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Friday, May 8, 2009

10 Of The Best SEO Keyword Selector Tools!

Using appropriate keywords are immensely crucial to the ranking of the site you are working on. Imagine a site which has the coolest Flash applications, great and unique content, the best products and services. However, without appropriate keywords, it would hardly ever have a good rank in the Google SERPs! And what about domains and keywords listed in them? This is why Keyword selector tools help us in understanding and analyzing the market while also capitalizing on its benefits.

Mentioned below is a list of 10 best keyword selector tools for SEO in alphabetical order:

Ask: Run a search for say, 'Search Engine Optimization' in Ask.com. On the left side of the SERPs, you will find a segment titled 'Narrow Your Search,' that has links to all many search terms related to 'Search Engine Optimization'. Use these as keywords. Ask gives you refined SERPs through searching further with this feature. However, many may find this time-consuming. Also, it does not feature volume of traffic.

ask.JPG

Compete: Compete offers three main features Keyword referral, Site referral and Compare sites. Keyword referral tells the most recommended domains for certain search terms and queries. In site referral, you tupe in a domain to find out the most referred phrases or search terms. And, in compare sites, you type in 2 domains to know the comparison for keyword referrals. With compete, you do gain a lot of insight on how your competition is faring but it doesn't give you ideas on how to take advantage of the data you get.

In case you don't have other alternative analysis tools and you do not mind paying up, its good enough. Else, don't.

compete.jpg

Digital point's Keyword suggestion Tool: Digital point's Keyword suggestion Tool incorporates the results of both Overture and Wordtracker's free tool. When you type a phrase, say 'Search Engine Optimization,' and press enter, the site returns two tabular lists of both Overture & Wordtracker information. When you think about it, there couldn't have been a better tool as no keyword is better than the one that brings in most traffic as Overture's tool shows daily results while Wordtracker's free tool shows results of every 6 months.

Again, as it feature's Wordtracker's free tool, the results are limited.

digital-point-forum-screens.jpg

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: The Google Adwords Keyword Tool benefits not just Google AdWords advertisers & AdSense publishers but laypeople like us SEO professionals too. As soon as you type a query, say "Search Engine optimization," it gives long tabular list of keyword variations. Okay, no great shakes! Its the next features, that bring home 1st prize- Search volume and average search volume. It shows how the potential keyword you will use is faring in comparison to 'Search Volume' and 'Avg. Search Volume.'

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Google Suggest labs: When it first emerged, I thought it was a really nifty tool. Not only does it try to complete the term for you, it also shows the number of results for each keyword. Obviously, it goes without saying that these are helpful keyword alternatives.

As for its disadvantage, Google search toolbar offers almost the same features now.

google-suggest.jpg

Google Trends Labs: Type two terms, say "Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimisation" in the query box and it gives a graphical representation about those 2 terms. You can put in 5 search terms at one go. You can also find out about the relevance of the search terms as it displays the frequency in which the respective topics have appeared in Google News. Additionally, it also tells in which location, people have searched for them most. Beyond this, it serves no benefits.

The disadvantage is that, only popular terms are served here. Not good if you are looking for a long tail!

google-trends.jpg

Keyword Discovery Tool: Keyword Discovery is one of the more popular keyword selector tools. It has many excellent features and if you are willing to cough up $49.95 per month, you can get over 1800 phrases!

Keyword Discover Tool lets you search specific results of keyword terms in different countries. For eg- A search for 'search engine optimization' in Australia had '9,164' results while in the UK its had just '16'. This tool is helpful if you want to export keyword data and then later import keyword data into other tools that will provide this kind of intelligence.

keyword-discovery.jpg

MS Adlabs Search Funnels: Use this in Internet Explorer and not in Firefox, as more features are available in the former. Type a query and choose from Funnel in or Funnel out. Funnel in will run a search where the results will show all things users searched for before say, typing "Search Engine Optimization". In the outgoing funnel, the results show is a search that starts with the keyword; for example, an outgoing funnel for "Search Engine Optimization" displays all the queries that customers searched after searching for "Search Engine Optimization". The main benefit of Search Funnel is that you can visualize and study behaviour of prospective clients' incoming and outgoing search terms.

Disadvantage is that, it can take long to learn and use.

microsoft-search-funnel.jpg

NicheBot: Nichebot's results combines the intelligence of Overture, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. That's not all, besides the aforementioned three, you can perform 3 more searches on Thesaurus, Lateralus and Google ranking. In simple words, for $9.95, you can have results of 6 searches and that is really a good deal.

However, Nichebot can get slow sometimes and it would only be good to use if it was little cheap!

nichebot.jpg

Word Tracker's Free Tool: Granddaddy of all. Wordtracker is home to 340 million search queries. Use it to discover the most appropriate keywords for your website. This even features a misspelling search which helps you find misspelled keywords. This will ensure your website ranks high in SERPs.

The biggest disadvantage is that, its not for free.

wordtracker.jpg

Yahoo! Buzz: As the name suggests, Yahoo! Buzz provides readers and everyone with the latest stories, most searched items, top daily searches and the top percentage movers. SEO can take advantage of these features by analyzing the results. This way, you know which domains to register for.

As helpful as it is, remember that it will only benefit you if you are seeking the 'percentage of users searching for that subject' within the US alone.

yahoo-buzz-log.jpg

What do we use at PageTraffic for keyword research? Our favorites are

Ask, Digital point's Keyword suggestion Tool, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, MS Adlabs Search Funnels and Word Tracker.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Keyword Best Practices: the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Search Engine Marketing

When I first wrote about the seven habits of effective SEM, my primary motivation was to point out that keyword selection was not the end all, be all of SEM. I have seen too many people waste too much of their day trying to come up with that killer ‘long tail’ keyword, instead of spending their time more wisely on other equally important aspects of SEM. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether keyword selection still deserves to be a top seven SEM technique, since the search engines continue to ramp up their broad matching technology (see, for example, Google’s recent “advanced broad match” announcement and Yahoo’s new terms and conditions which allow them to optimize your accounts for you), making it more and more difficult to find keywords where your competitors are not.

In the end, I concluded that keywords are indeed still important, just not as important as they once were. So here are my best practices for keywords:

1. Create Basic Keywords. Synonyms, action prefixes and suffixes, runons and misspellings, plurals (Google only). Before you start investing in expensive keyword research tools (some of which can cost up to $30,000 a year!), I recommend that you simply brainstorm a basic set of keywords. There are five types of keyword sets that every campaign should have. These are:

a. Root terms. This is the most basic keyword that relates to your campaign. If you are buying keywords for a mortgage lead campaign, this would include words like “mortgage”, “mortgage rates” and “mortgage quotes.”

b. Synonyms. Alternative words that basically mean the same thing as your root terms. Again, thinking about mortgages, this might include “home loans”, “refinancing”, and “home equity.”

c. Action Prefixes and Suffixes. These are words that you can append to the front or back of a root term or suffix that user might type in to further qualify their query. There are two types of prefixes/suffixes: general and category-specific. A general prefix would be something like “buy”, “find”, or “best.” A category-specific prefix might include a geographic region, a qualifying statement “bad credit”, or a commercial name like “Wells Fargo.” Note that the most generic prefixes and suffixes (like “the”) have now been almost entirely broad-matched out of existence, so if you see a prefix or suffix getting no traffic, this may be the reason (and you should probably delete that keyword to clean up your account).

d. Run-ons and Misspellings. Like generic prefixes and suffixes, the utility of run-ons and misspellings is much less than it once was. Still, you can sometimes get a few cheap clicks by creating words like “mortgagerates” and “refiancing.” You should put these in their own ad groups, especially if you are using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) in your ad text. I recommend that you don’t get too carried away with run-ons and misspellings – you should limit this practice to the highest volume keywords in your account.

e. Plurals. There can be significantly different user behavior on a singular versus plural keyword (see further discussion below). As such, you need to make sure that all of your top keywords include both iterations. Note that this is not necessary for Yahoo, as Yahoo does not differentiate between singular and plural.

If you create five root terms, five synonyms, 10 prefixes and suffixes, and use plurals, this will result in a list of 200 keywords. Add in another 20 misspellings and you are up to 220 keywords. Add in all 50 states, specific cities, and combining prefixes and suffixes on the same keyword, and you can see how these five simple rules can quickly build a keyword set for you without ever touching a fancy keyword tool!

2. Don’t Overdo It. While it may be true that the keyword “Pacifica California Subprime Refinancing Interest Rates Mortgage Companies” will not be specifically purchased by many of your competitors, it is no longer true that you alone will show up on this keyword should you be the only one to buy it. As I have noted numerous times in the past, the search engine “broad matching” algorithms have gotten increasingly better at aggregating tail keywords into the same auctions with head terms.

In the past, there were two advantages to tail terms – first, that you could show up by yourself on that keyword (no longer the case with broad matching), and second, that you could improve your click through rate (CTR) for that specific query and pay less for high position. The second may still be true to a limited degree, but you aren’t going to be able to pay $.10 on a six token (word) keyword phrase and outperform a big competitor paying $5.00 on a head keyword.

Moreover, Google has explicitly stated that keywords beyond five tokens will be automatically considered “low quality” by their Quality Score algorithm. The rationale behind this (which I don’t necessarily buy, by the way) was recently summarized as follows:

“very long phrases and very low volume keywords well down the long tail are not necessarily an advantage to a marketer, as they don’t reflect how “real users” normally search. The sweet spot of the long tail is 2-to-4-word phrase. 5-8 word phrases, not so much. Among other things, Google will have such limited data on these, they have no choice but to assign slightly worse quality scores to them.”

The other hidden danger of millions of obscure keywords is the risk of either slow bleeds or sudden keyword explosions. A slow bleed occurs when you have 50 or 100 keywords costing you $2 or $3 a month. These keywords fly below the radar but gradually can cost you thousands of dollars a year. Unless you have a bid management system that has the ability to cluster similarly-situated keywords, you are unlikely to discover these bleeders.

A sudden explosion occurs when one of your random long-tail keywords is suddenly matched on a major search, or a news event causes that keyword to get a spike in traffic. As an example, a few years ago I bought the word “Pope mortgage”, which happens to be the name of a city with the word mortgage appended to the end. When Pope John Paul II died, this keyword received a huge rush of unprofitable clicks in a short time.

All this being said, there is still value to the long tail. For most non-retailers (i.e., companies that don’t have thousands of products for sale), a good rule of thumb is to have somewhere between 500 and 5000 keywords in your account. If, however, you find yourself patting yourself on the back for having developed three million keywords, you are living in the past and need to start living in 2008!

3. Keep Them Targeted. Although Google allows 2000 keywords in an ad group, this does not mean you should strive to pack as many keywords into as few ad groups as possible. Indeed, in most instances, you will be better served by having few keywords in many ad groups. There are two primary reasons for narrowly targeted ad groups: CTR and Quality Score. Your CTR will increase if your keywords are closely related to your ad text. Segmenting similar keywords into well-defined ad groups enables you to create very relevant ad text.

Your Quality Score will also benefit from well-defined ad groups. Google rewards advertisers who send a targeted keyword to a targeted ad text to a targeted landing page. When you combine a better Quality Score and higher CTR, you have solved two of the three factors that impact your position on Google (the other being max CPC). This can enable you to pay a lot less than your competitors for the same keywords.

Just to be clear, you could take this targeting approach to the extreme by literally having a one-to-one relationship between a keyword and an ad group. If you have the ability to automatically create relevant ad text and automatically make bid adjustments, this might makes sense. If you are doing most of your work manually, however, the management costs associated with thousands of ad groups may not be worth the effort.

4. Track at the Keyword Level. Keywords are the DNA of your SEM campaigns. As such, you need to measure their performance on a keyword by keyword basis. Whenever I see a tracking URL that reads www.domain.com/?campaign=GoogleAdWords I know that the campaign is not being properly optimized. Individual keywords will vary tremendously in terms of performance. I often use the example of the word “mortgage rate” and “mortgage rates” to prove this point. Someone who types in “mortgage rate” is most likely looking for today’s current mortgage rate; someone who types in “mortgage rates” is looking to get multiple mortgage quotes. Depending on your business, the conversion rate between these two keywords can vary dramatically.

5. Test Match Types. Google offers three match types – broad, phrase, and exact – and you should make a point to test keywords on all of these match types. In most cases you will find that your exact match keyword has the highest conversion rate but also costs you the most with the least amount of traffic, and that the exact opposite is true for broad match. But every account is different and you need to test performance for your specific campaign. Note that I don’t count match types as part of the total number of keywords in your campaign – in other words, if you have 5000 keywords but you match each of these three times, your account would have a total of 15,000 keywords, which I still think is acceptable without “overdoing it.”

6. Be Negative. The number one mistake I see novice search marketers make is not paying enough attention to negative keywords. As the search engines continue to push the limits of broad matching, your best defense against getting a lot of unproductive clicks is to buy tons and tons of negative keywords. There are two ways to create negative keywords. The first way is to create a generic list of negatives that will apply to almost any keyword. This could include words like “lawsuit, complaint, refund, scam, do it yourself, free, sex, UK, etc” – this will vary of course depending on your business.

The second way to create negative keywords is to use the Google keyword tool and look for words that might be semantically related to your product but are in actuality not at all related. A funny example of this would be to exclude the word “one” from an advertisement for “night stands” that are used for bedroom furniture. I consider the creation of negative keywords to be just as important as the creation of actual keywords.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Keyword Research Techniques - The Strategy to Get High Ranking Keyword With Less Competition

At the end of article you would have learned the techniques and strategies for getting the best keywords in less time. Assuming you are into article marketing or even PPC, then I guess you will need to perform plenty of keyword research. There is need for you to do a thorough and prolonged keyword research in order to evaluate the campaign of your competitors, creating a number of keywords for the niche of your choice and discovering new niches or even the product of your choice.

As someone who is into these, I must tell you that keyword research takes a lot of time and it can even take up to a month or more to get the required keyword for your internet business, niche or campaign. But if you use a keyword research tool, you are assured of getting your result in a fast manner and most importantly you will get the targeted and less competitive in the niche of your choice.

All over the internet, there are varieties of keyword research tool, some of them are AdWord Analyzer, Wordtracker, Keyword Elite, Micro Niche Finder or even HitTail, etc. But the question here is: are they worth your hard earned money? Investing your money into some keyword research can be a waste of money and time.

As for me, one of the best keyword research tools I recommend is micro niche finder. I find it handy, easy and the results I get leads to profitable niches. This is due to it has varieties of features and functions which other keyword research tools don't have.

Are you into article marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, AdSense or SEO or even affiliate marketing, you need this software in order to skyrocket your earning. It will be able to evaluate your competitors PPC campaign, create a big list of profitable keywords quick and it will even save you time, so you won't invest all of your time doing manual keyword research. You just type the keyword of your choice and it will return thousands of similar keyword, both long and short tail keywords.

If you are into internet marketing and you haven't got this tool yet, then now is the time you should get it in order to fill the gap where you are not doing well.

Keyword Research Techniques and Strategies

Assuming you are into marketing a niche about an acne product. Let's say you want perform a search using the keyword "cure acne". Most people will just plug in the keyword "cure acne" in the search box for the keyword stuffing. As someone who is very experienced in this, the best way to get the top keywords out of this is to simply plug in the keyword "acne" in the search box. It will return similar keywords that pertains to acne both relevant and irrelevant ones. You should keep a pen and paper by your side for this. Glance through the result of the acne and select the words that pertain to curing acne like cure acne, treat acne, stop acne, fight acne, acne remedy, acne relieve, deal with acne, overcome acne and acne help etc. These keywords listed above are the keywords for solving a problem, avoid keywords like symptoms of acne, causes of acne etc. Though they are useful, as you are marketing a product about the remedy of a disease it is better to be more targeted here. Still plug the keywords I listed above.

If you continue plugging the keywords and searching them you will end up getting long tail keywords with little competition. You should get Micro Niche Finder, it is the best keyword for uncovering this little and hot niches.

Use High-Ranking and Relevant Keywords

If you want targeted traffic, then create several web pages, each focusing on just one or two high ranking keywords. The pages should contain high quality and relevant content. Such pages are liked by the search engines and your web pages will rank much higher in the SERP for their keywords because they contain targeted content.
You will thus have many high ranking web pages for different high-ranking keywords instead of having a single page containing plenty of keywords.
If you are selling products and services, then create a unique page for each product and service with its own specific keywords. In this way, you can create targeted traffic for every product and service separately.
This means more targeted traffic to your website, each traffic coming from a unique set of keywords, and possibly more avenues of online income. The other advantage of this method is that, you will have more high-ranking pages in the search engines for the given keywords.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Google PageRank (PR) vs. Alexa Traffic Rank Correlation (Regression) Analysis

Abstract: a statistical study (regression analysis) of a random sample of 102 websites has shown that a strong relationship (correlation) exists between Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank.

Introduction

Google PageRank (GPR) and Alexa Traffic Rank (ATR) are two different measures of a website's success. As you know (shame on you if you don't), simply speaking, GPR measures the number of links to the site, while ATR measures the site's traffic. (Official detailed descriptions of these two indicators are available at Google Technology and Alexa Help pages.)

Correlation between ATR and GRP has become my concern after I visited two websites in a row, namely CSS Zen Garden and Mail.ru. The first one, a specialized CSS design project, has Google Page Rank of 8 and Alexa Traffic Rank of over 13 thousand. The second one, a huge Russian portal, had Page Rank of 6, yet ranked 23rd in Alexa! The question occured, «does traffic affect link popularity?» Interestingly, although Mail.ru is a much more popular portal, CSS Zen Garden obviously had much more quality links pointing to it. This phenomenon can be explained with a look at the nature of CSS Z.G.; the site is oriented at designers, who are likely to have a site and give direct links. Users of Mail.ru, on the other hand, are mortals that want free email, videos, chat, news, etc, and are less likely to put links to the site.

Here is a comparative table:

Site            |  GPR  |   ATR
--------------------------------
CSS Zen Garden | 8 | 13,138
Mail.ru | 6 | 23

This difference between the actual real popularity of a portal and the quality links pointing to it created this desire in me to test the statistical correlation between the inbound links and traffic, measured by Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank respectively.

A copy of the original spreasheet is available, yet it does not contain graphs and charts.

The sample

The sample for this analysis consisted of 102 randomly picked websites. I tried to pick sites for this analysis as randomly as possible: I caught myself quering Google for such phrases that I would never ask for, such as "knitting", "nothing", "rotting" and other crazy queries. I tried to randomize the sample as much as I could. Yet I understand that there was a bias, because I was the only one who picked sites.

Many websites from the sample I like and visit daily, yet others I don't even know. To get some of the lower quality sites, I went to a lousy web design studio, and simply randomly clicked sites from their portfolio (most clone-looking 0-2 PR sites are their masterpieces). Note that there was a chance of humar error; my Google Toolbar might have malfunctioned or I could have simply overlooked the value. Complete list of websites is also available.

T-distribution (or Student's T distribution) table I used for my analysis offers .... 70, 80, 100, 150 ... degrees of freedom, among others. The key fact is that it does not offer 98 degrees of freedom. This information is important, since the formula I used needs n-2 degrees of freedom, where n is the sample size. Thus, I used exactly 102 observations purposefully (last two added later) so that I could find the accurate tabular values in Student's T distribution table (so that I deduct 2 from my sample and arrive at 100).

Each sample value (site) had three parameters (dimentions), namely URL, GPR, and ATR. In the initial spreadsheet, each observation also has an ID number and the date of measurement. (Please note, that some of the sites I am sure have changed since the study! Few of the them I run/manage/own/develop. Note the date of measurement.)

Google PageRank Distribution

Normally distributed! From GPR point of view, the sample was almost perfectly distributed, representing the bell-shaped curve. As you can see from the diagram, there was a very little skewness to the right. Mean average was 5.05 and median 5, with dispertion of 7. The coefficient of skewness was as low as 0.06, which means that the sample was quite normally distributed.

For the histogram above, I have chosen each of the 11 PageRank values for each class (exactly 11, not 10, remember that zero is also a separate value).

Alexa Traffic Rank Distribution

For Alexa TR, the distribution was much less normal. The entire sample was significantly skewed right, with as much as 73% observations representing one eighth of the possible values. This vast majority encompassed sites within the first 1,500,000 positions in the rank.

With mean average of 1,245,677.471 and meadian of 109,922, the sample had huge dispersion of 5351667608993.28, range of 10,960,325, and skewness coefficient of 1.47. I have divided the entire sample into 8 classes, with 1,500,000 as a class step, altogether ranging from 0 to 12,000,000.

Obviously, vast majority of the websites from the sample belonged to a minority group, which is a limitation of the study. I should have either gathered sites that were all in the top 2M range, or gathered more lower quality sites.

Analysis and methods

The initial idea was to test whether the ATR actually correlates to GPR. Thus, the null hypothesis H0 was, «no relationship exists between traffic popularity measured by Alexa Traffic Rank and link popularity measured by Google Page Rank». The alternative hypethesis Hf was, «there is a correlation between Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank». The purpose of the study was to reject the null hypothesis and to prove there truly is a correlation between the two site success indicators. (I must remind that the initial CSS vs. Mail encounter that pushed me toward this analysis showed that there was hardly any correlation between these indicators.)

Simple regression analysis and t-distribution significance test was used for the study.

Regression analysis

The two arrays of data (each of 102 observations) showed rather high negative correlation. The ultimate r (correlation coefficient) was equal to -0.5. The best fit line's equation was y = -439630,50x + 3469690,61. I had Alexa TR on the Y axis (and Google PR on X axis, respectively).

The data points are concentrated vertically at the 11 imaginary lines of PageRank values, because Google's rank only has 11 possible values. This phenomenon creates huge gaps in this discrete data array. Still, the tendency is obvious! There is a strong visible correlation between the two sets of data.

Hypothesis testing (significance test)

Regardless of the visual correlation, I had to test whether this was a chance occurrence, or a statistically significant phenomenon. As I mentioned earlier, I used t-distribution for significance test. The test statistic was r/√[(1-r2)/(n-2)], where r is the regression coefficient and n is the sample size. The number of degrees of freedom is n-2. I used standard significance level α=0.05. The table value of t0.05; 100df appeared 1.984. Thus, with a two-tailed test, if the absolute value of the calculated value of t is greater than the absolute value of tabular t, I can reject the null hypothesis (hypotheses are described above). The calculated value of t was -5.83125. |-5.83125| is greater than |1.984|, and therefore we reject the null hypothesis, and prove that there is statistical significance to claim that correlation between Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank truly exists and is not a random chance phenomenon.

Outliers and interesting observations

Two potential outliers are at the top of the graph; one at point [6; ~11,000,000] and the other one (yet less likely to be considered an outlier) at [3; ~10,400,00]. These two, however, are potential graphical outliers, visible with the naked eye.

Three questionable points, which are not that visible, yet are very hard to believe in, are concentrated near the origin. Especially the one right next to the origin (the bottom point on the Y axis), which is a website with zero Page Rank, yet relatively high traffic. This is an interesting phenomenon, which shows a popular website, with nearly no inlinks. (The site is Red Bean, and at the date measurement on Nov 29th, 2007, it had 0 PR and 27,214 ATR. Yet, at the moment of writing this article, I see it has PR of 7.)

Conclusion

Regardless of the limitations of the test, the study showed very strong relationship between Google PR and Alexa Traffic Rank.

If you notice errors of typos, please leave a comment. The copy of the original spreadsheet is available at Google Spreadsheets.

What Does Your Alexa Rank Mean?

Alexa is a funny little ranking engine. Your fluctuations in rank can be pretty dramatic until Alexa gets a handle on your site.

They have changed their algorithm to, supposedly, better reflect and predict all your traffic. This means they no longer depend on simply guestimating your rank based on Alexa toolbar users who visit your site.

After the update I went from 32,000 to 60,000+ and now I believe they rank me well over 100,000. Yet, my traffic continues to grow.

The important thing to remember is that Alexa is one of several indicators of your site’s traffic health. Of course, you know the exact number of uniques you get each day from your own stats. That’s the main indicator, above all else, you should use to gauge how you’re doing.

It is quite possible Alexa doesn’t know enough about the traffic that is hitting your site because it is too low at this point to estimate more accurately in their rankings.

With the traffic level you have now, my focus would be on more marketing, deeply important and interesting posts (linkbait) for your niche, more commenting and networking on other blogs and social sites, and link building.

Regardless of the quirks in Alexa’s particular ranking system, you want to set a benchmark of a solid 100 visitors per day and then shoot for 500, 1000 and beyond.

Eventually Alexa should reflect this progress in their rankings.

There's More to SEO than Rankings

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions in SEO is that ranking at Google and Yahoo is all that counts in search engine optimization. Potential clients come to me with a single goal: "Get me a top-ten ranking at Google." Some will also mention MSN, and a few will rhyme off a list of search engines and want to rank well at the top 200 of them.

It is time to separate fact from fiction.

Yes, I can get you a top-ten placement at Google. But...

  1. If the placement is for "dirty brown shoes", it probably won't help your shoe store one bit, even if I get you the first place ranking. Few people are actually searching for that term.

  2. Being number ten might not help much either, depending on the term. People searching for "Essential Nectar liquid vitamins", will probably click on the first result they see, or at least on one of the "above-the-fold" results that do not require scrolling. On the other hand, someone searching for "liquid vitamins" might check through two pages of results to familiarize herself with the options available.

  3. If your title tag reads like a cheap list of search terms, it will not be enticing. For instance, if it reads: "vitamins, liquid vitamins, multivitamins, multi-vitamins", you might skip over it in favor of the next result that reads "Liquid vitamins from the Liquid Vitamin Supplements Store".

  4. If your description tag is a mess, people will more likely skip over your listing, even if it does rank number one, in favor of one that sounds like what they are looking for. Google and others use the description tag usually when the term searched for is found in it, so make sure to include your key search terms in a description tag that actually reads well.

Predicting traffic from SEO results

I recently responded to a forum question, which went something like this: My site ranks number one for this term at this engine. The term is searched this many times per day, and the engine has this percentage marketshare. Can I expect this many visitors?

That's not an SEO challenge; that's a math problem: searches x marketshare = visitors

I responded with a few factors that override mathematics in the SEO game, including the site's title tag and description tag, as well as whether the term lends itself to scrolling. I also pointed out that it depends on the title tags and description tags of the competition, too.

Another factor that makes predicting traffic difficult is the abandonment factor - how many people click on none of the results because they get interrupted or confused, or abandon the search for a new one because they find themselves off-topic or searching too broadly.

It also depends on how many sponsored links there are and how they are marked. Often at Yahoo and Lycos, for example, there are so many ads that the average searcher might never scroll a screen or two to see the organic (natural) results.

And, of course, it also depends on the color of the walls in the room the searcher is clicking from, the weather outside and how well they slept last night. But there is little you can do about that.

What you can do is to work with your SEO consultant to choose the most effective search terms for your business and make sure he develops a title tag and description tag that sell to both humans and the search engines. Then make sure he is monitoring not just the rankings for your key search terms, but also the description used by each of the search engines.

A good ranking at Google and Yahoo is just one measure of your SEO consultant's success. A more complete evaluation is that he is your partner in building long-term, targeted traffic

Sunday, May 3, 2009

The Fatal Attraction of Online Marketers

Suppose you were offered 263 links coming into your website from 263 other websites all in one fell swoop. Everybody knows that the more inbound links you have, the higher you will rise in the search engine rankings.

Suppose further that these were real links from real websites that actually sold real products and services - no cheap FFAs throwing come-ons on a street corner on the bad side of town.

Suppose further that this offer included the reciprocal linking code for all 263 sites that just had to be cut and pasted into your website. Piece of cake.

Does it get any sexier than this? Are you drooling yet? Does the sweet perfume of "ka-ching!" float around your head? Is this love at first site?

Well, no, it's actually a fatal attraction, one you had best resist. One that could infect your website with deadly communicable diseases.

I resisted this very offer not long ago, and you should resist anything similar. Here's why:

  1. The link pages on these sites are essentially link farms. The more links on a page, the less value they have in a search engine's eyes, especially when you start approaching or even passing 100 links. And don't expect any direct traffic from this kind of link, either.

  2. There is a technical term for identical pages within a site or on multiple sites. It is called "duplicate content", and it is strictly verboten by the search engines. Here is what Google says about them: "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."

  3. Do some quick math. You have 289 outgoing links, 263 of them are labeled "bad neighborhood websites" by the search engines ... so bad that they might even have been banned. What do you think will happen to your rankings?
Sadly, many webmasters fall for such tantalizing come-ons without thinking carefully about what the repercussions might be.

There is a lot of truly bad advice floating around the Internet on how to trick the search engines or find a short-cut to high rankings. This is one example of how following poor advice and hopping into bed with the wrong partner could kill your business.

Here is a good rule of thumb. Two's company. Three's a crowd. Four or more will get you arrested. OK, so I just made that up, and it's not very elegant. But it will keep you from falling for that inevitable offer with the come-hither eyes and the deadly communicable disease.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Three things you should NEVER do in SEO

Three things you should NEVER do
(even if some slick-talking "expert"
tells you it will cost you only $499
and will guarantee you gaggles of customers)

A webmistress asked me recently how much I would charge to optimize her site for the search engines. I took a glance at her site, and the first thing I found was a hidden link to an association she was part of.

I asked her why the link was there. She told me it was "for the search engines." It never ceases to amaze me how much really bad - I mean absolutely horrible - advice is floating around the Internet.

She never did hire me, but she did walk away with one free piece of advice that I now share with you: "Remove that link ASAP." Hidden links and hidden text are big trouble and something you should never do.

A hidden link is simply a link the search engine robots would follow, but is not visible to the naked eye. It could be a one pixel by one pixel graphic the same color as the background. Hidden text could be keyword written in the same color as the background.

If a search engine detects text in the same color as the background, it might penalize or even ban your site. In fact, one search engine expert has even suggested that if your background is, say, white, and you have a black table with white text on your page, that search engines would read that as hidden text (white background, white text) even though the text is clearly visible in the black table. Hmm. I will have to revisit my own site's colors.

Why are hidden links and hidden text bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

Duplicate pages are also a no-no. Search engines like original content made for human visitors. Five pages with the same article are seen as spamming, even if you did change "bicycle repair" to "fix your bike" in the second version and to "bike repair" in the third.

I was asked to exchange links with four websites this one person owned. The sites are very wholesome and I believe the webmaster is too. But the link pages on each website are identical: same introductory text and same links in the same order with identical wording each. All it would take is one complain to get all four sites banned, or at very least, severely demoted at Google and other search engines.

Needless to say, I turned down the offer, so that my site would not be associated with a "bad neighborhood".

Why are duplicate pages bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

Doorway pages are also bad. A doorway page is a page carefully designed to do well on search engine results, but is never meant to be used by humans. Often there is then a link to a website or there is some form of redirect.

Why not just optimize your site for the keywords you want, rather than try to trick the search engines? It probably will cost you less to hire a good search engine optimizer, and your website will not get banned.

I was approached by someone offering a combination of doorway pages and link farming (another no-no!). He did not call them by those names, even insisting they were not doorway pages. He wanted a few hundred dollars a month. There's nothing like your friendly neighborhood mortician coming to call when business is slow and bearing his own special brew for you to sample.

Why are doorway pages bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

By the way, "doorway pages" should not be confused with "entry pages". I get lots of my traffic entering through one or another of my articles. But these are real articles with real content, designed for human eyes and optimized for the search engines. This is a good tactic, because it adds content (which is what search engines are looking for).

Hidden links and text, duplicate pages and doorway pages are just a few of the "clever" tactics that can land you in the "Search Engine Slammer". If you spend much time on the Internet, you'll be approached about many others sooner or later.

Here is a simple question to ask yourself: "Would this be helping the search engines deliver the best results, or would it be trying to cheat their rules?" If it feels a little funny, don't try it. Or ask someone who knows.

Search engines are your friends. Be nice to them, and they'll be nice to you. You might just land yourself a berth atop Mount Google.

Friday, May 1, 2009

SEO: Google's Next Big Move archive copy

By David Leonhardt

(Will your website be ready, or will you be playing catch-up six months too late?

November 2003 might go down in history as the month that Google shook a lot of smug webmasters and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists from the apple tree. But more than likely, it was just a precursor of the BIG shakeup to come.

Google touts highly its secret PageRank algorithm. Although PageRank is just one factor in choosing what sites appear on a specific search, it is the main way that Google determines the "importance" of a website.

In recent months, SEO specialists have become expert at manipulating PageRank, particularly through link exchanges.

There is nothing wrong with links. They make the Web a web rather than a series of isolated islands. However, PageRank relies on the naturally "democratic" nature of the web, whereby webmasters link to sites they feel are important for their visitors. Google rightly sees link exchanges designed to boost PageRank as stuffing the ballot box.

I was not surprised to see Google try to counter all the SEO efforts. In fact, I have been arguing the case with many non-believing SEO specialists over the past couple months. But I was surprised to see the clumsy way in which Google chose to do it.

Google targeted specific search terms, including many of the most competitive and commercial terms. Many websites lost top positions in five or six terms, but maintain their positions in several others. This had never happened before. Give credit to Barry Lloyd of SearchEngineGuide.com for cleverly uncovering the process.

For Google, this shakeup is just a temporary fix. It will have to make much bigger changes if it is serious about harnessing the "democratic" nature of the Web and neutralizing the artificial results of so many link exchanges.

Here are a few techniques Google might use (remember to think like a search engine):

  1. Google might start valuing inbound links within paragraphs much higher than links that stand on their own. (For all we know, Google is already doing this.) Such links are much less likely to be the product of a link exchange, and therefore more likely to be genuine "democratic" votes.

  2. Google might look at the concentration of inbound links across a website. If most inbound links point to the home page, that is another possible indicator of a link exchange, or at least that the site's content is not important enough to draw inbound links (and it is content that Google wants to deliver to its searchers).

  3. Google might take a sample of inbound links to a domain, and check to see how many are reciprocated back to the linking domains. If a high percentage are reciprocated, Google might reduce the site's PageRank accordingly. Or it might set a cut-point, dropping from its index any website with too many of its inbound links reciprocated.

  4. Google might start valuing outbound links more highly. Two pages with 100 inbound links are, in theory, valued equally, even if one has 20 outbound links and the other has none. But why should Google send its searchers down a dead-end street, when the information highway is paved just as smoothly on a major thoroughfare?

  5. Google might weigh a website's outbound link concentration. A website with most outbound links concentrated on just a few pages is more likely to be a "link-exchanger" than a site with links spread out across its pages.

Google might use a combination of these techniques and ones not mentioned here. We cannot predict the exact algorithm, nor can we assume that it will remain constant. What we can do is to prepare our websites to look and act like a website would on a "democratic" Web as Google would see it.

For Google to hold its own against upstart search engines, it must deliver on its PageRank promise. Its results reflect the "democratic" nature of the Web. Its algorithm must prod webmasters to give links on their own merit. That won't be easy or even completely possible. And people will always find ways to turn Google's algorithm to their advantage. But the techniques above can send the Internet a long way back to where Google promises it will be.

The time is now to start preparing your website for the changes to come.

Five SEO Tips To Improve

By David Leonhardt

"Dear David: I just created a website on baby toy safety. What should I do to make sure gazillions of people find me through the search engines?"

I can't promise you gazillions, but there are a few things you should do to make it easy for search engines to find you. I assume you have already decided to submit your site to the major search engines and directories. I assume that you will develop some sort of linking strategy (hopefully a better strategy than most websites use today). I also assume you will have picked key search terms for all the pages on your website.

Beyond that, here are my top five tips for making your website easy for those "gazillions" to find it.

  1. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but search engines don't read pictures. Make sure your key search terms are written out in text, not part of a graphic title you hire somebody to prepare for you. That also means you should not just show pictures of toys, but also write out the names, and possibly a keyword description with the title.

  2. Have several pages of articles related to your website's topic. Use a different keyword search term for each article. For instance, one article might use frequently the term "safe toys for babies", while another might use the term "baby safety".

  3. What's the URL of your website? Your name won't help you there. Your key search term will. In this instance, I might pick www.baby-toy-safety.com, for example (if that is one of your top keyword phrases). Hire somebody who knows what he is doing to develop the right keyword strategy for you BEFORE you choose your domain name.

  4. What's the title of your page? I don't know how many times I see titles such as "Article" or "Contact us". Don't expect the search engine robots to get all excited about that term. And don't expect anybody to search for that term, either. Much better to title your page "Free article on safe toys for babies" or "Contact the *Baby Toy Expert* today". By the way, this is the single most important place to include your keyword phrases.

  5. What about that navigation menu that appears on every single page of your website? Does it say "Contact the baby toy expert?" Or "about the baby toy expert". Or links about baby toys?" Need I say more?
If your website is about life insurance, you have little hope of hitting the front pages of any search engine. "Life insurance" is such a competitive search engine marketplace. Unless, of course, people are searching for a very specific and rare niche. Even then, I suspect you will need much more than these five tips.

In fact, there are dozens, if not hundreds of things you can do to win the search engine race. These top five search engine optimization tips are a great start, whatever your website is about.

How Search Engines Connect

Maggie knows how to find what she wants. She lets her fingers do the walking - not in the Yellow Pages, but at Google.com. She wants to learn about bread baking, and you have just written Bread Baking Made Simple, and you sell some great baking tools. The good news is the Google and other search engines exist for one simple reason: to help Maggie find your website.

Google will show Maggie 534,000 resources on "bread baking". Unless she fails to find what she wants on the first page, or top 10 results, she will never find your website listed 124th in the results. (Actually, if she does not find what she wants in the top twenty or thirty results, she is likely to refine her search to "easy bread baking" or "home bread baking").

How do you get into the top 10 results so Maggie can find your website? You might have heard a lot about "search engine optimization" and "ranking analysis" and "algorithms". It all sounds very complex, but it really works on a simple 1 - 2 - 3 principle.

  1. A search engine will show Maggie only resources (websites) it has on record. So make sure to submit your site to the key search engines and directories. You do not need to hire somebody who will charge you big dollars to do this. Nor should you fall for any of the auto-submit software or services. This should be done by hand, and anybody can do it. You can do it yourself.

  2. The search engine will rank highest those websites it feels are most "important". This means you have to show that your website is most important. There are a few simple things you can do. First, make sure you have content. Text content equals importance on the Internet. Links, both coming in and going out, are key. Connectivity equals importance on the Internet. Get listed in the major directories (DMOZ.com, Yahoo.com, Zeal.com, JoeAnt.com, etc.), as this also is a measure of importance.

  3. The search engine will show Maggie the most "relevant" high-ranking resources. Google might rank http://TheHappyGuy.com relatively very high, but it is totally irrelevant to a search for bread baking. How does a search engine know which websites are most relevant for Maggie's search? By the number of times "bread baking" shows up in text on your web page. By the variety of ways it shows up on your page. By number web pages you link to and that link to you with the words "bread baking" included.
Are you ready to roll? Possibly. Some of this you can easily do yourself. But there are three places that are worth spending money to help all the Maggies out there find your website and your book.

The first is choosing the right keywords. It might look simple, but "bread baking" might not even be the best keyword phrase to focus on. It might be "easy bread baking" or "home bread baking". The most searched terms might not be the best, nor the term with the least competition.

The second is to prepare a link strategy. The "link exchange" pages that are getting more popular each day are also becoming less effective each day. Here are just a few of the linking factors that will affect whether Maggie discovers your book:

  • The total number of incoming and outgoing links
  • The importance of the sites you link to and from
  • The relevancy of the sites you link to and from
  • Which pages on their sites and on yours are being linked
  • What you include in the incoming and outgoing links
  • Where on the page the links are placed
  • How many links are on those pages
  • How many pages are linked to or have outgoing links
  • The ratio of links to content on the pages involved
You can implement the strategy yourself, but it is worth hiring somebody to put it together for you. Ask the person what factors she would consider when building a strategy for you. If she does not mention several of the above, your money is better spent elsewhere.

The third place to invest is to have somebody knowledgeable review your html code. Chances are that you have missed numerous opportunities to let the search engines know your website is relevant, and possibly some opportunities to show it is important.