Nov 30th iRazor Webinar

First thanks to Cody and iRazor for hosting the Nov 30th Webinar.  It was a pleasure presenting to so many people, I hope that I was able to help present some information that you may have found useful.

Nov 30th Webinar Video

In following posts your going to get, as they are created, video clips from the Webinar that was held Nov 30th 2009.  Please check back as new videos are uploaded and made available.

If you have any questions about the information presented please feel free to post something here and I or others will try to get back to you as quick as we can. You can also send an email if you like. If you have a question it is likely that others have questions as well.

I promised to provide a link to a site where you can make XML sitemaps and here it is
http://www.tarrantit.com/GoogleSiteMap/
I would also suggest that at least once a month you create a sitemap even if its the same, and upload it. Google does notice the date a file is refreshed.

Thanks again, look around this site, all the information is free….  I try to use this site as a place to send clients who do not understand the web, internet, and marketing on the net so that they can get an idea of what is involved from website design to advanced SEO tips.    So your probably going to read lots of information you already know, but you I am sure you will also find interesting information that maybe you didn’t so feel free to use the site as resource for information, and a few different services that I offer.
Sparky

PS: If you feel like making a comment with a link for a backlink feel free to do so.  Do try to keep irrelevant links out of your comment or it will be edited.

WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER

In this segment Cody Flanagan introduces himself and also the agenda for the webinar.

Cody Flanagan of iRazor

Introduction to the Webinar

click the image to view the video

In this 2 minute Video Cody explains about Google’s Golden Triangle and how it is so valuable to be in the top ranking positions.

Googles Golden Triangle

Google’s Golden Triangle Explained

Click the image above to view the Video

In this 2 Minute segment Cody introduces his guest John Birrenbach who is going to speak on Google Tools you can use to help you and your site.

Introduction to John Birrenbach

Introducing John Birrenbach

click on the image above to view the video segment

In this segment John Birrenbach explains a number of different tools that Google offers you to use.  From Google Analytics to Webmaster Tools there are many things that Google will allow you to use to find out information.

Google Tools You Can Use

Free Tools From Google You Can Use

click on the image above to view this nearly hour long presentation on how to use Google Tools

In this 1 minute segment Cody Explains information from SEO experts on what they think affects your position in Google.

SEOMoz explained

SEOMoz information

click on the image above to view the video

In this 4 minute segment Cody explains some advanced techniques to using sitemaps.

Advanced Sitmap Techniques

Advanced Sitemap Techniques

Click the above image to view the video on advanced Sitemap Techniques

In this 5 minute segment Cody explains how to use Yahoo Site Explorer to find out valuable information.

How to use Yahoo Site Explorer

How to use Yahoo Site Explorer

click on the above image to view the video about How to Use Yahoo Site Explorer.

In this segment of the webinar Steve Flanagan explains how he uses Squidoo to drive link juice and traffic to his site.

How to Use Squidoo

How to use Squidoo

Click the image above to watch the video on how to use Squidoo

In this 15 minute segment Cody explains not only how he uses Roboforms but also some organizational things he does to keep track of his web properties.

Roboforms and how to better organize your campaigns

Roboforms Automation and Campaign Organization

Click the above image to view the video segment.

In this segment various people ask questions which are answered by Cody Flanagan, John Birrenbach and Steve Flanagan.  This is part one of two parts.

Questions and Answers

Webinar Questions and Answer #1

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In this section more questions and more answers from Cody, John and Steve.

Webinar Questions and Answers #2

Webinar Questions and Answer #2

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In this section we have a couple of final questions and a Wrap Up of the webinar.

Webinar Questions and Wrap Up

Webinar Questions and Wrap Up

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Google has released a beta of a new piece of software that runs with analytics and gives you various alerts.

Essentially this is like Google Alerts which scan the web for what you want to be alerted about, but is confined to your Analytics account.  So when something to which you have assigned an alert to happens google sends you a message.

The Alerts cover all things from if someone visits to your site as the result of a keyword search to other metrics associated with your ads, conversions and other information.   Frankly it is a bit amazing the various things you can associate with an email alert to you.

While it is still in beta, I would suggest that you set up various things that you want to keep track of, like where your getting traffic from, or when a keyword search results in a hit to your site, time on site for visitors is met or declining.. all kinds of alerts can be set up.

As always I am a firm believer in using Google Tools, especially new ones, as it shows your watching the net, your part of the “community” your an “active participant”, your on the “Cutting Edge” … your out there.

Sparky

For those of you that are looking for

high quality links from other sites, ie backlinks,

I have an extensive listing of profile sites

where you can get good links.

As I go along and find a site in one form or another I bookmark it and save it.  You never know when it might be valuable again for another site that needs a link.  Does your site need a list of High PR web 2.0 Social Networking Profile Sites?

Well I have over 800 of them, well over 800 probably closer to 1000 or more and if your interested I am offering a couple of services.

• 1. Sale of the urls to the sites. I will provide you with an HTML file that has links to the various sites that you can then use as you see fit.

• 2. Site submissions to the Sites. I can also have people create profiles for you if you don’t have time.  If you looking to get them done and get them done now, I have people who I have build links for me that know what they are doing and how to make a good profile complete with picture and a better about me than you will find elsewhere.  We make them look natural and can build them at what ever speed you want. I suggest you do not create more than 50 per day per keyterm.

The basic price for just site links to sites that you can put a link in is 25 cents per site with a minimum of 100 ordered at a time ($25 paid via Pay Pal).  I will then personally email you your links for you.

The price for profile submissions is $0.75 per profile with a minimum of 100 ordered at a time ($75.00 USD paid via Pay Pal).  I will get your information and pass it on to one of my AMERICAN workers and have them create your profiles for you and give you a listing with links to your profiles.  Now this is 75 cents per profile. If you want to have links to 4 different sites with 4 different keywords, that is fine this brings the cost down to less than 19 cents per site.  I do not recommend more than 4 sites per profile.

You can hire people in other countries and outsource this.  We outsource it as well, but we outsource it to Americans who are stay at home or unemployed, need the extra income kind of people.  So your not only getting an excellent service, for a very reasonable price, but your also helping someone out.

Number of Links

100 $75.00 200 $150.00 500 $375.00

If your interested in this service please contact me.  sparky@birrenbach.com

Sparky

sparky@birrenbach.com

First I use my own sites to conduct an experiment before utilizing it on another site.  This way if someone is affected it is me first.

Coffee-n-Caffeine website.  This is a gourmet coffee website with lots of age.  Earlier in 2009 I started looking more closely at the site and determined my ranking for various coffee keywords, the traffic for the various high value keywords and my SERP for those terms.  It was not surprising from the amount of traffic and what various server stats were telling me was that I was doing well for specific but not the general terms.

• I began looking at what others were saying about various forms of backlinking strategies that were supposed to work.  I took one and finding that I already ranked FAIR for flavored coffee and finding that I was competitive and offered a wide selection (along with data that said I sold more of that than anything else) I wanted to push myself up.

• I used some of the linking strategies that were the easiest.  Blog comments, profile links, Article submissions to blog sites, Social Bookmarking and saw my position rise.  As a result significantly as are sales.  In a period of unprecidented economic turmoil my traffic is up, sales are up 45% over last year.  Clearly good links from High PR sites either profiles, articles, and social bookmarking has a significant impact on my site.  Will it work for yours?  Depends on how agressive your competition is.  There are ways to find out what your competition is doing but that is another story.

Thomassnosports.com – About Sept 2009 I was visiting a local Arctic Cat dealership doing some computer repairs.  While there I found they actually had a website and were already doing some good business with it.  I said how about if I can increase your SERP to the first page of google for Arctic Cat Parts and Arctic Cat Used ATV as they were not even in the top 100 in google.  As I have known them and I explained what I had done to my coffee site he was interested.  I made him a deal. I put you in the top 10 for Arctic Cat Parts and Arctic Cat Used Atv and you pay me a $200 bonus.  Having nothing to loose and everything to gain he took me up on my offer.  I went back a month ago and reported to him that he was sitting comfortable in postion 35 for each of the terms.  He had to look… there he was.  I was back again in the middle of Nov 2009 and told him he was sitting comfortably in postion #18 and that by christmas I expected to be getting that bonus.

• What I did was basically spin a 2 articles out there, send out some videos, create a few profiles, and use social bookmarking.  In particular I have been using social bookmarking on the site as I wanted to see what it does.  Clearly it has an effect as over the last month that is all that has been done with the site and it rose from 35 to 18 for two terms.

Basic Experiments Results are that I have come to a couple conclusions.  First links, no matter where they come from so long as they are good PR (even low Pr are good as it looks more natural) have an effect. Tossing out Videos, Articles, Creating Profiles on diverse sites, all with links to your site will have an effect of getting you either into the top ten or very close.  Then comes the difficult part.  Finding links that push you into the top of the first page. but that is another experiment.

Now all of this is going to change as Google changes its search methods and that could make things change as to what kinds of links give you better juice.  I am still convinced that a link for a relevant source is much better than one from an unrelated source and has more juice, at the same time it is clear that to some extent google likes links to your site no matter where they some.

Sparky

Everyone is linking to links and linking to their home site. Building a battery of links that are hopefully being picked up by google and giving you juice to your website.

I had a WOW moment. Sites that are listed linking to a home site or page in either Webmaster, Site Explorer, or backlink checking of various means are it would seem to me to be sites that google, yahoo, bing or what ever have decided are important to your site and giving it significant enough juice to show up in the results no matter where you get them.

These sites, pages, should be social bookmarked and given even more juice to them which in tern gives more juice to the home site. Take a look at the following page for a diagram of what I am thinking about.

In the diagram below you will see the home property and how it is linked according to the link discovery devices out there.

Link Juice

Step 1:
This is the home page, and splash pages, they each have articles,  sites, etc…  that Webmaster or Site Explorer have discovered linking to you.

Step 2:
These sites are bookmarked by various users increasing the amount of juice each of these things carry.

In this way you take links that are already giving your site energy and energize them even more so that they become more important and thus what they link to, your home properties, becomes more important.

Think about the juice that could be added to your site by turning something that is linking to you from a PR 1 into PR3 or more?

Sparky

IN a previous post I mentioned how google likes it when you use their tools on your website. Analytics, Webmaster, Google Check out are all great tools that google offers webmaster to use in their sites.

But what about the user? How about Joe Six Pack what are there for him to use, and webmasters/SEO specialists can use to our advantage.

The biggest un-talked about thing is Social Bookmarking.  Not many know about social bookmarking and if you search for other posts here you will find out what I am talking about.  Essentially like Digg, Mixx, etc… Google has it’s own bookmarking service.  You can find out more about how to install it here Google BookMarks. Basically this allows you like other bookmarking services to keep track of some of your favorite places on the net and allow Google to store them for you.

So how does this help out a website?

Well we all know that Google loves to gather data.  It’s essentially one of the greatest data miners that has been invented.  If it is on the web you can be certain that google has most likely scanned it and indexed the information.  This is how they determine what to show in a search result. Person types in what they are looking for, google examines the information it has mined and determines what is the best result.

But how does this help a website? Well what data do you think google takes as more important than other data it might come across?  Do you think that just cause it crawled and indexed your page that makes your page important?  Well look at your PR, look at where you rank for keywords.  Are you number one in search results?  Most likely not.  So your onsite and offsite SEO has not pushed you into even the first page.

I am clearly of the opinion that google likes itself and all the tools you have to use when making your website.  So what makes for a even better source of data for google to use in it’s determining what is a good search result for a user?  Data collected from other signed in Google users.

If anyone out there thinks that the SE that is hell bent on gobbling up all the data it can and is ignoring the data from it’s users (both signed in and not) would be simply foolish.  In fact I would venture to guess and research proves I am right, that google is giving more weight to what it’s users do than anything else.

Now the key is how to feed google information you want to show up well for.  The first thing you can do is go to the Google Bookmark link I gave you and if you do not already have a google account you create one and slowly start to bookmark your favorite sites.  Now the key here is that google has not really told or made widely public it’s bookmarking service.  It’s there, but it is not something like google image search that is right there on the front page of google, you have to look for it to find it.  So a great deal of care must be given when you start using the google bookmark service. You do not want to have too many bookmarks made of sites, at least at first, you certainly do not want to rush out there and bookmark your site as many times as you can yet.

The real key is making what your doing look natural. Would it be natural for a user to go out and just bookmark one site?  Would it be natural for a user to bookmark a hundred pages or sites in an evening? What would look natural, especially for a tool that is not widely promoted? Something slow and easy, building gradually over time.  Daily bookmarking of a favorite site would be fine, so long as it is not the same one over and over and over again.  Build a Bookmark profile that has all kinds of things in it the more the merrier, and along with all those other bookmarks you bookmark your favorite sites.

There is a second thing you can do to increase google paying attention to your bookmarks. Do a search first.  Search for the Keywords that your thinking your site should rank for.  Now look through the listings until you find your site.  Click on the link and go to the site.  Browse around the site, especially if the site uses analytics.  This makes it look like you searched for Flavored Coffee as an example and you found Coffee-n-Caffeine you clicked the search link, bingo a vote for a search link is in itself valueable to a degree, then you browsed around the site and bookmarked a couple of pages in the site as you traveled around.

What is this telling google? What this tells google is you were looking for flavored coffee you searched your found a site you liked and you bookmarked it.   3 points that google can look at and say, this must be the right kind of site for that kind of search. One you searched for a term and clicked on a site.  Two you traveled around the site, bookmarking things you like or want google to think you like.  Three Google analytics confirms that you went around the site.  All of these point to the fact that you as a user found the search result to be RELEVANT and if you found it relevant, enough so that you traveled to the site, moved around, bookmarked a few things and then moved on.  Is this a valuable source of data for Google to include in its search results?  In my mind yes VERY powerful.  You have just told the largest most used search engine YOU LIKE THIS STUFF.

So you give the data miner what they want… the gold.  Was this site relevant to the search they did?  Yea cause they clicked on it and traveled around the site.   Was the site so outstandingly relevant that you bookmarked various pages or the home page so you can remember where it is, obviously cause that is what you did.   Is that information then more relevant for other users? DAMN RIGHT IT IS.  The best metric google can use is what users like and don’t like.

WARNING THIS CAN BE DANGEROUS: There now as I say you have to be careful with this cause google can hurt you and hurt you bad if you do things the wrong way and do not make them look natural.  That is the key to all OFF SITE SEO is to do it naturally.  The more natural it looks the less likely google is to say wait a second something is not right here.

Happy Googleing

Sparky

Google is constantly making new tools available to not only the webmaster, but also to the user. In this posting I will focus on the tools to the webmaster, in another i will cover the user.

Among the tools for websites are:

- Webmaster tools – while these do not give hard core information they do provide an insight to a number of aspects to your site.  Key words, Links google has determined are important to your site, and to a lesser trusted degree the number of backlinks and the anchor text associate with them.  The last I consider to be more important.  While webmaster will never give you a look at all your backlinks it is certainly going to give you the ones google considers the most authority links.

- Google analytics – This is a way to measure the metrics to your site.  It will tell you how people are finding you from links from other sites to key words that people are using to find your sites content.  It also shows Google that your willing to share information about the traffic to you site and how people view your site.  Powerful data your turning over to a search engine and it will IMHO pay attention.

- Google Adsense and Adwords – while I do not recommend adwords campaigns for searches, as you can go broke real fast.  Campaigns on the Adsense content network will give you some impressions and also backlinks from sites that are content related. Adsense and allowing Adwords to appear on your site indicate a couple things.  First to google that you serious about making money, and you will make some, the second and more important is that it shows your customers that you KNOW your the BEST cause your not worried about the “competitors” and show that you know your product is best.  Think about the effect on customers if you walked into a store and there were ads for competitors?  What would you think?  You would be astounded right?

- Google Search – this allows people from your website to either search your site or to search google. Again you will make some revenue from it but more important like Adwords and Adsense and customers that your not afraid and your serious about making money.

- Google Alerts – these allow you to set up alerts for keywords and monitor activity on the net based on these keyword alerts.  While these are really only valuable if your watching your competitors again the more of googles tools you use the more I am convinced google will like you.

- Google Base or Merchant Center – these are great tools to show google your serious about your site.  Even submitting a small feed, updating it regularly shows google you want search results and your willing to go that extra mile to get them even if it means creating an XML file to submit to them.

- Google Docs – this is one you have to be careful with.  First cause your making possibly sensitive company data available for google to index and let loose in search results.  On the other hand, stuff you want google to index, along with links to your site, then this is a perfect tool to share more data about your site to google.

- Local Business Center – in my mind this is again something very powerful to google.  Not many people take advantage of it, but for certain keywords it again shows google your willing to use their tools to help customers to find your site.

- Gmail – this can be very powerful if you use it to send out emails to your mailing list.  Google already admits that it is scanning emails for links, the more links or times it sees your site being sent the more likely your going to get better results.

There are many more google tools that you can use and I will explain them in future posts as we delve into how the master data miner in the world is using that data to help sites rank better.

Sparky

What works and what doesn’t work in getting inbound links that make a difference? There is a lot of discussion about this in SEO circles on what is the best methods to use.

For a long time, and some still swear by it, that it was send out comments to blogs with links back to your site.  This works  remarkably well, however there is a drawback to degradation.  You eventually loose your links so unless your always making hundreds of them a day eventually your fighting a loosing battle.

The next big thing was to get into the social networks.  Many of them allow you to create links or put things in your about me that contains a link back to your site.  Theory being google crawls the profile and sees the link.  There is lots of evidence that this works remarkably well.  I can stand as proof that links like this do work.  I pulled my coffee site up using a number of links like this.

Video submissions is another sought after source of links.  Usually when you post a video you get to put up a an about this video where you can put links or you create a profile and get links.  I find this to still be remarkably effective in getting links.

You can create articles and with spinning services or your own hard work you can send them out to the various Web 2.0 sites that allow you to post blogs and articles like Ezines and the like.  There seems to be little being followed in this area unless your article gets posted to one of the big sites.  There is value in that no doubt the blogs are being indexed (and hopefully with the caffeine update to google more so) that this is worthy of doing.

What seems to be the next step or the next big thing that the Big G is gonna pay attention to? There is one thing that I have noticed a very real trend in and that is Social Bookmarking.  Social bookmarking is where you set up an account with one of the hundreds of services out there.  It allows you to create a list of links to sites you like and even leave comments so that when your not at your computer you can access them from someplace else.  Remarkably stupid concept yet I am finding that it is much more powerful than I first thought.

I say that I think it is much more powerful is that I have been researching this since before the announcement about Caffeine and the buzz about what google is going to be watched to index faster.  I looked at Alexa for my coffee site.  I looked at Site Explorer for my coffee site, I looked at google webmaster tools for my coffee site.  I started to look at what each was saying I had in the way of backlinks.  Understanding that each is not telling me everything but each is giving me a piece of the picture of what they think means something to them.  I quickly began to notice a recurring theme in all of them.  Backlinks from Mixx (a social bookmark site), links from Digg, Links from all kinds of places I had been bookmarking in the past couple of months with friends and software.

Thinking about these bits of information and thinking how google might think something is important and currently hot, and of interest by a large number of people I thought where better to gather that data than from sites that are providing that service?  The Social Bookmarking network sites.

These sites are ever changing, people are constantly adding new sites, bookmarking sites for friends, bookmarking what THEY THINK is important and interesting enough to want to pass around or keep track of.  Well what is important to users of the internet is important to google to determine real time, relevant search results.

I think given what I have heard about the upcoming Caffeine update to Google, what I am seeing with regard to my own sites and their links, rank and position in search results I can say that parts of Caffeine are being employed now and that part of the update is to look more and more at these kinds of sites for relevant information.

Sparky

Everyone is abuzz in the SEO world about the forth coming update to the search formula Google uses to show results called Caffeine.  The question on everyones lips is “What is gonna happen to my rank and position in the search results?”

It’s already clear to me that parts of the update are already being put out there by Google.  They do not want a repeat of the much Famed Florida update to search results.  So little by little Caffeine will be tossed in as incremental updates to the search formula.

But what is going to count to google to produce search results that are relevant to the user? Google has already indicated that it is going to try to go with more real time relevant results.  OK, what does that mean?  Google is going to look to see what is most active on the net for various terms, Google says it wants to crawl and index more of the net more frequently.  OK, so their bots are gonna be more active and looking for information from where?  Google indicates it is going to be watching the social networking items out there.  Things like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and other social networking tools.  So what does this mean to the average retailer of a product or service who is ranking for a search term? Not much in my mind.  Unless your position changes regularly because one of your terms happens to make it into the news or gets tweeted about for some reason.  For a site like say my Gourmet Coffee site where my search terms are coffee related I do not think that Caffeine is going to make much of a day by day lasting impression.  However at moments when other coffee companies make a major move and happen to get tweeted alot it could change results temporarily.

My thoughts are that for most peoples positions you may see some minor shifts, either up or down depending on the changes made to the search results.  I do not think your suddenly going to find yourself rocket to the top or drop off google if your already ranking well for terms and getting traffic through those terms.

Sparky

You can dominate the results in Google for certain search terms.  Yea you can.  I currently hold links to 5 of the top ten sites listed in google for gourmet coffee blog and flavored coffee blog.

Not all of these results are direct links to my site, many are through social bookmarking sites that my site has been submitted to, article sites that are indexed by google.  None the less, if you search google for gourmet coffee blog, your going to find links to my sites coffee blog one way or another for half the top 10 results.

This is called dominating the top in google.  When you or your other properties are effectively bumping your competition out of the top ten so that you dominate google for a search term.

Sparky