Setting Realistic SEO Expectations

Those who’ve been in the SEO biz for a number of years know how much more competitive it is these days compared to a few years ago. The number of web pages indexed by search engines has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in past years. On top of that, a good portion of site owners and webmasters know just enough SEO to be dangerous. In the golden age of SEO, the vast majority of websites hadn’t given a thought to the search engines, and when they did, it was only to place some keywords in their Meta tags. (Which, incidentally, didn’t help then either.) Those were the days when anyone who knew even the slightest bit about SEO could easily rank highly in all the major search engines, with very little effort. Even competitive areas were doable with just a little more work than their non-competitive counterparts.

The Competition Is Fierce

These days, it’s almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you’re doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day and gone the next. The problem is magnified for new businesses and new websites. If your site isn’t at least a few years old, your SEO efforts will be less likely to provide the results you want. This is one reason why your website optimization should always be seen as a long-term proposition.

It’s About Targeted Traffic, Not Rankings

As we move forward in this industry, webmasters, site owners, and SEOs need to shift their focus from asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers. Unfortunately, a large portion of those looking into SEO services are still seeing the small picture. For instance, on the contact form on our High Rankings site, I ask people to tell me a little bit about their “business goals.” A good number who fill it out want something like “top-5 rankings in Google and Yahoo for this keyword.” Huh? That’s not a business goal! A business goal is more like “Bring more people to my website who are searching online for the types of products we sell.” (As a side note, soon after writing this, I got an email from someone whose goal was to have their Flash site be “#1 in all the search engines for the word ’spring.’” I kid you not!)

Don’t get me wrong, I very much understand why people would love to move their rankings up from #11 to #1 for a highly sought-after and targeted keyword phrase. I’m quite sure it would very much increase their targeted traffic and their sales (assuming they’re doing everything else right). My frustration lies in the fact that there are people who believe that somehow an SEO company can magically snap their fingers or wave their magic wand and make it so.

Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

Does this mean that SEO is dead?

Absolutely not! But SEO that focuses on rankings for the most highly sought-after keywords in any given space is most definitely dying. This doesn’t mean that you have to settle for keywords that receive few searches. It just means that you have to broaden your horizons and see the big picture.

Almost every time I review one of those “put me at #1″ prospects’ websites, I see tons of opportunities for fixing the site in general so that it will work better for both their users and the search engines. They are almost always so focused on their “money phrases” that they completely neglect many areas of their site. Instead they put their special phrase on every page and never research the thousands of others that are being typed into search engines every day.

Content for Content’s Sake

Another trend I’ve been seeing a lot lately is the creation of content simply for the sake of creating content. What’s that all about? SEOs certainly throw the words “good content” around a lot, but why is it that nobody seems to know what that means? We now have a whole cottage industry of companies who will allegedly write “good content” for you. Worse, there are even some that will *rent* you content! Newsflash…good content has nothing to do with the history of your products. Nor is good content a bunch of madlib spam pages where you simply substitute keyword phrases from one page into the other. Good content isn’t stuff you write for the search engines.

What Exactly Is Good Content?

Good content is unique. Really and truly unique. It is creative ideas that simply popped into your head which nobody else in your space has thought of yet. The key to good content is creativity. Unfortunately, creativity itself seems to be a dying art. Being creative isn’t looking at what your competitor is doing and copying them. It’s being a leader, not a follower. It’s having your own voice and your own opinions and expressing them, regardless of what others might think. It’s pouring your heart and soul into your website, not looking for the next quick fix. And it’s (say it with me) making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines. It’s what brings targeted traffic to our own site for thousands of phrases, and it’s what will help your site gain traffic for whatever phrases relate to it. But it’s not easy, and it’s not fast. And it can’t be done with the flick of a switch.

Determine Your True Goals

So please…if your pet phrase isn’t ranking highly enough, don’t call me and don’t email me. In fact, don’t call or email *any* SEO company. Instead of calling, you need to reassess your goals. No SEO company in the world will be able to help you unless you are ready to forget about what you think you want, and learn more about what you really need. Read that last sentence again until you really understand it. Forget about what you think you want, and learn more about what you really need.

Beware of SEO Companies Who Will Tell You What You Want to Hear

And remember, there are plenty of SEO companies that will say they can do whatever you want them to do. You want to be #1 for “spring”? Sure, no problem. They will happily take your money, do some work, and promptly get no results. Don’t blame them though – they were just telling you what you wanted to hear.

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1950/1/Setting-Realistic-SEO-Expectations/Page1.html

Google AdSense is fast becoming the preferred way for people to earn an income online. Forget eBay and multiple affiliate programs - Whether you are a work-at-home mom trying to make a little extra cash or an Internet entrepreneur with hundreds of monetized websites, AdSense is truly the easiest way to earn money.

Simply sign up for a free account, grab your ad code and paste it in your site. But here’s the amazing thing - no matter how much money AdSense is making for you right now, a few simple tweaks can increase that amount considerably. And I should know, after learning about these tricks, I more than doubled my AdSense commissions!

The self-proclaimed AdSense gurus and experts are sharing this insider knowledge, for a fee. You can learn all these secrets from them, as long as you buy their e-book, sign up for their seminar or purchase their newsletter. But I’m going to share all their AdSense tricks for free. Here they are:

1) Color code your ads to match your web site palette *exactly*. Don’t use frames around your ads. Instead, in the AdSense code generation interface, make sure you choose the same color as your page background for the ad frame and the ad background.

When choosing the ad heading colors, match them to the *exact* color of your page headings. Use the exact same ad background shade as your page background. Use the exact same ad text font and color as the text on your pages. You can see an example of this color-matching on my search engine advice blog - notice the 4 link ad unit and skyscraper text ad unit on the left hand side under the headings Ads by Google as you scroll down the page? The link and text colors are identical to the color palette used throughout the rest of the page.

Near enough is NOT good enough. If you can’t quite get the color matching right, use Google’s built in color palette together with the RGB to HEX or vice versa color converter on this page. That handy little tool was a life saver for me.

This is probably the one single tweak that made the most difference to my commission levels.

2) Try not to use the traditional horizontal banner style or leaderboard image ads because people are blind to them.

3) Use Google’s own AdSense optimization tips and visual heat map to assist you in deciding where on your page to place your AdSense ad code.

4) Research competitive keywords using a keyword research tool such as Keyword Discovery or grab a list of the most popular keywords from various sources and use them in your web site pages where relevant.
This article is a good source of frequently searched keywords. Targeting popular keywords should trigger AdSense ads on your pages that utilize those keywords. The more popular the keyword or phrase, the higher AdWords advertisers are generally willing to pay per click for it so the higher your commission on those clicks.

5) Incorporate the AdSense code into your page so that the ads look like a regular part of your site. You can see an example of this on the Internet Dating Stories site where link ads are incorporated within the regular left hand navigation of the site under the heading “Sponsor Links”.

6) Use Google’s new 4 and 5 link ad units wherever possible. They seem to have a much higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than regular ad styles. You can view all the AdSense ad formats here.

7) Place images next to your ads to attract the eyes. You can see this in place on the search engine article library page at the bottom where 3 images draw your attention to the bottom of the page. But be careful here - the use of arrows or symbols enticing viewers to click are NOT allowed by Google and publishers may NOT label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements”.

Use the full allowance of multiple AdSense ads on each of your pages - 3 regular AdSense ads, plus 1 link unit. Use careful placement of these ads so they blend into your site and don’t distract from your content. Clever use of this allowance can be seen on this page about bad Internet dating stories where you see:

- 1 horizontal 4 link ad unit towards the top of the page under the first paragraph
- 1 vertical skyscraper text ad unit about halfway down the left hand side under “Sponsor Links”
- 1 vertical skyscraper image ad unit down the left hand side under “Sponsor Links”
- 1 horizontal text banner unit at the bottom of the page with images above each ad.

You can also include 1 AdSense referral button in addition to the 3 other units.

9) Tailor your page content to a particular niche or focus. Page content that is tailored towards a specific theme is more likely to trigger AdWords ads that closely match the content and are therefore more likely to interest your visitors and inspire them to click. Don’t create pages merely for the sake of placing AdSense ads. Visitors (and search engines) can see through this ruse in an instant.

10) Use custom Ad Channels for each of your ad placements, for example, “Top 5 Link Unit Blue Palette” or “Left Side Navigation Image Skyscraper” etc. Tweak, track and measure the success of each of these custom channels so you know what gives you the highest CTR. Some ad formats and colors will work better than others, but you won’t know which until you test, test and test some more!

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1496/1/Top-10-AdSense-Tricks-To-Boost-Your-Commission/Page1.html

Here’s an Internet marketing observation that may shock you. The average business website has more than enough traffic to support the company’s goals — but they’re simply not capitalizing on that traffic.

I’ve worked with many clients who swore they did not have enough website traffic, based on the fact that they were getting very few leads from their website. After analyzing their website logs or analytics program, I would discover that they had steady streams of web traffic, day after day.

In other words, these folks wrongfully assumed that web traffic equals web leads. This is not the case at all. Traffic equals traffic. You don’t generate leads until you put an effective lead generation plan in place. See the mathematical equations below.

• False: Web traffic = web leads
• True: Web traffic + lead generation = web leads

I would say lead generation is the most important aspect of Internet marketing. After all, you could own three different websites, blog twice a day, and get 2,000 visitors per week. But without a lead generation plan, all that activity and traffic will do you little good.

To illustrate this point further, I’ve created a few “laws” of online marketing, based on my own experiences over the years. Apply these laws to your Internet marketing efforts, and you’re bound to generate more leads and more business for your efforts.

Internet Marketing Law #1 - Traffic is only an opportunity.
My first law of Internet marketing online states that website traffic is only that … traffic. Until something is imposed upon it, traffic will remain traffic. In order for traffic to be of value, it must be converted into something else. Hence the term, “website conversions.”

Let’s imagine you have a lemonade stand beside a busy highway. But your stand is located on a narrow shoulder of the road where there’s not enough room for cars to pull over. All day long, cars whiz by you at 45 miles per hour, but nobody stops. You have an endless supply of traffic, but your lemonade stand is a failure because nobody stops. The traffic is right there in front of you, but it might as well be a million miles away.

Opportunity only favors those who capitalize on it.

Now let’s get back to Internet marketing. If your website has plenty of traffic but no form of lead generation, then most of your traffic will pass right by … like those cars passing the lemonade stand.

So before you fall into the typical trap of obsessing over your website traffic levels, ask yourself this: “What am I doing to capitalize on the traffic I already have? How am I actively converting traffic into leads, and leads into clients?”

Internet Marketing Law #2 - Value and response are directly proportional.
In the previous “law,” we talked about the importance of a lead generation program. But equally important is the value behind that lead generation program. Your website visitors will remain anonymous until you present something useful and valuable in exchange for their action.

Keep in mind that “value” does not have to mean costly. For example, a 12-page guide on choosing the right CRM software would be very valuable to software shoppers, and many will sign up to their hands on that guide. But the guide could actually be cheap for the marketer to produce. They could simply create it in house. In this case, value is conveyed through useful information that’s beneficial to the audience.

That’s just one of many ways to add value to your offer. Whatever path you choose, remember this response goes up in proportion to the value of your offer. On the contrary, response goes down with a weaker offer.

Internet Marketing Law #3 - Attrition is your perpetual enemy.
In your online marketing program, attrition follows you every step of the way. Attrition refers to people who “drop off” along your marketing process, somewhere between first contact and client acquisition.

Usually, there are several attrition points in any marketing process. The good news is, each point of attrition can be improved – that is, you can minimize the number of losses at each step of the marketing path.

Here are some examples of online attrition points, and what you can do to reduce them.

• Attrition Point #1 – A lot of highly-qualified prospective clients may never even find your website or blog. But you can counter this by focusing on online PR and search engine optimization (SEO).
• Attrition Point #2 – Of those people who do find your website, many will leave if they don’t find anything of value. But you can counter this by constantly adding useful content and resources to your website.
• Attrition Point #3 – Of those people who (A) find your website and (B) find it useful, some will leave without making contact with you in any way. But you can counter this by using lead-generation techniques on all key pages of your website.

From this brief sample, you can see how attrition shadows all aspects of your Internet marketing program. On the positive side, you can also see that for every point of attrition, there are things you can do to increase the number of people who continue along in the process.

Internet Marketing Law #4 - Successful techniques are not successful for everyone.
An Internet marketing tactic that works wonderfully for somebody else may not work for you. On the other hand, it may work even better for you than it did for the other person.

With any marketing strategy, you have a lot of variables that affect your results. These include the makeup of your audience, the timing, and the way you execute the strategy. You never know what will or won’t work for you until you try it. So don’t let anyone tell you, “That didn’t work for me, so don’t waste your time.”

There is experimentation, and then there’s speculation. Only the former will reveal the truth.

Internet Marketing Law #5 - Technology does not change psychology.
Technically speaking, the Internet is a dynamic, ever-changing environment. But while the way we communicate online may change, the communication itself stays the same.

Regardless of how you talk to people, they are still people — and they are still motivated by the same things as before. You just have more ways to communicate with them than before. Sure, you have to adjust your message delivery to account for new technologies, but the message itself does not have to change.

Whether you communicate with people through email, a blog, a podcast or an old-fashioned sales letter, the following marketing fundamentals still apply:

• People want what’s best for them … online and off
• People will respond to well-presented offer of value … online and off
• People will ignore a weak message with no value … online and off

Technology changes the way marketers communicate with consumers. But it does not change the fundamental psychology that leads consumers to take action.

Conclusion
Remember, website traffic is only website traffic until you act upon it. To get those website visitors to act in some way, you need to create a lead-generation program based on value and incentives. Good luck with your online marketing!

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1597/1/After-SEO—The-5-Laws-of-Website-Lead-Generation/Page1.html

Step 1: Phrases that pay

Think of SEO as like cooking a meal. Keywords and keyphrases are your ingredients. Discovering phrases that pay is all about finding the right keyphrases for your business proposition, then deploying them for best effect in your site and campaign.

• Proposition development is about working out who your customers or audience are; what you can sell or promote to them online; how they will find your site; and what will convince them to do business with you.
• Keyword discovery is the first of three steps in my D–A–D keyword analysis technique. In discovery, you generate the longest list of possible search words and phrases your customers might use, with your competitors as a guide.
• Keyword attractiveness is the second D–A–D step and involves balancing keyword popularity and keyword competitiveness to determine the overall opportunity, or attractiveness, attached to each word or phrase.
• Keyword deployment is the third and final D–A–D step, where you use the principles of prominence, proximity, and density to work out how to chain, split, and splice together keywords into phrases that pay.

Step 2: Courting the crawl

Courting the crawl explains how to help Google to find your pages and index all of them appropriately, through building the right technical foundations and structure for your new or existing website.

• How Google finds. Your first important step in courting the crawl is learning how the Google spider, Googlebot, actually works and how to use sitemaps and robots.txt to initiate, control, and manage its crawl through your site.
• Setting up a new site contains vital information for new webmasters on how and where to host your site and how to select your domain name.
• Managing an existing site explains how to move your site to a new web host and/or move to a new domain without having an adverse impact on your website.
• Site structure and navigation concerns how to structure a site to the right depth and width to facilitate an effective crawl. It includes the optimization of your directory structure, file names, and file extensions.

Step 3: Priming your pages

Priming your pages covers the SEO art of page copywriting and asset optimization. This includes deploying your phrases that pay throughout your site and manipulating Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

• How Google stores. Before you can prime your pages you must understand how Google stores your content in its search index. This important chapter also covers the dreaded supplemental index and how to avoid it.
• On-page optimization is all about effective SEO copywriting of metadata, tags, page text, and other on-page elements, so that web pages are keyword rich for search engines but still read well for humans.
• Asset optimization. It is vital also to optimize the images, documents, videos, and other assets on your site. This section shows you how.
• SERPs and snippets outlines how Google displays its search results and how to manipulate the link and the snippet for your own pages, so that web surfers are enticed to click on the result and visit your site.

Step 4: Landing the links

Priming your pages is only a small part of the battle to get top rankings. By landing the links in a well-managed link-building campaign, you can go from also-ran to world champion and establish both the importance and the relevance of your site.

• How Google ranks. One of the most important sections in the book begins with an exploration of the Google algorithm (how sites are ranked or ordered within search results). It also covers PageRank, TrustRank, and text matching.
• Off-page optimization, the longest part of the book, incorporates strategies to build keyword-rich anchor-text links into your pages from other websites, so that the quality and quantity of your links exceed those of your competitors.
• What’s new in Web 2.0 explores how the emergence of hugely popular social networks has shifted the balance of traffic on the internet. The chapter specifically explains how you can use this to your advantage in your search campaign.
• Avoiding penalties is an introduction to the dark side of SEO: how to avoid using methods that could attract a Google penalty, and how to recover from and reverse a penalty if it happens to you.

Step 5: Paying for position

While 65% of people never click on paid (or sponsored) search results, 35% do. No comprehensive website promotion campaign is therefore complete without a full evaluation of paid search engine marketing.

• Selecting match drivers involves choosing the location, language, and time you want your ads to be searched in and selecting the phrases you wish to pay for (positive matches) and qualifying words you want to exclude (negative matches).
• Ad text optimization is the biggest challenge in copywriting: compelling a user to click on a link when all you have to work with are 25 characters for a title, 70 for the ad itself, and 35 for the URL. I show you how to achieve this most effectively.
• Landing page optimization. Your cost-per-click and conversion rates both benefit from well-written landing pages that deliver on the promise you made in the ad and channel the user through the rest of your site.
• Bid and campaign management is all about managing your campaigns, budget, day parting, bids, and ad variations to minimize the cost and maximize the return on investment. There’s more to it than you might think!

Step 6: Making the map

As the web gets bigger, so searches become more locally focused. This innovative step shows you how to exploit this by improving your position for locally qualified searches and on local Google instances. It also covers Google Maps and Google Earth.

• Language optimization. If your site is multilingual, it is important that Google knows this. This chapter shows you how to tag pages and individual text blocks for different languages and how to get ranked in local-language searches.
• Geographical optimization. This may surprise you, but users narrow down 35–45% of their searches to sites based in their own country. This chapter covers the key steps required to rank well in these local search instances.
• Google Earth and Google Maps. In this chapter you learn how to rank well in Google Maps and even Google Earth for local searches – a vital piece of futureproofing for the increasingly mobile web.
• Priming for local search. Many people add a place name to their regular search query. This chapter shows you how to factor this into your regular search campaign.

Step 7: Tracking and tuning
SEO is not a one-off process but an ongoing competitive struggle. You need to monitor your performance objectively, using reliable data, and feed this back into your campaign. This step shows you how.

• Google Analytics. Discover how to sign up for and use this amazing set of free tools from Google: learn how to monitor your paid and organic search traffic and track goal conversion and campaign return on investment.
• Google Webmaster Tools is the all-in-one interface for managing your crawl, monitoring your search rankings, and checking your backlinks. Google continues to enhance this now invaluable toolset.
• Other useful tools contains a round-up from across the web of tools for tracking PageRank and Traffic Rank, plus how to interpret your own website statistics. The chapter also explains how to use a Google API key, if you have one available.
• Tuning the campaign considers how to use the results of your ongoing monitoring activity to refine your campaign further and tune your site. It also looks at how to monitor what your competitors are up to and learn from them.

I’ve been a loyal reader of High Rankings Advisor for several years now and the one thing I’ve appreciated most is the way you’ve been completely honest with people who write in with questions seeking answers.

Well, I guess I’m one of those people because I would like to get your expert opinion on a question I have about Google’s PageRank. Yes, I know you’re not exactly the biggest fan of PageRank, but I thought I’d ask you anyway.

I recently signed up as an advertiser with [a blog review website] so I could purchase blog review postings for one of my clients. After enrolling, I purchased a PR5 blog review posting at the standard PR5 price of $40. Eventually my offer was picked up by a blogger, but the review posting only stayed on their PR5 home page for one day as the next day it was shifted from the front page of the blog to an archived page that had a PR0.

When I complained to a site representative that I had spent $40 for a link that should last more than one day, they reassured me that my client’s website will get the full impact of the PR5 link even though the review posting was no longer on the front page.

Here’s their representative’s exact quote:

“Blogs are ranked as a whole, the post pages are not ranked in Google. So what counts is the home page not the post links.”

My question to you is: When evaluating the value of a given link, is the representative correct, or does Google consider the PR of the web page the link is actually on, not the PR of the home page of the website?

Yours on the ‘Net,

Kenneth

++Jill’s Response++

Hi Kenneth,

It’s a bit more complicated than what the rep. told you. Pages are most definitely not ranked by the home page’s PageRank, as every page has its own PageRank. That said, PageRank *does* get passed throughout the website by the way the pages are all linked together.

For instance, if the page your link is on was linked from the main navigation of the website i.e., every single page of that website linked to it  a whole lot of PageRank would pass to it. However, I doubt that your one review page on their website is linked to within their main navigation. More likely there’s a section called “reviews” or something that is in the main navigation, and that main section page would most likely have a decent amount of PageRank. Then from the main reviews page, there is probably a list of reviews.

(Please note that I haven’t checked out the particular site you’re talking about, and am just making assumptions based on the way websites are generally put together.)

Now, depending on how many other review links there are on that page, and if your review is actually linked to from the main category page or not, your review page will of course gain some PageRank from that link. Then your review page will in turn pass some link popularity to the page of your actual site to which it links. (As an aside, please don’t use the toolbar green graph to judge PageRank because it’s only updated once in awhile…I’m talking about REAL PageRank…the kind only Google knows about.)

The thing is, because the review on their site is most likely linked to from only one link somewhere else on their site, it’s not going to be given a whole heck of a lot of PageRank. This doesn’t mean that it’s not a good link, or that it doesn’t pass some link juice to you, but it’s highly unlikely that it is anywhere close to passing the toolbar PR equivalent of a PR5.

Still, no worries. A link is a link, and a $40 one-time fee isn’t so bad for a link these days.

That said, there’s something else you should know – Google is actively trying to discount any paid review links and not allow them to pass PageRank because they don’t consider them a real vote for your site, but more of an advertisement. So if Google can in any way tell that the review and link to your site were paid for, then your site will get no PageRank or link juice passed to it. If the review site that your review is on is public about the fact that they take money for their reviews, chances are that Google knows this and is not passing PageRank to your site from the paid review link.

While many people are up in arms over this, it really does make sense that Google wants to count only actual votes for people’s sites in their PageRank algorithm, not purchased votes. So if Google already knows that your review was paid for, then whether it is on a PR10, PR5 or PR0 page it will provide your site with the same amount of PageRank – exactly none!

Hope this helps!

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1857/1/Are-Websites-Ranked-as-a-Whole/Page1.html

Clifinar for Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization provides higher keyword rankings for web sites on so called “organic” results from search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, Live.com etc.) by optimizing the technical structure, meaningful content and back links popularity of a web site . Check out what happens when you search for “search engine optimization in Israel” in Google.com. Search Engine Optimization is critical for your website to have best positions in search results, and will give you the competitive edge needed without compromising the design or functionality of your site.

This is one the reasons why SEO companies need well trained, creative and highly technologically advanced staff. One of the ways to achieve this is having clifinars. A clifinar is a kind of activity where staff members aquire knowledge and skills to perform optimization tasks at the highest level. The following topics are normally discussed during clifinars:

Structure Optimization clifinar topic

Optimization of the web site’s structure, according to the search engines needs. This does not mean we change or even touch the design, but we do go “behind the scenes” and conduct changes and alterations that make the site more “search engine friendly” Structure Optimization enables search engines to read your web site better, crawl it easily, finding content and links. The service also supplies solutions to obstacles such as use of frames, session id’s, flash based web sites, database driven web sites etc.

Content Optimization

Search engines read the copy of your web pages, and then decide what your page is about. Content Optimization includes optimization of more then 75 different parameters on each page; we set the information hierarchy (using proper headings, paragraphs etc.) as well as, page name, meta tags, headers, alt image tags and most important – body copy optimization. Optimizing body copy is the main focus of our Search Engine Optimization service. We optimize textual content as well as meta tags in order to promote the target key phrases within a relevant context.

Link Development clifinar topic

Developing inbound and outbound links, as well as improving the internal link structure enhanced with the specified key phrases, will improve link popularity, sending qualified users to the website and boosting its position in the search engines. However, Link Popularity is determined not only by quantity but also by quality.

We have researched the web and search engines for the last five years, and came up with certain parameters to check when evaluating a web site as a potential link provider such as:

• Home page’s Page-Rank on Google
• Number of indexed pages in Google
• Amount of Back-Links to the site in Google
• Amount of exit links on the web site’s web pages
• Theme of the web site
• Web site’s domain name history
• Whether or not the web site shows on any Back-Links search
• More…

We have teamed up with web properties that met the criteria and segmented them into theme categories and page-rank values of the homepage.

Our Link Development Service promises:

• No cloaking
• No PR Zero web sites
• Homepage must have a minimum PR of 5
• No illegal content
• No redirection of any kind
• No SEO spamming detected on the web site’s pages
• The company reserves the right to deny listing for any other reason.

We provide our clients with quality Link Popularity Development and external link affiliation programs, targeting relevant high-ranking sites, based on our experience. During clifinar meetings we also study the best web sites in terms of Page Rank, daily traffic, relevancy of the site (for your business), as well as other parameters, and come up with the most cost-effective options for Link Development.

source : http://www.general-pages.com/search-engine-optimization-38.html

The whole American Idol craze is hard to ignore. I’ll bet that even if you’re like me and hate American Idol, most of you have some idea who the current and past contestants are. Does the name Sanjaya ring a bell? Of course it does, as does the word made popular by one of his famous hair styles, the Pony Hawk.

Sanjaya was blessed more with great hair than he was with a great vocal style. Yet he was last season’s most talked about contestant on American Idol. He rode the American Idol wave to pseudo-celeb status. We all remember his name. We recall his hair. I secretly tuned into American Idol last season just to see what Sanjaya was going to do. Through a little differentiation, Sanjaya became a brand through the American Idol medium.

What does this have to do with Pay Per Click? Well, PPC vendors work in much the same way for advertisers as American Idol works for wanna-be idols. How so? Think about how contestants are approved each week:

* American Idol contestants have to win over judges in the early rounds with an apparent combination of factors such as: youth & relevance, a good singing voice, charisma, stage presence, etc.
* PPC advertisers have to win over the PPC vendors they’re advertising with through a combination of factors such as relevant keywords, editorially acceptable copy, adequate bid prices, approved landing pages, etc.

* American Idol contestants have to win over the American public in the final rounds apparently through good song choice, good audience contact, poise, and a sense of being ‘the next big thing’, etc.
* PPC advertisers have to win over searchers in the final phases of their campaigns through good campaign structure, targeted ad messaging, a unique value proposition (UVP), clear and persuasive calls to action, etc.

Advertisers can take a lesson from the brand awareness that American Idol affords some of its more visible contestants. Notably, some contestants were already in bands or singing for a living before trying out for American Idol. Yet, no other form of personal marketing could ever give them the national exposure or open more doors for them that simply being on just a few episodes of American Idol.

What’s the lesson for advertisers? A well-strategized and executed PPC campaign can propel your site into becoming a known and trusted brand, just as American Idol shaped Clay Aiken, Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, and other pop idols that were American Idol runners-up, but ultimately did not win. They lost first place, but instead they won the hearts and ears of the American public. Obviously, it’s highly unlikely they would have made it that far without the American Idol branding vehicle.

As an advertiser, your real objective should be not to rank #1 in PPC results, but rather to look for value. Win the trust of searchers through effective keyword research, ad messaging and landing pages. Use the branding power afforded by PPC vendors. The result is that your CTR will rise and your ROI and conversions will have a substantial boost. Delighting customers and improving your online revenues is the name of the game, baby.

What other lessons have you learned from pop culture?

source : http://www.utahwebservices.com/utahseoblog/ppc-american-idol-of-search/

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a few run-ins with plagiarism in various forms and thought I’d take the opportunity to have a little rant about it. My hope is that by discussing it, people will become more educated about the issue and perhaps it will become a little less rampant online.

Plagiarism as it relates to SEO (or the Internet in general) is not quite the same as copyright infringement. With copyright infringement, a person might take an entire article or other written work from someone and copy and paste it as is, claiming to be the author, or providing no author at all. Copyright infringement is a huge problem for anyone who publishes regularly online, and it is fairly easy to spot. You can paste a sentence from your article into Google (using quotes) and see what else shows up in the search results. Don’t be surprised to see some versions of your work under someone else’s name!

Plagiarism, on the other hand, is more insidious. One definition of plagiarism (from Dictionary.com) is: “The unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.”

Notice that it says “close imitation” and also that it mentions “thoughts” and not just the language. In other words, one could plagiarize an article or parts of an article without actually using the same words that the original author used. If someone read an article and then rewrote it point for point, but used their own words, it would still be plagiarism. Even if they only took a few points and completely rewrote them, it would be plagiarism because the ideas and thoughts presented were not their own but someone else’s.

The fact is that most plagiarists do use some of the exact words of the original, and that’s how they get caught. From what I’ve seen, it appears that they copy and paste whole paragraphs into their article, and then

just rearrange the words a bit and perhaps add a few of their own. This may make it tricky to spot via traditional copyright infringement detection methods, but not impossible. And certainly, when the original author of the material reads the plagiarized version, they recognize it in an instant.

I haven’t yet decided whether plagiarists (a) were not taught how to properly cite other people’s work and give credit where credit is due, (b) have no idea that it’s wrong, or (c) are just lazy and/or unoriginal and don’t care. Or perhaps it’s some combination of those. It’s hard to imagine anyone graduating from college (or high school, actually) and not knowing how and why to properly cite sources. I do think our educational system is partly to blame because some schools let kids get away with plagiarism without realizing it.

For some plagiarists, it might even be an ego thing. Perhaps they want people to think they’re smart and that they thought up everything on their own, and therefore don’t cite the original sources. Others may actually have no idea how to figure stuff out on their own, and they can only parrot what others say because they really don’t understand the underlying concepts.

Regardless of the reasons, plagiarism runs rampant online and specifically in the SEO world. It didn’t take me more than a few minutes to find a couple of plagiarized articles at Sphinn in the “what’s new” section. The good news is that all the articles I checked that had made the front page did not appear to be plagiarized, so it appears the democratic voting process at Sphinn does work, and people can actually separate the wheat from the chaff. It would have been extremely disheartening had I seen any big-name SEO/SEM authors plagiarizing stuff.

Perhaps that’s the lesson in all of this…if you really want to become a well-known and/or respected writer online, you will need to have original thoughts and be able to put them in writing. Plagiarized articles or blog posts will get you only so far; in the end, you’re really only fooling yourself.

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1855/1/SEO-Plagiarism/Page1.html

When it comes to ecommerce sites, there are plenty of keywords to choose from. Because sites typically follow a fairly set format, numerous pages are created between the home page and the order confirmation page. Those pages all need keywords and phrases if they are going to rank high in the search engines. So, how exactly do you choose the best keywords for each page? Here’s an easy strategy to follow. (Please keep in mind that all keyphrases used in this article are for example only and have not been researched.)

When you start out, use keywords and phrases that are descriptive of your overall site. For example, if you sold clothing for the entire family, you might opt for phrases such as “ladies clothing,” “men’s clothing” or “kids clothing.” Those would be expressive, but could also be worked easily into the home page copy.

Think of the sales process as a funnel. It’s broad at the lip and gets more narrow as you move closer to the spout. The same goes for the keyword strategy: broad keyphrases at first and more specific ones as the subject matter gets more specific.Once you move to the category pages, you’ll want to select keyphrases that work well with what you’re trying to describe in your copy. If your visitor clicks on the women’s shoes category, she’ll want to read about and see pictures of women’s shoes. Perhaps you’ll use phrases such as “fabric ballet flats” or “leather peep-toe pumps.”

I typically create a paragraph at the top of the page, then add a descriptive sentence or two under each image. Sometimes, I’ll also add a paragraph of copy at the The product description pages should incorporate long tail keywords that are laser specific. If your visitor clicked on a link for “Bermuda shorts” on the category page, you’ll want to get as detailed as possible, so your customer can make the decision to buy.

For instance, a keyphrase such as “Liz Claiborne pastel plaid Bermuda shorts” would be perfect for a product description because it is… well… descriptive. Long? Yes, it is a long phrase. Most long-tail keywords will be. But the further into the sales process a customer gets, the more specific their searches will be. Chances are, someone who has decided she wants pastel plaid shorts will use a phrase like the one above instead of something like “Bermuda shorts.”Here’s a plus: Because long-tail phrases are much less competitive than broader terms, you stand a better shot at getting ranked highly for them. Here’s where some copywriters get confused. When you use links in anchor text, you’re giving credit to the page being linked to.

For instance, if you have a category page for shorts, you would want to use the keyphrase “Bermuda shorts” in the anchor text of a link that pointed to the Bermuda shorts page. That way, the Bermuda shorts page gets credit for the link. The link would be of no (or very little) value to the general shorts page. When you take note of the navigation and purchase cycle of your visitors, you begin to see why this simple strategy for keyword placement works so well. Using more specific terms as you write more specific copy helps usher visitors from the front door to the checkout counter with ease while also boosting your search engine rankings.
Source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/articles/1861/1/A-Simple-amp-Effective-Keyword-Strategy/Page1.html

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend.  Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time.  We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming.  After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

This update seems to have revolved around three main areas:  domain age, backlinks and PageRank.

Domain Age

It appears that Google is presently giving a lot of weight to the age of a domain and, in this SEO’s opinion, disproportionately so.  While the age of a domain can definitely be used as a factor in determining how solid a company or site is, there are many newer sites that provide some great information and innovative ideas.  Unfortunately a lot of these sites got spanked in the last update.

On this tangent I have to say that Google’s use of domain age as a whole is a good filter, allowing them to “sandbox” sites on day one to insure that they aren’t just being launched to rank quickly for terms.  Recalling back to the “wild west days” of SEO when ranking a site was a matter of cramming keywords into content and using questionable methods to generate links quickly I can honestly say that adding in this delay was an excellent step that insured that the benefits of pumping out domains became extremely limited.  So I approve of domain age being used to value a site – to a point.

After a period of time (let’s call it a year shall we) the age should and generally has only had a very small influence on a site’s ranking with the myriad of other factors overshadowing the site’s whois data.  This appears to have changed in the recent update with age holding a disproportionate weight.  In a number of instances this has resulted in older, less qualified domains to rank higher than newer sites of higher quality.

This change in the ranking algorithm will most certainly be adjusted as Google works to maximize the searchers experience.  We’ll get into the “when” question below.

Backlinks

The way that backlinks are being calculated and valued has seen some adjustments in the latest update as well.  The way this has been done takes me back a couple years to the more easily gamed Google of old.  This statement alone reinforces the fact that adjustments are necessary.

The way backlinks are being valued appears to have lost some grasp on relevancy and placed more importance on sheer numbers.  Sites with large, unfocused reciprocal link directories are outranking sites with fewer but more relevant link.  Non-reciprocal links lost the “advantages” that they held over reciprocal links until recently.

Essentially the environment is currently such that Google has made itself more easily gamed than it was a week ago.  In the current environment, building a reasonable sized site with a large recip link directory (even unfocused) should be enough to get you ranking.  For obvious reasons this cannot

(and should not) stand indefinitely.

PageRank

On the positive side of the equation, PageRank appears to have lost some of it’s importance including the importance of PageRank as it pertains to the value of a backlinks.  In my opinion this is a very positive step on Google’s part and shows a solid understanding of the fact that PageRank means little in terms of a site’s importance.  That said, while PageRank is a less than perfect calculation subject to much abuse and manipulation from those pesky people in the SEO community it did serve a purpose and while it needed to be replaced it doesn’t appear to have been replaced with anything of substantial value.

A fairly common belief has been that PageRank would be or is being replaced by TrustRank and Google would not give us a green bar to gague a site’s trust on (good call Google).  With this in mind one of two things has happened; either Google has decided the TrustRank is irrelevant and so is PageRank and decided to scrap both (unlikely) or they have shifted the weight from PageRank to TrustRank to some degree and are just now sorting out the issues with their TrustRank calculations (more likely).  Issues that may have existed with TrustRank may not have been clear due to it’s weight in the overall algorithm and with this shift reducing the importance of PageRank the issues that face the TrustRank calculations may well be becoming more evident

In truth, the question is neither here nor there (as important a question as it may be).  We will cover why this is in the …

Conclusion

So what does all of this mean?  First, it means that this Thursday or Friday we can expect yet another update to correct some of the issues we’ve seen rise out of the most current round.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone too much, we’ve been seeing regular updates out of Google quite a bit over the past few months.

But what does this mean regarding the aging of domains?  While I truly feel that an aging delay or “sandbox” is a solid filter on Google’s part – it needs to have a maximum duration.  A site from 2000 is not, by default, more relevant than a site from 2004.  After a year-or-so the trust of a domain should hold steady or at most, hold a very slight weight.  This is an area we are very likely to see changes in the next update.

As far as backlinks go, we’ll see changes in the way they are calculated unless Google is looking to revert back to the issues they had in 2003.  Lower PageRank, high relevancy links will once again surpass high quantity, less relevant links.  Google is getting extremely good and determining relevancy and so I assume the current algorithm issues has more to do with the weight assigned to different factors than an inability to properly calculate a links relevancy.

And in regards to PageRank, Google will likely shift back slightly to what worked and give more importance to PageRank, at least while they figure out what went awry here.

In short, I would expect that with an update late this week or over the weekend we’re going to see a shift back to last week’s results (or something very close to it) after which they’ll work on the issues they’ve experienced and launch a new (hopefully improved) algorithm shift the following weekend.  And so, if you’ve enjoyed a sudden jump from page 6 to top 3, don’t pop the cork on the champaign too quickly and if you’ve noticed some drops, don’t panic.  More adjustments to this algorithm are necessary and, if you’ve used solid SEO practices and been consistent and varied in your link building tactics – keep at it and your rankings will return.

Source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1689/1/Google-Algorithm-Update-Analysis/Page1.html