Welcome to the latest edition of the SEO Chat newsletter. We may not be quite as inevitable as death and taxes, but you can depend on us to give you the best ideas for optimizing your web site (and hopefully your bottom line) week after week. And we give it all to you for free. Let's see Uncle Sam match THAT for return on investment!

Speaking of free stuff, the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek talks about the newest thing you can get from Google for free: development tools. Did you like the way President Obama was able to answer so many questions lobbed at him from three million users online all at once? Wouldn't you love to get your hands on the tools that let him do it? Check out the article; you just might be able to add a whole new level of interactivity to your site. You'll find some great security features, too.

So what other articles do we have for you this week? If you're part of a not-for-profit organization, you'll want to read Monday's article on non-profits and the Internet. You've find out why these organizations stand to benefit so much from having a web site, and some ideas to get you started. On Tuesday we wrapped up our five-part series on factors that make your web site rank well in the search engines. If you've been following it so far, you don't need me to tell you why you should check it out; the quick list of all the factors discussed, organized by importance, is worth the price of admission all by itself. On Wednesday we reviewed Stumpedia, yet another people-powered search engine. Is it worth your time? Check the review to find out.

This week's thread deals with breadcrumbs, a form of navigation that helps insure your users always know exactly where they are on your website. We use it at SEO Chat, as you've probably noticed. But does it make sense from an SEO standpoint? What do the search engines think of it? And should smaller sites use them, too? This topic came in for some lively discussion; get a taste of it below, and then check out the full thread in our forums.

You'll also want to check out the SEO-related tutorials available on Tutorialized. Recent additions focused on boosting a website's rankings in Google, what search engines specifically look for, and techniques for creating content. You'll find these, and close to 100 more on similar topics, the next time you visit Tutorialized. Why not stop by there today?

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, deals with a question that comes up pretty frequently in our forums. Why do websites that apparently have very little content show up well in Google's results for certain keywords? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

• News of the Weird makes you look smart. And you need that.
• Juan Valdezburg would like you to meet his cousin. Again.
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Google seems to hold a lock on the search space, but many of us still come up empty-handed from time to time when we search. It is enough to keep us looking for a better search engine, or at least one that goes about the whole business differently. Stumpedia offers a big difference: no bots, no spiders, no algorithms, just users entering links and voting them up or down.

Stumpedia CEO Luis Pereira likes to differentiate his human-powered search engine from the others that are out there. "Stumpedia is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. Unlike Mahalo and Wikia Search, Stumpedia is not a content producer or provider and as such does not host any content pages. Furthermore, unlike traditional search engines we do not use bots or crawlers," he explained in an e-mail to me.

Launched in February 2008, the site features a blog, as you would expect for any good Web 2.0 company. As of the time of this writing (late March 2009), it boasted 45,019 members, 16,761 links, and more than 40,000 search terms. Just looking at those numbers, my first inclination would still be to take my searches to Google.

Read Stumpedia: Yet Another Human-Powered Search Engine

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Effective Keyword Use as an SEO Ranking Factor
by Ivan Strouchliak
2009-04-14

This is the final part of the SEO ranking factors articles. Here we look at basic on-page SEO such as keywords in title, H1, body, domain, URL, H2, H3, Alt, image, bold and meta information, finishing with a list and discussion of the most crucial SEO factors.

We have already covered most on-page factors in this series; however, for the sake of completeness, we will look at each tag separately and assess its weight in search engine optimization.

Title Tag

This is the most important part of the page. The title tag shows in search results and must feature your targeted keywords. In fact, the title tag alone can change your search engine rankings.

Read Effective Keyword Use as an SEO Ranking Factor

Non-Profit Organizations and the Internet
by Joe Eitel
2009-04-13

Non-profit organizations have gained a surprisingly beneficial venue for creation through the rise of the Internet. Many people associate Internet organizations with small businesses, entrepreneurial websites, and individuals trying to make their voices heard. It is relatively rare for non-profit organizations to come to mind when we are thinking about the organizations that have benefited most from the wild success of the Internet.

It is easy enough to see why small businesses have gained a very strong foothold in the online market. There is a much lower associated start-up cost, there is a much wider selection of customers, and work just seems to get done easier online. Given some thought, it is not surprising that these are the same exact reasons that non-profit (namely charity) organizations have done well online.

If you think about it, a non-profit organization does not operate all that differently from a typical for-profit business. Non-profit organizations need revenue, have expenditures, and are made up of people. The key difference has typically been that traditional businesses operate in physical products, while non-profit organizations rely largely on donations.

Read Non-Profit Organizations and the Internet

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Are breadcrumbs helpful on a web site? Are they even necessary if the site is small? What effect, if any, do they have on your rankings in the search engines? These and related questions came up in this week's thread. Don't forget to stop by and share your experience.

Breadcrumbs on the website

Hi,
I am thinking about breadcrumbs on my website. I just dont know what impact they would have in SEO. Would it boost my website position on Google or have no effect or make it worse?

Please advice on ranking context from the search engine's point of view.

Thanks.

The effects would be the same as any other text link placed outside of your content.
This type of structure is quite useful from a user's point of view, especially in complex sites with multiple layers.
If you think your site is complex enough to merit the breadcrumb navigation, be sure to Nofollow the links that you think are irrelevant to the current page and you should be fine.

For simple structured sites I would not use breadcrumbs. I generally would advise you to have global navigation for the user, and integrate anchor text links to your internal pages within your content.

You could nofollow your global navigation but I have not found any extraordinary benefits to this practice of nofollowing.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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The Inexplicable Number One Site

One of the questions regularly asked in the SEO Chat forums involves site ranking. Specifically, a (usually) new member will mention a particular keyword, point to the site that comes up organically in the number one spot for that keyword, and wonder what it did to achieve this. The sometimes-frantic post will often list all of the things the site does that appear to violate accepted SEO best practices.

The most recent example of this question focused on a site that the poster complained featured only images, no meta tags at all, no content, and had not been updated in years. So why was it number one, the poster wanted to know, while the sites under it, which (in their opinion) were of much better quality, received a lower rank?

This question received a number of answers from our other forum members. One said that the original poster overlooked the site's navigation to see what it really has to offer. Another poster observed that this was perhaps the best sign yet that meta tags don't count for anything anymore. Nobody mentioned the age of the domain as a possible factor; that could certainly be playing a role.

But these on-page factors tell only half the story, at best. To get the big picture as to why this site ranks so highly for that particular key phrase, we need to look at the site's backlinks. It boasts about 125 of them. That's comparable to the site ranked number two in Google for the same phrase...but the site in the last position on the first page in Google has only 13 links to it.

Now let's consider the phrase about which our poster asked. It's four words long, and Google lists 143,000 hits for it. That may sound like a lot, but when you compare it to searches that deliver tens of millions of hits (one politically-charged one-word search turned up more than 25 million hits), that's almost nothing. Where there is less competition for a particular phrase, a site does not require as much in the way of SEO to rank well.

The age of the domain, as it turned out, doesn't seem to be playing too much of a role here; a domain age tool revealed that the top site is half the age of the second and tenth sites.

So what have we learned from this? First, lack of meta tags won't keep you from ranking. Second, links are highly important, even for queries that aren't too competitive. Third, it could be what you're overlooking that's making the difference. And fourth, a little research goes a long way. Good luck!