Seo

Longterm Strategies For Getting And Keeping A Top Search Engine Ranking...

By Brad Callen

Table of Contents Table of Contents..................................................................................................................................................... 3 0 – Introduction......................................................................................................................................................... 7 1 – The SEO Mindset.............................................................................................................................................. 9 What is SEO?....................................................................................................................................................... 9 What is NOT SEO?............................................................................................................................................... 9 Understand How Search Engines Work............................................................................................................. 10 Customize Your SEO Strategy............................................................................................................................ 10 Think Long Term..................................................................................................................................................11 Think For Yourself............................................................................................................................................... 12 Create A System................................................................................................................................................. 12 Prioritize Your Work............................................................................................................................................ 13 Rankings Are NOT Everything!........................................................................................................................... 13 Review................................................................................................................................................................ 14 2 – Understanding Search Engines.................................................................................................................... 16 The Search Engine ‘Index’.................................................................................................................................. 17 The Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)...................................................................................................... 19 What Google Wants............................................................................................................................................ 21 Yahoo, MSN, etc................................................................................................................................................. 23 Google vs Yahoo vs MSN................................................................................................................................... 24 Tracking Search Engine News............................................................................................................................ 26 3 – Search Engine Ranking Factors................................................................................................................... 27 Ask – The Forgotten Search Engine................................................................................................................... 27 Google Sandbox – Time-Based Quality Indicators............................................................................................. 28 Google PageRank – Still Important.................................................................................................................... 29 On-Page Ranking Factors.................................................................................................................................. 29 Site-based Ranking Factors............................................................................................................................... 31 Link-Based Ranking Factors............................................................................................................................... 33 4 – Your SEO Master Plan.................................................................................................................................... 37 Part 1: Doing Research...................................................................................................................................... 37 Part 2: Building / Optimizing Your Site................................................................................................................ 38 Part 3: Site Launch............................................................................................................................................. 38 Part 4: Long Term SEO....................................................................................................................................... 38 5 – Setting Goals.................................................................................................................................................. 40 What Is Your Website’s Purpose?....................................................................................................................... 40 Who is your target audience?............................................................................................................................. 41 What Does Your Site Do?................................................................................................................................... 42

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Existing Site Analysis.......................................................................................................................................... 43 Building a New Site............................................................................................................................................. 44 Success Objectives and Tracking Progress....................................................................................................... 44 6 – Keyword Research......................................................................................................................................... 45 Build Your Keyword List...................................................................................................................................... 45 Using Keyword Research Tools.......................................................................................................................... 47 Evaluate Keywords............................................................................................................................................. 56 Shortlist Keywords.............................................................................................................................................. 61 7 – Competitive Analysis..................................................................................................................................... 62 Competitive Analysis Overview........................................................................................................................... 62 Your Top Competitors......................................................................................................................................... 65 Competitor SEO Checklist.................................................................................................................................. 66 On-Page Factors................................................................................................................................................ 68 Site Factors......................................................................................................................................................... 68 Backlinks Research............................................................................................................................................ 69 Summary............................................................................................................................................................. 71 8 – Keywords and Site Content........................................................................................................................... 72 The Search Engine View.................................................................................................................................... 72 Matching Keywords to Site Pages...................................................................................................................... 72 SEO Copywriting................................................................................................................................................ 74 Optimizing Site Content on Existing Sites.......................................................................................................... 74 9 – On-Page SEO.................................................................................................................................................. 75 Title Tags............................................................................................................................................................. 76 Meta Tags........................................................................................................................................................... 79 Keyword Usage.................................................................................................................................................. 80 Avoid Duplicate Content..................................................................................................................................... 81 Other On-Page SEO Factors.............................................................................................................................. 82

10 – Site Architecture........................................................................................................................................... 83 URL Structure..................................................................................................................................................... 83 Sitemaps............................................................................................................................................................. 84 Internal Linking................................................................................................................................................... 85 11 – Link Building Basics.................................................................................................................................... 88 “Trust” and Links................................................................................................................................................. 88 Authority and Links............................................................................................................................................. 89 Link Popularity.................................................................................................................................................... 89 Link Evaluation................................................................................................................................................... 90

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12 – Site Launch Links......................................................................................................................................... 94 Trusted Directories.............................................................................................................................................. 95 Highly Trusted Websites..................................................................................................................................... 97 13 – Link Sources................................................................................................................................................. 98 Directories........................................................................................................................................................... 98 Paid Links / Reviews......................................................................................................................................... 100 Article Submissions / Guest Blogging............................................................................................................... 102 Link Requests................................................................................................................................................... 103 Link-Worthy Content......................................................................................................................................... 103 Community-based Sites (Profiles / Content)..................................................................................................... 104 Industry News Blogs......................................................................................................................................... 105 Press Releases................................................................................................................................................. 106 Contests / Free stuff.......................................................................................................................................... 107 Quality Web Design.......................................................................................................................................... 107 Blogging Conversations.................................................................................................................................... 108 Social Media Marketing.................................................................................................................................... 108 14 – Finding Potential Link Partners.................................................................................................................111 Directories..........................................................................................................................................................111 Search Engines.................................................................................................................................................112 Backlinks Analysis.............................................................................................................................................113 Topical Research...............................................................................................................................................114 Local Search......................................................................................................................................................114 15 – Link Valuation..............................................................................................................................................116 Quality Content / Providing Value......................................................................................................................116 Backlinks Analysis.............................................................................................................................................116 Outbound links...................................................................................................................................................117 Site Topic...........................................................................................................................................................117 Site Authority......................................................................................................................................................118 Link Format & Destination.................................................................................................................................118 Value / Competition in niche..............................................................................................................................118 Traffic Value.......................................................................................................................................................119 Link Popularity / PageRank...............................................................................................................................119 Site Age.............................................................................................................................................................119 16 – Link Worthy Content.................................................................................................................................. 120 What is Link-Worthy Content?.......................................................................................................................... 120 Quality............................................................................................................................................................... 121 Originality.......................................................................................................................................................... 122 Usefulness........................................................................................................................................................ 123 Timelessness.................................................................................................................................................... 123

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17 – Campaign Tracking.................................................................................................................................... 124 Site Analytics and Search Marketing................................................................................................................ 124 Tracking Search Engine Rankings.................................................................................................................... 125 Tuning Your Search Marketing Campaign........................................................................................................ 125 18 – In Closing.................................................................................................................................................... 127

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0 – Introduction People often ask: “What can this product / e-book / service do for me?” The SEO Mindset is a book on how to bring targeted traffic in from search engines on a long-term, consistent basis. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important component of any online business strategy, and this book will show you the most effective methods to dominate search engine rankings for any niche or set of keywords. It is also a book on how to think about search engine optimization (SEO) – partially to combat the vast loads of misinformation floating about in forums and blogs and other e-books, and partially because as an industry, SEO is constantly evolving and the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to know its final destination. What this book does not teach you: • • • • •

Web design PHP scripting How to upload files to your webhost Product creation (or any other Internet Marketing techniques) Anything unrelated to search engine marketing

Unfortunately, I don’t have the space here to tell you everything about how to design and setup websites. That’s enough material for a whole new book, and it would not be fair on you if I was to hand you a 1,000+ page book which had everything you needed to know in order to operate computers, build websites, do SEO, create products, write sales copy, build e-mail lists, manage blogs, etc. Such an approach will only serve to overwhelm you and will not help you actually learn anything. The smarter strategy is to use dedicated guides for each separate topic. This book concentrates on teaching you SEO, and in case you need help in areas other than SEO, I’ve created a comprehensive ‘Resources’ section at the end of the book with links to reference books and websites that you can use to learn about other subjects. Now, on to what you’ll learn in this book. What this book DOES teach you: • • • • • • • •

How to develop an SEO mindset How search engines ‘think’, and what they want from websites How to do keyword research How to evaluate your competition How to setup your websites to be SEO friendly from the start How to do on-page optimization (and what to really focus on) How to get links – free and paid A step-by-step method for dominating page 1 rankings in Google for your target keywords

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I made these two lists so that you would have a clear idea of what it is that this book will do for you. Ideally, I would suggest that you print it out (or even print out just the first few chapters), grab a pen/pencil and a notepad, and start reading it right now. Because if you are interested in making money online, you need to know this formula: Targeted Traffic + Conversion = Money This book will show you how to drive hordes of targeted traffic to your websites (mostly free traffic, I might add). Conversion after that is a simple process of getting them to click on your ads, sign up to your e-mail list, subscribe to your blog or simply read your sales pitch and buy your product / service. The first few chapters will help you develop a SEO mindset – this will allow you to build websites along the same principles that search engines use to evaluate their search engine results. The end result will be that as search engines continue to improve their algorithms and try to make them ‘perfect’, your websites will also keep improving their rankings because you are ALREADY doing what the search engines ultimately want the top websites to be like. This SEO mindset will be the foundation of everything else you learn in this book, so I would ask you to make sure that you read it first, although if you need specific help on a topic you can always jump ahead and take a look. Alright then, let’s get started.

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1 – The SEO Mindset What is ‘the SEO Mindset’? • It is a specific way of thinking about online marketing and search engine optimization in order to achieve long-term, consistent, page 1 search rankings. • It is a set of guidelines that you will constantly refer to during the SEO process and use as filters for what to do and what not to do. But before we start with the Mindset, let’s answer a fundamental question – what is SEO?

What is SEO? Most people – ok, almost everyone outside the SEO industry – equate SEO with getting the #1 ranking for your website in Google. But SEO is much more than that. There are 3 main steps in the SEO process: First, like any business, you need to identify your audience (your target market). Not only are you setting your website’s goals and profiling your audience, at this stage you are also scouting your competition and evaluating what you need to do in order to ‘dominate’ this particular sector. Second, you take steps to get your website rank as high as possible in the search engines for those keywords that this audience is most likely to use. This involves things you do to the site itself (if you are setting up a new website then you should ensure that it is search engine friendly from the ground up). It also includes off-site activities which are all geared towards the process of having other websites link to yours. Third, you constantly track your website’s progress in the search engines and make adjustments to your SEO strategy as necessary. While we define SEO, it is important to also clarify that SEO does not encompass other online activities that are designed to bring traffic to (or promote) your website.

What SEO is NOT… • Online advertising (buy advertising for traffic from other websites) is not SEO (it is site promotion, although the advertising links can help your search rankings). • Public relations (press releases, media mentions, blogging coverage) is not SEO (although once again, it is site promotion, which may lead into your site getting links). • Building a website that exploits a loophole in search engine algorithms to rank #1 for select keywords for a short period of time is not SEO (that’s search engine spamming, which we’re not going to discuss here). • SEO is not a gimmick designed to drive X thousand visitors to your website in 24 hours.

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• SEO is not always free traffic – several very effective SEO techniques will cost you money. • Writing a book and giving it away for free to your site’s visitors is not SEO The thing about most of these activities is that they CAN be part of your SEO strategy IF you chose to use them that way. However, as SEO is usually part of an overall strategy designed to promote your site, separating other promotional activities from SEO work is important.

Understand How Search Engines Work It goes without saying that if you want to rank #1 for your target keywords, you need to understand how search engines work. This means that you must not only know what factors search engines use in ranking websites, but also how they ‘read’ web pages and ‘index’ them (This topic is discussed in detail in the next chapter). Search engines have evolved considerably in the last few years, and continue to update their ranking algorithms periodically. So apart from learning how search engines work right now, it will also pay if you: • Understand what each search engine is trying to achieve when ranking websites • How you can track changes in search engine algorithms • How you can keep a ‘pulse’ on the latest developments in the search engine world The next chapter discusses search engine behavior in more detail – for now, just keep in mind that a key component of your SEO strategy will be to stay on top of developments in the SEO world, especially when it comes to how the search engines are evolving.

Customize Your SEO Strategy The most important thing about SEO is that an ‘out-of-the-box’ formula for achieving top rankings will not work as well as a customized, one-on-one strategy for each project. Yes, a cookie-cutter approach will work – but it won’t be as effective as a custom-made battle plan for your website. The general principles will always apply to your website, but there’s a significant component of analysis, drawing conclusions and then determining what to do in light of those conclusions. At the end of the day, it is YOUR SEO plan. You will decide what to focus on, you will be the one doing competitive analysis and evaluating how difficult or easy it will be for your website to rank for particular keywords. Every website has different goals – these goals will in turn determine what type of keywords you will be targeting, what the composition of your audience will be, the competitiveness of your target market and your willingness to spend money / put in the time and effort. Here’s an example of how you would customize the SEO process based on your project: Site A is focused on a very niche topic and is an informational site (as opposed to a product-oriented site). This has an influence on the keywords targeted for the site. Those keywords (as well as the target niche itself) have weak competition, so it will take less effort and time (and money) to get Site A to rank #1 for its target terms. Also, Site A will depend exclusively on search engines for traffic.

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Based on this information, you would have two choices – you can save money by doing ‘free’ SEO and not paying for directory submissions and links. Or, you could save time and pay for inclusion in highly trusted directories to give your website’s rankings a kick up the search engine results. Here’s another example: Site B is a corporate website of a rapidly-growing company in a fairly competitive industry. This sector is not as competitive online, however – some terms have little competition while others have moderate competition (later on we’ll also define what ‘competition’ really is and how you can determine your top competing websites). Search engines will only be one aspect of their online marketing strategy. Primarily this site is being set up to highlight their services, which means targeting some top level keywords (which have plenty of competition). Based on this information, you know that to be #1, you will need to invest both time and money in the project. Paying for directory submissions is a must and so is spending money on purchasing links. Some of these keywords will also take a long and concerted spell of link building to allow for page 1 rankings. In this case, your SEO strategy will also depend on how much freedom you have to spend money and make changes to the website – you may be asked to show results before paying for links (although in my experience paying for directory submissions is usually accepted without hesitation) and making changes to a corporate website is usually a painful experience in dealing with red tape and people afraid of change. All in all, you’ll have to think for yourself here – I can give you the tools and show you how to do each task, but I cannot be there with you at every step of the way or make decisions for you. The good thing is – if you stick to the guidelines mentioned below, you will do just fine.

Think Long Term Search Engine Optimization (or, if you want to be technically correct, Search Marketing) is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme nor is it about getting short-term, temporary results at the risk of getting your website banned by the search engines. Just to make things clear, this is not an ethical concern for me – as far as I am concerned (you might think differently), search engines provide a service, and their guidelines are not ‘the law’, they are just generalized statements on what works best. Those statements are a bit misleading and do not give a complete picture of what it takes to rank for keywords in the search engine result pages (SERPs). However, putting your website at risk by actively pursuing optimization policies that openly violate search engine policies and are detectable by search engines is foolishness. Personally (once again, you are entitled to your opinion) I think there are far better ways to dominate the SERPs without resorting to tricks or anything that will get your website banned from Google or MSN or Yahoo. So that is one aspect of thinking long term – if you are doing SEO for short term gains, in most cases it is not SEO but tricks to take advantages of a search engine’s limitations. Another aspect of long term SEO is your SEO strategy itself. SEO is a process that invariably takes time –

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certain factors used to determine rankings in Google, for example, use time as an element in their calculations. Concepts such as link-aging, the sandbox (or the trustbox, depending on your perspective), quality filters and domain-aging (do not worry, I will explain these concepts in full detail later on in this book) mean that you cannot be #1 overnight – at least not in Google. For the two examples I listed above (Site A and Site B): • Site A would take anywhere between a month and 6 months to get to #1, depending on what you do and how strong the #1 ranked site really is. • For Site B, it would take you 6 to 12 months to get to the top, once again depending on how fast you move and which keywords you are targeting. Bottom line – SEO takes time to be effective, so whatever you are planning, make sure you plan for the long run and consider long term consequences of your actions.

Think For Yourself Quite often I meet people in the SEO industry who blindly follow what a certain ‘guru’ says, or believe everything that Google says to be gospel. But as I told you earlier – there is no one way of doing SEO, and there definitely is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. It is all about what tactic is most effective in taking you to the top of the SERPs, and that is all that you should be really focused on. Blind faith in Google’s idea of SEO, or some guru’s idea of SEO, is usually a bad idea. Listen to all sides of the argument, see the results for yourself and if possible, carry out your own experiments if you have to. One such example involves paid links. Google has explicitly said that paid links for ranking purposes are not acceptable and will be penalized, where as paid links for traffic purposes are fine. This has caused a lot of debates in the SEO industry on whether paid links are right or wrong vis-à-vis Don’t be a slave to Google or what other people tell you about SEO – there is no set pattern on doing SEO and there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ either The most successful SEOs I know of publicly question some of Google’s policies and ‘preaching’ when it comes to Search Marketing. That’s not to say that you should go against Google, but that you should keep an open mind and focus on what works and what is guaranteed to be successful in the long run. Everything else, whether told to you by Google or the SEO gods or me, is irrelevant. Stay on top of the ball as far as developments in the SEO world are concerned; focus on what works, and what your experience tells you works.

Create A System Having a ‘system’ to accomplish goals is a natural progression for anyone that has to do one type of project more than once. Web designers who put together 10-20 sites every year have a system, programmers working on large projects swear by their ‘system’ of doing things, and so on.

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If you do not already, it is time to think of SEO in terms of developing an effective system of activities and processes that will help you bring in targeted traffic to your website from the search engines. A system is only effective if it can help you achieve your targets each time you do a similar project. And as I said earlier, makes sure that continue doing that which is most effective in the long run, not what is easy or cheap to do, or what saves time, or what the search engines tell you to do. Do what works now, and what will work in the future.

Prioritize Your Work Once you have a basic system to do your SEO activities, you will find it much easier to prioritize which task gets done first. In SEO, as in real life, there are some key activities that take less time and effort but have a large impact on search engine rankings. Remember the 80-20 rule (the Pareto principle) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_ principle) ? It works quite well in SEO, thank you very much, and it certainly makes life easier for us SEOs. The most important SEO tasks will take roughly 15-25% of your time, and will yield 70-85% of the benefits associated with search marketing. For example: • Optimizing your blog’s Title tags takes less than 2 minutes, but it has a major impact on how your web pages are ranked in SEs. • Paying for (and submitting) a directory listing in Yahoo takes 5 minutes, but that link is more valuable than submitting to 100 free directories that have been spammed to death. Make it a habit to ask yourself the importance of any SEO task before you do it – it will help you save time as well as refocus you on the more important things in SEO.

Rankings Are NOT Everything! The hard truth about search engine marketing is that sheer traffic (achieved from page 1 or #1 rankings) does little good to you if you have no way to use it. If you have set specific goals for your website, you will also have a clear idea of what audience you are targeting and what exactly they are supposed to do when they arrive at your website. This could be asking for signups, selling them a product or service, getting them to click on ads, getting RSS subscriptions, etc. And if your website is not doing this part of its job properly, those rankings and all that traffic will be wasted. Bottom line – Search Engine Optimization is great when it works well, but you also need to know how to make best use of that traffic.

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Review We have covered a lot of basic ideas here, so it is time for a short recap: What is SEO? • Identify audience and set targets (research) • Do on-page and off-page tasks to increase search engine rankings • Track progress and adjust as necessary SEO is NOT: • A short-term solution • Online advertising or public relations • Free Understand How Search Engines Work To be successful as an SEO, we need to know how search engines work, how they have evolved in the last few years and in which direction they are moving. Customize your SEO Strategy Each project and website is different in scale and targets. A non-profit website has different goals than a site that is geared to earn money from ad clicks. Do your research, and adapt accordingly. Think Long Term Long term planning where SEO is concerned allows you to do things once and then not worry about periodic changes to the search engine algorithms. Search engines are using time as a variable in evaluating several ranking factors, so expect to be in it for the long haul. Think For Yourself Do not blindly follow what other people tell you – there is a LOT of misinformation spread about SEO, and the funny thing is that no one knows for sure what they are talking about. SEO is an art, but more importantly, the only thing you can trust is what WORKS (in the long run). Create a System Having a system to do your SEO will save you a lot of time as well as help you be more effective. Prioritize Your Work Follow the Pareto principle (80-20 rule) and make sure that you do the most important things first.

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Rankings Are NOT Everything Rankings and traffic are not worth much if you cannot convert them to meet your site’s initial targets. I hope that the ideas presented in the last few pages have helped you understand better what SEO is about and why it helps to approach it with a specific mindset. This chapter was just the first part in building that SEO mindset. In the next chapter, I will discuss how search engines work and how you can use that information to streamline your SEO strategies and build a search engine-friendly plan to dominate search engine rankings. And once that is done, we will move on to the actual process of doing SEO on a project, from start to end. Everything we have talked about here – customized approaches, SEO systems, prioritization, long term planning – will show in the processes and strategies that are discussed in this book. But I am getting ahead of myself – first, we must understand how search engines work.

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2 – Understanding Search Engines Search Engine Optimization is the process of driving targeted traffic from search engines to a website. Learning this process is not possible without understanding how search engines work. And when I talk about understanding search engines, I am specifically talking about: • • • •

How search engines index (read) websites How search engines rank websites Why search engines change their ranking algorithms How (and when) search engines update their algorithms

Points 1 and 2 are relatively easy to grasp (even if #2 is the main reason SEO is such a thriving industry). There is plenty of misinformation, but if you have the right sources, practice SEO yourself and learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, you will have a pretty good idea of how search engines rank websites (the next chapter gets stuck into ranking factors in detail). Points 3 and 4 give SEOs a lot of grief, mainly because: • Changes in the ranking algorithms can cause site rankings to change, and there is the possibility of your website losing its high rankings. • Not knowing when search engines update their algorithms (at least until you start seeing significant changes or someone in the forums notices it) means webmasters never know when their rankings could be negatively impacted by a search engine. The unpredictability of search engines (SE) means that if traffic from search engines is your only source of traffic, and your websites are your only source of income, your livelihood hinges on the whims of Google. That is a very scary thought, and is the primary cause for much of the ‘panicking’ you see (or will see) in SEO forums whenever SE updates are discussed. Do not place all your bets on one mode of income. If your traffic is primarily from search engines, diversify and get traffic from forums and other websites, as well as building a regular readership. If your income is primarily from running AdSense ads on your websites, diversify into affiliate marketing, creating your own products, etc. And if all your bets are hinged on your online income, diversify further and think about making money offline as well. Smart money-making principles transcend industries and the offline / online divide. Once again: Do NOT place all your bets on one website, one mode of traffic, one mode of income, or one source of income. Diversify. The second important thing to note is this: If you know what the search engines want, it is easy to plan ahead and shape your SEO campaign as such that each ‘update’ actually benefits your site rankings.

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Think about that for a second – usually, search engine algorithms are a time when webmasters scramble to find out whether their sites have lost their #1 rankings or not. What if you could set up a system that allowed your sites’ search engine rankings to improve every time Google or Yahoo did an algorithm update? That is going to be a recurring theme throughout this book, and that is one of the main targets that I have set out to achieve here. So how do search engines work really?

The Search Engine ‘Index’ While it is important to know how a search engine ‘reads’ websites and stores them in its ‘index’, it is even more important (or more relevant) to know how to get included in it. There is only one ‘serious’ way to get included into search engines, and it is this: Get links from other websites to point to your website. Submitting to search engine inclusion forms, using software that ‘guarantees’ to get your website included in search engines, paying spammers who offer to get your website indexed in 100+ search engines… All of that is a waste of time. Avoid any such schemes like the plague, and steer clear of ‘search engine submission forms’. Why? Because getting indexed by search engines is a piece of cake IF you know how to do it. But how do I get links? There are several ways to easily get links for free pointing to your website (and if you are willing to pay, more power to you) and you can usually have your website (or at least your site’s front page) indexed in Google in 2-4 days of launch. Note: Later on in the book you will find a whole chapter on building links for the site launch phase, so do not worry too much now (or skip ahead to that chapter if you wish). Crawling Frequency Crawling is a term used to describe the behavior of search engine spiders (also known as ‘bots’ (short for robots) which are computer programs written to ‘read’ websites. These spiders use links to go from one website to the other (hence the need to get links to your website). Crawling frequency is a measure of how often a website gets ‘read’ by a search engine. This frequency depends on a number of factors but the two main factors you want to worry about are: • Freshness (how often is the site content updated) • Site importance (measured by the number of links pointing to that website)

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If you get links from a website that is updated daily and has a lot of links pointing to it, you are bound to have the link to your site found quickly and get your website indexed. Example: Performancing.com is a very popular online resource for professional bloggers – it is updated daily and has tens of thousands of links pointing to it. A link from such a website would have the search engine spiders knocking on your website’s proverbial door very soon. Another example: Article directories such as EzineArticles.com are usually updated several times a day (with new articles uploaded every day) and have thousands of links pointing to them as well. Submitting an article to such article directories (if done the right way) will also help you get your website indexed quickly. Recommended Resource: Article Submitter (http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com) We’ve created a free program that will submit your articles to hundreds of popular article directories across the internet. Note only will this get you a quality link pointing to your website from the article directory, but many other websites will likely pick up your article and syndicate it on their website, which will lead to many more links pointing to your website! A paid example: The Yahoo Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/) is the biggest and most popular online directory. Inclusion costs $299/year, and as such it is not a cheap proposition. The benefits, however, are often worth the costs. Inclusion in the Yahoo Directory (a process that takes a week’s time as they review your site) will not only guarantee that your website gets indexed in all search engines, your site rankings should also receive a boost (especially in the Yahoo Search index, which mixes directory results in its search results AND gives more importance to sites included in its directory). These are just a few examples of how you can use high-powered links to get your website indexed quickly. There is one caveat though – the examples I gave above, and other such sources of ‘power links’ are easy to get, but only if you know HOW to get them. I will explain how later, so for now let us look at the next part of the puzzle – search engine results. Recommended Resource: Directory Submitter (http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com) We’ve created another free program that will submit your website to literally thousands of other website directories across the internet. While the Yahoo directory is an excellent, “paid” directory to submit your website to, there are also thousands of completely FREE website directories you can submit to. Doing this submission manually will take you days and days of time, but using out free Directory Submitter software, you can do this much faster. Directory Submission is something that I highly recommend doing at the time I am writing this book. The more directories you can submit your website to, the more one-way links you’ll get pointing to your website, and the higher you will rank.

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The Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) Note: Search engines rank web pages, not websites. This is a basic but crucial distinction, because it says that you can optimize individual pages for different search terms, thus giving your website more points of entry and a greater chance to gain traffic. Each search engine (by the way, we are only considering the top 3 search engines, and even then we will focus mainly on Google – more on this later) ranks and displays search results differently. Knowing how each search engine (Google, Yahoo And MSN) displays search results is important because they give you clues to various entry points to the first page of search results for any of your target terms. Also, understanding the components of the information displayed for each individual search listing will better help you optimize your websites. Most searchers do not go beyond the first page of results. Reason? Searchers either find something they need (from the first 10 results or one of the sites they click through to) or they go back to the search box and change their search query to be more specific. To verify this, think about your own searching patterns – do you delve way deep into the 20th page of search results to find something, or do you click on the first few results, browse a few sites then return to refine your search query? Search habits have evolved into a somewhat iterative process (search, browse, refine your query, repeat – until you find what you are looking for). Because of this, the first page of search engine results is prime real estate (just like the home page of a website is prime real estate when you are considering what goes on it). The more you know about what goes on it (and how it gets there), the better your sites’ chances are for being on that first page.

Note: The best way to understand the following paragraphs of this section is to run a few search queries across all three search engines.

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The SERPs Each search engine shows some common information in their SERPs: • Sponsored ads (above search results or in the right sidebar) • Related searches (to help refine the search query). • Links to internal search / content properties such as: o Google News, Google Finance, Google Groups, Google Images, Google Maps, Google Video o Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Video, Yahoo Directory o Live QnA • At the time of writing, MSN lags some way behind Google and Yahoo in promoting its own content verticals in search results – Yahoo does it heavily, while Google has increased this practice as well Each of these options are excellent ways to enter the top 10 results for your target terms and offer alternative entry points to the first page of search engine rankings. Image Search, for example, can drive plenty of traffic to your websites, so can the News sites. Individual Search Results Each search engine displays a search result pretty much the same way – page title + a brief snippet of description for that page either picked up from the page itself or from that page’s DMOZ listing. (Note: dmoz. org is the largest human edited website directory on the internet) Sometimes, Google and Yahoo also offer additional links to internal sections of a site. Yahoo also lists the directory page where the site is listed (if that site is in the Yahoo directory) as well as referencing sections of the page itself (named anchors). MSN offers the least amount of information, but this should change as the search engine matures. Having links to specific sections of your website will help searchers narrow down their search on your site, making it more likely for them to find the information they are looking for (and if you have done your work right, earning you new site readers / users more easily). Not every website gets such treatment. Having a popular site (lots of backlinks) helps, but what helps even more is having a clear navigational structure on your website / web page, one that is accessible to search engines as well as users. In other words, how you organize your website and where you place your site navigation links is important. Yahoo also offers an option to get more results from a site, while Google offers a ‘similar pages’ search (which displays pages similar to the one you have selected (based mainly on backlinks analysis and site topic).

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Note: Expect search engines to also offer the ability to ‘bookmark’ search results for future review – Google already does something like this with their ‘Note this’ option.

How is all this relevant? If you have a popular website, getting site categories included as site links in search results helps. But if that is not the case, then the main thing you are looking at is the page title and description that comes up as a search result.

As you can see in the image above, there are four main parts of the individual search result. • The page title is taken from the Title tag of that page (or website, in this case). • The site / page description is usually taken from the meta description tag if present (as it is in this case). If not, search engines usually pick up snippets of text containing the search term, or use the Dmoz directory listing description. • Keep the page URL descriptive to make it easier for searchers to quickly assess where they will land. • Site links are ‘rewards’ for good navigation as I mentioned above – not to mention that good navigation in itself is very helpful in getting good rankings to begin with. The ‘big deal’ here is that your page title, your page description and your page url are the first impression a searcher will get of your website in the search engine results. What the searcher will read will determine whether they want to click through to your web page or move on to the next search result. Search marketing is not just about getting the technical aspects right – you also need to know how to write well in order to maximize clicks and fully benefit from your site rankings.

What Google Wants In February 2007, Google was used by 48.1 percent of the US search market – almost double than that of Yahoo (28.1 percent) and more than four times of MSN (10.5 percent) (comScore, February 2007).

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Those numbers are powerful, but what is more telling is that while Google’s market share is on a consistent rise, MSN seems to be falling and Yahoo has not made up any ground on Google either. Note: There is no big secret behind Google’s popularity. Google positioned itself as a ‘pure’ search engine; Yahoo has always been a portal and MSN joined the race too late. The ‘purity’ and focus of Google’s search, combined with their head start (Google provided search results for Yahoo early on) means that Google are simply way ahead, and too hard to catch. What this means for us search marketers is that we have to pay close attention to what Google says, and more importantly, to what Google wants to achieve with its search engine rankings. Ranking for Google is a matter of finding that web page that is considered the most relevant to the search query and is from a website that is considered an authority on the subject and is trusted. Relevance Relevance is measured by the information the search engine can read from a web page. As I mentioned earlier, each web page is a point of entry for your website, and you can (and should) optimize your website so that each web page is targeting a different keyword. There are several factors on a web page that are used to measure relevance, with the Title tag and keyword usage on the page being the two most important factors being used to measure relevance. If a page is about ‘how to lose weight’ and the searcher has entered ‘how to build a boat’, this page is not going to be considered relevant and thus will not be part of results. On the other hand, a page on ‘building your own boat on a budget’ may be considered moderately relevant to the search query and therefore would stand a much better chance of appearing in the SERPs. On-page SEO – changes made to your web pages to improve search engine rankings – is mainly concerned with increasing the relevance of your web pages to their target keywords (you will read more about this in later chapters). Authority Authority is a ‘social’ indicator of how much a particular website or a particular web page is considered THE source on a particular topic. Authority measures expertise, and more importantly, the acknowledgement of that expertise within your industry and outside as well. If you run a golf accessories website and you have many other golfing sites linking to yours, it implies (to Google) that your website is considered a somewhat authoritative source on ‘golf accessories’. And if you have non-golfing sites linking to you as well, this will further enhance your ‘authority’ status, although this is tempered by the fact that the opinion of sites within your niche holds a greater value (because they themselves are considered authorities on the subject). Here is a quick list of the types of links that will convey authority to your website – from least useful to the most: • Site with few backlinks and unrelated to your site’s niche. • Site with many backlinks (some authority) and unrelated to your site’s topic. • Site with few backlinks and closely related to your site’s niche.

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• Site with many backlinks (some authority) and closely related to your site’s niche. Authority links are a key part of the link building process – hunting such links is an art as much as a science, and I will be showing you how in later chapters when we discuss link building. Individual web pages can also have authority on the same lines as websites do - which is why getting links to individual pages of your website (also known as deep linking) is a very important part of the link building process. Trust Trust is a measure of how reliable a website is in providing accurate information. Google uses several factors to measure trust – authority and relevance are two of them and so are links from other ‘trusted’ sites. Another trust-measuring factor is time, and it is this bit that has had SEOs and webmasters going crazy over what is now commonly called as the ‘sandbox’. The ‘sandbox’ refers to a number of filters in Google’s ranking algorithm that prevent a website or web page from ranking highly until it has reached a certain threshold. Does the sandbox really exist? Google says that a set of quality-measuring filters could be mistaken for a sandbox because sometimes their effect can be the same as that of the suggested sandbox effect. SEOs disagree, but here I tend to side with Google – there is no need for Google to intentionally hold back websites, but they do have a clear need to establish a website’s quality, and time-based filters that measure a site’s age, rate of updates, age of authority links, etc are a useful means of measuring that quality. Trust takes time to develop, but there are several strategies (all within Google’s guidelines) that you can just to boost your site’s trust and authority. However, ranking in Google is still a long term game, so expect to have to wait. Depending on your chosen niche and your SEO strategy, it could be anywhere from 6 months to 18 months. All three factors have some measure of overlapping amongst them. Anchor text can be used both to measure relevance and to measure authority, while links from a high ranking, popular website can convey both authority and trust to your website. In the next chapter I will put together a ‘cheat sheet’ of the main ranking factors that apply specifically to Google and also to other search engines. Before we do that though, let’s take a look at the other search engines.

Yahoo, MSN, etc. Google’s dominance has meant that Yahoo and MSN come a distant second and third in importance for SEOs (and Ask doesn’t even feature, getting only 5% of total market share). Here’s an interesting thought for you – many SEOs report that it is easier to get high rankings in Yahoo and MSN than it is in Google. Personally, I think it all depends on your SEO strategy. I have websites that receive traffic exclusively from Google and almost none from Yahoo or MSN. I have other websites that have very high rankings in Yahoo but

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not so good rankings in Google. The only difference I see there is the way I promoted those sites and the link building methods I used. Which is more valuable? Google controls almost 50% (I expect this number to keep climbing and may be much higher when you read this) of all search traffic, so yes, Google definitely more valuable. Note: Which is easier to optimize for? Common consensus in the SEO community is that Google is the toughest search engine to optimize for. I think that’s an unfair statement, mainly because most SEOs are (or have been in the past) pursuing outdating strategies and have paid attention to factors that Google has progressively downgraded over the last 3 or 4 years. The old way of doing things can still get you good rankings in Google, but with those methods you are far more likely to rank highly in Yahoo and MSN than in Google. But the big question is – what ranking factors do these top 3 search engines use, and how can we use them on our sites?

is

Most (if not all) discussions on ranking algorithms in online forums and on blogs are speculation – the SEOs do not share their best secrets that they have gleaned through experience and only the search engines know which algorithms they use and they don’t publish that information.

The second part is answered in the rest of this book. The first part, I have answered below.

Google vs Yahoo vs MSN Ever wanted to know how Yahoo and MSN rank websites as opposed to Google? Here is a quick look: Google Note: Based on the model of academic citation, uses relevance, trust and authority to rank websites and is biased towards informational sites that serve as resources (based on backlinks analysis) within their specific industries. • Is the best search engine at determining whether a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link • Prefers natural link growth over time – a site getting many links quickly that are not editorially earned will most likely get the site penalized • Biased towards informational resources (as opposed to commercial results) • Much more biased towards link-based data than either Yahoo or MSN • Site age matters a lot in establishing trust • Keyword variation is important; heavy keyword densities will trip quality filters and will work against the web page

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• Anchor text variation is important, for the same reason as above • Reciprocal links and site wide links (and especially those link lists in the sidebar (or blogroll) and the site footer) have very little benefits – Google prefers in-text links as they are more likely to indicate editorial citations. • Effective at eliminating duplicate content • Site crawling (and indexing) is determined by a certain threshold of PageRank and link quality • Uses a series of quality filters that simulate a ‘sandbox’ effect for websites – it will normally take your website several months to achieve good rankings in Google, more if it is a competitive niche • Uses a site’s history in search engines as part of its ranking algorithm Google takes time to get top rankings in and its ranking algorithm forces SEOs to adopt new practices that take more than just old-fashioned link building and link-exchange networks (even though those still work). Yahoo Note: Based on the model of academic citation, uses relevance, trust and authority to rank websites and is biased towards informational sites that serve as resources (based on backlinks analysis) within their specific industries. • A Yahoo directory listing can do wonders for your site’s rankings in Yahoo search results • Responds much better to sheer link popularity as compared to Google – thus links from non-related sites and reciprocal links (as well as those blogroll links) still work well in Yahoo • Less biased towards links than Google • Gives much more weight to site metadata (such as page titles and descriptions) than Google (even though Title tags are fairly important in Google as well) • Better than MSN but far away from Google in determining link quality – as a result uses site authority more than link type (editorial, paid, reciprocal, link list, etc) itself • Pushes Yahoo Answers heavily in its search results and is constantly looking at ways to include the social side of ranking into its algorithm • Search results in many competitive industries (or those prone to spam) may be manually edited to minimize spam MSN Note: New to the search engine race, and not very good at it. • Relatively new to the search engine races • Relies heavily on Microsoft’s dominance of the OS market to push MSN

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• Poor at link analysis • To compensate, they place more weight on on-page factors than either Yahoo or Google • ‘Fresh’ links matter a lot – if your site’s backlinks grow consistently, this could help you in MSN • Is quick to index and rank websites • Poor at determining relevance • Favors frequently updated sites

Tracking Search Engine News There are a handful of websites that track search engine news comprehensively, so that the rest of us don’t have to. Here are my 3 main picks for keeping track of search engine news: Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/) – The mega powerhouse of search reporting. Danny Sullivan and Barry Schwartz lead the show with regular contributions by Eric Ward, Gord Hotchkiss, Greg Sterling and Bill Slawski, amongst others. Search Engine Roundtable (http://www.seroundtable.com/) – Barry Schwartz brings you the best topics and discussions from the search world (and especially from forums). Search Engine Journal (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/) – Loren Baker mixes up search reporting with SEO tutorials, including the excellent SEO Clinic, where contributing columnists combine to provide free consulting twice a month. These three should keep you busy and in the loop, as far as SEO is concerned. If you are looking for heavier reading though, I would recommend Bill Slawski’s SEO by the Sea (http://www. seobythesea.com/) for his analysis of different algorithm and rankings patents filed by Google, Yahoo and MSN. It makes for fascinating reading, but I should warn you that this might not be your cup of tea if you’re not interested in being involved professionally in SEO. Up next, we look at the key search engine ranking factors and why they matter (and more importantly, why they will continue to matter in the long run).

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3 – Search Engine Ranking Factors Not all ranking factors are important – some, like PageRank, become important in limited circumstances. Others, like META tags, are there for usability and getting the small details right instead of having a massive impact on your search engine rankings. The goal here is to establish what ranking factors we need to look at in order to dominate all 3 search engines effectively. In this chapter I have included the most important search ranking factors and discussed how each is treated differently by the search engines. In specific chapters later, we will look at more factors and examples on how to optimize for them. It is quite difficult for a website to obtain top rankings on one search engine, let alone 2 or more at the same time. Webmasters often complain that their sites rank well in Yahoo but are no where to be seen in Google, or that they rank well in Google but have no presence in MSN. Developing a strategy that can take on Google, Yahoo and MSN all at once (let’s throw in Ask as well for good measure) is difficult, but not impossible. In the previous chapter you saw how each search engine behaved and ranked websites. In this chapter, I am going to start off by giving you a brief overview on Ask (the 4th most popular search engine) and then we will talk about the key searching engine ranking factors that will help you rank high on all search engines. I will also be talking about the Google Sandbox and PageRank, and why these two are important to understand and how you can benefit from them – yes, once you think about it, there is a definite way to benefit from the ‘Sandbox effect’. Will you automatically top Google, Yahoo and MSN after following this advice to the letter T? No, you will not. However, I can assure you that there are different keys to ranking in all three search engines and based on the principles described in this book, you can do very well in them. Top? Cannot say for sure. Page 1? Very, very possible.

Ask – The Forgotten Search Engine Ask.com has often been praised for its accuracy of results, but a lack of exposure and the market dominance enjoyed by Google and Yahoo means that there just isn’t any space for alternative search engines. However, even if Ask commands 5 percent of the search engine market share, that’s a 5 percent that you CAN capture using good search marketing principles, so why hold back? The main things to remember about Ask are: • Heavily biased towards topical authority and link relevance • Slow to rank and index websites • Closer to Google in its preferences for links over on-page optimization

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Ask gives a lot of weight to on-topic links, so ranking on Ask.com is a good test to determine if your website is getting the right type of links (relevant and authoritative). Their emphasis on clustering topical communities also means that unless your site has several links pointing to it from within your niche, it will not be ranked well (and may not even be properly indexed). You do not have to worry about Ask.com and I probably will not even mention them in the rest of this book. However, keep in mind that checking your site’s rankings on Ask.com is a useful way of judging your site’s topical rank and if that is an area your site needs further strengthening in.

Google Sandbox – Time-Based Quality Indicators Regardless of whether you believe that there actually is a ‘Google Sandbox’ or not, you should keep in mind the fact that Google establishes quality (of your site or web page) using time-based indicators. Now these indicators could be related to the site’s link profile (link age), the site itself (domain age) or maybe some other factors as well. The reality is that no one can pretend to know exactly what factors Google uses or how it uses them. What we do know for sure is that Google uses time-based indicators to establish trust in a website. The best way to take advantage of these is to continue your regular link building practices but get the ‘best’ links as early as possible, and to factor time into your ranking expectations. Whereas you can rank for your target terms in a month or two in MSN and in 2 to 4 months in Yahoo, Google can make you wait for as long as an year and in really competitive niches, more than that. Of course, in very competitive niches you also have aggressive competitors to contend with who probably already have a head start on you. You will hear many theories related to the topic of ‘getting out of the Sandbox’ and they all tend to say the same thing – get lots of relevant, authoritative, trustworthy links, and then wait. If you want to take advantage of these time-based indicators, here are a few simple rules: • Go for quality 4-in-1 links (links that are relevant, authoritative, are from trusted sources and from high PageRank web pages / sites). • Start your website today, and start building those links today too. Every day you spend not working on your link building is another day you are wasting in getting top rankings in Google. • Get your best links – the ones that will deliver the most ‘trust’ – first. How can you benefit from the Google Sandbox? Site age and link age delivers plenty of trust, so old websites with a good link profile tend to have good rankings in Google in face of young websites with more links. If you have an already-established website and have done some link building in the past, chances are that it will already have passed the ‘trust’ test and will be ‘out’ of the Sandbox. Established sites have a clear advantage over new websites and Google’s quality factors perpetuate that advantage.

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The downside is that if your website does not have great link profile and has not passed Google’s quality indicators, you will have to follow the same path as other new websites (although you will still manage to ‘get out’ of the Sandbox quicker).

Google PageRank – Still Important Note: To see your website’s Page Rank, you need to download and install Google’s free Page Rank toolbar. You can do that here: http://toolbar.google.com Today SEOs make a point of saying that PageRank (PR) is irrelevant, but that’s a limited worldview and the reality is that not only a lot of link buying and selling is based on PR and ignores the fact that Google still uses PR in its crawling, indexing and ranking processes. How does PR help you? • A web page needs a certain threshold of PR before it can be crawled – so for your website to be deepcrawled (with Google hitting all your site pages), you need to get some high PR links to your site. *Keep in mind that the Page Rank we see in the toolbar is an outdated Page Rank, but it’s the best indication we have. • Although not always true, PR is usually associated with authority websites. High PR links (relevant and in-context, of course) are a good way to build authority links. • With all other factors being the same, a high PR link is more valuable than a low PR link. • PR is a measure of link popularity as well, and considering how Yahoo and MSN give more weight to sheer link popularity, it is a good indicator of how your website can perform in other search engines. PageRank by itself does not automatically convey high search engine rankings. PR + proper keyword usage does not help either (as it used to once). But PageRank is still an important metric in calculating value of links and plays a (limited) role in ranking search engine results.

On-Page Ranking Factors The following factors are on-page items – different parts of a web page – that affect its rankings. Title Tags Denoted by the