You logged into Google today, viewed you referring keywords, and BAM: One of the top referrers was: “(not provided)”.

Google have introduced a new feature into their search where logged in users have search defaulting to SSL. Supposedly this is only meant to be affecting 10% of statistics, as apparently only 10% of queries to google search come from signed in users, however, we are seeing a much higher value for pingable. Sites that target a more technical audience will likely see similar statistics as us, where this number might become quite high.

Here’s is Googles official announcement on the topic.

What does this mean for web masters?

Obviously less data. The number 1 referral to pingable.org is now a keyword called (not provided). As annoying as this is, I guess the positive way to look at it is that it just scales down the data you can get from users. Overall, keyword referrals should be similar, however they will seem slightly lower, as you will not be getting the full picture.

The roll out has been taking place over the last few days, take a look to see how it is affecting out data:

So nothing to be too worried about. Your keyword performance is not dropping, Google are simply hiding the data from you.

There is no question that Google is the goliath of search, bigger and more powerful than any other search engine.  But with 70% of the lucrative search engine market share, there is bound to be constant challengers to their position.  Google usually buys out any serious competitor before they can become a threat, but that doesn’t stop some very smart people from trying to build the next Google.

Whether interested in the financial prospects, ethical interests, or because they like the challenge, new search engines are popping up everywhere.  Here are a few of the latest and coolest search innovations.

My personal favorite, DuckDuckGo takes privacy very seriously.  They don’t track your searches or click behavior.  They also produce a mighty fine search result and have tons of nifty features and add-ons.

Blekko has the biggest push behind it since Bing.  Although they produce a nice search result, I think anyone could with $25 Million in venture capital behind them.  They use hashtags to help searchers sort through notoriously spammy results like “online degrees”.

Despite my longstanding opposition to everything Twitter (read: I don’t care what you just ate for lunch), Twitter is being used as a new search tool.  Their user base has reached the size that it can actually provide a somewhat accurate, real-time presentation of what’s happening.

Wolfram|Alpha is about as real as it gets.  There’s no flip-flop spam here, just detailed facts.  You pay a price for those facts, but cutting out probably 99.99% of the searchable web.  If you’re looking for many obscure results, try one of the above searches.  If you need encyclopedic results, go with Wolfram, if you can remember the name.

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Thesis makes some serious claims including having 25k + purchases. (At a minimum $87 license, assuming every purchase was through an affiliate, that’s $1.47 Million)  Here are some of them:

• Separated HTML, CSS and PHP for superior SEO qualities
• Robust theme options panel for style and layout customizations
• A big time support network
• A number of influential bloggers using Thesis such as Laughing Squid (Web Host endorsed by WordPress)
• Child/Sub skins that can be applied with relative ease

After reviewing the claims made by others that used thesis (decreased bounce-rate, pagerank bump, etc.) I decided to give it a try.  I fronted the $87 and purchased the individual license.

As Thesis version 2.0 rounds the corner, here is what I found with version 1.7, the current stable release.

1. Thesis installs fast, and is very small.  It uses minimal server resources because there is barely any images in the entire thing.  In addition, there was a noticeable loading time difference over most other themes I’ve used.
2. Customization is pretty easy for the basics.  We’re talking changing navigation menu color, adding pages to the menu, and changing from 1, 2 and 3 columns.  However, this is where the simplicity stops.  Thesis was incredibly hard to customize as a non-coder.  Doing something as simple as finding where to add some custom code was incredibly tricky.  Granted, someone adept at coding PHP could probably fly through this.  But many people use WordPress because it is simple, easy and fast.
3. The “skins” available for Thesis are quite lame.  I could find no skins that wowed me or offered any eye-pleasing design.  It seems that Thesis offered two possibilities: make my own boring design, or use someone else’s boring design.
4. I liked the idea of using an premium SEO theme, one that would help me reach more people.  What I found was just that, a theme with major SEO muscles, but wasn’t much to look at or work with.  I spent two days trying to learn the inner workings of Thesis, and failed.

Regardless of your feelings on the matter, it is worth checking out Thesis Theme if you’re interested in converting your current theme to an SEO rockstar.  If you can code, try it out.  If you’re a novice at the coding side of things, you might want to check out Themeforest and get a shiny, out-of-the-box theme.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the key aspects to long term success with any online venture, so if you are looking to make your WordPress blog a success in the long run, you are going to want to consider how best to optimise your content for search engines. As it is out of the box WordPress has a few issues which need to be sorted out with plugins. In this article I will look at the key concepts of onsite optimisation, and I will provide you with links to all the necessary plugins to ensure your WordPress site is not ignored by search engines.

Keyword Research

The foundation of all good SEO involves clever keyword selection before you begin. Your overall site should be optimised to eventually rank for some high search volume keywords, and you should also target lower volume terms with individual posts. The main concepts in keyword research are: search volume and competition. Obviously you want to target keywords that get searched often, so ranking for them will bring you traffic, but you also need to consider who you are trying to outrank. To find estimates of the type of search volumes keywords will bring I suggest using the Free Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. On this tool use “Exact” rather than “Broad”, exact tells you how many people are searching for that keyword, but not other keyword phrases which might incorporate your term. To look at competition you need to search for the term in Google and analyse sites that are ranking for it. You would look for things like page rank, site age, keyword in title, backlinks to the page, and backlinks to the domain. I am not suggesting it’s practical to complete this sort of analysis on for every post you write, however, if you are planning a whole site based on a topic, you want to know how much search traffic that site can pull, and how hard it will be to obtain.

Also keep in mind that a high portion of search phrases entered into Google every day are being search for the first time. New topics and products come out all the time. So it is also a solid SEO strategy to simply write about hot trending topics. There may not be any historical data to suggest ranking for that term is worth while, but if it becomes hot, then ranking for new terms can be well worth it.

Onsite SEO

Of course not all SEO is done on site. If you know anything about SEO, you will understand that building targeted quality anchored backlinks is the main key in improving search engine ranking, however in this article I will be looking at mostly onsite SEO factors. The important onsite factors which you should be looking control include:

Post Titles

The title of your article is important, as it is the first indicator to a search engine of what the content on that page is all about. It is key to ensure your titles are optimised with researched keywords that will bring traffic to your site. Normally this just means inclusing your keyword in the article. For this article I might be trying to rank for the keyword “Wordpress SEO”, my title includes this term.

Meta Information

Although optimising Meta tags to improve search engine rankings doesn’t work like it did is the past, it is still important to optimise this content. The Meta Description is what Google uses to display as the description of your page when it is listed in a SERP (search engine result page), so you want this to be attractive to visitors to encourage them to click your link. You also want to this to be unique for every page on your site. For this task I use the plugin discussed below.

Post slugs

Post slugs are the name that each post gets in the URL of the page. You don’t need a plugin to optimise this, WordPress allows you to do it from the permalink page from your settings panel. I suggest using your post title for your permalink as the default permalink is involving an ID number will not help you rank at all. If you wish to have a different slug to your title for an individual article, there is also a field in your WordPress post page that allow you to change this. Here is an article about WordPress post slugs.

Internal link structure

How you anchor links around your site is probably the most important onsite SEO factor that people get wrong. When you link to another page in your site you want that link to be anchored with keywords. Look at how I linked to the WordPress post slug article in the paragraph above. This link tells search engine what that page is about. Wikipedia ranks highly in Google for millions of keywords many of which are very competitive terms, and one of the main reasons it does this is because whenever a keyword appears inline in a wiki article, that Wikipedia has a page about, it links that keyword to the page. This is a very effective controllable way to improve your sites ranking.

No index

There are certain pages on your site which you probably don’t want to rank in search engines. So why bother passing authority to these pages? A common page to apply no index to is the contact page. Also including tag and category pages in search engine indexes will mean there is duplicate content included. This is a debateable topic, as many SEO experts will tell you this is a major no-no. However, others will argue, that duplicate content from on the same domain has little to no negative effect, and in some ways can be considered a positive, as if more of your sites pages are included in the search engines index, then that is more of your site’s internal links that will be counted. I feel that unless you are trying to get tag pages to rank for keywords there is little reason to include these pages, so I suggest applying no-index to them, and I will talk about a plugin a little further down which will do this for you easily.

Image alternative text

Including keywords or title as the alternative text of your image will help bring traffic from Google image search. Google image search traffic is terrible for converting into an ad clicks or sale, but for such an easy task this traffic is still worth chasing if you are not lazy.

Headings within an article

Heading or <h1> tags can be used within posts to help reinforce what an article is about, and what keywords you want to rank for. For this reason it’s a good idea to use <h1> tags within your article, and to use your keyword in the tag.

Site map

A site map is what tells search engine spiders what content you have on your site, and it makes life easier for search engines to find your important content. Using a plugin which I will talk about below to generate a sitemap, and submitting it to Google will help your site to be indexed and ranked more easily.

Keyword density

There was a time when simply including a keyword lots of times on a page meant that that page would rank well for the keyword, however, these days have long gone. It is still said to have some weighting when sued sensibly, 2-3% being a good amount. Basically all this means is that you should include your keyword a few times through out your posts.
Ok enough of the concepts, what do we use to improve rankings

WordPress SEO Plugins

There are plenty of plugins out there aimed to improve the SEO of your wordpress blog, lets take a look at those which are absolutely key, I use all of these plugins on all of my WordPress sites.

All in One SEO for WordPress

This plugin is the number one most downloaded (4,254,635 at the time of writing this) Wordpress plugin and with goog reason. It is essential, it does it’s job, and it’s easy to use. The first key task which this plugin does is that it allows you to define meta tag info for your site like homepage title, keywords, and homepage description. It also generates and rewrites this info for your posts using special tags (see screenshot below) and allows you to format this appropriately. And even better, it does all this for you out of the box. Above I talked about no index. This plugin allows you to apply no index to tag, category and archive pages, simply by ticking a box. This ensures only your post content and homepage is included in search engine indexes, and ensure your actual content gets all the attention.

Google XML Sitemaps

As discussed above, having a sitemap for your WordPress blog makes life much easier for the search engine spiders to figure out where all your content is. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin easily allows you to generate a sitemap for your WordPress site, and also to customise the priority of content on your site specifying which pages are more important. Once you have generated a sitemap you need to go to Google Web Master Tools to submit your sitemap.

Internal Link Building

This little plugin is designed to optimise the internal link structure of your site like Wikipedia does, by automatically hyper-linking certain keywords which you specify to the pages that you are trying to rank for.

Using just these three plugins you can achieve all of the main goals with onsite SEO. There are other plugins designed to improve SEO of your WordPress blogs.

Best of the Rest:

• Headspace 2 –  This does the same thing as All in One SEO, however, I find it a little more complicated for beginners.
• SEO Blogroll – A plugin that allows you to show who your friends are with a blogroll, but allows you to apply no-follow if you wish, meaning that the site doesn’t drain your page rank.
• SEO Paged Comments –  Fixed issues with paged comments causing duplicate content issues. Worth looking into if you get lots of comments on your blog.
• SEO Friendly Images – Makes adding Alt tags and title tags to your image easier.
• SEO No Duplicate – Another plugin to fix duplicate content issues
• Efficient Related Posts – A related posts plugin – helps increase internal anchored links and helps maintain readers on your site.
• Platinum SEO Pack – Another complete solution like All in one SEO.
• SEO Title Tag – Useful tool for mass editing your post titles.

Google have released a fantastic new feature as an option in their search engine. The Wonder Wheel will surely give Google yet more information as to how searchers think. But, for those who want to target search engine traffic it is a pretty fantastic keyword research tool, that not only gives you an endless supply of related search terms to look at, but also allows you to study competition. As the tool functions inside your Google search results, and as you explore new terms the results update, it is a great way to quickly evaluate competition for terms also.

How does it work

1. Search for a term that you are interested in
2. Select show options

   

3. Select Wonder Wheel

   

4. Explore your term and it’s related searches.

   

5. It goes deeper…

This is a fantastic new edition to Google search that will help you decide which keywords to target, and probably help you think of new ideas to create posts for your blogs about.

This is a guest post by Gagandeep Singh.

The design of a website can be an important factor when optimizing for search engines. A web site needs to be designed effectively in order to take advantage of a SEO campaign. Web site designers can keep in mind a few points when designing a website for the dual purpose of attracting more users and increasing page rankings:

1. Amount of Content: The amount of content a website has can be a major impact on search engine rankings. Search engines focus on content, so It’s crucial to include information about each and every aspect of your topic or company. A good idea is to incorporate free resources to attract more visitors.

2. Avoid usage of Dynamic URL’s: Dynamic URL’s are long and often consist of special characters and randomly generated numbers or letters. Pages consisting of dynamic urls are automatically generated by the database or Content Management System. Search engines will not give a high priority to them while searching for a given query. The solution to this would be to include more static pages in your site. A good internal linking system can also lead to more pages of a web site being indexed.

3. Selection of a proper URL or domain name: The basic rule for high page ranking is that while selecting a domain name, one should choose a business name or the brand name. Domain names provide you with the opportunity to include as many keywords as possible. But at the same time very long and complex urls should be avoided. Also if changing the existing domain name or url you should be careful to redirect your old domain correctly to avoid losing the any value your old domain had.

4. Updating content of websites regularly: The content of Web sites should be continuously updated in order to encourage more visits from search engine spiders, which can improve rankings. Stagnant content may even decrease the popularity of a web site. Older web pages are less likely to include content with searches for recent events or products. It is generally a good idea to create a section of your site devoted to news related to your company or enterprise, or provide users with frequently updated blog.

5 Avoid using Flash: Web spiders used by search engines for indexing function much similar to a typical text-based browser. However, they are often not able to read the text embedded in Flash. It is a common mistake to embed target keywords in flash. As a result they are not easily able to rank well. The solution should be to use flash only when you can not achieve what you are trying to do with another format. However, with more recent versions of flash modern search engines are getting better at indexing and ranking content.

6 Title and Meta Description Tags: Search Engines give lot of importance to the title tag and meta description tag of each page. So including your keywords will help. Also it easier to gain more traffic from search engines faster if you are targeting less competitive keywords.

Building quality links to your site will help it grow, and gain organic traffic from search engines. This is key to the success of your blog or website. So what social sites are good for link building?

Best Social Sites For Link Building

Hub Pages is a great option for link building. You need to build your profile to have a ranking above 74 before your links get nofollow taken from them. This isn’t hard if you plan to have more that 4-5 hubs.

Squidoo is a good option. You can create a lens on any of your niche topics and embed follow links back to your main sites.

Both these sites give you tools to create great media rich content, and is ideal for link building.

Best article sites For Link Building

The best options for building links using articles sites are:

E-zine – The articles can rank well in Google, and links in the resource box will carry a good amount of strength.

Go-articles – Another good option link building, articles can rank well in Google, and the links well worth your effort.

Tips for build linking on these sites

Articles on the above sites can rank quite well in Google, and the links can carry a lot of value, but for you to get the most out of them, you need to do more than just write content and hope. Good readable content is a must. Read other hubs and lenses and see what content is performing well.

Here are a couple of hubs I have created to give you an idea of the sort of level expected. Both are only very new though. I didn’t put too much effort in to either of them, as I find it easy to write about MMO topics.

• Make Money Online Today
• Make Money Online For Free

Other thoughts

A good strategy for building quality links to your site is do more than simply create content on these sites, but to create content which links to your site, then build links to that content as well. A few links from social bookmarking sites will help your hubs, squidoo’s and articles to perform much better, and give much more value to them.

I’ve just been reading an article on blogstorm giving evidence that Google is showing a comment count next to site links for some blogs.

This is very interesting for two reasons. 1) It suggests Google is tracking comment numbers on blogs. 2) It is likely that if they are tracking comment numbers that it may be or become part of their ranking system for blog posts.

I love the thought of this, because I have no problems getting comments on this blog. It might also explain why some of my posts rank rather well for some good terms despite not really optimising them much for the terms. An interesting thought anyway.

I received the strangest email from the Google Adsense team an hour ago…Santa Search Tips. Basically it is a simple game designed by Google to help you understand some of Google’s search basics SEO Tips. The site is a .co.nz, so it is possible that the email only went out to New Zealand Adsense publishers. It is all good stuff. I have gone through the pain of finding all 15 of the tips for you:

Tip #1 If you’re unsure…

if all your pages are being seen by Google, search for your site’s address after the command “site”, ie site:yourwebsite.com. When you see your pages in the results, check your snippet content and page titles. Include information that matches the product or category of products on a particular page. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis Tool in Webmaster Tools.

Tip #2 Did you know?

if you upload new products faster then Google crawls your site, you should submit a Google Sitemap to include a refresh rate.

Tip #3 Remember to…

label your images appropriately. Don’t miss out on potential customers because of [001.jpg] instead of [NintendoWii.jpg] Images Search is one of the largest search properties out there, so take advantage of it.

Tip #4 Make sure you…

manage your Sitelinks. Your most valuable links may not be the ones that Google chooses as Sitelinks, so remember to remove any that you don’t think will benefit your users.

Tip #5 Don’t forget to…

check for error and keyword traffic in Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.

Tip #6 It’s important to…

serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you’re permanently out of a product, serve a 404. I you have permanently moved a product to a new page, serve a 301. The more we know about your old pages, the better.

Tip #7 Consistency is key…

if your website directs customers to a brick and mortar store, make sure you double check you business listing in Google Local.

Tip #8 Take a few minutes…

to test the usability of your checkout process. Ask yourself if a user can get from product page to checkout without assistance? Is your checkout button easy to find?

Tip #9 There’s no doubt about it…

users and search engines like fresh content. We recommend original product descriptions or a product review section on your site.

Tip #10 Have you thought of?

reading our recently released SEO Starter Guide?

Tip #11 Would you like an overview of our top tips?

Watch our Tutorials for Webmasters.

Tip  #12 You can always…

find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.

Tip #13 For even more tips…

get the latest updates from the Webmaster Central Blog.

Tip #14 You can always…

answer your other questions in our Webmaster Help Center.

Tip #15 It’s never too late to…

ask your last-minute questions in the Webmaster Help.

Connect Content is a network for web masters like you and me to get relevant anchor targeted links to our web content. I have been using this service to promote some of my niche sites and articles since it’s private beta launch and and want to offer readers an opportunity to join also.

Connect content is not free. It will cost you $12 a month or $120 a year.

What will you get from this network?

You will get targeted links and direct traffic to your content. You decide what content to promote, what anchor terms you want to promote and other web masters will promote your content on their sites. The harder you work promoting other web masters content, the more your content will be promoted by others.

The end result will be more search engine and direct traffic to the content you promote, which is worth much more to you than this network will cost to be part of. You will also make genuine connections with other web masters, just like you, trying to promote their content to make more money from their sites.

Is this selling buying Links? Will I get in trouble from Google?

No this isn’t selling and buying of links. You don’t have to link to or promote any sites you don’t want to. And no one has to promote your sites if they don’t wish to. This network is simply a medium to share with other webmasters the content you have which you want targeted anchored links to. You are under no obligations what so ever to promote any particular content. RT the creator of the site has gone to great effort to develop a network that is both useful to web masters and that abides by all of the Google quality guidelines. So no, I wouldn’t think you will get in any trouble by Google or any other search engine for promoting your content on this network. However, as with anything, these things are often some what of a gray area, and nothing can be guaranteed. Having said that, I am using the network myself, so I have confidence that it is not in any breech of Google’s quality guidelines.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up and try this puppy out: Invite