Super Search Engine Marketing

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