Make Money By Doing SEO Work
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Make Money By Doing SEO Work
December 22, 2006SEO tool – Link Value Checker -
August 2, 2006The Link Value Checker is a Highly Recommended SEO tool Tested by: The World of SEO.
With the Link Value tool You will be able to find a Selling Price point for a Link on Your Homepage, This is a Good SEO tool if you decide on selling Link space on Your Website, You will know exactly How much to Sell that link for, You could sell it for less or more but atleast you now have a starting point.
Find Your Homepage Link Value Know at LinkVendor.com
Put a Link Value Button On Your Website Click here It Looks like this:
As You Can see a Link on this Page could be sold for $3.50. You Could set that up as a monthly subscription price an earn $42 a year per text link. Sell ten text links Earn $420 but you would never know that with out the Link Value tool. Without it you might be selling your self short or over charging. You Could even have your Potential Link space buyers use the link value tool, to show your giving them Fare Market value for that space.
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ClickTracks.com PTC Fraud Tracking SEO Analysis tools
August 1, 2006www.ClickTracks.com offers intuitive, insightful analysis of your web site. It shows you campaigns, site navigation patterns, PPC, SEO and ROI stats instantly.
ClickTracks is a web analytics program that uses a radically different architecture, making it easy for marketers to perform desktop datamining activities that are difficult or impossible to implement using traditional web analysis methods.
Whether you need a log file analyzer or hosted software, we have a solution that’s sure to fit your budget…and your brain.
Analyzer
ClickTracks Analyzer Hosted is a web analytics service starting at $25.00 per month. Just insert a few lines of JavaScript on each page of your site, download and install the ClickTracks Viewer on your Windows desktop and ClickTracks Analyzer Hosted will gather the data you need to start making more informed marketing and business decisions.
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Optimizer
ClickTracks Optimizer Hosted is a web analytics service starting at $99.00 per month. Just insert a few lines of JavaScript on each page of your site, download and install the ClickTracks Viewer on your Windows desktop and ClickTracks Optimizer Hosted will gather the data you need to start making more informed marketing and business decisions. ClickTracks Optimizer Hosted has everything that ClickTracks Analyzer Hosted has, PLUS:
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PRO
ClickTracks Pro Hosted is a web analytics service starting at $179.00 per month. Just insert a few lines of JavaScript on each page of your site, download and install the ClickTracks Viewer and ClickTracks Pro Hosted will gather the data you need to start making more informed marketing and business decisions. ClickTracks Pro Hosted has everything that ClickTracks Analyzer Hosted has, PLUS:
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CLICKTRACKS JDC OFFERS HIGH VOLUME, SECURE WEB ANALYTICS
Now you can host ClickTracks data collection on your own servers. Other JavaScript solutions collect your data on a third-party server with third-party cookies. Not the JDC. ClickTracks’ JavaScript Data Collector lets you keep control of your data by gathering data on your server, eliminating any third-party privacy implications.
Get all the award-winning features of ClickTracks Pro in one software purchase: no limit on page views, no recurring fees, and all the benefits of first-party cookies.
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ClickTracks finds Click Fraud and Problem Campaigns, Too
Are you paying for clicks that don’t bring results?
Click fraud occurs when a person or a programmed script incurs a “pay-per-click” charge event for you (the advertiser) by causing the appearance of a legitimate visitor to your web site. Unchecked, click fraud can account for up to 20% of the average pay-per-click advertising budget. Since you’re probably increasing your online advertising, you need a simple-to-use click fraud reporting system that helps you pinpoint poorly performing campaigns and campaigns that are affected by click fraud.
The majority of decisions related to suspected click fraud result in ad modification—which is what happens when an ad just isn’t performing like you’d hoped it would. That’s why ClickTracks highlights both ads that may present possible click fraud, along with ads that are poorly performing. And why not? You, the advertiser are wasting money either way, so providing a method to detect both seems completely intuitive.
Find out More infromation about stopping Click fraud, during Your PTC Campaigns, Stop losing Your advertising Funds to Fraud, Get More Customers Reading Your ads and visiting your website, thus buying Your Products. Click Fraud can Take all Your advertising funds before a Real person even visits Your Site, Don’t be a victim, fight back Use ClickTracks SEO Analysis Tools.
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The World of SEO: has reviewed ClickTracks SEO Tools and Highly Recommends There PTC Fraud Campaign Analyser. This Fraud tool is the only tool you need to Prevent Fraudulant Clicks on Your PTC ads, Saving You advertising Money for Real people to click Your ads, and then by Your Products. You should have this Fraud click analyser before starting any PTC Campaign, or you risk becoming a victim of Fraudulant Clickers.
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What is RSS?
July 31, 2006RSS is one the latest buzzwords flying around the internet, constantly referred to, but hardly ever explained its use. As a blogger (or even someone that reads blogs), it is important to understand RSS and how it can make your internet experience more enjoyable.
To quickly define, RSS is short for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. To put it plainly, it is a way of distributing content information (usually blog/news headlines) an an XML format. Do note that RSS is also referred to as RDF (Resource Description Framework)
Whatever is XML? XML is a flexible text format. To state briefly, it can be used to quickly categorize data according to its nature.
RSS delivers information as an XML file, and this XML file is called an RSS feed. This feed contains information as designated by the site’s owner.
So back on topic, RSS is used to distribute content to whoever wants it. By requesting the appropriate RSS feed, an end user can quickly find out the latest information posted on a website.
An aggregator (also known as a feed reader) accumulates RSS feeds for you, and distributes that information to you as you want. Some require a program to be uploaded, some do daily emails, and others integrate right into your browser.
In the end, RSS is about distributing content quickly and easily. It also increases efficiency – instead of having to visit a site every day, by using RSS, you can automate the process and be notified when an update occurs.
Lets use a few examples to elucidate how RSS works.
Example 1
Your name is Mr. Joe, and you are a fan of five different blogs. You also end up wasting a lot of time visiting these blogs. So you turn to an RSS feed aggregator, and add their RSS feeds. Now, once a day (or however often you want), the reader will check the RSS feeds for each site, and notify you when there is an update.
Example 2
Your name is Mr. Joe, and you live in Britain. You have a little website, and would like to have the latest sporting news on your website. You of course do not have time, so you turn to BBC, and use their sports RSS feed to incorporate sports news into your website.
In order to make life easier for you, each blog entry includes quick links to RSS subscriptions for the most popular tools. This way, while browsing our directory, you can simply click and easily subscribe to a feed. written by BlogFlux
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Common SEO Terms and Meanings
July 30, 2006Here is a List of Common SEO Terms You Should Familiarize. Know what Your Doing and what things mean in SEO is Real Important to the success of Your Website and to get a better Pagerank
Above the fold: Web page content that is visible by a web user without scrolling down the page.
Adwords: Google’s Cost Per Click (CPC) based advertising system.
Algorithm: aka algo The formula used by a Search Engine to rank their search results.
Anchor Text: aka: link text The text of a hyperlink that you can click on.
Alt image attribute: (Alt Tag) Alternate text – that describes a particular graphic. This text is displayed when the user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Their main use is to make webpages accessible to the disabled.
Backlink: aka: inbound link A link to a page received from another web page.
Banned: aka de-listing The action of a Search Engine preventing your site from appearing in its search results.
Below the fold: Web page content that is not seen by a web user unless they scroll down the page.
Blog: aka Weblog An online diary made on a regular basis.
Cache: A copy of a web pages stored within a search engine’s database. Cache also refersto the copy of a site stored on an internet user’s hard drive to speed up viewingof pages that you have already seen.
Click Through Rate: aka CTRA ratio of the number of impressions shown to the number of clicks.
Cloaking: The action of showing different content to search engine spiders than you showto human visitors.
Cookie: Information stored on a user’s computer by a website. Examples: Clustering The process of listing only 1 or 2 pages from a website within the search engine results.
Cost per Click: aka CPC The cost for each click through to your site. An advertising cost of placing yourad on someone’s website.
Cost per Thousand: The cost for each thousand impressions of your ad.
Cross Linking: Having multiple websites linking to each other.
Deep Crawl: The ation of a spider following links from the domain’shome page deeper into the site until it finds much of the site’s content.
Deep link: A link to a page deep within a site rather than a link to the home page.
Directory: A site that lists other websites, grouped into categories. In a directory, listingsare gathered using human efforts, rather than by automated spidering.
Doorway Page: aka bridge page A web page who’s purpose is to attract internet traffic from search engines andthen direct the traffic to another website.
SERPs: The search engine results pages. The pages you see (excluding the paid ads) whenyou do a search in Google, MSN, Yahoo…
Dynamic: Web page content that is generated “on the fly”, from a database
Frames: A technique that combines multiple HTML documents into a single web page.
Inbound Link: aka IBLA link from another website to your site.
Heading Tag: Tag that designates headlines in the text of a site. Examples: H1, H2, H3
Link Farms: Websites that have a primary goal of creating links between member sites. A violation of search engines’ rules.
IP Address: A numeric identifier given to each internet connection. Allows data to find its way to your computer.
IP Spoofing: A method of reporting an IP address other than your own when connecting to the internet.
Keyword or Keyword Phrase: A word or phrase used in a performing a search.
Keyword Density: A ratio of the number of occurrences of a keyword or “keyword phrase” to the total number of words on a page.
Keyword Stuffing: Using a keyword or “keyword phrase” excessively in a web page, perhaps in the text content or meta tags.
Meta Tags: Header tags that provide information about the content of a site. Examples: Title, description, keyword.
Mirror sites: Duplicate copies of a website, usually on a different server.
ODP aka DMOZ: Open Directory Project. A huge human edited directory.
Organic Listings: Search engine listings based on merit as opposed to paid listings.
Robot: See Spider.Robots.txt A file that can be used to instruct robots that visit your site. Thefile can be used keep certain pages from being scanned by one or all search engines.
ROI: Return on Investment.
Search Engine Marketing: Promoting a web site in the search engines using various methods including organic and paid listings.
Search Engine Optimization: The act of altering a web site so that it ranks well in the organic listings ofthe various search engines.
SEM: Acronym for Search Engine Marketing
SEO: Acronym for Search for Engine Optimization
Spamming: The sending of unsolicited bulk email. The term used by search engines to describe methods for increasing rankings, that they consider unacceptable.
Splash Page: A page displayed for viewing before reaching the main page.
Spider: aka robot, bot A web program that explores a website. Search engines use spiders to scan yoursite and store relevant details in its database.
Stemming: The inclusion of word variations and plurals of a term. A search can include allwords that come from the same “stem” word. Examples: act, acts, acting, actor
Stop Word: aka filter words A stop word is a “common word” which is ignored in a query because theword makes no contribution to the relevancy of the query. Examples: I, the, you.
SEO Your Webpage Content for Page Ranking
July 30, 2006The best time to start optimizing your website is when you are in the planning stage. If possible, choose the keywords you want to optomize before you design your site.
- Try to achieve a word count between 300 and 750 words on each page. Shoot for a keyword density of between 2% and 3%. If you are optimizaing for a competitive industry and you are not high in the rankings then you can try pushing the density higher.
- Do not optimize all your pages for the most popular keywords. This advice applies most for new sites. The search engines use link popularity as a key ranking factor and it takes a while to compete effectively with established sites. You are better off being on the first page of a less searched term than page 20 of a very popular keyword phrase. Very few people make it past page 2 of the search results. Use a keyword suggestion tool {google sand box works the best} to find appropriate kewords.
- If feasible, create separate pages for different types of informaton (e.g. themes, categories, product lines, products).
- Use one or more header tags in your main page body and include your most important keyword phrases. Use header tags <H1> and <H2>. You can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to alter the appearance of your header tags so that you don’t have to change the look and feel of your site.
- Use the different versions of your keywords, when possible. The search engines have improved their use of word stemming. Word stemming describes taking the stem of a word and generating common variants of it. The search engines can find search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you searched for.Keyword: submission
Possible stemming results: submit, submissions - Try to have your content be the first thing that appears to the search engines. Content at the top of the page is ranked higher. In some cases, adding blank table rows can prevent your menus from appearing first.
- Avoid duplicate content between your own site and others. Google is quite efficient at identifying duplicate content. Both versions of the content will not appear near the top of the search results.
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The SEO Importance of Backlinks!
July 30, 2006All of the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN now use link popularity and link anchor text as the most important factors in determining their rankings.
- Submit your site to directories like DMOZ. There are hundreds of directories that will give you decent PageRank and some traffic. I especially recommend it for brand new sites that usually have less success exchanging links (see point 2). Our sister site has numerous list of the best free & paid directories.
- Increase the number of external links coming into your site by starting a link exchange program.
- Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, “link:” followed by your competitors’ domain name.
Example: link:www.web-directories.ws - Find sites that accept site submissions.
Visit your favorite search engine and do a search for: : “add url” “your keywords”
- Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, “link:” followed by your competitors’ domain name.
- Add content that will attract sites to link to you. This is a harder one, but it will pay off big time in the long run. Think of it as getting free advertising.
- Within your web site, ensure that you link your internal web pages to each other. Add a Site Map. Ensure that you have links to your most important pages on every page of your site. This will maximize the PageRank to your important pages.
- Paid advertising is another method to gain links. If possible, you should purchase links from sites with a similar these as yours. For example, if you are a travel site then other travel sites would be the most valuable links.
Patience Required
Be patient. It is believed that there is an aging factor on new links in some search engines and that new links do not provide their full benefit for a number of months.
There is also evidence that links from older established sites are more valuable than links from newer sites. To make things even more complicated, search engines, especially Google, give more weight to trusted, authority sites. Government and education sites are a couple of examples.
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SEO for Google, MSN and, Yahoo together!
July 30, 2006This article is part four of a four part series on optimizing your website for the three major search engines. Part one, titled “SEO For MSN” covered optimizing your website to rank highly on MSN, while part two, titled “SEO For Yahoo!” covered optimizing your website to rank on Yahoo! and part three, titled “SEO For Google” covered how to rank highly on Google. In this article we will cover how to tie your optimization strategies together to attain the highest rankings possible on all three engines simultaneously.
The Major Factors:
There are some constants in search engine optimization; some factors that, by necessity, must be considered by all the major engines. Fortunately for use, these factors are generally the most important. Unfortunately, each of the engines uses them in different ways. Let’s begin by listing these factors:
- Age
- Content
- Keyword density
- How it fares in the results
- Site structure
- Backlinks
Age
Many of you will already be familiar with the aging delay that is commonly referred to as “the sandbox”. For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, the sandbox is a penalty that is applied to new sites and new links under the assumption that they cannot play nicely with others. It is only after time that the penalty is lightened and eventually disappears and the site is left to play in the park with the rest of the “nice sites”.
This penalty is applied most strongly by Google and to a lesser degree Yahoo! On Google a new website cannot expect to rank for any competitive phrases for between 6 and 8 months. Even then, the links that are being built to this site still have to age so for most new sites competing for high-competition phrases you’re looking at a good year-or-so to see top results though you’ll likely see good results for many of your secondary phrases well before then. The penalty is also applied by Yahoo! but to a far lesser degree. The penalty on Yahoo is both shorter and lighter than that applied by Google. MSN does not apply such a penalty at the time of this writing.
Content
This is obviously a key feature across all the engines but again Yahoo! and Google take the lead in penalizing sites that do not have a lot of content related to a similar theme. Recently we have seen this act as mixed blessing, at least on Google, with some major sites getting overlooked due to a large amount of information on a wide variety of topics in exchange for sites focused on a single topic however with their recent tweaks they seem to be balancing the overall content focus with other factors to create a solid set of rankings that are relevant, will provide results that are more likely to produce the desired information, that don’t neglect sites that may contain wide information on a wide variety of topics yet provide a good deal of valuable content on the searches subject. Yahoo doesn’t seem to be catching up in this area with some holes in their results. That said, as the are not “gamed” as much as Google they haven’t had to put on such strong filters and their results remain solid despite this.
It should be noted that the content does not necessarily have to contain the same keywords to be considered related. The engines are getting far better at determining themes of sites and knowing which words are related to each other. For example, Google will view the word “personal” and “personalized” as related by theme. You may not rank the same for both words in a search however they are tied together and
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the overall percentage of your page content that is made up of the targeted keywords. An additional factor in keyword density is the percentage of your keyword content that used special formatting such as bold, italic, anchor text, etc. While keyword density is not the end-all-be all of SEO (there is no single factor that is) it is a factor and one of the more difficult to optimize properly. While hitting specific densities for both overall content and special formats is easy enough, it becomes more difficult when you consider and are even more important than optimization: your real-for-real human visitor!
One should try to attain near optimal keyword densities using a tool such as Total Optimizer Pro (see below), GRKDA, or other similar software however one much always be aware of how the optimized content reads to your visitors. It’s important to keep your visitors in mind, your sales message clear, and also remember that if you have to sacrifice a bit in one area (like keyword density) it can be made up through stronger efforts in others (such as link building).
Keyword density holds the most weight on MSN, followed by Yahoo! with Google coming in last. This does not mean it should not be considered for reasons which will follow below.
How A Site Fares In The Results
One factor that is not often discussed among SEO’s and which is not known to many outside the community is that how your site fares in the results is a factor. This factor is a fairly recent addition but is sure top become a stronger and stronger part of the overall algorithm as it matures. Google pioneered this technology however Yahoo! appears to be following suit and MSN is sure to do so as well considering that this is information that is very easy for any engine to track and truly adds to the “democracy” of the results in that it becomes the users “vote” that helps secure or topple a high ranking site.
This factor breaks down as such; the search engine knows when you have clicked on a result. They also know when you have returned to the results to try another site. If a site shows up for a specific search query often yet visitors tend to return to the results quickly after visiting the site the engine can thus assume that the searcher did not find what they were looking for on the site and thus the site can be deemed not relevant for that phrase. This factor alone has far-reaching effects on a number of traditionally non-SEO related factors and pulls them into the SEO-realm. Content now has to be more captivating, navigation has to be clear and easily accessed and the visitor has to be able to find the information that they’re looking for quickly and easily. If the searcher returns to the search results quickly you will lose a point. If this happens often enough you will lose positioning.
Site Structure
The way your site is structured determines how easily a search engine spider can get through it, the priority is gives specific content, and how much code the spider has to weed through to get to your content. Essentially, having a structure that allows the spider to easily get through your website, placed the content areas as high up in the HTML code as possible, and which minimizes the use of formatting code such as the font tag will increase the overall weight of the content and insure that the content you want the spiders to focus on are what they “see” early on.
Many sites are structured such that the actual content doesn’t appear until half-way down the page as far as the HTML code is concerned. Having a content area that starts at line 174 in the code is not a good start when it comes to SEO. While there is no specific answer as to what line the content area should start, using proper table structures or better yet, tableless design practices using CSS can greatly increase the weight your content is given. Using CSS again we can significantly reduce the need for formatting code, further reducing the amount of coding that the search engine has to go through to get to the content.
The higher up in your HTML the content lies the greater the weight it is given. Optimized site structure, especially in moderate to high competition industries, is one of the first steps one can take to secure a competitive advantage over one’s competition.
Backlinks
Ah backlinks. Once upon a time simply securing mass numbers of links to your site using whatever means were available was enough to rocket sites to the top of the rankings. Fortunately for search engine users this is no longer the case. With backlinks, as with websites in general, it’s quality that counts. While there are numerous factors regarding the value of a link (many of which were discussed on the article, “SEO For Google”) the basics are:
- Age. The older the link the more weight it has. (Google and Yahoo!)
- Link location. Links higher up on the page hold more weight. (All three)
- Link location two. Links occurring within content hold more weight that a directory-style link. (Google and Yahoo! to a lesser degree)
- Anchor text and formatting. The anchor text and the use of special formats in the text affect a link’s weight. (All three)
- Relevancy. The relevancy of the site linking to you. (Google and Yahoo predominantly)
- Number of links. The more links there are on a single page, the less valuable the link to your site from that page is.
- Non-recip links. Non-reciprocal links hold more weight than reciprocal links. (Google and yahoo! to a lesser degree)
- Authority sites. Links from authority sites (.gov, .edu and respected news and information related) hold more weight.
Tying It Together
Knowing this one must assess the best course of action when launching into a new SEO campaign. For the purposes of this conclusion we will assume the the keywords we are targeting are in the moderate to high competition levels. In this event one must balance off the various factors and timelines to produce the highest ROI in the short term with an eye on maximum profitability in the long term. What we mean by this is that with aging delays occurring on Google and to a lesser degree Yahoo! one should focus first on MSN. This means that when you are adjusting your keyword densities and tweaking the onsite factors early in the campaign you will want to focus on hitting optimal levels for MSN knowing that Google, regardless of what you do, is unlikely to rank you highly for your primary phrases for some time.
Your link building efforts will need to take into account the long-term objective of ranking highly on Google with an understanding that MSN is not going to penalize your newly created backlinks with aging delays. A balance of speed vs perfection will be required. All the links you build should be relevant (if your visitors wouldn’t be interested in going to the site then don’t link to it) however if you can’t always get inline links or your link will appear lower on the page you will still want to secure it.
After time (assuming that the right tactics have been used) you will notice your MSN rankings improve. This is a good benchmark for how your site will fare overall. Once you are ranking well on MSN it’s time to focus your attention on Yahoo! At this stage you will want to slowly shift the onsite optimization towards Yahoo! You may be asking, “Am I about to lose my MSN rankings?” Good question and the answer should be, “no” if your continuing on the right path. Non-optimal levels in one area can be offset by increased strength in another. While you are slowly shifting the onsite optimization away from MSN’s optimal levels you are continuing to develop more and more links further strengthening your site in this area to make up the difference.
After a couple months you will notice your Yahoo! rankings improving. A general timeline would be (assuming you are working diligently at it and are targeting fairly competitive phrases with a new site):
- 2 – 3 months: MSN rankings secured
- 4 – 6 months: Yahoo! rankings improving
- 6 – 8 months: Yahoo! rankings secured and Google improving. Many secondary phrases are attained on Google.
- 8 – 12 months: Google rankings secured.
The timelines will be quite different if you are working with an existing site (i.e. it has a solid history and a good PageRank already), are targeting less competitive phrases, and a variety of other considerations.
Conclusion
The path is not an easy one (or SEO’s would be out of their jobs) however with hard work and perhaps more importantly, constant work it can be done. Remember, there are currently 10 sites sitting on the first page. Match what they did, do 10% better and you will be there too.
Resources
Below are a few important resources to help you on your path to higher rankings:
Total Optimizer Pro – Total Optimizer Pro is the tool we use for onsite and offsite competition reporting including keyword density and backlink analysis.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines – They’re put out by Google but apply to all the major engines. Add this one to your favorites and reference it often.
Search Engine Watch – Great source for news on the search engines in general. Also great coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conferences when they’re being held.
Written by Beanstalk-inc.com
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SEO for Google
July 30, 2006This article is part three of a four part series on optimizing your website for the the three major search engines. Part one, titled “SEO For MSN” covered optimizing your website to rank highly on MSN, while part two, titled “SEO For Yahoo!” covered optimizing your website to rank on Yahoo!. In this article we will cover optimizing your website for Google.
I likely don’t even need to mention that Google is currently the largest of all the search engines with ComScore Media estimating this giant to be responsible for 42.7% of all online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people tend to view Google as the engine to rank on. While this point is debatable (let’s remember that there’s still 57.3% of searches that aren’t done on Google) it’s definitely an important engine to rank on. So how is it done?
The Factors
To optimize and rank highly on Google, as with any of the major engines, specific areas need to be addressed. On Google the most important of these factors are:
- Backlinks
- Age
- Content
- How it fares in the results
Backlinks
More than on either Yahoo! or MSN backlinks are key to attaining top rankings on Google. More importantly, Google’s methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is very different than either of the other two engines. Once upon a time backlink acquisition was mainly a numbers game. If you had more links you had higher rankings, it was basically as simple as that. Today however Google has an algorithm inside their algorithm for determining which links are more valuable than others. This algorithm has a number of factors itself, however there are some that are more important than others. They key factors that determine the value of a link in regards to its contributions to the ranking of your site are:
- The age of the links – Like domains, links gain weight with age. The longer your links have been on a web page the higher their value. Basically this means that your link building efforts today aren’t going to pay off for a number of months. The weight seems to age gradually. In a month your link will hold partial weight, in two months it’ll hold a bit more and so on. Links hold the majority of their weight after about 5 to 6 months.
- The location of the link – The physical location of your link on the page is an indicator to Google of it’s value. A link buried in the footer of a page will hold virtually no weight whereas a link near the top (i.e. where a visitor is likely to see it) will hold much more. Another location factor is how this link is situated relative to the content around it. A link that is located within content holds more weight than a link in a typical link-page or directory format with a title and description. The inline nature of the aforementioned location indicates that the link itself is more natural.
- The anchor text and formatting – The linking text used is obviously important. If you are targeting a phrase such as “seo firms” then using these two keywords in the anchor text is going to attach relevancy between your site and these keywords. Be careful though, building a thousand links using all the same anchor text is going to look suspicious. Vary your anchor text, perhaps include other keywords and you’ll find your efforts rewarded. The formatting of the link is also relevant. A link that uses bold, italics, etc. is obviously meant to be seen by a visitor and is thus more highly regarded by Google.
- Relevancy – The relevancy of the site linking to you is of key importance. Getting a link on a health site if you’re an SEO firm is going to hold little weight whereas a link from an SEO resource site will be much more valuable.
- PageRank – While the value of PageRank is arguably dropping when one is considering it’s importance in link building it is still a factor. A link from a PageRank 5 page is worth substantially more than a link from a PageRank 2 page.
Age
In a patent application from back in 2004 Google told SEO firms (and anyone else for that matter) that age was an important factor. Google has since become a domain name registrar which gives them access to whois data and thus they can clearly see the age of a domain, who it is registered to, where it is hosted, etc. The older your domain is the more legitimate Google sees it and thus the more likely they are to rank it. Additionally, domains that are registered for longer periods of time are also seen as more legitimate and thus will tend to rank higher.
Content
Google is more picky than either Yahoo! or MSN when it comes to content. While the phrase, “content is king,” may be overused it is still relevant. The more content you have on your site the more likely someone is to find what they’re looking for when they get there. Thus, the more content you have on your site the more likely Google is to believe a searcher will find what they’re looking for there. This does not mean that you should grab every bit of content you can find and build a 500,000 page site about potatoes. The content needs to be relevant and preferably well written. While a search engine spider may not be able to tell if your content is truly well written it must appeal to a human visitor. The reason for this will be made more clear below.
A blog is a good option for the easy addition of relevant content provided that you can dedicate the time (generally only a few minutes per day) to post some new and interesting information on your industry.
Keyword density is not as large a factor on Google as on Yahoo! or MSN however it is a factor and in the SEO “game” any factor that holds weight needs to be taken into consideration in all but the least competitive areas. While a site targeting a phrase such as “bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere” can afford weakness in some of the areas most of us cannot. As noted in the articles on MSN and Yahoo! it would be unwise for me to specify an optimal keyword density here as the optimal levels vary by site type, topic, and fluctuate with the algorithm updates. Keyword densities need to be reanalyzed approximately monthly or any time an update is noted.
How it fares in the results
How your website fares in the results is a growing factor and will only continue to gain importance as time passes. If your website appears in the results for a specific phrase yet no one click on is your website will drop out of the rankings. Arguably worse, if your website is clicked however after a few seconds Google detects that the searcher has returned to the results to find a new site your site will drop. It is for this reason that it is important to insure that the titles you write for your website are both search engine and human friendly. You want Google to rank it highly and you also need humans to click it or Google won’t rank it highly (circular logic I know but valid nonetheless).
You also need to make sure that what people see when they first land on your page either is the information they are looking for or alternatively, clearly indicates where that information can be found. This point may seem obvious simply from a usability standpoint however the number of sites out there that violate this basic principle is vast. As part of your SEO efforts you will want to take a look at your site from a user’s standpoint or better yet, watch real users navigate it to see if they can find what they’re looking for quickly. You have about 3 seconds to get a visitor’s attention so make sure that your visitor can find what they want in that time. You may need to hire experienced web designers to bring your website up to speed however the cost of this is lower than the cost of losing rankings and business due to poor design and the falling rankings that will follow.
Conclusion
Google has the most sophisticated algorithm of the three major engines and must be treated as such. Tricks rarely work and when they do they tend to work only for a short period of time. Build a strong site with lots of quality content that is easily navigated and will appeal to your human visitors and you’re off to a good start. Optimize your keyword densities and secure quality links to your site and while it may take a bit of time to get past the aging delays, you will succeed on Google.
Recommended Resources
Total Optimizer Pro – A keyword density and backlink analysis tool. This tool breaks down a variety of onsite and offsite factors giving you a full snapshot of how the top 10 got their positions.
Google Press Releases – Read the latest press releases from Google. This may not give you the algorithm but it will tell you the direction they’re going. Understand this and you’ll be better equipped to deal with changes down the road.
Matt Cutts Blog – Read this blog from Google software engineer Matt Cutts. Obviously he’s not about to give you the algorithm (or he wouldn’t be a Google engineer would he?) but he does give great advice and the occasional head’s up on updates. He allows comments on his blog and many of them are useful as well.
Article Written an published by Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc’s CEO Dave Davies.
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SEO For Yahoo!
July 30, 2006This article is part two of a four part series on optimizing your website for the the three major search engines. Part one, titled “SEO For MSN” covered optimizing your website to rank highly on MSN. In this article we will cover optimizing your website for Yahoo!
Yahoo! is the second biggest of the three major engines and includes an enormous network of websites. The algorithm is based on that of Inktomi which Yahoo! purchased back in 2002 as part of their plan to stop serving Google results to search queries. The algorithm itself can pose a problem for some SEO’s as we optimize client website to rank highly on multiple search engines due to the way that it deffers from Google and MSN. That said, any issue can be addressed provided that the right attention is given to the right details.
The Factors
To optimize and rank highly on Yahoo!, as with any of the major engines, specific areas need to be addressed. On Yahoo! the major areas are as follows:
- Keyword density
- Site structure
- Backlinks
- Aging
Keyword Density
As noted in the article on MSN, it would be unwise for me to specify a keyword density for you to target on your website. There are two reasons for this. First, if there is a delay between the writing of this article and when you read it specific numbers could well send you off in the wrong direction. Second, you will need to analyze your specific competitors to determine what the best density is in your area and for your type of website. Optimal keyword densities are no longer a one-size-fits-all calculation. Your industry and site-type will affect the optimal densities and thus, a complete analysis using a tool such as Total Optimizer Pro will be necessary.
Additionally, optimal keyword densities change on a regular basis and so you will need to periodically reanalyze your densities and compare them with others in the top 10 to insure that your densities remain within the optimal levels. When using Total Optimizer Pro for the onsite analysis we generally aim our densities for the upper end of the top 10 results but not aiming to be the top. Generally you will see a range that appears much like a bell curve with a couple sites in the very low range (0.5 to 1.0%) and a couple site in the very high range (5.0 to 8.0%). The rest will generally fall in the middle. Ignore those in the very low and very high range and target towards the upper end though not the highest of the remaining sites and you will be on target.
Site Structure
On no other engine is site structure more important than on Yahoo! While having a good site structure is important for a vaiety of reasons, it was on Yahoo! that Beanstalk noted the most significant gains when we brought our homepage and key internals into compliance with W3C standards (the rest of the site will be brought into compliance as part of our complete redesign scheduled for launch on April 24th). While slight gains were noticeable on both Google and MSN they were so minor that they may well have just been part of the ebb-and-flow of the results. On Yahoo! however we noted a three page jump the day the changes were picked up. No other changes to the site were performed during this time.
The site structure is important for two key reasons. First, the site structure determines the order in which your page content gets seen by the search engines and thus, whch content will be given the highest priority. Content that occurs higher up in the code of your page (not necessarily in your browser) is given a higher weight than content lower down in the code. Second, a properly structured site will be lower in code through the use of CSS, reduced or eliminated table use, etc. The reduction in code will push the content higher up the page as far as a search engine is concerned and thus, it will be given more weight.
Backlinks
Like the other two major engines, having a solid backlink count from relevant sites using good anchor text practices is a major factor on Yahoo! for any reasonably competitive phrase. When it comes to calculating backlinks Yahoo! is far more similar to Google than MSN. Aspects of backlink counts that must be taken into consideration when optimizing your website for Yahoo!:
- Quality of site – like Google has attempted to do in the past with PageRank and is learning to do with TrustRank, sheer numbers aren’t what will get you high rankings on Yahoo!, the quality of those links is more important. We must remember than PageRank is a Google calculation, not Yahoo! and so it alone cannot determine the value of a link when we are optimizing for this engine. It can be used as a quasi-benchmark however when determining if a link is a quality link on Yahoo! we are better off to considered whether it is from a site that is ranking well on Yahoo! for the same or related phrases, does it come from a site that it related to ours, does the site link to a site that is ranking well on Yahoo! and does the link come from a trusted domain. For these purposes a trusted domain can be considered any domain that is over 3 years old, has a solid number of backlinks coming from a wide variety of sites and which at least a solid number of are non-reciprocal links.
- Position of link – like all the major engines, the position of your link on the page is important. A link at or near the bottom of the page is less valuable than a link nearer to the top. Also, if your link is on a page with other links, the effect that link will have on your rankings decreases respective to the number of links on the linking page.
- Anchor text – the text used to link to your site will help reinforce that the keywords in that anchor text are associated with your site/page. Also, if that anchor text in in the midst of the content it will hold greater weight than if that anchor text is in a directory-style format above a description (i.e. link a standard links page)
- Non-reciprocal links – reciprocal links are certainly still valuable on Yahoo! however it is important to supplement these links with non-reciprocal links in the form of directory listings and other one-way links.
Aging
The bane of new websites is the aging delay. Many focus on Google’s “sandbox” when they think of aging delays however Yahoo! employs one as well, though it is lighter and lasts a shorter duration of time. New sites and links are not given the same weight as sites and links that have been around for a while. The aging delay on sites has been extended over the past couple years however it isn’t as severe as that imposed by Google. New sites can expect to find it extremely difficult to rank for competitive phrase inside of 6 months even if everything else is in place. To add to the difficulty is a delay on the value of links. When a new site launches it obviosly has no links. These links are subjesct to a delay that appears to be somewhere between 3 to 4 months before they hold their full weight.
The combination of these delays can make it very difficult for new sites to rank for competitive phrases inside of 8 to 12 months however because the restrictions are lighter than those imposed by Google one can expect to see rankings for secondary, tertiary and completely unexpected phrases far faster on Yahoo!
Conclusion
If is important to note that a very important area that needs to be considered is coming in part four of this series. Simply optimizing your website for Yahoo! will likely not get you the traffic you’re hoping for. Part three will cover optimizing your website for Google and part four will be titled “SEO For The Big Three: Tieing It Together” and will outline how to tie all the optimization tactics together into a concise strategy that will result in top rankings on all three major engines.
Resources
Total Optimizer Pro – A keyword density and backlink analysis tool. This tool breaks down a variety of onsite and offsite factors giving you a full snapshot of how the top 10 got their positions.
Yahoo! Press Room – Read the latest press releases from Yahoo!. This may not give you the algorithm but it will tell you the direction they’re going. Understand this and you’ll be better equipped to deal with changes down the road.
DigitalPoint’s Yahoo! Forum – Read the latest news, feedback and discussions on the DigitalPoint forums. A great way to keep updated but beware, not everyone in there is a qualified opinion.
Article Written an published by Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc’s CEO Dave Davies.
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