Welcome to your weekly SEO fix! If you're always focused on what Google has been up to lately, you might enjoy the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek. It looks like Google is getting even more serious about expanding its offerings into the enterprise. Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook lets users integrate the popular e-mail program into Google Apps Premier and Education editions. Check out the article for the full details.

You can give your content a boost by reading this week's SEO Chat articles. On Monday we wrapped up a three-part series on crafting your site to appeal to the four major personality types. That's pretty challenging, since they each need different things to help them make purchasing decisions; fortunately, you can reach them all without leaving any of them feeling shortchanged or neglected. Tuesday's article revealed that the practice of submitting to directories can still yield results, if you choose the right directories. If you're looking for a guide to the core concepts of copy writing, go straight to Wednesday's article; it's the first part of a two-part series covering exactly that topic.

In SEO, sometimes it's what you don't know, or don't think you can do, that hurts you. This week's thread makes that point. The original poster faces challenges in optimizing his e-commerce web site that may be entirely unnecessary. Check out the thread to offer your opinion.

While you're sharing your expertise there, why not stop by Tutorialized and submit an SEO-related tutorial? We'd love to see your insights. And if you're looking for a little insight yourself, you'll find it here, on a wide range of topics. Learn how to improve your blog, design a better web site, and much more.

This week's Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, tackles the topic of PageRank sculpting. It's a little esoteric...but Google made some changes to the way it treats the nofollow tag that you need to know about if you do this. In fact, you just might be surprised to find out how long ago the search engine made those changes. Hint: it's quite a bit more than a month or two. Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

• Jenny returns with more News of the Weird.
• Jenny Smash. Nothing more needs to be said.
• Juan Valdezburg returns and he is sexier than ever.

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Human visitors read. Bots scan and rank, but bots do it for human visitors. It will be moms, dads, sisters and brothers who read the page, and it's those people who have the wallets with credit cards, and PayPal accounts. In this article we discuss core online copy writing techniques to help make your website more effective at selling and making money.Speak to One Person

• Hello Dear Visitors!
• Hey You - in Front of The Monitor!

Which one gets your attention? Speak to one person. (Read those two salutations again to feel the difference).

Talk "For Real"

Talk as if you're speaking to a person. Imagine yourself walking down the street and talking to your buddy. How does the conversation sound? Casual, relaxed, maybe even a few bad words here and there, and a couple of jokes. Talk to your visitors as if you're talking to your buddy. Keep it casual.

Read Online Copywriting Advice

Submitting to Directories
by Ivan Strouchliak
2009-06-16

Submission to online directories still works. Contrary to the widespread rant that directories are dead, they are not. Good directories can still help you rank in Google; you just have to watch for signs of quality. You can still make a website rank for relatively competitive three-keyword-long terms with directory submissions.
One of the best signs of quality is whether a directory is found in search results. If it is, especially on Google, take it as a good sign. It's usually worth the money to buy a link from that directory.

Don't submit to too many directories too fast. Space it out over several months.

• Avoid free directories.
• Directory Description and Anchor Text

Search engines are well aware that SEOs use directories to promote websites, so they've developed technology to spot directory submissions designed to manipulate search results. One of the biggest clues is the use of similar anchor text and descriptions on many directory listings. Some SEOs simply copy and paste a paragraph from the website, which is never good. Try varying your anchors and descriptions.

Read Submitting to Directories

Formatting a Website with Personality Types in Mind
by Ivan Strouchliak
2009-06-15

Welcome to the third part of a three-part series aimed at helping you improve your conversions by catering to the personality types that visit your web site. In the first article of this series we discussed four different personality types, their traits, habits and preferred methods of decision-making. In the second article we touched on copy writing and after sales service for each personality type. In this article we will discuss design elements and design combinations for each personality type.

Site Design Essentials

Before going into design for each personality, let's touch on the foremost design essential - usability.

"On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a web site's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here? There's no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty." - Jakob Nielsen

Read Formatting a Website with Personality Types in Mind

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Sometimes hazardous assumptions can hamper your SEO efforts. In this week's thread, the original poster faces a problem that may be relatively easy to solve with the right CMS, or a conversation with the website owner, depending on the situation. Be sure to stop by the thread and join the conversation.

Seo for e-commerce sites

Hello everyone, I'm new on here,

Was wondering what all your views were on optimizing eccomerce websites, as we don't have FTP access or access to the code, so we have very limited access to the whole thing. Obviously links plays a big part in optimizing this website, but was wondering if anyone else has any other helpful tips on what to do.

Cheers

Craig

You are making a generalization about commerce sites that isn't even remotely true.

What platform are you running an ecommerce store on that you do not have FTP access or access to any of the code?

As for how to proceed with SEO, it is fairly straghtforward. You do what you can. If you can change the title tags though your CMS you do that, otherwise you skip straght to your page content, or you decide you need a new platform.

Then you work on the off page factors like any other site.

If you have zero flexibility to upload quality content and adjust basic factors like page titles and headings, then I would say you may have picked the wrong ecommerce platform and should consider the costs/benefits of adopting a new one.

I just posted this [see below] on another thread. I must say I have serious doubts on how you are going to optimize a site without access to the website. To properly market the site, it has to be a partnership between the website owner and yourself. I tell my clients this before entering any kind of an agreement with them.

Quote:

One of the fastest easiest ways to get your products listed in Google is to use Google Base.

When users go to the Google Product Search [link deleted], they will be able to search for products, and if your items match their search it will show.

Google Product results sometimes show at the top of regular search results. Look at the link below of a search for timberland boots. See the results at the top? The ones with the prices? Those are Google Product results and they are free.

[link deleted]

You need to create an XML or text feed. It can be very easy depending on what kind of shopping cart software you are using. Or you can PM me and I'll help you do it.

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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Consider the bar raised

Is PageRank Sculpting Dead?

Matt Cutt's blog posts often create buzz in the SEO community, but his recent entry on the nofollow tag caught a lot of readers by surprise. As you know, Google treats links from one page to another as a “vote” by the first page for the second page. Thus the first page passes “link juice” or PageRank to the second page. This is an oversimplification, of course. The rel=”nofollow” tag was created to give webmasters a way to say “I'm not actually voting for this page.” So nofollowed links don't pass PageRank.

So far, so good – until SEOs began to use the tag for link sculpting. It didn't make sense for pages frequently linked to within a site, such as the Terms of Service, to gain PageRank and thus potentially show up well in the search results. The nofollow tag, then, became a way for SEOs to preserve PageRank on pages so that it would be passed only to those pages that they wanted to rank well in the SERPs.

Except, according to Matt Cutts, it hasn't worked quite like that for at least a year. Using the example of a page with ten PageRank points and ten outgoing links, with half of them bearing the nofollow tag, Cutts explained that “Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each...More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.” Apparently, the rest of the PageRank just evaporates.

What does this mean? Internally, at least, Cutts encourages SEOs to let PageRank flow freely through their website. Using the nofollow tag to sculpt your PageRank isn't going to let a page give more “link juice” to other pages. Of course, if you've never bothered with PageRank sculpting, as respected SEO Chat forum member jsteele823 noted, this year-old change won't mean a thing to you.

So as far as internal linking goes, simply make sure that your web site boasts good navigation and a well-thought-out site architecture, and never mind the nofollow tag. But what about external links? In a comment replying to that very question, Cutts noted that you should probably still let PageRank flow most of the time. So should you ever use nofollow anymore? Yes. Nofollow serves its purpose when “you can’t or don’t want to vouch for a site, e.g. if a link is added by an outside user that you don’t particularly trust,” explained Cutts. “For example, if an unknown user leaves a link on your guestbook page, that would be a great time to use the nofollow attribute on that link.”

So we've come full circle with nofollow. Some SEOs find this frustrating, but perhaps jsteele823 has the right idea. Since PageRank sculpting doesn't deliver the goods, and hasn't for more than a year, you can stop doing it – and spend the time you would have formerly spent on sculpting on something that WILL give you good results in the SERPs, like creating killer content. Good luck!

Read the relevant article.