There have been many changes with the Big G and how it shows results so what does it take to get good rankings for your site or page?

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.

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

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

Pay Per Show advertising can be effective and is usually much cheaper than Pay Per Click ads.  These are ads that you purchase for a specified period of time on websites.

In order to determine if it is worth your advertising on a site in this manner is a matter of dermining the value. Getting an ad on the local High School Hockey team is great for your local shop or other online business but for another it may not be.  Where ever you place your ads you need to know who is visiting the site and all sites can provide some information on how many unique visitors they have per day, how many repeat visitors and where they usually track in a site.

Everything is logged on the net in some manner or another. Servers track everything from computer address, to a bot scanning your site, what kind of browser, the operating system, time of day, types of files, everything is tracked which leaves a perfect trail that you can use to spread your ad money where it works best.

PPS ads are probably not going to generate lots of traffic to your site and unles you find that there is going to be a value above the number of people who click to your site the better off you are.  There is also an ongoing debate on paying for ads on sites as it may look like your paying to have a link to your site by the SE’s however if they offer up ads from google and the like at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be a big SEO, SEM, or SERP problem.

Sparky

One of the hot new things is the Social Networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. These are also excellent ways to advertise your site, you just have to be creative in how you go about it.

First is to create graphics and things that people can use as comments or layouts on their page.  In the graphic and other elements you use to make it easy for people to use your site to get comments, you put in things that bring people to your site.

Creating comment Graphics is much easier and it can also show off your product or services.  I run a site called You Sexy Thang which sells sexy clothing for men and women.  Part of the site is obviously pictures of the various products, so I have taken some of the pictures added some text and then saved them in a different location on my site so that they are seperate from the product pictures.  Then create a page with the code that people need and Bingo ready made comments with links to my site.

This creates several things that will benefit your site. First it brings people into your site when people click on the image to look for reply comments and while there maybe buy something.  Second, It also creates inbound links with proper tags that eventually the SE’s will find and thus it adds one-way links to your site which should increase your PR and SERP.

This is a fun and interesting way to promote your site and your products.

Sparky

Once you have completed the various other tasks the next thing to do is to get yourself into the search engines.  First ones are the big ones.

Google, manditory and easy to do.  If you go to google and look around you will find a link that allows you to submit a site to them.  Once that is done eventually google will get around to indexing your site… sooner or later if you search for your domain name you will find it.

Yahoo, manditory and easy to do.  There are two types of submissions you can make to Yahoo.  One is a regular free submission which like google once they get around to you they will index your site.  The other is a annual fee you can pay for inclusion into their directory.  Some swear by paying for inclusion in the directory part of Yahoo as key to getting high ranks with Yahoo.  As I look at it unless your making lots of money off of your website there are other ways to get into yahoo that are more effective than their directory submission.

MSN, manditory and again easy to do.  MSN like google offers a way to present a new website to them which eventually they will get around to indexing and offering up in searches.

You must wait until your site is up and operating before you register with a search engine. No pages that are under construction or empty of content.  You can have blank pages or incomplete pages, just do not link them to the live part of the site until they are ready to go.

There are other directory’s / search engines out there and if you run across one your not in, you should register yourself. In another article I will explain how you can get yourself into almost a thousand directories which will help to increase your Page Rank on the major search egines.

Sparky

Directory Submissions Information click

Links are what takes a person from one page to another. When you clicked to view this page you clicked a link.  The internet is built on links, one page linking to another, one site linking to another, this is why its called the World Wide Web.

Without links there would be no web. Links are what make the web the web.  They are what take you from one site to another searching for what ever it is your finding.  Links are one of the most important parts of the internet and your site.

There are a number of types of links you can get. Some are good, some are not.  Good links are links that are coming into your site.  You only have limited control over who links to you.  There are no laws on the internet that forbid people from linking to you. While some incoming links are better than others and certainly better than none, the right kind of link will bring you a better result.

The Best links: The best kind of link you can get is one from a website that ends in .EDU or .GOV these are, it is believed, to be links that are the best to have.  Part of the reason is that they are next to impossible to obtain due to the nature of the sites.  EDU sites are educational, and usually only have links to sites or pages that they know are of value.  The same is true for a GOV or government sites.  If your able to get a link from any of these kinds of domains take it, it is worth gold to the search engines.

Great Links: If your able to get a link from a news organization you can expect that you will not only see traffic increase but also a boost to your sites ranking.  News sites are generally ever changing and checked very often by the SE’s the more times you show up in links in News sites, especially the big ones, the better your going to rank and the more traffic your going to get.

The Next Best links: The next level of links are links that are one way to your site. The more people linking to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The SE’s keep track of how many links come into your site, the more links coming in the more important they believe your site to be. To a certain degree you can not control what sites link to your site so there is no real disadvantage to having an incoming link from any site.

Links in Directories: I will explain further in another article the value of registering your site with as many directories as you can find out there.  Suffice to to say that it falls into the category above where the more links coming in the better.

Link Exchange: This is where you seek out sites that will trade a link on your site for a link on their site.  This is also a subject I will discuss in another article in greater detail as it is an art form all to itself.

Sparky

Links exchange is a great way to get two things coming to your site. One is customers, the other is the SE’s.  The key to successful link exchange marketing is to keep it tight to the overall theme of your web site.

The main key to links is to trade links with sites that fit the theme of your site. Take a look at my coffee site.  Down near the bottom you will find a links of interest link which takes you to an index of my link categories.  You will notice that the links are with sites that are related to coffee.  These would be things like Kitchen stuff, Dinning Room things, Coffee sites, Gourmet Foods, and other sites that are related in some manner to coffee, the theme of my site.

The other thing is to not link with what we call link farms. Link farms are sites that link with just about anything.  They are easy to spot because before you ask for a link from a site you want to look at their links.  If they are links that are relevant to their site and your link is relevant then you have a fit, pop them a message asking for a mutual link.  See links that do not fit their theme, stay away and look at another site.

The second thing you want to do is have different kinds of links out there. You do not want to have the same link everywhere on the net.  The SE’s notice this and it is partly how they end up ranking your site and what it has to do with.  So using a variety of sample links that sites can put on their site is important.  Even minor word changing is fine.  Move a sentence around, change the alt text for the link, get as many variations as you can.

Next is how do you find links? Well you can do it the old fashioned way and go to a site similar to yours and start looking at the sites that they have in their links of interest area or use a SE.  Follow the rules of are they relevant, are they a link farm, and if they like your site, they will probably link with you.  Many sites have forms you can fill in or an email address specifically for links.  I like to always tell them that I have added them and if they reply with where my link is located at I will make it permanent link.  The formation of a good links letter can mean the difference between getting links and not getting them.

There are other alternatives to hunting up sites yourself. There are companies, such as mine that for a fee will find you links and keep finding them.  One of the important things about links is it is an always going activity. The more links you get coming to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The more links on other sites the more important your site is to the WEB.

Customers going to one website DO look at links and follow them. While no endorsement is implied and even expressly denied, it means something to a browser that if they are good enough to be on this site they must be ok factor is in the mind of the consumers mind when they come to yours.  My coffee site lives off of links with other sites. I track where clicks are coming from and most of them are through links with other sites.

The other way to get links is get a program that will search the web for you. A number of them are out there one that I happen to like is called Zeus .  It can be programed with keywords that are relevant to your site, and even negative or exclusion words to look for.  Basically you tell it what to look for, what to avoid, where to start and it goes out and follows links and ranks sites.  If a site ranks well enough it puts it in a look at file.  The speed it scours the net depends on your connection and a variety of factors but in no time at all you can have lots of incominge and out going links.  Then you just need to look at the sites it finds and if they fit, it will send them your prepared email and even upload the links.  Some will even do a pretty good job of tracking to make sure your links are still out there.

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One of the best things that can happen to your site is incoming links to your site. I have previously discussed the value of links, well there are incoming links and outgoing links.

Outgoing links take people away from your site. Which is not a bad thing but you do want people and the SE’s to come to your site.

Incoming links are links that are coming into your site from another site. These serve several purposes.  The first is that it brings in customers to your site.  Second is it brings the SE’s to your site.

SE’s have what are called spiders. You know World Wide Web, has World Wide Spiders.  These are programs that follow links around the internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… are always looking for new content on the net.  One way they find it is when you submit your site to them.  The other is they find your site through a link on another site.  The more they come to your site the better as each time they come they look for changes from the last time they indexed your site and may add your information to their data center.

There are a number of ways to get incoming links to your site. One is to use the directories that are out there.  Known to lots of people there are other places to find directories of websites that are used like the major SE’s.  Lots of people use these directories to look for things of interest.  They are usually smaller than the Big Three out there, but have a loyal fan base that is growing.  Many of these directories will allow you to suggest your site for free.  This is a perfect way to get more incoming links to your site.

The other method to get inbound links is to do article submission. If you happen to be good at writing and have some information that will be valuable to others you can submit articles to websites in hopes that they publish them and along with the article you have a link to your site.  These are not as easy to obtain as other types of links as you have to be able to write good content for it to be included in a website and you have to submit it to websites that may or may not include it.  I will discuss article writing in another part of this section as it deserves more attention than I can give it here.

There are a number of reasons to get incoming links to your site. First of course is the potential for new customers finding you.  Second is that as the SE’s spider the net they come across these directories and index them and follow their links, which means you have the SE’s coming and spidering your site more often.  It is also counted by the SE’s as another link to your site.  If your up against another site and all things being equal, the one with more inbound links vs outbound links is going to be one that is more likely to be listed above the other.

You will notice a link on the right that says Free Dirctories. That is a listing of nearly 1000 directories that will take your site.  Here again like link trading you want to have a variety of Title’s, and descriptions so that your site is indexed in different ways by the SE spiders.  This can be a long and tedious process, and again a service that I offer is to submit your site to as many of the directories as I can.  I use a piece of software that allows me to put in your information and then use it to submit a variety of worded links to your site from these directories.  The sooner you get yourself listed in these directories the better.  Many of them have a long waiting list so get yourself included as soon as you can.

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Google itself offers up vast amounts of information on how it works, what it looks for and what it dislikes.  While they do not give away all their secrets, they have a patent on how they provide searches, they do lead you in the right directions.

According to Google they consider themselves as “an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.”

But how do they do this? Google says that this is accomplished with three things.  Crawling, Indexing and Serving.

Crawling is what their spider does. It “is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.“  They use large banks of computers around the world to constantly monitor the web.  If the stats from some of the sites I monitor are any indication, google bots are very active little creatures.  I have sites that google visits on average of 40-50 times per day with peaks of 300 visits per day.

As the google bot goes from one site to another it indexes changes, dead links, and new links, the links it follows around and sees where it takes them. It looks at information submitted for google to search by webmasters, like myself, such as sitemaps and other files placed in websites to direct its bot around to better index the site.

Google says that they do not use the influence of it’s ad generating side of the business to affect search results. There is no evidence of that this is true or not so we kind of have to take them for their word for it.  However search results on Google if you haven’t noticed are surrounded by ads so you can pay to get on the first page, if you have enough money.  I will talk about paying for advertising on the net in another article.

Next is the indexing of the pages. Google bots read the pages and catalogs the words it reads on pages and where they are located at in the page.  Quoting from Google 101 “In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”

Next is serving up the information when someone does a search. According to Google they look at what the “querry” is and through the use of over 200 things they determine what it is that they are looking for and offer up search results.  One of the things they do note right away is they look at links coming into your site. “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.”  adding “each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank“.  Thus the importance of links from other sites.

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This is probably one of the more advanced areas of measuring of your sites performance.

Google allows webmasters and owners to track information that google itself is storing about websites it crawls. The information is vast and can be used to help further target your market and make your site perform better in the SE’s for SERP.

Google allows you to submit directly to google sitemaps of your site for their bots to crawl and index. This is probably one of the most useful tools as it assures you that your site is submitted and all the pages that google should crawl get crawled and hopefully indexed.  That is the other very interesting thing is that when it does crawl the sitemap it tells you how many pages are indexed by google.  Hopefully the two are the same but if they are not, then you know there are pages to do some work on.

Google also tells you other things about your site. Like do you have duplicate page titles, content, various other sorts of things that it finds as negative about your site. This is usually why some pages are not properly indexed.  As an example my Coffee-n-Caffeine.com website had some short meta tags.  Not something that was too big a deal on a site with almost 2o0 pages to not have 10 of them properly indexed.  However since I found that and I fixed that now all the pages are indexed by google.

Google also provides information about what people are searching for which they have clicked on your link to go to your site from google. This information is invaluable, it shows what people are looking for that leads them to you, and also what they are not finding you for.  The details that google provides to the webmasters and owners of sites can be of tremendous value in futhering your SERP and also your market share.
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SERP = Search Engine Rank / Position.  This is where you actually show up in the search results for various words or terms used to search for and find your site.   This is something no one has real control over as each SE has its own way of ranking sites when someone searchs.  Search Results are also very fluid.  You can be top position one second and the next be #10 as the fluidity of the net alters your search results.

Sometimes your SERP is due to an error in your site or a change in that of your competitor.  SERP errors can be discovered and fixed if they are within your own site.  If they happen to be because of significant changes in the other sites all competing for the same search there is not much you can do other than make significant changes or additions to your site.

SERP can be affected by all kinds of things.  The first and foremost is the code used to make your site.  If your W3C complaint in the code of your site then your good to go there.  You can look at how the SE’s see your site.  There are a number of ways to do this.  One of the simpelest is to click within your page and do a select all and copy.  Then past that text into a NOTEPAD document and it will show you how the SE’s see your site.  The text and content is read just like what you see there.  If it makes sense to you then it makes sense to the SE’s.  If you site is coded so that your content shows at the top part of the page and reads properly then its time to look at the content and how often it changes.  The SE’s notice how often your site changes.  Everytime something changes, the SE’s take notice.  The addition of materials to your site on a regular basis shows the SE’s that your site is growing and thus becoming more important as a search result which increases your SERP.

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In this section I will present information to you about the basics of design and other elements needed for a website on the internet.

In this section I will explain the need for various types of things in order for your Site to get a high SERP, be Properly SEO’ed.

There are many things that go into the design and operation of a website that can get you higher in the search engines quicker.  There are many dangers to also avoid that can get you banned from the search engines, which unfortunately is very difficult to overcome.  You can plead with the computers at Google all you want, your not likely to get to a real person unless you know someone who works there.

There are many different elements which need to be considered when designing your website.  What your products are, what kinds of customers your looking for, eye candy as I like to call it (curb/store front appeal in bricks and mortar stores), and many other things that you can do that will attract customers to your site, and the search engines as well.

The design of your site not only the look for your customers but the elements it contains for the search engines.  Your marketing to two groups, one your customers are more stable, the other the search engines are not.

It is things like this that I will further discuss in this section of this site.  If you have any questions about the terms I use be sure to check the terms dictionary as I try to explain the various things.  Many times I will take a term and make a link to it in the Terms Dictionary as I did earlier for SEO and SERP.

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The way in which you present your content is also important. Who ever said a picture is worth a thousand words never built a website.  While for a viewer a picture is great, to a SE it means nothing (other than the alt text attached to it).

Do not get me wrong the use of good graphics is important to a website, in the case of hard goods it is imparitive that you show a picture of the product if available.  Customers want to see what they are buying. Unfortunately to a SE a picture only means what the alt text or the name of the file is.  So where you gain with customers you do not with the SE’s.

Words are what count as content, at least now.  In the future content of Video, Audio, and Pictures will be readable in one form or another by the SE’s.  Right now we have not yet achieved that state.  Where it nice if we were it would make building a site with pictures and some text, like a catalog, so much easier.  If the SE could see that it is a Red Dress with shoulder straps sites would be more equally ranked.  Unfortunately they can’t, yet.

One thing the SE’s do understand is that BOLD text is more important. You will notice that I use Bold and Italics on text on various pages.  It accomplishes two things.  First it drags your eye to the content. Second it does the same to the SE.  The SE sees the difference in the code of the site and realizes your trying to point something out.  Using Bold and other format of text tells the reader and the SE things you think they want to know.

So you need to use a combination of text and pictures to make your site look attractive to your customer and also to the SE. Look around the net at various websites.  Find what attracts you about their site and what doesn’t.  Make notes about how things are laid out and you will be able to design your site to the optimum.

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Within every website there are elements that create the page. These elements are what we call HTML code.  HTML code can be made up of many things from Java Script, to cookies, to the tags that are used to make the words appear the way they do, links to pages, pictures or graphics, and other elements some of which are great to use others are better used in certain ways or not at all.

The barest and most basic of all websites is a file that ends in .html (there are other types of file endings but for simplicity we will consider them all the be html files) .  What is contained within these files  is what a serving website sends to your browser when you click a link to a page.  All the information that is presented, links to other pages, graphics that show up and where are all controlled by the Code that is put into these pages. How the code is put into the page determines how the information is shown to the viewer and also crawled by the SE’s.

All web pages contain a variety of things, For details on HTML code you can check with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortiom) for the current standards they set forth. For me to go into all the various tags here would take a whole section.  I will focus on the most necessary elements, and the ones to avoid or use in other ways.

Meta Description is a tag that describes your page to the search engine.  It needs to be unique among the many pages of the site. This can be in a minor form for example my Flavored Coffee pages on my Coffee-n-Caffeine site each have the name of the flavored coffee contained within the description of the Meta Description tag.  This tells the SE’s that this page contains….  Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee as an example.   Description tags should contain at least 100 characters in the form of words that make sense.  Example “Coffee-n-Caffeine offering Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, 100% Gourmet Flavored Coffee, Fuzzy Navel, Blends, Fair Trade Organic, Caffeine, Retail, wholesale“

Meta Keywords – This is where you put in key words not only for your site but also for the page as well.  Most of the SE’s like to see differences in these tags as well. So using the same tag line throughout the site is not a good thing.  It will not hurt you but it is better to have each of them being slightly different.  Key words or phrases are important as combined with the other meta tags it helps the SE’s properly index your site for what you think is important on the site.  Example “Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, Coffee-n-Caffeine, Coffeecaffeine.com, Gourmet Food, Gourmet Coffee, Coffee, Coffee Beans, Coffee Gift, Caffeine, Coffee Information, Organic coffee, Fair Trade coffee, Earth Friendly, Free Coffee, Online Ordering, Kosher Coffee“.  Again long enough and with the changing of the name of the coffee and some other changes throughout the various pages, you can gain an advantage.

The other tags that are good but not as important are the following

doc-class content=“Living Document” this tells the SE’s that this page changes.

meta name=“author” content=“author name” Tells the SE’s who wrote the page… not very important.

meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow” this tells the SE’s that they should follow the links on the page and read the page. Not important if it’s missing, but better to have it there.

meta name=“revisit-after” content=“1 Week” this tells the SE’s how often they should return. Rest assured that even with a 1 week return if you follow the other things I point out in this section you will be indexed more than several times per day.

meta name=“language” content=“EN” This tells the SE’s what your language is so that it knows how to read your site. Believe it or not the SE’s can read most all languages.

meta name=“copyright” content=“Copyright holder” this is basically a tag that says the content is yours and you have the copyright.  Not important but you should use it.

meta name=“rating” content=“kids” -  this one shoud be adjusted depending on what rating the site is.  If it is an adult site then it should be changed it helps the SE’s and also the Parental Filters that are being used.

These tags will help your site get better results from the SE’s.

Sparky

There are a number of things that will limit your sites presence in the search engines. First and foremost is conent that the SE’s can read.  Many can now read PDF Files and some multi media files, others can’t.  Here are a few of the things that they can not read, yet.

Graphics – Graphcs are meaningless except for the file name, and any alt tags that are added to the html code that puts the graphic on the page.  File names are important. A graphic labeled icon1.jpg is not going to be indexed by the SE’s very well.  Now a graphic with a name of Band-Schedule.jpg is going to be read by the SE’s.  Add to that an alt tag in the code that says Click here to see the Bands Current Schedule of upcoming shows, and you have added readable content by the SE’s that help your site.

Java Script – Java script is meaningless and in many cases can halt SE’s dead in their tracks.  If you need to use Java it is best to have it in a separate file and use an include or some other means of bringing the script into the code of the page.

Style Information – many people, and software, put style information in the page.  This is code that tells the browser how to show various things on a page.  This information again is better used in an external file that is called upon by the page in it’s code so that it doesn’t confuse the SE’s

Outdated Code – there are updates made to the code that is used to create websites.  It is important to try to remain as close to W3C Complaint in your code as you can.  No site is perfect, but the better you are the better you show up.  This is dual effective.  First is that the customers will all generally see the page the same way regardless of the kind of browser or computer they are using.  Second is that it shows the SE’s that your using proper code in your site.

Frames - frames are an old way of trying to control where things show up on a page.  While the code is still valid, it isn’t easy for SE’s to see your site properly. It is far superior to use tables and nest them together to get control over the content, and the look will be the same, but the SE’s will read it better.

Those are just a few of the Don’ts that you should avoid in your website design.

Sparky