SEO and More

Google is still the Big Mama of search according to the data gathered for search in 2005. Some results below:

Search remains a major source of visits to retail websites during the holiday season, with search engines and directories contributing 17.9 percent of all visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Google led in search engine referrals, having provided 10.8 percent of all visits to online retailers. Yahoo Search and MSN Search accounted for 4.1 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively. Consumers continue to manually search and compare across several online retailers. Search engines and comparison shopping sites should consider this manual search behavior as proof of demand for better shopping and comparison search. (Source: MarketingVOX)

The top three search engines - Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search - accounted for 93.5 percent of U.S. Internet searches across major engines in July 2005. Amidst that triumvirate’s consolidation of search power still lies Google, which claimed 59.2 percent of searches across all major engines in the same month, a 14 percent increase in share versus a year-ago. Yahoo! Search and MSN search respectively captured 28.8 percent and 5.5 percent share of searches in July 2005. So, despite MSN’s vow to own search, and major advancements by Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, Google is still the dominant consumer search engine by far. (Source: Hitwise)

Remember how I tom-tommed the fact that we got our new domain from PR0 to a very healthy PR5 in under two months? Actually it was less than two months because we didn’t get started on the linking till a month after we bought it. But never mind that.

The fact is that we used very sound techniques to make that happen. And it was no fluke. We can keep doing it again and again and again… for all the clients who entrust their SEO to us.

Among the most effective techniques that helped us build QUALITY links to our website was the use of press releases. In fact, using an optimized press release is such a powerful method of building links that I now recommend it to all our clients.

Just a single press release helped us build links not only from high-PR press release sites, but also from competitor sites where our news was syndicated.

Competitor sites? How did we do that?

Well here’s the secret (if you want to call it that). One of the best sites to submit your press release is on PRweb. Using the $80 option, you can get your release syndicated through Yahoo! News so that it gets picked up and syndicated on a lot of other sites related to your theme or topic.

Result: You can get up to hundreds of theme-relevant links pointing back to your site in just a few hours after your press release has been syndicated. Many of these sites could be your competitors.

Imagine having your competitors working to build links to you. What more effective link-building tactic could there possibly be?!

Of course, once your link on Yahoo! News vanishes, your link popularity (and PageRank) could drop. But that didn’t happen to us, because we always build redundancy into our link campaigns. So we simultaneously carry out article marketing and directory submissions to build links.

Some marketers are touting press releases as the new “blog and ping” alternative to getting indexed? I wouldn’t go so far as to call them that. But if you want to build quality links, create publicity, and boost your reach and influence, press releases may be just the tool your business needs.

In an article title SEO For The New Google, Dave Davies writes about the latest 3-part Google update, nicknamed Jagger, that has essentially changed many of the rules and have thrown the SEO community for a loop. The key areas, he notes, that have been affected with this update are:

The History Of Your Web Pages

The longer your site or page has been online the better your chances of it ranking well. He recommends that in the beginning of a promotion you should optimize for less competitive secondary phrases that contain the primary phrase rather than an intensely competitive phrase. Excellent advice, we say!

The Way Backlinks Are Counted

- The sandbox for links means that new links will take longer to show an effect on your rankings

- Because of Latent Semantic Indexing, links to your site do not have to be from pages that match the exact keyword of your page, but can be from related industries

- Natural links have gained weight over unnatural links. Links that are contained within content areas of a page will be weighted more strongly.

- Avoid redundant anchor text so your link building efforts look more natural.

Site Content & Structure

- Keyword density is no longer important (no big surprise here). Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.

- Google no longer ranks pages but the entire site, opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page.

The article concludes with the recommendations here.

- Use clean tactics.

- Don’t spam. Google is better able to detect it, so its becoming less effective.

- Dedicate yourself to building a site with a lot of useful, relevant information and solid, natural links.

In other words, in the long term, it pays to play by the rules than break them.

Google’s duplicate content filter has been the target of much discussion on search engine forums. Recently search engine hackers Googlewashed Matt Cutts’ blog, to prove a point. Those guys sure do some interesting stuff.

A while ago, I wrote an article on how to benefit from article marketing by using unique content, which I describe in detail in my SEO manual.

I rewrote the article to reflect the concerns of webmasters and article marketers today. Feel free to reprint it on your blog, with the resource box intact.

_______________________________________________

Article Marketing Tips: How To Beat Google’s Duplicate Content Filter

Copyright 2005 Priya Shah

If you have any interest in getting high search engine rankings for your website (and who doesn’t) you’ve probably been sold the idea that writing and publishing your own articles will do it for you.

Here’s why that’s not entirely true.

Imagine the following scenario…

You write an article around a keyword or keyphrase you want to rank well for.

You submit that article to all the article submission sites and directories and ezines you can find.

Your article gets published in hundreds of places.

You now have hundreds of links pointing back to your main site…

But your own site never shows up in the top ten results for that particular keyword or keyphrase.

Instead you find that there are lots of other sites carrying your article that rank better than yours.

You’ve completely missed out on an excellent opportunity to get high rankings for your keyword or keyphrase.

Even worse… you just handed your precious keyword-rich content on a platter to possible competitors who happened to publish your article on their website, and may have lost some of your most targeted visitors and sales to them.

So where did you go wrong?

Your mistake lay in using your article for entirely the wrong purpose. You failed to use the power of article marketing to give your site an unbeatable advantage over others.

Here’s how to use your articles the right way to boost your search engine rankings.

1. Publish Unique Content On Your Website

When you make an article available for reprint, the article, by virtue of it being published on hundreds of other sites, now no longer qualifies as unique (the operative word here) content.

Google’s duplicate content filter will make the more authoritative sites that publish your article rank higher than yours for the keywords your article is optimized for.

Instead of making your article the main course, use it as an appetizer to direct search engines and readers to a unique, optimized report or white paper on your website, and you’ll see dramatically different results.

2. Use Your Article As Spider Bait

Think of your articles as simply the conduit that leads search engines to your website.

Publishing your articles all over the web is like leaving scraps for a puppy (a.k.a. the search engines) that follows them all the way back to the kennel (a.k.a. your website) where it can feast on the main course - your unique content.

3. Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text In Your Resource Box

Use your primary keywords or keyphrases in the anchor text of the article resource box that contains a link pointing back to your unique content.

This will create hundreds of keyword-rich links pointing back to the well-optimized report on your website, and boost your rankings for the keywords of your choice.

Follow the steps above and you can use your content the right way to beat Google’s duplicate content filter.

_______________________________________________

Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More and writes an online marketing blog. Request the whitepaper Boost Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS

This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.
_______________________________________________

The forums are buzzing with the news that Google has filed for an organic search patent, Personalization of placed content ordering in search results , to serve organic search results based on user profiles. The patent deals with profiling Google users based on their search history in order to personalize Google ads with behavioral targeting

According to the Search Engine Journal, Google has also applied for a similar behavioral targeting patent for its advertising network, but this seems to be a first from Google with plans to integrate user profiling into natural search ranking.

Such profiles are created by Google and gathered from previous queries, web navigation behavior via tracked links and possibly sites visited which serve Google ads, computers with Google Applications installed such as Desktop Search, Google Wi-fi Connection or Sidebar, and personal information which Google identifies which may be “implicitly or explicitly provided by the user.”

The Behavioural Targeting Patent is ‘ Determining ad targeting information and/or ad creative information using past search queries‘ which was authored mainly by Sumit Agarwal. The patent abstract describes this patent as follows : Ad information, such as ad targeting keywords and/or ad creative content for example, may be determined using aggregated selected document-to-query information associations.

For example, popular terms and/or phrases also associated with a selected document may be used as ad targeting keywords and/or ad creative content for an ad having the document as a landing page. Query information may be tracked on a per document level, a per domain level, etc. The determined ad information may be used to automatically populate an ad record, or may be provided to an advertiser as suggested or recommended ad information.

Google is also optimizing ad sales, creatives and landing pages for its AdWords and AdSense programs to assist advertisers in launching site targeted campaigns, help publishers sell those advertising spaces, and even optimize the advertising creatives and landing pages for the advertiser, in other words, its becoming a one stop advertising shop and network, cutting out the graphic artists, copywriters, landing page designers, and keyword researchers out of the equation with their automated offerings.

This thread on WebProWorld discusses Google’s ongoing Jagger Update. Some webmasters have noted that their traffic from Yahoo jumped during the update and wonder if the public dislikes Jagger as much as SEOs.

Once people start switching their default home page to Yahoo, look out. Could Jagger be the dagger in Google’s back?

I’m not very sure users will switch loyalty that easily, though. Although traffic from Yahoo + MSN together can exceed that from Google, a good Google ranking can still be a huge boost to your bottomline, especially with the holiday season coming up.

The traffic stats for one of my most successful niche sites (online since August 2002) looks like this. Google has been the most significant source of traffic to this site and I don’t think that’s going to change significantly anytime soon, Jagger or no Jagger.

Here’s a nice blog post with some more data and feedback on whether Google, Yahoo or MSN send more traffic.

Bob Bly (who didn’t believe in blogging earlier) now states that he doesn’t believe in SEO Copywriting.

I agree with him to a point. I don’t believe you need to compromise good copy for good rankings. Copy must always be written for the visitor. Besides keywords in your page are only ONE aspect of copy. There are many top ranking pages that have very few keywords they are targeting in their page copy.

Inbound links are often a more important ranking factor than copy. You have to use both optimally to get the best results. There are many ways (usually involving the use of appropriate HTML elements) of making search engines give your primary keywords more weight when they occur in your page copy.

To write good copy for the search engines, you need to think like both - a copywriter and a SEO.

Via Phil Dunn

Content is the staple diet of SEO copywriters. As a publisher, I’ve often turned to article directories for content for my many websites. After all there are only so many topics I can pretend to be an expert on, right?

One of my favourite article directories (for the quality of their articles and writers) is EzineArticles, run by Chris Knight. Last month they exceeded over 1 million unique visitors! I wonder what Chris’s Adsense check looks like.

I can personally vouch for the fact that expert authors who submit their articles to EzineArticles receive massive spikes in traffic to their website as their articles are picked up by niche ezine publishers looking for quality original content.

It helps that Chris also has some very strict guidelines for reprinting articles and accepting original content. In fact his editorial guidelines are first-rate and if you’re planning to write and submit articles, I recommend that you print them out and refer to them all the time.

A while ago, Chris stirred up a hornet’s nest by declaring his lack of confidence in ghostwritten articles and stating:

It’s not that I’m against the concept of ghostwriting at all, but that most authors who hire ghostwriters don’t quality control their people and they end up sending in crap that we then have to sift through to reject.

I’m thinking that we should start to label authors with the following grades:

A) Original written material
B) Ghostwritten material (this author may be fake)
C) Ghostwritten material with some original words.

How in the world can a publisher come to our site to find articles that were really written by the authors who say they wrote them?

As a Platinum Author on EzineArticles, and as one whose articles have been ripped off once too often by shoddy ghostwriters, I am completely in support of Chris’s stand. I always write my own articles, give credit where due and follow copyright guidelines when reproducing content.

But as an SEO copywriter, I have to use my client’s content, in other words, play the role of a ghost writer, to help them get better search engine rankings. So how do I manage to juggle those roles?

Actually its not that difficult. For one, I don’t actually write the articles for my client. I only optimize their copy, edit and rewrite the content they provide into articles for syndication. One of the clauses in our client agreement is that they have sole copyright over all the content so that no copyright issues arise once we’ve syndicated it.

But if we do get ghostwriters to write articles for our clients, we plan to check every piece of copy for plagiarism. Copyright violations can cause you to lose your author rights and business reputation. In our opinion, shoddy ghostwriters are just not worth the risk.

The buzz on Google’s latest algo update (nicknamed Jagger) has crashed the WebmasterWorld Forums, but the discussion continues here. Plenty of complaints on the new update on the Search Engine World Forums.

Google engineer, Matt Cutts, offers tips on his blog on how to weather the Jagger Update. Matt also confirms that the new Google Jagger Update will show new PageRanks (LarryPageRanks) for some sites and the new PageRank update is accessible via some IPs.

Jim Boykin discusses how to deal with the paranoia that erupts with algorithm updates. So far the update’s been good for all our sites. Probably cause we don’t chase algos anyway.

Speaking of spam, Google’s Blogger and Blogspot blog hosting service were also targeted yesterday for attack by software that creates thousands of spam-blogs (or splogs). Read more about it in Blog Wars II: Attack Of The Splogs.

In other news, “Do No Evil” is proving very profitable for the Google as their rapidly rising profits soared to new heights in the third quarter as its internet-leading search engine churned out a sevenfold earnings increase that blew past analyst expectations. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, attributed much of the earnings blowout due to “Product Improvements“.

Google has also fallen in line with the concern voiced by Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam’s concerns over possible misuse of Google Earth’s high resolution images of sensitive locations by terrorists. Google has offered to hold discussions with the Government on the issue, though interestingly, making no such offer to Thailand, which echoed the same concerns.

In other irrelevant news, just spotted this on the SearchEngineWorld forum: A new portal for India (so what’s new, already?) called Google4India. It looks no different from the hundreds of other Indian portals and the disclaimer at the bottom of the page says: * Google4india is not in anyway associated with Google Inc. This site is developed for the love we have on Google. Whatever!

The proof of the pudding… is in seeing that our methods work.

The SEO and More site went live just after the 25th of August, 2005, and in less than two months, we already have a Pagerank of 5.

You know how much webmasters struggle (for years sometimes) to get a good Google PageRank, so I’ll bet you’re wondering what methods we used to achieve this. Why, the same ones we use and recommend to our clients.

1. Article marketing
2. Press releases
3. Blog and RSS feeds
4. Directory submissions

No black-hat stuff, reciprocal linking, link purchases or anything that could even remotely get us banned. You can see why we’re smiling so much…