Even though there have been significant changes in how google presents search results there really hasn’t been a huge change in what google uses to put you on the top of the results.

Google has certainly moved to favoring local business in it’s search results. This alone has made it easier to get better rankings for sites whose primary purpose is to promote a local business.  This means that if you search for Gourmet Coffee Shops your going to find results that are first local and second ranking well with google.  It appears that the further you are from the location of the business the lower the page is going to rank.  This is not to say that your not going to rank well in other data centers it is just going to be easier to get the local results.

So how do you get ranked well in Google? The basic strategy is still the same.  Google looks at each site as a popularity contest and uses a variety of things to determine how popular your site is compared to others.  One of this is sure volume of backlinks and key words that are linked to your site.  Other factors are the content of your site, quality of the content, the frequency of change in your content.  The more and better content you have on your site the more your going to rank, the more people that visit your site the better your going to rank, the more of googles tools you use the better your going to rank.

One still tried and true method of getting links is pumping out articles to the many article sites that are out there.  This can be time consuming writing and posting articles but the work is worth the effort.  The better your content in your articles the more likely your content will be approved and posted with of course a link or two leading to your site.

Using Social Network sites is a great way to get links.  Setting up a Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and other like accounts and putting up links to your site is another way to not only get links coming in but also a stream of traffic.

So while google has changed many things in how it presents search results, the way to get to the top of those results is still the same.. CONTENT, LINKS, CONTENT, LINKS… master them and you will see your results improve.

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

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

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

What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks indicates the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a particular keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When there is a banklink to your site come from other sites, and those sites have information that is related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The relevant the inbound link, the greater their quality.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher. Thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques such as automatically generated pages whose purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In a link exchange, one website places a link on their website that points to another website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted.  This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. You could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We should begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being as careful as we can with which websites we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are relevant to others, sometimes they are not.  Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way. Too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your link exchange or backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks. There are tools to help you keep track of your backlinks and make links with other sites.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link’s anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like “click here” which probably won’t relate in any way to your website, using the words “Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten” is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink.  This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to SEO, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.

Sparky