I like to just go on record saying I wasn’t in any way paid to do a case study on this site. This is purely what I was shocked by and felt I wanted to share with you.

Alright so most of the US audience should be familiar with Esurance. They are a fairly new but big Automotive Insurance company. They seem to be in a huge rush to gather as many clients as possible, in fact I hear their ad every 5 minutes on one of my favorite radio stations. One thing that I find very Interesting is their total lack of SEO on their own website. Last I checked, that was a big factor to getting better placement online and even driving traffic to pages that arent just the home page.

As I like to do when I’m in between work, I stumbled onto this Esurance page. http://www.esurance.com/home/tv.asp So what did I find but the entire page loads with one massive image in the background. I felt I needed to further investigate how Esurance handles their SEO. So I took a screen cap for those of you who are too lazy to check out the link and to help further illustrate my point.

Lets start with the down to earth basics. The title of the page, “Erin Cam - Page 1″. When I last looked at web standards in general the title of the page was supposed to relate directly to the content and entice the reader into further exploring the website. Erin Cam - Page 1 doesn’t tell me anything other than some person named Erin is running a Cam? Catch my drift. Then next we take a look at the description Meta tag. Well I would look there, but there is a lack of anything to look at. So what will the search engine bots naturally look at? The on page text, which if you look at our fancy picture there is barely anything. Here is a quote of the first 30 characters on the site the way a search engine bot would see it: “Home > Erin’s World > Erin’s Cam Page 1 2 3 Privacy and Security”. This sentence in general really doesn’t grab anyone attention. In fact I wouldn’t know what to make of it if I were to see this in a search engine results page.

Lets take a quick look at the code of this page. Would it validate in the W3C validator? No, in fact we find 105 errors on the page itself. Without proper code usage the pages would stand less of a chance of getting correctly interpreted by the search engine bots and less of a chance of getting placed correctly in the search engine results.

Now I would look to see how the keyword usage is on this page, but in fact there is a total lack of keywords to be used. This is a huge flaw in the overall page optimization. I would assume that the page is getting ranked for the words “Erin Cam” seeing as thats the first set thats being used in the title. The results that those words would produce, would in fact be completely off compared to what Esurance would like to see.

Now that we have the problems, lets come up with some viable solutions for this setup. First and foremost, get some valid code. Takes about 10 minutes to accomplish and the code itself will be easier to read for both you and the search engines. Keywords will need to be considered, I would go with the standard “auto insurance” or something within their needs. The title and description tags should both be given some attention especially considering the on necessary keywords in their campaign.

The really tough part comes with the page itself. As it stands its one big background image with some pictures laid on top of it. My first thoughts would be to drop the description text for each video off of the background. With some creative writing this could easily increase the on page SEO and keyword density. The next would be to make those video’s interactive on the page itself (youtube embeded video’s or some home grown solution). This would not only increase the click throughs from an external site but give something interactive for the users to enjoy. As opposed to each video loading in a new window. Pop-up windows are a commonly hated problem in the world wide web. Every user dislikes dealing with them. The final piece would be to add the rel=”nofollow” tag to all of the links used on the bottom of the page. This is wasted link authority on pages that don’t need to be seen in the search engines. The only one I would possibly consider leaving is the sitemap link.

Overall this is one page of many that Esurance needs to take a much closer look at. Its obvious why they may rank for 3+ keyword phrases, just mainly due to the amount of advertising they are doing. For them to do well in a long term sense on the search engines Esurance is going to have to start paying more attention to how they code their pages and what kind of keywords they are using.

As far as everything goes, I am not an SEO, nor will I ever label myself one. I get most of my conclusions from my own trial and errors. So with that I thought I would share something I’ve been working with for a while.

Link Structure.

Maybe you have or you havent heard of it, but the concept is easy to understand. Structuring the links on for your site both internally and externally to better your linking power. I’m going to focus more on the internal.

Now I had a lot of trouble with this and I definitely had my share of faults trying to get the link structure on a few of my sites setup correctly. My sites went from decent rankings to horrible(page 2 on Google to about page 10). Even in some cases the sites were taken completely off the search engines, due to duplicate content issues. So a fair warning to anyone who messes with this stuff. Thats not to say this is hard stuff, just very temperamental.

To start, link structure doesn’t help just yourself, but in some cases it will even help out your site users by giving them a more pleasant time navigating through your site. There are a bunch of methods to setting up your links internally. I’ll focus on what worked for me, the Pyramid method. I made a real crude example of how the pyramid scheme works.

Assuming your home page is the starting point. Thats where you are directing most of your sites authority and generally  where most of your traffic is going. The basics is you take that authority and you spread it evenly around the site. So starting at my “Home Page” I use one way links directed at the “Categories” of the site. When I say one way links I mean take you are linking to the page, but that page is not linking back to you. So in the case of my “Category” page on all links going to the home page I put the “rel=’nofollow’” tag in there. Since just about every single search engine these days follows the nofollow rule, then its safe to say this works. Same goes for the “Category” links down to the “Single Post”.

When the site is setup correctly, you are evenly distributing your linking power throughout the site. Instead of just sending it all over the place. Again, this is for a simple site. The more complex the site is, the more you’re going to have to consider how its linked. Took me a couple hours of drawing it out to get it all down on some of my more complex sites.

Now the big “Magic Trick” of the linking structure is when you have your “Single Post’s” each carrying a small amount of link power, when you use them all together you can have a lot of link power. So what I have had success doing so far is putting a link on the “Single Post” pages and effectively transferring that link to the “Home page”. Giving the “Home page” a ton of authority in the site itself. You could also use those “Single Posts” to link externally to other sites in your network to give them more authority. I should also mention the “Single Post” isnt linking to anything else, except possibly similar posts or other “Single Posts”. It wont link back to the “Category”. Thats why its holding so much link power as a collective.

I’ve had some pretty good success with it. Its brought me up in the SERP’s a few spots just by reworking the structure. If I was a real smart person, I would consider the link structure as I was building the site. That would be the SMART thing to do, but oh well lesson learned for next time.

Give it a shot and let me know how your successes and failures go. Lets face it, not everyone will get this the first time out.

Well I was greeted today with what I was surprised to see was an apology email from Andy Jenkins. It goes into how his newsletters had gone a little off topic as off late. He linked to a new video entitled Going Natural 2.0. Now let me say that I was merely looking for more written content from Andy and his crew. Rather I found a video that starts out with a very serious note on how StomperNet had gotten a little away from its roots of free content and how he wants to improve on that. He took the time in his video to talk about my post on newsletter marketing(link: Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon Newsletter Marketing).

Now of course I had to continue on with this video and see what it was all about. I have to say it starts out with one crucial piece of advise on increasing your natural traffic. Andy didn’t go into any SENSATIONAL CLAIMS(j/k Andy), he just talked straight about improving your websites traffic. Andy really takes John Reese’s advise on not just delivering whats expected, Andy goes above and beyond my expectations for a newsletter and for StomperNet overall. Now I’m not some huge eCommerce man, but I do find tons of value in what Andy has to say. Its great to see StomperNet going back to what it does best.

Take 30 minutes of your day and check out the video you won’t regret it.

link: Going Natural 2.0

Well I for one think so. As I have been traveling around the net for a while. I occasionally run around to a few seo/affiliate marketeers sites, I like to run over to AoJon.com and read up on his various trials through Googles new algorithm. Now not having actually looked at the algorithm I cant say for sure, but after reading Jon’s example on his site about TrustRank I have a very solid feeling his findings are 100% accurate. Just by following his trials with it on his site, you get an idea of how difficult it can be.

I have been studying link structures and MiniNets for the last few weeks. Just by his vague PR example he explains on his blog I feel I have a better understanding of how the tip of the TrustRank iceberg works. I’d rather not give away examples, but the simple matter is Jon found a way to give a semi-accurate if not completely accurate TR score for peoples websites and how to out score anyone else out there. I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a copy of the TR algorithm just to have a look at what the work would be like deciphering it. I’ll leave that for another day. Overall though the message from Jon to every person working on SEO for their site is stop worrying about PR scores. Anyways check out his blog. Its some solid info, but dont bother him about buying his TR service, its all done now.

Link: http://www.aojon.com/

Sidenote: Even if you dont care about the TR algorithm, you should read Jon’s blog its pretty fun to read about him ripping on Ebooks and various other things.

Recently I’ve been on a real kick of reshaping how I structure my sites links. Now I’m not talking about doing links for your users, which is something you should never ignore, but having a proper link structure for the search engine spiders to go check out. There are numerous benefits to getting this done right and numerous ways to go about doing it.

The one way I’ve been experimenting with as of late is using that fancy rel=”nofollow” tag that everyone in the SEO world has been raving about. With some simple PHP scripts and a little bit of my afternoon I was able to rip apart my sites and make them spider friendly. The basics of using the rel=”nofollow” tag is it tells the spiders what links to follow and how to go about cruising through your sites link structure. Now obviously you want to take some time and figure out the optimal structure for your site. I advise you go find a copy of the ebook Revenge of the MiniNet, and study the hell out of it. Its the basics for creating a great site structure. What are the benefits? Well if you can learn how to stretch the link structure correctly and by doing so your site will seem like more of an authority on your topic. Or you can get that PR a boost by putting the right weight of PR on each link.

I’ve seen some slight improvements so far in my major sites. Some jumped a notch up in PR in the last update due to this, I’m sure. If you’ve had some fun with link structures and the nofollow tag, lets hear your stories.

SEO for Firefox is something every webmaster shouldnt be working without. What this plugin is it will append various important stats to search results on google. Things like PR, cache, supplmental, alexa rank, etc etc. I use it on a regular basis to help me track important stats for my various sites, instead of some website that most people may goto to find this kind of similar info out. One of the more important recent additions is the supplemental indexing tracker. This has really helped me keep a close eye on the duplicate content some of my sites create, and easily get rid of it. This is definitely a plugin I cant live without now.

Download: SEO for Firefox

Recently I’ve been seeing the usage of these social media networks like DIGG and YouTube for a new form of marketing your blogs/websites. Among some of the resources I turn to for advise on various topics this one being the internet, I stumbled on to http://www.harpzon.com which he recently did a quick article on bringing traffic to your sites through things like making Diggs that speak directly to the Digg community.

Now back when I started doing this whole internet marketing thing a year ago my whole goal was to be a whore on the net for all of my sites. I really saw some of my tactics as being a “spammer” but at the same time gaining tons of backlinks and really getting the name out there. More specifically I looked at “spamming” my site through comments on relevant blogs and making really solid comments on their sites. Now almost instantly after doing that on a TON of sites in the early stages of my site I was able to create some serious amounts of backlinks and people visiting my blog specifically for my content. I’m talking about 40-100 visits per comment I left. Now this may not seem like a lot but when you drop your sites url on 40+ sites it adds up fast. The same goes for DIGG, I took the time to make solid content for the Digg machine to make use of and over the long haul it has really added up to a lot of visitors.

The Rundown:

• *Making relevant and helpful comments on other peoples blogs is easy FREE traffic. You get all your click backs through people clicking on your name (your name generally has your url in it, ryan yockey).
• *Make Digg articles with helpful and relevant content, your title is key here. Bad title ZERO clicks, good title = MONEY in the bank.

So there you have it, a couple solid tips on free traffic to your blog.

So recently Google decided to toss one of my bigger websites into the so called Google “Sandbox”. This has happened a few times to me for my other sites. Right now I consider myself to be a little more educated on SEO and Googles practices in general. I’ve come up with a couple theories on why I think Google has decided they dont like my sites.

1. Googles biggest problem these days is duplicated content. The CMS thats the biggest natural offender is Wordpress. I’m not knocking wordpress, because I use it on the vast majority of my sites. But, while doing some research I’ve noticed that the amount of cached pages vs the amount of supplemental pages for this particular site are 253-cached/241-supplemental. I’m sure the low ratio of cached vs supplemental pages is a cause of the site being taken out of the searches.

2. This is more of a how they put my site in the Sandbox, than a why its there. As my site went into this Sanbox the PR of the website desided to jump from its PR4 ranking to PR0. It did this for a good 5 days as it slowly settled down to its normal PR4. This is probably how google offsets a site so that its unranked for any keywords in the search engine index.

The best way to combat the duplicate content in wordpress is to make a robots.txt file that disallows things like pages,categories,feeds, and any “wp-” labeled files. This usually is a direct cause to having a ton of duplicate content in google. The next would be any static text on any page.

As in any case I’m open to some other peoples experiences with the sandbox and getting out of it.

**Update**

So after about a day of playing with the duplicate content on my site and adding some various things to my site in question, I’m back out of the Google Sandbox.  I’ve figured for this site I’m working with my problem was the duplicate content, but not only that almost all the pages google had indexed were part of the duplicate content.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my percentage of duplicate content was at about 97% compared to what its at now which is 79%. Roughly anything above the 80% mark means your site is going to get dropped off the search index. You can figure this out by dividing the amount of pages you have in the supplemental index by the number of pages cached.