The most important search engines for SEO

Getting Started With SEO

The What, How, And Why Of Keyword Densities

How to Build Massive Keyword Lists

The perfect balance between on-site and off-site optimization

Arachnophilia, the Joy of Playing with Spiders

Google's Patent Implications

SEO Client Expectations

Google ranking secrets revealed - part 5

Google ranking secrets revealed - part 4

Google ranking secrets revealed Part 1, 2 and 3

Search Algorithms R&D Session from SES NYC 2005

The most important search engines for SEO

Market research company Nielsen//NetRatings has recently released search growth numbers for the top five search engines.

AOL and Ask Jeeves rose 15 and 16 percent, respectively, in the number of searches conducted, while Google and Yahoo! maintained single digit growth:

Search growth Q1/2005 - Q2/2005:

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings Mega View Search July 2005 - Graph by Axandra.com

AOL and Ask Jeeves grew three times as fast as the big three search engines.

Top Search Engines by Share of Searches, June 2005 (U.S., Home & Work):

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings Mega View Search July 2005 - Graph by Axandra.com

Google is first with 47 percent of all searches conducted online, Yahoo! at 22 percent and MSN at 12 percent. AOL Search held five percent of all searches, and for the first time, My Way Search made its way into the top five rankings with two percent of all searches.

My Way is a banner-free web site that allows you to choose Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Looksmart as the provider of the search results.

What does this mean to your web site?

It's no surprise that Google still is the most important search engine and that it's important to be listed there.

However, you're missing a lot of qualified traffic if you focus only on Google. Yahoo and MSN Search also can bring you a lot of targeted visitors. Optimize some of your pages for Google, others for Yahoo and others for MSN Search to make sure that you're not too dependent on a single search engine.

You don't have to optimize your web site for MyWay and AOL because these search sites get their results from the other big search engines.

Copyright Axandra.com - Web site promotion software tools   -  Published Sep. 2005

Getting Started With SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is big business these days.  If your company has a website, chances are good that you would like people to be able to find it when they're searching at Google or Yahoo for the products and/or services you sell.  Many companies that have had websites for years had never thought about SEO before -- they didn't have to.  Suddenly they are waking up to find that their competitors are gaining on them in the search results, and they don't like it!

Due to its rising importance, there's an increased demand for SEO companies and SEO consultants. However, there are also numerous people calling themselves SEOs who have just learned it very recently.  It's true that SEO is not rocket science, and I firmly contend that it's very much a common-sense type of work.  That doesn't mean that anyone can or should read a few SEO articles and then decide they can start charging people for their services.

Yet many are doing just that.

One of the easiest things to learn in this biz and probably many others is the right things to say to a potential client that will convince them that you know what you're talking about and can get the job done.  The problem is that you can convince others of this before it's actually true!  There are enough freely available articles and newsletters written about SEO which can teach a newbie all the right buzzwords.  If they are even the slightest bit good at sales and marketing, we now have a dangerous combination -- someone who sounds credible and believable, but who cannot actually do what they say they can do.

This sneaky tactic isn't limited to one-person SEO consulting firms either.  In fact, it may be even more prevalent with larger SEO firms who have huge sales teams in place.  The sales force doesn't know anything about actually doing SEO or how to gain high rankings, increased search traffic, and more sales.  But they do know exactly what to say to a potential client to convince them that their company can get them all those things.  In fact, many large SEO companies have more people selling SEO services than actually performing them!

The hardest part of SEO is not selling it; it pretty much sells itself.  The hardest part is doing it.

So how can someone new to SEO get started in the business in a way that will benefit themselves as well as the sites they optimize?

Aside from reading all the reputable information you can get your hands on with regards to SEO, you may want to attend a search marketing conference or one of our High Rankings search marketing seminars.  (These are held approximately twice a year.)

After you have some basic education, instead of trying to set up shop on your own, why not seek out established SEO companies, marketing companies, ad agencies, and Web design firms who are already doing some SEO, and see if they need an extra pair of hands?  (You may even find these companies at the conference or seminar you attend.) There's a good chance that if they are good at what they do, many of them could use some additional help.  Don't get too excited though -- they won't need you for the "fun" stuff at first, but more likely they will want to use you for the grunt work that nobody else wants to do.

Unfortunately, stuff like keyword research, competitor analysis, link building, etc. are at the heart of a successful optimization campaign but can be awfully time-consuming.  Most companies can always use help in this area, if you're willing to work at a fairly low wage in order to gain some great training.

Here are some of the benefits of approaching your SEO education and future job security in this manner:

• It will provide you with an opportunity to learn effective SEO techniques in a real-world setting, without making a client's site the guinea pig.

• You can be trained by qualified SEOs who do indeed get results for their clients.  (Make sure about this before agreeing to work for them!)

• SEO companies are growing fast and the most difficult part is finding smart, qualified people willing to work hard and do some of the boring fundamental work that is necessary in an SEO campaign. They will appreciate your help!

• It's a great way to work your way into the more interesting client work that you might prefer doing, such as copywriting, account management, etc.

If you follow this route, eventually, once you have learned enough, you may wish to break out on your own, and you will now have the knowledge, skillset, and ability -- as well as some proven methods -- to start taking clients on your own.

So don't be another in the long line of wannabe SEOs who talk a good game but who can optimize only for keyword phrases that nobody is actually searching for. There are companies all over the world who need you and would love to have you work for them in-house.  Let them know who you are and how you can help them, and that you are willing to do whatever it takes to learn SEO from the ground up.

Good luck!

Jill

Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and editor of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter.

Article by Jill Whalen,   www.searchengineguide.com  -    Published Sep. 2005

The What, How, And Why Of Keyword Densities

By Matthew Rotterman © 2005

Keyword density is an important concept for website owners to understand. Keyword density, in today's Internet, is what will ultimately improve your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. The importance of having a high SEO rating is absolutely critical if you wish to have high volumes of traffic to your website.

Let's talk first about SEO and what it does. If you type a search into google, yahoo, MSN, or any other major search engine there are likely to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of results come up on the search engine. So let us imagine that you sell ceramic dolls on your website. Now someone types "ceramic dolls" into a search engine, where in those thousands of website results does your website fall? Does your website rank on the first page? If you are like most websites, your ranking is probably somewhere in the depths of the results ranking well over number 1,000. Imagine a customer seeking what you sell, but not being able to find your business. Do you really think that someone is going to sift through the first 1,000 results to find yours?

Search engine optimization (SEO) simply means that you are going to employ methods that will move your website up in the search engines results for "ceramic dolls" or your own personal keywords. Research and common sense tells us that if a potential website visitor/customer does not find your website within the first 20 results, he or she will move on and try a new search or simply use one of the first 20 websites that he or she has found. This is where keyword density comes into play.

In years past I can remember finding web pages that had hundreds of words listed at the bottom of the page, this was a common practice. The reason for this was so that the search engines would place this website on the results page if a web surfer typed in any of those hundreds of words. Times have changed and so have search engines. Today the search engines are much more sophisticated in how they locate websites to list in their results.

Keyword articles (adhering to certain keyword densities) dramatically improve a websites SEO ranking. Going back to our ceramic dolls example, this site would want a keyword article written with the keywords "ceramic dolls" inside the article. This way when a web surfer types in "ceramic dolls," the site will come up much higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP's).

The search engines use certain algorithms that "read" these keywords for the surfer. If you go and type in any phrase into a search engine you will notice that the results show those keywords highlighted in bold. They show you how the keywords are listed in those web pages. Placing articles on your website that contain the keywords your customers are looking for will help your search engine ranking for these specific keywords.

Now, you cannot simply type the "ceramic dolls" over and over again on the same web page. With the sophistication of today's search engines, doing that would actually harm your search engine ranking. You need to provide articles that not only contain the keywords, but articles that also contain some relevant information as well.

There is great debate over what density to use in a keyword article. Suppose you want a 500-word article written on ceramic dolls. What percentage of the time (density) should the phrase "ceramic dolls" be used? Should it be in there 4% (20 times) of the time, 7%, or 12%? You must be careful because using the keywords too often hurts your rankings, while using too little doesn't improve your ranking enough. So what is the answer? The answer is that only those that develop the algorithms for the search engine companies actually know.........and they aren't talking. Most people use anywhere from 3%- 15% keyword densities. Some people believe that having the keyword phrase in the title and as the first word of every paragraph helps. Some believe that using "dolls that are ceramic" 18 times and "ceramic dolls" 2 times in a 500-word article with 4% density will work.

Here is what everyone does know, if you are not utilizing keyword rich articles on your website (regardless of the density you choose) you will not be very highly ranked in any of the search engines. Keyword rich articles are one of the best ways to advertise your site. If you want more visitors to your website, who translate into more customers, you must utilize keyword articles to improve your search engine rankings so that people can find your website.

Matthew Rotterman is a writer and editor at: KeywordText.com. "Keyword Text" managed to bring together several writers and editors to provide a few low-cost writing services for those who are working hard to become more profitable. They offer Content Creation Services which include: Exclusive WebPage Content, Reprint Articles, and Newsletter Creation and Development services. Volume Discounts. Compare us to our competition, you will be surprised.

Article by Matthew Rotterman - http://keywordtext.com/dir.pl/ktc/index.html - Published Aug. 2005

How to Build Massive Keyword Lists

As keyword marketing becomes more and more expensive and competitive, it has become essential when building your lists to focus on the maximum number of phrases and their variations that a surfer might enter into the search engines.

Why?

Because according to Amit Singhal, principal scientist at Google, a guy who really should know what he's talking about, over 50% of the 200 million searches performed a day have never been searched before. He also said: "When performing a search most surfers give a 2-4 word query."

So here are my top 18 recommended ways to build massive keyword lists:

1. Visit your competitor's web pages and look in the title and meta tags.

2. Search for brand names in Google's Sandbox. This will return additional keywords that searchers entered when using the brand name. You can also enter regular keyword phrases and get related keyword phrases that have been searched on Google. Link: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

3. Look over your past customer testimonials, and see if there are any keywords you can use. This strategy lets you get inside your customer's mind to produce more market centric keywords.

4. Consider synonyms. A synonym is a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in the language. Enter your keywords into Roget's Theasaurus for a list of related synonyms. Also visit LexFN.

Links: http://thesaurus.reference.com & http://www.lexfn.com

5. Think of singular and plurals keywords.

6. What about verbs? Example: Ride, rode, ridden, ridding, rides.

7. Use hyphenation and variations. Example: off-shore, offshore, off shore.

8. Consider domain names. Many people enter domain names into the search engines rather than their browser address bar. Example: cnn.com. In June 2005 cnn.com was searched 843,256 times on Overture.com.

9. Get books on your subject and use the terms in the index and glossaries to grow your keyword lists.

10. Download a free copy of Weblog Expert Lite. Then ask your web host how to download your raw stats files. Run them through the software and you will then discover every possible keyword combination that surfers have used to find your website.

Link: http://www.megastep.com/wle

11. Use Wordtracker. What does Wordtracker do? "... helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered." Wordtracker is an essential tool to use.

Link: http://www.keywordlistbuilder.co.uk

12. Then go to the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in a keyword and Overture returns all the prior month's searches that include your phrase. The problem with the Overture tool is that it doesn't give you the exact way that the search was entered. This is why it is essential to use a tool like Keyword Tumbler (see # 18) to generate the maximum possible number of keyword combinations that a user might enter a search phrase into the engines.

Link: http://inventory.overture.com

13. Use abbreviations and misspellings. A good misspelling tool is Search Spell. Search Spell uses actual misspellings entered into the search engines. Misspelled Keywords is another software tool that will literally create thousands of misspellings for any given keyword phrase you enter into it.

Link: http://www.searchspell.com/typo & http://www.misspelledkeywords.co.uk

14. Use acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a name. Example: due diligence becomes DD. A good acronym generator is Acronym Finder. Link: http://www.acronymfinder.com

15. Combine your keyword phrase into one word. Example: strawbale houses => strawbalehouses.

16. Use "space" and "+" with keywords. Example:
- strawbale+houses
- strawbale +houses

17. Visit Crossword Compiler and download their demo software. Plug in your keywords and discover a multitude of additional words.

Link: http://www.crossword-compiler.com

18. Once you have your list compiled visit Keyword Tumbler and download the free software. Put your keywords into a text file and then let Keyword Tumbler generate multiple variations of each keyword phrase you have... instantly!

Link: http://www.keywordtumbler.com

It does this simply by mixing the words in each phrase around. Example: "horses for sale" generates a list like this...

horses for sale
horses sale for
for horses sale
for sale horses
sale horses for
sale for horses

As Perry Marshall, author of the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords said at a recent seminar: "Every combination of keywords that somebody could conceivably type in on Google is a market."

I hope you have found this advice useful? It's the exact same procedure I use everyday when fighting the pay-per-click wars.

Rob Taylor has been marketing online since 1996. Take advantage of his battle tested marketing strategies that could quietly make you five figure cash profits every month. Subscribe free to his high content newsletter at http://www.megastep.com.

(c) 2005 Megastep International - All Rights Reserved - http://www.megastep.com/pm - Published Aug. 2005

The perfect balance between on-site and off-site optimization

It is common that search engine rankings go up and down all the time. Many webmasters are unsure what they have to do to keep their web sites at the top of the search engine result pages. There are two main factors that influence the rankings of your web pages.

On-site optimization and off-site optimization

High search engine rankings can be achieved with on-site optimization and off-site optimization. On-site optimization refers to the factors that you can control on your web site: text, links, keyword density, etc.

Off-site optimization refers to the ranking factors that are usually out of your control. The most important off-site factor are the links to your web site.

Search engines use these two main factors to determine the rankings of your web pages.

What is the better way to optimize your web site for search engines?

Some webmasters focus only on on-site optimization. They optimize the text of their web pages, they try to get the right keyword density, optimize the web page title, etc. but they don't care about links.

Other webmasters think that links from other web sites are the only way to get high search engine rankings. They spend several thousand dollars to buy links from other sites without fully optimizing their web page content.

You can achieve good results with both methods. However, you'll get even better results if you combine both on-site and off-site optimization.

How do search engines rank web pages?

Optimized web page content helps search engines to find out what your web site is about. If the optimized content of your web pages shows search engines that your web site is relevant for a special search term, your web site will get high search engine rankings for that search term.

If more than one web site is optimized for the same search term, search engines have difficulty to determine the best web site. That's where links come in. In general, if more than one web site is optimized for the same search term, the web site with the best incoming links will get the best ranking.

The higher the competition for a search term, the more you need both optimized content and links from other web sites. Using only one factor works for unpopular search terms but as soon as there are other sites that compete for the same search term, you have to optimize both factors.

What does this mean to your web site?

Optimize your web page content and get links from other web sites to make sure that your web site is in a good position for high search engine rankings.

Getting more customers and more sales through on-site and off-site search engine optimization requires some time and work. The results are worth the effort.

Detailed information on how to optimize your web pages so that they receive top rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other important search engines can be found in our free search engine optimization ebook.

Copyright Axandra.com - Web site promotion software tools   -  Published Aug. 2005

Arachnophilia, the Joy of Playing with Spiders

Spiders make great geek pets, at least virtual ones do. Here at StepForth, we keep a couple spiders on our system to test sites, pages and documents in the hopes of learning more about the behaviours of common search engine spiders such as GoogleBot, Yahoo's Slurp and MSNBot. Recently, we learned that virtual pets share a similar problem with live pets; they grow old and eventually die. While our mock-spiders are still very much alive, the information we glean from their behaviours is increasingly irrelevant to predicting how a spider from a major search engine will behave. Our pet-spiders have grown too old to shower us with the informative affection they once did.

It used to be easy to predict the behaviour of common search engine spiders. Today, predicting search spiders is not so easy and with a growing number of spiders and search databases to consider, trying to get a leg-up on where the spiders are going is rather tricky. In previous years, Google, Inktomi and other electronic 'bots could be relied on to visit a site on a regular basis. The working environment was a bit simpler a few years ago, easily summed up with nine letters, G-O-O-G-L-E-B-O-T. GoogleBot was at one time the only important search spider around. While others existed, even as recently as two years ago, Google fed search results to most of its competitors.

Visiting on a somewhat regular monthly schedule, Googlebot would compile information on all the documents in its database, a process that took about one week and then rearrange their listings during the eagerly anticipated GoogleDance. Search engine optimization firms were often able to anticipate the unscheduled start dates of the GoogleDance by examining spidering activities in their weblogs and noting PageRank and back-link updates that generally preceded a shift in Google's rankings. When the shift actually happened, changes stemming from it were fairly significant as many of the search results would be altered based on new data found during the monthly spider-cycle.

What a difference a couple of years can make. Today there are four major general search engines and several vertical search tools, each with a unique algorithm and spidering schedule. So just how important is it to know the spidering schedule of the various search engines?

In previous years, most SEOs would say it was extremely important to know when a spider was going to visit a client's site. SEOs worked with fairly fixed deadlines, hoping to have clients' optimized content uploaded about a week before the expected GoogleDance began. Even then one was not entirely sure that the date they predicted for the Dance was correct but with a somewhat regular spider/update cycle, SEOs had fixed windows of opportunity with subsequent weeks to tweak and rework content if rankings didn't materialize during the last update.

Today's spiders have become almost intuitive and it is less important to know when a spider will visit as it is to know where a spider will visit. Most spiders visit an active website very frequently. According to three months worth of stats compiled by Click Tracks, spiders from Ask Jeeves visits at least once a day while MSN and Yahoo spider the index page of the StepForth site several times a day. Google only visits our index page, every four days on average. Compared to previous years, even the least frequent visitor, GoogleBot is gobbling up content. With daily or even weekly visits, the increased number of visits gives SEOs a much faster turn around time from completing optimization on a site to seeing results in the Search Engine Results pages.

A major shift in the way search engines think about content is seen in where spiders will visit, the frequency of visits, and what drives them there. Previously, search engine spiders would consider a domain or URL as the top level source of information. It would go to the index page and spider its way through the site from that point. That is no longer the case as search engine spiders are now better able to contextualize content found on unique documents within a domain and schedule spider frequencies accordingly. For example, on a site dedicated to the sale of Widgets, the document that refers to the highly popular Blue Widgets will see more spider traffic than a document referring to the less popular Red Widgets. Similarly, a document that changes regularly will see more visits as the search engines tend to know when changes are made on documents in their database. In other words, search engine spiders tend to know your website as a collection of unique documents contained under a single URL or domain, as opposed to a collection of topically themed documents under a single URL or domain. Based on the number of searches for relevant keywords performed by search engine users, the number of incoming links, the frequency of change, and the frequency of live-human visits to a document, the 4 major search spiders are now setting their own schedules.

While the timing of spider visits has changed radically, many standard behaviours remain the same. Spiders still travel where links, both internal and external, take them. The difference today is those links often lead to internal pages. In previous years, most links lead to the index or home page of a site. With the advent of PPC programs such AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, webmasters and search engine marketers are creating product specific landing pages, each of which might be relevant to organic searches. This has allowed savvy SEOs to optimize landing pages for organic rankings as well as PPC conversions. Search engine results now tend to be more relevant to the specifics of any given topic as opposed to a general overview of that topic.

Of all the spiders, the most active by far is MSNBot. Visiting each document in its index at least once per day and often more frequently, MSNBot has been known to crash servers housing sites with dynamically generated content as the ‘bot sometimes doesn't know when to quit. After MSNBot, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are the busiest of the major bots. Oddly enough, the quietest is GoogleBot, which visits each document in our site at least once per month but with little or no discernable pattern.

In order to prompt spiders through the site, we suggest creating a basic, text based sitemap appended to the back of your website. The sitemap should list every document in your website. To jazz it up, add a short description of the content of the document linked to below the link. Add a link to the sitemap to the footer of each page in your site. That will help with Ask, MSN and Yahoo. For Google, a slightly more complex solution is available through the creation of an XML based sitemap .

About two weeks after implementing the HTML sitemap on your site and uploading your XML sitemap to Google, start to watch your server logs for increased spider visits. Be sure to watch for where the spiders are going and which documents receive the most frequent visits. You may be pleasantly surprised at how friendly modern spiders can be.

Article by Jim Hedger, News Editor, StepForth Search Engine Placement, Inc.  www.stepforth.com  -    Published Aug. 2005

Google's Patent Implications

You may have already heard or read about Google's latest patent application regarding "information retrieval based on historical data" (see: http://tinyurl.com/4o9vj), but if you're like me, you probably didn't bother to read it all.  Patents are not easy to read, that's for sure!  I had skimmed it and glanced at a few forum posts and articles that discussed it, but until today, I hadn't actually read it completely.

I wasn't surprised about the stuff in the patent that corresponded with Google's aging delay and its "sandbox" as I had already seen a lot of discussion on this.  For those who aren't familiar with the aging delay and the sandbox, you'll want to note that there is a lot of disagreement over what causes a site to be thrown in the sandbox. However, based on my own observations and the experiences of some trusted SEO friends, it's my belief that the sandbox is basically a purgatory database where Google places certain URLs based on a variety of predetermined criteria.  (Much of this is spelled out in the first part of the patent application.)

The aging delay, on the other hand, is actually a subset of the sandbox.  In other words, the aging delay is just *one* reason why a URL might get placed in the sandbox.

Basically, if you have a brand new domain/website, it will automatically land in the sandbox regardless of anything that you do with it.  Your new website will be stuck there for an unspecified period of time (averaging around 9 months these days) and it will not rank highly in Google for any keyword phrases that might bring it any decent traffic.  Yes, it can sometimes rank highly for the company name, or the names of the people who run the company.  It may also show up in Google for a few additional phrases that other sites are not focusing on within their content.  But new domains will not show up in Google's natural results for even slightly competitive keyword phrases until they are removed from the sandbox.

Other reasons why a site might be placed in the sandbox go beyond the aging delay.  Google's major algorithm upheavals such as the recent one dubbed "Bourbon" by the folks at WebmasterWorld, show all too clearly that old domains can also be placed in the sandbox, under the right (or in this case wrong) circumstances.  Nobody can really say for sure what the criteria is, but Google's patent does give us some insight into what some of them might be.

For instance, did you know that Google might use traffic data from sites when determining how to rank them? The patent application specifically states in part "...information relating to traffic associated with a document over time may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with the document."  Since the application was filed in 2003, it would be a pretty safe bet to say that they are in fact using that information in today's ranking algorithm.

You might be wondering how they get information about your site's traffic since you're not providing them with your log files or traffic reports.  Well, Google has some nifty big brother spyware installed on tons and tons of people's browsers in the form of the "Google Toolbar."  In order to use certain functions of the toolbar, users have to agree to allow data to be transferred back to Google, which includes which sites they've visited, and how long they were there. Now, this isn't any cause for alarm if you're a Google toolbar user, as they're not actually identifying you personally (as far as I know). They are simply taking the aggregate data that they receive and then using it for whatever purposes they see fit.  It actually makes perfect sense that they'd use this data to perfect their ranking algorithm.  Highly trafficked sites are popular sites, and Google would want to ensure that their searchers easily find popular sites.

Another factor used in Google's ranking algorithm is clickthroughs from the search results pages.  In Google's patent they say, "[Google] may monitor the number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results and/or the amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document. [Google] may then score the document based, at least in part, on this information."  Google has had tracking URLs on most of the links appearing in their search results for quite some time. With these in place, they can study which pages are getting clicked for which queries.  They can also figure out whether people are satisfied with the page they clicked on by making note of whether the user came back to the results page and clicked on additional results.

There's lots more in the patent regarding links and anchor text, including the length of time it takes for links to show up, and whether they fit the profile for being artificial or natural. Suffice it to say that as long as you're not attempting to artificially inflate your link popularity, then you have nothing to worry about.

I cannot stress enough that the ideas in this patent have been put forth as spam fighting measures. Unfortunately, as soon as the search engines start giving things like links any kind of prominence in their ranking algorithm, they get abused by those whose only goal is to "game" the engines. There will always be people who set out to obtain high rankings through exploiting weaknesses in the algorithms. They create numerous websites based on the algorithm of the day, and make as much money as they can until their sites are caught. Then they simply figure out the next loophole and start the process all over again.  It's an interesting and exciting business model, but certainly not one that a company in business for the long haul should be interested in.

If you have a real company that is looking to establish a real brand and a long-term customer base, then you'll want to stick with the basic SEO techniques which have been proven to work time and again. In other words, the stuff I've been teaching and doing for years. Yes, it can be time consuming and a huge amount of hard work and/or money to do things the right way, but the reward is long-term search engine success.

It is true that even for those who do practice what I preach, there have been occasions when some search engines mistakenly throw the baby out with the bathwater.  That is, you may do everything by the book, but something somewhere trips a spam filter and your site may mistakenly get sandboxed, penalized or banned.  This is certainly rare, but not as rare as it used to be. Each new search engine update brings new cries of "Where's my site?!" from people who didn't do anything to deceive the engines. One can only hope that the engines work quickly to allow these sites to get back into the rankings as quickly as possible.

At any rate, you should never count on your natural search results as your sole method of bringing you business.  Be sure to use traditional advertising, word of mouth, public relations and whatever forms of marketing suit your business objectives.

Here's hoping that the search engines keep getting better, and they finally figure out a way to separate the wheat from the chaff once and for all!

Jill

Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and editor of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter.

Article by Jill Whalen,   www.searchengineguide.com  -    Published Jul. 2005

SEO Client Expectations

The other day a new client of mine wrote to say how busy they were, and although they wanted to proceed with an SEO campaign, they weren't sure how much time they could personally invest in it.  They asked me to spell out what we'd be expecting from them and how much time it might take.  This client knew that a professional SEO campaign is a team effort and wanted to be sure that they would be able to do their part.

It was really a great question to ask.

Many clients never think about that aspect until the campaign has already been kicked off and we start nagging them for things we'll need to get started.  For instance, there's some essential information that needs to be provided by the company before any SEO work can get off the ground. This includes target audience information, keyword phrase ideas, recent statistics and reports, and info regarding the overall goals of the campaign.  It also helps to be provided with an overview of any SEO work that may have been previously been done to the site.

Once the campaign gets underway, there is some additional client involvement needed.  For example, during the keyword research phase, the client will need to review the keyword lists and remove irrelevant phrases, then order the relevant ones in terms of importance to their business.  It's critical to have the client involved in this phase, because as much as we know the SEO side of things, the client will always know their business better than we could.

We'd also need to run any copyediting and/or copywriting by the client for their approval. Once these are approved, and HTML tags are created, we'd need someone to create the HTML files or templates, and then upload them to the client's server.  This normally falls under their Webmaster's jurisdiction, as many clients don't like to provide full server access to anyone outside of their company.

The bottom line is that in the end, it is the client's site, and therefore it's imperative to keep the lines of communication open at all times -- especially where changes are being made to the visible content on the site.  At the beginning of any project, there will generally be more client involvement necessary than later on in the game.  Once things kick into high gear, the approval process should be much easier and less time-consuming.

In addition, we've found that clients appreciate it when we provide them with our info in manageable chunks, instead of a ton of stuff to approve at once.  It also helps to have one point of contact and a smart Webmaster on the client's side who can quickly and easily make the recommended changes.

This info should help both SEOs and potential SEO clients understand what might be expected of them during the SEO process.  Getting it out in the open before a contract is signed, and in fact, adding it to all proposals, should avoid many problems and lag time once the campaign begins.

Jill

Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and editor of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter.

Article by Jill Whalen,   www.searchengineguide.com  -    Published Jun. 2005

Google ranking secrets revealed - part 5

Google has recently filed a patent that details many points that Google uses to rank web pages. The title of the patent is "Information retrieval based on historical data" and it reveals details of algorithms that Google uses in addition to its main ranking algorithms.

In this article series, we're trying to find out what this means to your web site and what you have to do to optimize your web pages so that you get high rankings on Google.

How Google might track your surfing behavior

Last week, we informed you that Google tracks user behavior to determine the ranking of web sites. Google has recently released web accelerator program that is intended to make surfing faster for broadband users. Google might use this program to track the surfing behavior of people who have the web accelerator installed.

This means that Google now has at least four different tools that allow Google to track which web sites you visit: the Google toolbar, Google Desktop, Gmail and the new Google web accelerator.

These tools could help Google to collect the user information that is mentioned in the patent specification. As soon as you login to any Google service (Gmail, AdWords, etc.) this information can be assigned to your name and address.

Other factors that might influence your Google rankings

In addition to factors regarding user behavior, link popularity and domain names (see previous issues of this newsletter), the patent specification lists some other factors that might influence how Google selects results.

The document specification indicates that web pages with frequent ranking changes might be considered untrustworthy.

In addition, keywords that have little change in the result pages are probably matched to domains with stable rankings. Keywords with many changes in the results are probably matched to domains with more votality.

What does this mean to your web site?

Regarding these factors, there's nothing you can do to influence the ranking of your web site. Fortunately, there are many other factors that allow you to influence your rankings on Google.

In general, it is important that your web page content is optimized for Google. The ranking factors mentioned in the patent specification are only additional factors. If your web page content is not optimized, all other ranking factors won't help you much.

Remember that this patent doesn't mean that Google really uses all of this. The patent only lists options that might be used by Google. The most important factors for high rankings on Google are good incoming links and optimized web page content. You should make sure that your web site has both if you want high rankings on Google.

Copyright Axandra.com - Web site promotion software tools   -  Published Jun. 2005

Google ranking secrets revealed - part 4

Google has recently filed a patent that details many points that Google uses to rank web pages. The title of the patent is "Information retrieval based on historical data" and it reveals details of algorithms that Google uses in addition to its main ranking algorithms.

In this article, we're trying to find out what this means to your web site and what you have to do to optimize your web pages so that you get high rankings on Google. Click here to read part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Part 4: How search results and user data can affect your rankings

The patent specification indicates that Google might track how often users click on a page when it is listed in the search results pages. Google might also track the amount of time that users spend "accessing the document".

It seems that Google might be tracking click-throughs and rewarding those sites with higher click through rates (similar to what Google does with their AdWords program).

The patent specification also indicates that Google might track the behavior of web surfers through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files (possibly with the Google toolbar and the Google desktop search tool).

The patent specification indicates that Google might track the following information:

• The volume of searches over time is recorded and monitored for
  increases.

• The information regarding a web page's rankings are recorded and monitored for changes.

• The click through rates are monitored for changes in seasonality, fast increases, or other spike traffic.

• The click through rates are monitored for increase or decrease trends.

• The click through rates are monitored to find out if stale or fresh web pages are preferred for a search query.

• The click through rates for web pages for a search term is recorded.

• The traffic to a web page is recorded and monitored for changes.

• The user behavior on web pages is monitored and recorded for changes
  (for example the use of the back button etc.).

• The user behavior might also be monitored through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files.

• Bookmarks and favorites are monitored for both additions and deletions.
  The overall user behavior for documents is monitored for trends changes.
  The time a user spends on a web page might be used to indicate the quality and freshness of a web page.

What does this mean to your web site?

If Google really tracks the click-throughs to your web site, you should make sure that your web pages have attractive titles so that web surfers click on them in the search results.

Make your web pages interesting enough so that web surfers stay some time on your web site. It might also help if your web site visitors added your web site to their bookmarks.

Make sure that your web page content is optimized for Google. The ranking factors mentioned in the patent specification are only additional factors. If your web page content is not optimized, all other ranking factors won't help you much.

In upcoming newsletter issues, we'll discuss other important factors that can influence your ranking on Google and that are mentioned in the patent specification.

Copyright Axandra.com - Web site promotion software tools   -  Published May 2005

Google ranking secrets revealed - Part 1, 2 and 3

Copyright Axandra.com - Web site promotion software tools   -  Published May 2005

Search Algorithms R&D Session from SES NYC 2005

The Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York had many new, never-before-seen sessions. Of these, the most exciting and promising for many SEOs, myself included, was the Search Algorithms Research & Development Session. The focus was on the more well-known search engine research papers and the threads from SEW by Orion (Dr. Garcia).

Three panel members were present: Mike Grehan (of e-marketing-news.co.uk), Rahul Lahiri (of AskJeeves) and Dr. Garcia (of miislita.com).

"When a client asks you 'How do search engines work?' and you say, 'Well, I don't know, they just do,' that doesn't work very well," says Mike Grehan, introducing his presentation.

Mike's point is well taken and it's one of the primary reasons that so many SEOs are becoming interested in this work. Mike's presentation included a good dose of British wit and touched on some of the most important topics in historical algorithm developments:

* Citation Analysis -- This is based on the idea that a link is a "vote" for a particular page and the concept that if two pages are connected by a link, they are on the same topic. Mike notes the inventor of citation analysis was Gerard Salton (way back in 1983).

What does it mean: Search engines count links to pages.

* CLEVER (CLient-side EigenVector Enhanced Retrieval) -- Jon Kleinberg's algorithm that introduces the idea of topic-specific communities, further refining the concept of linking so that pages which are cited by popular pages on the same topic rank more highly than those that are simply cited on the Web in general. If you've ever been outranked by a PR 8, 9, or 10 page that's not even on your subject, this applies to you.

What does it mean: A page about cars linking to another page about cars is more important than a page on pharmacies linking to a page on cars.

* Run-Time Analysis -- The CLEVER algorithm can't be implemented by search engines because it's slow. Luckily, Apostolos Gerasoulis solves the run-time problem while at Rutgers University in NJ and becomes the founder of Teoma.

What does it mean: Until Teoma's creation, none of the search engines could use the concept of subject-specific links effectively.

* LocalRank & Hilltop (these are explained below) -- Krishna Bharat develops Hilltop (the familiar concept of hubs & authorities) and LocalRank for Google.

* Florida!!! (Google's infamous update from Nov. 2003) -- Mike's favorite slide of the bunch. His interpretation of the Florida update is that it was based on Google's implementation of the LocalRank algorithm, forcing locally popular pages up the rankings and globally (non- locally) popular pages down.

What does it mean: Mike believes the Florida update was due to Google's use of local popularity (similar to, but substantively different from Teoma).

The next speaker is Rahul Lahiri from AskJeeves. He's very personable and charismatic, and he notes that many of his points are a rehashing of what Mike has already presented. For brevity's sake, I'll introduce his fresh material only.

* Local Popularity -- Finding sites and pages that are popular (often linked to) from within a topical community. This differs from LocalRank in that only the topical community sites are counted towards link popularity, rather than any on-topic pages.

What does it mean: HighRankings.com ranks highly for many SEO-related searches at Teoma because other SEO blogs and sites frequently link to it.

* Hubs & Authorities -- The concept (taken from the Hilltop paper) that certain pages in a community link to many of the best topical resources, while other pages in the community are authorities on particular subjects due to their link popularity within the subject-specific community.

What does it mean: Linking out to many useful sites can make your page a "hub," while getting lots of inbound links from sites in your community can make you an "authority."

The last speaker is Dr. Garcia, who could not be present due to a mudslide in California. He is presenting via recording, interlinked with his Powerpoint presentation. Chris Sherman of SEW stands at the podium to guide the audience through the notes.

* Semantic Connectivity -- Two words or phrases are connected to each other semantically based on their associations in the search engines' index. The more frequently the terms occur together on pages (and in close proximity), the more connected the search engine perceives them to be.

What does it mean: Search engines know that the words "Norton" and "Antivirus" are related to one another because they have millions of indexed pages where the two appear together.

* Co-Occurrence & C-Indices -- Using a formula (called the C-Index formula), we (as Web searchers) can estimate how semantically related the search engines believe two terms or phrases to be.

What does it mean: Using this formula, you can find out if Google thinks "cuisine" is more related to "cooking" or "recipes."

* EF Ratios -- EF Ratios can be used to estimate the relative frequency of natural sequences and phrases in a source. They can also be used to examine how easy or difficult it would be to rank for a given sequence in a particular search engine.

What does it mean: Using this formula, you can see how natural it is for two terms to occur next to each other in the search engines' index.

I know that I've shared a phenomenal amount of information in a very brief space. If you find yourself as interested in these subjects as I am, visit the resources below for more information:

Dr. Garcia's Website <http://www.miislita.com> Search Technologies Forum @ SEOChat <http://forums.seochat.com/f65/s> Search Technology & Relevance Forum @ SEW <http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forumdisplay.php?f=21> SEOmoz Tools (including C-Index tool) <http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools.php> Xan Porter's Weblog <http://spaces.msn.com/members/search-science/PersonalSpace.aspx> Rand Fishkin SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org

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