Latest Search Engine Optimization Reviews

What’s the Story on PageRank?

A lot of website owners are upset or puzzled when their website’s Google PageRank goes down or does not rise. Is it worth losing any sleep over changes in that green line and number that appear in a Google tool bar at the top of your browser? I think that excessive worry or thought about PageRank is not constructive, and it is better to put it all in perspective by taking a rational look at what PageRank is and what it is not.

First of all the concept behind PageRank is indeed at the heart of Google’s ranking process. The Google founders came from academia and they noticed that in many academic documents some sources were continually cited. They reasoned that if a particular document such as a book or research paper was mentioned in many places then it must be important. They applied this to the web and assumed that if one website links to another it is in fact, giving a “vote” for that site. A website that has many incoming links must have a certain degree of importance. In the current Google algorithm the quantity and quality of incoming links is certainly a factor in deciding the ranking of a particular website for any given search-query.

Think about it. In the early days of the web people would build websites and then they would tell their visitors to check out other “cool” sites and they would link to these sites. This is the process of natural linking and it still goes on. If you really have good content, people will link to you without letting you know. Similarly, if your name is Bob Dylan and your website is www.bobdylan.com, thousands of people will link to you without you having to send a cheesy email begging for a link.

Various government agencies, educational institutions, established companies and anyone else who is “big” in the “real world” is likely to also be big on the Internet simply by virtue of their previous fame and accomplishment. Google’s ranking system took this into consideration and this is one of the reasons why Google is currently the number one search engine. It gives better results and that is why people use it.

But, does that mean that only the big players can be seen on the net? Far from it. While there is a difference between one guy working in his house with one computer and a corporate giant with a whole staff, and this is indeed reflected in rankings, the Internet provides a much leveler playing field than in yesteryear. Prior to 1995, it would have been very hard for someone to spread their news and views far and wide as bloggers do today. It costs millions of dollars to publish a daily newspaper or to print and circulate a magazine, but it costs far less to publish a website or a blog, and lots of “little guys” have taken advantage of the power of the Internet.

But what about PageRank, how much of it do I really need to get my site noticed? For those who are not familiar with the PageRank system. Google supplies a tool bar which you can download and install on your browser. If you make a complete installation with all the advanced features, then every time you open a new website you will see a green and white bar with the label PageRank. Put your mouse on the bar and you will see a number from 0 to 10. If a website is not indexed by Google or banned by Google, the bar may be grey or all white.

But what do the numbers mean? I had a client who was worried about his number 3 PageRank figure and based on my observation I answered him with my unofficial view on the rankings. Here is how I currently see it:

PageRank 0-2 shows that a site does not have many links and needs work, However, and this a big “however,” it may not really affect your search engine rankings. I have a client with a page rank of 2 and his site ranks well, even number one, for several search terms in a fairly competitive industrial category. So PageRank is not everything; it may have an impact on your rankings and traffic, but in some cases it may not matter. In any case if you have a PageRank of 0-2, you can work on it through proper link building activity which I will explain at the end of the article.

PageRank 3 can be OK in some cases but in highly competitive industries you should work to improve it.

PageRank 4 is quite a normal number and indicates that you have enough links in either quantity or quality to make your site competitive.

PageRank 5 indicates that a site has many links or links from authoritative sites, and that Google has good “trust” in the site. It is a respectable and attainable PageRank.

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PageRank 6 is very difficult to attain. This rank indicates that the site has many links and links from respected places. Remember the example of www.bobdylan.com, which I mentioned above; it has a PageRank 6, so you can get an idea of the difficulty involved.

PageRank 7-10 is usually earned by large and established institutions or websites which have tremendous authority, due to the quantity and quality of the incoming links. It is extremely difficult to attain this ranking. You really have to be special to get it.

So, don’t worry excessively about PageRank. First look at your traffic, then look at your sales and finally at your bottom line. They are the important numbers to watch. If you want to increase your traffic and also PageRank, then here are a few steps that you can take:

1. Add content to your website. Make your website so good and so useful that people will link to you without you asking for a link.

2. Write articles and get them published on other websites and blogs with a link back to your site.

3. Distribute online press releases

4. Judiciously exchange links, or even better, exchange content (containing links back to your site) with other websites.

5. Get your site listed in online directories.

These efforts will certainly help you to build targeted traffic, and they most probably will also help you to increase your PageRank as well.

1. Traffic (“data transfer” or “bandwidth”) - These terms refer to the amount of information, measured in bytes, that is delivered from your website to visitors. Although you will hear about “unlímited bandwidth”, check to see if the same terminology used for marketing purposes is reflected in the contract. In other words, read the contract before signing on the dotted line. Unless you will be uploading photo archives or using your site to swap large files, your small- to mid-size website should normally use no more than 3GB of bandwidth monthly. Watch out for “overage” charges (per additional GB, usually) and consider upgrading your account if the site traffic increases.

2. Disk space - Apply the same skeptical approach to the “unlímited disk space” deals, as you did to the claims about traffic above. Again, the majority of small to mid-size sites need 10-20MB of web space at most, so unless 500MB or “unlímited space” is part of the basic package, don’t bite. You can easily determine how much storage you need by checking your file sizes and adding them up - all the HTML pages (which are small) plus all the images (some of which can be big).

3. Uptime (“reliability”) – The minimum figure for uptime should be 99%. Today, in fact, that is the minimum advertised amount, as 99.5% or more is referred to all the time. Many people would consider this the most important consideration.

4. Tools and security (FTP, PHP, SSI, etc.) – Some hosts require getting prior approval to install various scripts like CGI or PHP. You would be less constrained with a host that does not make you wait for approval. To properly maintain databases, set up security measures and otherwise customize your site, you need the full tool set. Once you find out what you get in the way of tools, press a bit further and find out about restrictions on their use, if any.

5. Email – What’s the use of having a custom-named domain for your business if you continue using Hotmail or other web-based mail applications? Every hosting plan will include e-mail services, allowing you to look and sound like a “real company” with its own e-mail addresses. The quality of such add-ons as auto-responders, mail filters and mailing managers will vary among potential hosts. Don’t forget to verify that you will also have “webmail” (web-based access to your mail server) and make sure to evaluate the anti-spam tools that are available.

6. Technical support – As things often break down at the worst possible times, you want tech support available as much as possible. Sometimes “24/7 support” is more like “12/5 support”, so find out about coverage on weekends and holidays. It is also important to speak with a human being rather than be stuck in a circle of FAQ pages and e-mail service requests. If you face an emergency that threatens your business, you also want to know that the tech staff is knowledgeable. Ask about their training.

7. Remote controls – It may be called your “control panel”, it may be called a “tool kit”, but every host will give you utilities with which to manage your account. Often, there is a certain web page established from which to do this. Managing your e-mail, mail accounts, passwords and anti-spam tools are all basic chores for webmasters. With a powerful set of tools, the important control over your business stays in your hands.

8. Server architecture – There are numerous reasons for choosing one type of server over another. If you want to use the ASP web programming language, for example, it is only available on Windows servers. However, cost-wise, it is often better to use a Unix system running Apache server software, which is stable, dependable and lets you manage error pages, block specified IP addresses, stop email harvesting and more, without waiting for your host to approve anything. Also, if yours will be an e-commerce site, you will want to get SSL (Secure Socket Layer), MySQL and shopping cart functionality.

9. Costs and payment plans – Price, quite obviously, is an important factor, but the most expensive hosts are not always the best ones. Consider cost, of course, and beware of dramatic price differentials on what are really quite similar plans. You can pay via annual or quarterly payment plans that will discount the monthly rate, and the more you pay at once (and upfront), the less you will pay per month.

10. Reputation and reviews – Search the Internet and talk to all of your business colleagues. Track down both complaints and praises about your potential hosts, but remember to consider the source of the comments.

You will save yourself a lot of frustration if you do your homework. If you are unclear or uncertain about any of the particulars, ask someone you know who has more expertise for assistance.

Welcome to The introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), optimizing design, and how to maximize your websites search engine positioning for the major search engines.

When it comes to running an effective website that ranks well on the search engine results pages (SERPs), there are three major factors that can influence the number of search engine referrals (incoming searches) you get. This applies to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live).

Content Is King

The most important thing is the content on your page regardless of how much time you put into Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) for your website without the content people are searching for you will find very little return on your efforts.

Involved with the preparation of your content is analyzing the keyword(s) for your given industry. Just putting Keywords in the keywords meta tag will get you no where without those Keywords existing in your content. This is known as Keyword Density, basically the more often you’re keywords the more relevant your content is for the searcher in the eyes of a search engine. Keep in mind an ideal density is around 3.5% per word in you phrase.

When writing your Search Engine Optimized content don’t forget about the end user. If you can’t get your keyword densities bang on, then don’t worry about it. I prefer to have a lower density but higher quality content for the end user, than having spammy content and a lower conversion rate. The end goal is still to convert your visitors to your products, services, or whatever your goal may be. Users, unlike search engines, are not interested in Keyword Density so beware of keyword spam.

And a final note on Content for this introduction is that it is advisable to constantly update your content. The longer your content goes without updates, the staler the content gets, and the lower your search engine positioning will drop. However with enough Link Building this can be negated.

Link Building Your Way Too Success

Link building is easily the second most important factor in SEO, and in some cases the most. Building links into your website is the only way as a webmaster that you can affect the authority of your website, and the value your existing content may have in the eyes of the search engines.

To conceptualize link building think of your website as if it was a person. The more popular a person is the more authoritative what they have to say is to their target audience. The big difference being that our target audience is Google, and the other major search engines, and having quality links on other sites equates to your websites “popularity”.

Now keep in mind when you start your link building that nearly no two links are exactly the same. When Google calculates the value of a link it looks at several important things to figure out just how much strength to give you. Here are just a few:

1. How much strength did the page with the link have

2. Number of external links on a page

3. Anchor text used for the link

4. Is a rel=nofollow tag used

5. How long has that link been there

Now keep in mind all of these factors above are irrelevant if Google hasn’t cached the page with the link, if Google hasn’t found it then it is worth nothing. The stronger the strength of the page your link is on the more strength you will get in return. The more outgoing links there are on a page the more that strength will be divided between all the linked sites.

A link with a rel=”nofollow” attribute is virtually useless to your website other then increasing your overall link count to give your competitors a scare. You will mainly find NoFollow attributes for Blog Comments, Website Advertisers / Sponsors, Paid Links, or links to competitors (I use them on my resume for past work experience).

When a link is built very few search engines will give you the full strength of that link right away. This is done to maintain the quality of the SERPs if everyone could just go out build 1000s of links then rank there would be no quality to the search engines. Instead they slowly give you more strength as these links age up until around the 6 month period.

Lastly you will constantly see something called Google Pagerank. Pagerank is an arbitrary Google measurement assigned to a website / page to denote that pages strength. Now some people consider this measurement to be the end all be all, but in truth it means very little other than an indicator of you sites health. If you have a PageRank on your homepage as well as pagerank on most of your internal pages your off to a good start. Also keep in mind that pagerank only updates every 3 - 6 months, and ultimately the proof is in the search engine results not some number in the toolbar.

* It’s important to note that when I’m referring to PageRank above I’m referring to the visual PageRank displayed in the little green bar, not the actual PageRank that Google uses internally to calculate the value of a page.

Optimize Your Website Navigation Structure & Design

I purposely left site structure to last as it can be the quickest way for you to royally mess up your website rankings. The worst case with bad structure is that no part of your website will be cached and you will see no visitors. I’ve seen a lot of sites with a lot of issues causing no search engines to crawl these sites. Some of the worst yet simple structural issues that can affect your search engine crawler visibility that I’ve seen are:

1. Automatically redirecting all visitors that come to your site to another page.

2. Using HTTPS only

3. Pure Javascript based navigation

On other sites I have seen Google only cached the index page, which may have an assigned Pagerank without spidering the rest of the website. The things to remember when mapping out the structure of your website are:

1. At all costs avoid having dynamic URLs (ie index.php?PageId=1), a dynamic URL is a URL that contains HTTP GET variables. Search engines don’t tend to spider these sites well. And to users they don’t have any relevant information to their Queries. Try to use Page keys that contain your keywords, if you need to use Dynamic scripts to build your website (i.e. through a Content Management System), use Apache Mod Rewrites to build a static in appearance website (Notice how all URLs on my personal web design & development site appear to be directories). If you have to use Dynamic URLs keep your number of variables at no more than 2.

2. If possible try to use the Keywords you are targeting for your industry in your URL or Files / Directories. This helps increase your Keyword Density, as well as providing users clicking through on Google information relevant to their query in your file names.

3. Don’t constantly change your website structure. Pagerank takes time naturally to develop, and Google holds new sites back in a Sandbox. By renaming a page you can often kiss your pre-existing search engine positioning away on renamed pages until their rank is redeveloped.

4. When designing a new site try to avoid having filenames with extensions in the URL (ie Products.asp), this can limit your options in the future if you change programming languages (ie ASP to PHP), as well as the platform your website can be hosted on (ie Windows vs Linux Hosting).

5. When implementing a new structure or new site, create a Google sitemap, and register it with Google to let Google know what to index.

6. Whenever possible attached CSS and Javascript as external files.

Once you have decided on a website structure, or you have a pre-existing structure, the best way to score higher search engine positions is to have minimalist coding in the HTML to maximize your Content to Markup Ratio. The best way to minimize the amount of HTML code required is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets allow you to pull the design out of your HTML pages and place them into a separate file. Not only does this remove a lot of HTML if you were using Tables for layout, it makes maintenance a lot simpler as all your design changes are made in one place.

When I moved my website from table based layout to Cascading Style Sheets I managed to reduce my markup code by around 60%! If you have a very large site this can be even more beneficial as some search engines limit the amount of hard drive space they will allocate to caching your website, as well as raise the position of your content higher up in your document.

Conclusion

And thus concludes my introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it may sound long and long winded, but that is really just a little bit of what goes into successful positioning your website on the search engines. I’ll finish up with one last warning and that is to not buy or sell links, as you can easily be penalized completely from the SERPs for this (Google supplies a page for reporting websites for buying and selling). Good luck on your Search Engine Result Pages and Positioning!

Targeted Traffíc to Your Site in 7 Steps

There is no doubt about the fact that Forum posting works when it comes to driving traffic to a site. On many occasions, I have successfully used posting to forums to gain exposure to my affiliate landing page, squeeze page, sales page, etc.

I tell you, if you’re really smart, the goal of every forum post you make is to get as many people to subscribe to your líst! Posting to forums is a very fast and powerful way to build your base of subscribers in as little as 30 minutes. Below is a step-by-step guide:

Step 1 - Find Forums About Your Niche Very Easily

Just Google the following:

+”your niche” +forum
or
+”your niche” +”discussion board”

For instance, if I am looking for Forums in the Internet Marketing field, I type +”Internet Marketing” +forum. The results show the top Internet marketing Forums such as:

www.im4newbies.com/forum
www.warriorforum.com
www.forums.digitalpoint.com

Step 2 - Join the Forums and Set Up Your Signature

Remember to include your website address in your signature. Signature is another name for your resource box. Your resource box is just like an ‘about the author info’. This appears at the end of every post you make and drives traffic to your website.

Step 3 - Read the Rules and Regulations of the Forum Before Posting

This ensures that your posts are not deleted by the Administrators of the Forum. Now, don’t go about spamming all members of the Forum with your website advert. In fact, I will advise you not to post an obvious ad. It’s a pure waste of time because it will be deleted.

So, what’s next?

Step 4 - Ask for Input

Approach from a weak man’s position. Assuming you’ve written an article on your site entitled “13 Ways to Drive Traffic to a New Site.” You could make a post asking folks to check out the article and see if you missed anything. Or you can ask for additional points to add to your article. Of course you’ll have your opt ín box at the end of the article with a compelling offering.

Let’s say you’ve written an article on meeting the right partner. You could post a message like this: “If you had a chance to learn how to meet your right partner now, what would you do?”

It’s a great way to get the attention of forum members to your article. You also get them engaged in the article by asking for their input. And who knows, you may also get other publishers who would use your content in their ezines, thereby getting more exposure for your site.
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Step 5 - Ask for a Critical Assessment

If you are the type that is not easily hurt by honest feedback even when it hurts, you can go to a forum and ask for a honest critique. You may think this will not make people sign up for your líst, but I tell you, many people will end up subscribing to it. It’s a more indirect and acceptable way to ask people to check out your site without blatant advertising.

Plus, the feedback they give you may help to make your squeeze page even more compelling. Ask them if it would persuade them to give it a try, assuming they were in your target market (of course, you already know they are by the forum you selected). And, if they say no, ask them why. You can get valuable information on what they want (and don’t want) this way.

There are two types of forums where you should ask for critiques: the niche forum itself and a marketing forum. You’ll likely get more sign-ups from the niche forum and good advice to test out from the marketing forum (although you’ll get some opt-ins there as well).

Step 6 - Ask Your Target Market What They Want

Unknown to most people, this is one of the best ways to develop products and services. And most times, Forum members are ready to tell you what they’ll buy and give you ideas for articles, auto-responder content, your blog posts, whatever you need. People guess the products their target market will want and create them only to discover no one is interested in the product, but with this approach, you have real people telling you what product they want, how they want it and how much they are prepared to pay for it.

The way you would use this technique to get them to subscribe is to post something like, “what’s your biggest question about loosing weight?” Or “what’s the single most important thing you’d like to know about building a business?”

Don’t forget to ask if they’re willing to pay for solutions to their problems and have them give you an indication of how much they would be willing to pay. Powerful stuff!

Let them know you’ve already answered 10 questions (your 10 step mini-course loaded in your auto-responder), for example. Then they’ll be more likely to sign-up. Make sure you point out that you’ll add to your mini-course with the answers to the questions they’ve provided, and that they’ll get answers to the existing questions in your mini-course PLUS the new ones when they subscribe. Everybody wins!

Step 7 - Provide a Step-By-Step Guide or Video Tutorial

If someone asks how to create an ebook, give them a progression of steps they can take. Or, make a Camtasia tutorial video showing them how. Now that you’ve got them to your site, you’ll want to “make them a proposal they can’t refuse.”

Provide a Líst of Resources and Websites

In addition to checklists, resource lists with website URLs make a great site for them to bookmark! Make sure you supply more than just links. Make it a huge info-page of information. A collection of resources, links to everything you have - articles, video, audio, your blog, other useful sites, tools, you name it.

Solve a Problem for People

If someone asks for help or asks a question, provide your experience and try to help them. But to maximize your odds of getting both the asker of the question and everyone else who reads the post to subscribe to your líst, try to phrase your answer in one of the following two ways:

1. Give them tips, techniques, shortcuts, secrets, or anything that offers both the promise of exclusive information and fast results. A shortcut to success.

2. Whenever possible, supply them with specific results. Think about it. When you want to learn how to make income online, you go to someone who is making revenue online to guide you. This quickly establishes you as an authority in that area.

And by helping them, maybe - just maybe - they’ll click on the link in your signature to check out your website. If you direct them to a blog post or article you wrote to answer their question, they’ll be even more likely to investigate.

That’s all there is to it but at the end of the day, it’s a failure-proof way to drive serious traffic to your website using Forum Posts. Apply it and see your traffic soar through the roof. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!