the creation of many deep subcategories isn’t enough. If your site is big enough, you may need to have extensive pagination such that not every page of results can be reached in once click. In these cases, there are a few clear dos and don’ts.

Do:

• Try to link to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible without breaking the 100(ish) links per page limit
• Show newer content at the top of the results list when possible, as this means the most link juice will flow to newer articles that need it (and are temporally relevant)
• Use and link to relevant/related categories & subcategories to help keep link juice flowing throughout the site
• Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs

Don’t:

• Show only a few surrounding paginated links from paginated URLs – you want the engines to be able to crawl deeper from inside the structure
• Link to only the pages at the front and end of the paginated listings; this will flow all the juice to the start and end of results, ingoring the middle
• Try to randomize the paginated results shown in an effort to distribute link juice; you want a static site architecture the engines can crawl
• Try to use AJAX to get deeper in the results sets – engines follow small snippets of Javascript (sometimes), but they’re not at a point where this is an SEO best practice
• Go over the top trying to get every paginated result linked-to, as this can appear both spammy and unusably ugly

When in doubt, consider the directives you’re optimizing toward – the need for fewer extra pages of pagination, the desire to make the browsing experience usable (many webmasters mistakenly think users will simply give up and search, forgetting that some of us can’t recall the name of the piece we’re looking for!) and the importance of maintaining a reasonable count of links per page. Also note that although I’ve illustrated using 5-10 listings (for graphical space requirements), a normal listings set could be 30-90 links per page, depending on the situation.

Titles & Meta Descriptions for Paginated Results

In most cases, the title and meta description of paginated results are copied from the top page. This isn’t ideal, as it can potentially cause duplicate content issues. Instead, you can employ a number of tactics to help solve the problem.

Example of results page titles & descriptions:

Top Page Title: Theatres & Playhouses in Princeton, New Jersey
Top Page Meta Description: Listings of 368 theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (including surrounding cities).

Page 4 Title: Page 4 of 7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Page 4 Meta Description: Listings 201-250 (out of 368) theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (inclusing surrounding cities).

Alternate Page 4 Title: Results Page 4/7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Alternate Page 4: Description: -

Yes, you can use no meta description at all, and in fact, if I were setting up a CMS today, this is how I’d do it. A missing meta description reduces complexity and potential mis-casting of URLs as duplicates. Also notce that I’ve made the titles on results pages sub-optimal to help dissuade the engines from sending traffic to these URLs, rather than the top page (which is made to be the better “landing” experience for users).

Nofollows. Rel=Canonicals and Conditional Redirects

Some SEOs and website owners have, unfortunately, received or interpreted advice incorrectly about employing directives like the nofollow tag, canonical URL tag or even conditional redirects to help control bot activity in relation to pagination. These are almost always a bad idea.

Whatever you do, DO NOT:

• Put a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL. You’ll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren’t worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).
• Add nofollow to the paginated links on the results pages. This tells the engines not to flow link juice/votes/authority down into the results pages that desperately need those votes to help them get indexed and pass value to the deeper pages.
• Create a conditional redirect so that when search engines request paginated results, they 301 redirect or meta refresh back to the top page of results.

The only time I recommend using any of these is when pagination exists in multiple formats. For example, if you let users re-sort by a number of different metrics (in a restaurant list, for example, it might be by star rating, distance, name, price, etc.), you may want to either perform this re-sort using javascript (and employ the hash tag in the URL) or make those separately segmented paginated results rel=canonical back to a single sorting format.

Letting Users Display More/Less Results

From a usability perspective, this can make good sense, allowing users with faster connections or a greater desire to browse large numbers of results at once to achieve these goals. However, it can cause big duplicate problems for search engines, and add complexity and useless pages to the engines’ indices. If/when you create these systems, employ javascript/AJAX (either with or without the hash tag) to make the pages reload without creating a separate URL.

(the Google Analytics interface allows users to choose the number of rows shown, though they don’t have to worry much about crawlability or search-friendliness)

Also remember that the “default” number of results shown is what the search engines will see; so make that count match your goals for usability and SEO.

Additional Resources

• A Gallery of Pagination Examples and Recommendations from Smashing Magazine
• A Farewell to Pagination from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series
• The SEO Pager Plugin for Wordpress is a highly customizable set of options that allows you to create search-engine friendly pagination in Wordpress’s CMS from SEO Egghead

If you have any thoughts or recommendations to share in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!