Search Engine Optimization – Micro Business Specialist

BackLinking Success With EZArticleLink

As an internet marketer, I’m always looking for easier and better ways to get quality backlinks to my websites, so as to boost my search engine ranking.

In particular, I’m looking for a service that:

1) gets me hundreds of backlinks for EACH article I post, regardless of how small my niche is;

2) automatically builds backlinks to the articles that I post, which is the key in article marketing;

3) allows me to post unlimited articles and build unlimited backlinks to unlimited number of domains;

4) builds unique backlinks to my website automatically and infinitely, so that I can forget link-building!

So far, it seems that there is only one system that provides such a service. It’s called EzArticleLink.

Don’t just listen to me. Head to the website now at http://ezarticlelink.com?r=earlnetwal and check out its huge collection of testimonials (more than 150 of them on its homepage).

If you are still skeptical, there’s even a free membership that you can enroll in. The free membership can easily get you thousands of high-quality backlinks, not to mention its Gold membership!

Good link building system is hard to come by. If you are serious in SEO, you must add this service to your arsenal.

Get your instant access at http://ezarticlelink.com?r=earlnetwal.

[tags]ezarticlelink, backlink, backlinking,seo, seo backlink, seo backlining, search engine optimization[/tags]

SENuke – A Big Boy Tool – Big Girls too!

One of the challenges for new people to internet marketing is the need to not only know what to do, but to do it on a massive scale. The beauty is that you can, IF you have the correct tools.

You can try to get by with free tools and hand me down tools to learn the ropes, and most people probably should do it that way. But once you understand the role that building backlinks represents to your websites or those of your clients, you must investigate systems you can employ to make it an easier, and more powerful part of your operations.

The massive action available to you from powerful tools makes it possible for you to develop much more effective sites with much less time and effort. The downside is that you need to pay for advanced tools to do this. Sorry, the professional tools don’t get given away like the starter tools and ebooks you may be used to.

The good news is that you can often get a free trial, to help you see if the tools is right for you. Why wouldn’t it be? Well, maybe you are not ready for the power of some of them. Or perhaps you don’t understand how to take advantage of them yet. It make little sense to buy a professional tool like SENuke unless you are ready to put it to work for you.

There is just one exception to that, and that is when you know you are committed to learning what you need to know and can get a great deal by acting quickly. That may be the case here, and during the launch of the powerfully enhanced SENUKE they are offering a one time lifetime access that is a dead simple decision for long time user like me. I will let them explain the special for you inside.

Now if your not a big kid yet on the internet marketing circuit, you probably shouldn’t be buying this today. But you owe it to yourself to take a serious look at its capabilities if only to know what is possible. It might also show you a bit about why your occasional article to the article directories is not flooding your account with new sales.

Success takes massive action as I said above, take some time to check out the spanking new version of SENUKE and if you are a big girl or big boy online, take the plunge.

Once you do, you will be able to blow away your competition in thousands of different niches and actually start making some real money online.

[tags]SE nuke, SENUKE, search engine optimization, Building backlinks, Internet marketing Tools,[/tags]

How Much Is A Top Google Listing Worth?

I bet you have taken the time to search for your businesses web site on Google just to see where it ranked. When you searched for it by name using your url or most of the words of your domain name it probably did pretty well. However if you are a bakery, and search for “Bakeries”, the odds are that you are in the nether regions of the 13,900,000 listings.

A lot of small business people have given up on their websites as a result of this apparent invisibility. The gallop to the internet was all the rage before and after the dot com bust. However, for most small businesses, it has had little if any positive effects for their business.

The alternative that was easiest to figure out was to buy pay per click ads. They cost money, but at least they had an active prospect on the other end – usually. When some one did click on the ads, they were shown your offer and either did or didn’t buy.

At first a lot of keywords were real cheap, as little as a dime or less. Some still do, but many clicks these days run from $2-5 each and some go well beyond that into the $20 -$50 each and even much higher. You really need to know what you are doing to spend that type of money. And yet it can be well worth it.

Initially the pay per click ads were on the right side of the “organic” listings. The term organic listings refers to the free information that Google would find relevant to a searchers keywords. These free organic listings are the target we are shooting for when we try to get a top Google listing. Eventually, Google added some ads on the top of the left side as well, but we are still referring to the top organic listings.

When thinking about the value of this top organic spot, we can compare the value by looking at the equivalent cost of the top ads for the same search term.

It would cost $25 for 100 clicks to the advertiser. And this would be the equivalent value for 100 clicks on any of the organic searches.

Thus if a business were to get their organic site listed so that it got a hundred clicks a day, that listing would be worth the equivalent of $25 a day to them.

Now multiply this out for higher pay per click rates of say $2-5 each or much higher. Some keywords get a lot of searches every day, and this could multiply the value. The term “dog training” for example gets over a half million searches every month in the US alone. Dog training is a competitive word that would cost you $2.44 on average if you wanted to get the maximum pay per click volume for it. According to Google’s Traffic Estimator, if you were the top advertiser, you would expect to get 358 people clicking on your add every day, costing you $895.28. [Note that estimate of 358 people is 2% of the daily traffic.] (550,000 / 30 / 358) = 2%]

On the surface this would seem to indicate that have a top organic listing for Dog Training on Google would be worth almost $900 a day, assuming that the top listing got the same number of clicks as did the top ad.

It does not.

It probably gets a lot more.

Some time ago, as many as a fourth of all visitors would click on one on the ads on they typical results page. Recently, that number is closer to 18%

Industry experts suggest that a whopping 43% of people will click on the top organic result. This is significant.

It is even more significant when we understand that the percentage of people clicking on ads means those clicking on any of the ads.

Thus the top organic search result is getting between 8 and 22 times as many clicks as the top pay per click ad!

Calculating the results for our Dog Training example where the pay per click ad was worth about $900 a day, our top ranked listing should be worth roughly anywhere from 7 to 20 thousand dollars!

And that is why, getting to the top of Google’s Organic search is so valuable. As a result a whole new consulting industry has emerged to deal with this potential for value creation. Getting a listing to the top of the search engines is a worthy goal.

There are some additional caveats that need to be taken into account, but the central thrust of the above still holds true. People who choose the ads may for example be more actively looking to make a purchase compared to those who click the organic results who may be more interested in getting information.

Being the top organic listing may be meaningless, if the page people are taken to does not result in a desired action, etc.

That said, it should be obvious that getting a top organic search result is worthwhile.

[tags]Google, google Ranking, Organic Search value, top organic search, SEO, SEO Value, Why do SEO, Search Engine Optimization, pay per click[/tags]

Plumbing Minneapolis – an SEO Study

I just completed the first in a series of studies I intend to do on local businesses in Minneapolis area.

In the study I look at the top 30 web sites on Google when searching for the term, “Plumbers Minneapolis.”

The objective for me is to develop clients for my SEO consulting services in the “real world” of day to day businesses. Each of the participants will get an email informing them that their web site was mentioned in the study and provided with a link to the study.

While the report focuses on their specific results, a lot of it is boiler plate that applies to the topic in general. Thus I expect to re-use the bulk of the report for additional industries.

It turns out that there are several pretty good web sites in the area, but most are shall we say “less than optimal.” Any experienced internet marketer should be able to assist any of those of page two or three of Google to win a first place showing.

Now of course that will vary keyword by keyword, but as the plumbing example seemed to show, the major term”plumbing” was better accounted for that was a second term I selected which had to do with one possible reason a person would call a plumber, ie Hot Water Heater Replacement Mineapolis.

For this term, the competition was very limited. This points out a basic error of many main street web pages. To the extent they are set up to rank for a term, at least in this case they were ranked for the term they may have wanted to appear under in the Yellow pages: ie Plumbing and Plumber.

This old way of thinking reflects the Yellow page tradition and not today’s likely web search that is more likely to be based on the issue on the mind of the searcher, in this case hot water heater problems.

The report I prepared can be viewed at http://microbusinessspecialist.com/IndustryStudies/Plumbing_Minneapolis.html

I expect to refine the report, and hopefully find a way of condensing it as I do repeats of the effort in the coming weeks and months. If you happen to see any errors in the report or have other suggestions, particularly on making it clearer and more readable, please let me know.

I note that a new training program aimed at reaching out to Main Street Businesses is in the offing Called Street Fighter. It will go into pre-launch next week, and are actively looking for affiliates to join them in the launch. I’ve signed up and you may want to as well.

As this little study shows, there is a lot of room for improvement in main street business web sites. If you aren’t making as much money as you would like online now, or better yet, if the people on your list aren’t you may want to steer them into this course and opportunity. There are many wide open opportunities in your community. Street Fighter

[tags]industry report, Street Fighter, off line marketing, main street marketing, affiliate programs,SEO, search engine optimization,[/tags]

Squidoo eBook Gets Some Backing

Some time ago I got interested in Squidoo as an inexpensive way to create a web presence. It was relatively easy and free. It wasn’t until later that I learned how valuable a site it could be for generating backlinks to other web properties.

Now knowing something and doing something with that knowledge don’t always follow. At least in my case. It turns out I know how to do a lot of things that frankly I don’t always do. How about you?

I published a Squidoo eBook called Squidoo Basics and get a few sales every now and again, but haven’t actually promoted it in the past. I had a stray sale the other day that reminded me of its nearly orphan status, and I decided to give it a promotional push.

I’ve also been experimenting with Market Samurai a keyword research tool plus more and selected a series of keywords to focus on. The best in my estimation was the phrase Squidoo eBook.

So I went to my one page sales letter and added my new keywords, title and descriptions as I teach others to get the page itself set up properly for the search engines.

I then started writing. First a I did an article on my Home Staging Business Tips blog on Squidoo, making sure to create a Squidoo eBook anchor text backlink to my sales page.

I then took the guts of that article and posted it on Active Rain, which is a real estate authority blog site that many homestagers also use. I again used the same anchor text.

From there I went on to create a quick Blogger blog who’s one post is on Squidoo and yes with the same anchor text. Then on to Hub Pages, and then Knol, and now back here to Micro Business Specialist. You can fully expect to see a link in the coming paragraphs.

I intend to follow this up with a series of articles that I will post to the article directories. With any luck the combination eventually gain me a first page listing on Google.

Anyone who searches Google for the phrase Squidoo ebook should be a pretty good prospect for an eBook Called Squidoo Basics, don’t you think?

Now, I’ve heard varying theories on how best to do this, so I am open for your comments. But my goal here was to create a circle of backlinks from a variety of high ranking web sites and some less so to start driving my single page sales page higher in the Google Search engines.

In the past, I have advocated linking first from one source to another and then to another to flow the accumulated Google Juice to one spot. In what I did today, I did not link from one to another, but just to the sales page.

While I like to pretend I know everything, I’d be interested in readers comments on this. I can always go back to each of these and create some cross links. I do know that I do not want to have links going from a to b and b to c and c back to a. That creates a circle and apparently negates the value of the back links. Same with a to b and b to a.

The topic of Squidoo is certainly large enough that I could easily go to any of these sites and add more content which will give me ample time to promote my Squidoo eBook. I am also likely to go back to Squidoo and create some additional lens on the topic, rather than add to the existing one. That way I will have another backlink, rather than just a backlink from a longer Squidoo Lens.

If you are new to Squidoo I invite you to click on my link and join Squidoo for FREE!

[tags]Squidoo, squidoo ebook, backlinks, seo, search engine optimization, hub pages, knol, market samurai,[/tags]

Beyond Squidoo: Get Support from HubPages

Get More Link Juice Via Hub Pages

In my last posting, I spent some time describing Squidoo.com and how useful it can be as a source of quality backlinks to your site.

Squidoo offers you the opportunity to create your own backlinks that you can custom design. By that I am referring to your ability to use anchor text that uses precisely the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and the ability to direct that link to a specific page on your web site.

Since Squidoo is free to use, there is no reason why you can’t create multiple Lens, and add additional links to your site. From a search engine optimization standpoint it makes sense to have multiple short Lens rather than one long comprehensive one. So if a home stager wants to create a lens on staging a bedroom and another on staging a living room and a third on outdoor landscaping you now have three sources from which you can send links back to your web site. Within each lens you want to include a couple anchor text links to various pages on your site.

The power of Squidoo comes from it’s internal grouping system. Once you have created your lens, you want to join your lens to every relevant group you can. If you are a potter, you will want to sign up your lens with all the various pottery groups, as well as art and crafts groups and any others that make sense.

The search engines see Squidoo as a large web site with many different topics. Normally this would be negative as it’s not focused and many lens are not specifically relevant. However since your lens is connected and linked to internally via your group memberships and also by Squidoo’s own internal tagging system you are seen as part of all the groups you are associated with. The strength of your individual link is a product of all these relevant association within Squidoo. To learn more about the internal linking and groups within Squidoo get a copy of Squidoo Basics.

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A similar venue like Squidoo is the Hub Pages site. Go the www.hubpages.com. Set up an account there, and jump right in. The set up is different but similar to Squidoo. You will need to create a title of 120 characters or less, which becomes part of your url. Just as with Squidoo, you want it to consist of the keywords you want your own web site to rank for. So if you are following my advice on using geographical keywords you may want to name your site, CincinattiDryCleaning if you are a dry cleaner in Cincinatti.

Just like Squidoo, you want to create anchor texts in your hub pages. You can use much of the same material in your hub pages that you did on your Squidoo pages, but you want to rework it into a different format so it is distinctly different than the way it appears on Squidoo or anywhere else. Make it unique.

Now while you will be including links to various pages on your web site, you also want to create some links from your Hub pages to your Squidoo pages. That’s why we talked about Squidoo first.

Remember last week when we talked about “link juice.” Hub pages have a little less link juice than Squidoo. But they are still a highly ranked site, just not quite a big. Your link from Hub pages pours link juice into your Squidoo lens. This link juice accumulates there and is passed via your Squidoo lens to where it links, ie. your web site.

It is important that you maintain the one way nature of this linking. As we also discussed last week, if you reciprocate links the link juice cancels each other out. So for my purposes, I always link from my Hub Pages to my Squidoo pages and never the reverse. Since I have many different niches this rule keeps me out of trouble.

Which one you use to link to the other is less important, than that you make sure to keep the one way relationship alive. And please remember that means you cannot link from your web site to your Hub pages as this would create a circle and negate the benefit of all the links.

Next time I will begin to discuss why article marketing is so powerful.

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Two additional tidbits. I have had a lot of projects building up lately thus the delay in getting this post out. I am still doing my analysis of peoples web sites. But am now restricting myself to just four a week. These are very useful to people and I want to maintain my hands on service to as many people as I can. To get details go to http://cli.gs/7gH1Zr

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In addition to maintaining your web site and getting it set up for search engines, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to blog from your own wordpress blog. WordPress blogs are easy to use and free, but can be very bewildering because there are so many options in terms of themes, plug ins, widgets and settings. I have learned a lot about blogging from Mike Paetzold who is a master blogger. He just released a new “How to” eBook and video series Tuesday night and is offering $20 off until sometime Saturday. It’s called Word Press Made Easy and is a “must have” in my opinion. He walks you through all the plug ins and settings he uses on his plethora of blog sites. If you are going to blog, and you should, it is a good idea to copy a master blogger, until you learn enough on your own to make specific variations. With his help you can have your blog up and running and or re-tuned in about an hour. Well worth it, I promise you. http://cli.gs/mv5Whd

Squidoo – Who ever came up with this name?

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines XI

Squidoo – Who ever came up with this name?

Building Backlinks on Squidoo

We have established that to advance up the search engines your site needs to be set up properly in terms of on page factors, and also needs to get Back Links from other sites to boost your credibility. Ideally these backlinks should be in the form of anchor texts that highlight the specific keyword you want your page to rank for. For most locally based businesses, it also makes sense to have these keywords and anchor texts include your specific geography such as Home Staging Atlanta or Minneapolis Best Meat Market, etc.

One point I should have made already and didn’t is that these back links need to be one way backlinks. I’ve used the term “Link Juice” before. Imagine that a web site by linking to you is passing on to you some of their Link Juice. If they are a high value web site the back link may be a gallon jugs worth, if it’s a lower ranked site you might just get a pint. That’s if the link is one way to your site from theirs. If you return the favor, you have a hole in your bucket, dear Liza. The Link Juice leaks right back to where it came from. Now if you have a higher ranking than the person linking to you, you may actually loose juice in the process.

At one time it was all the rage to build reciprocal linking arrangements, and one of our readers reported just that after my last post. Unfortunately these are no longer wise moves in terms of search engine ranking. That said, they may still make sense if they send traffic and business from one market to another as part of a referral system. If that’s the case, you may well want to keep them even if they cost some “juice.” But don’t build reciprocal relationships hoping they will help out your search engine ranking. They won’t.

Nor can you set up a circle, where A links to B and B links to C and C in turn links to A. Such circles are readily detected by the search bots, even when inadvertent. So pals we may be, but mutual admiration societies are not the way to get ahead on the search engines.

So how do we get these one way links? There are a lot of ways actually. I mentioned a few to you last time and today we will take a closer look at one of my favorites, Squidoo.

Squidoo is one of many so called Web 2.0 sites, which merely means it is part of the recent wave of sites that allow visitors to interact with the site rather than just read it like a static web page.

There are four primary things I like about Squidoo. First it’s Free. Second, it allows you to put blatantly self promoting commercial messages on it. And thirdly, it’s relatively easy to use. A fourth factor is that is has a high page rank of 7, which means that back links from Squidoo to your site send you giant economy size bottles of Link juice, which is very nice indeed.

To get to Squidoo just go to www.squidoo.com. Once there, sign up for an account. It’s free and easy.

Once you have your account, you are going to create your first site, which Squidoo refers to as a lens. Perhaps the most important thing to remember when setting up your first lens is that what you name it is critical.

For my Minneapolis Meat Market, I want to name the Lens “Minneapolis Meat Market” – if that is the phrase that I want to rank for on the search engines. Now every lens on Squidoo needs to have a different name, so your favorite term may already be taken. If that is the case try adding hyphens between words, or an extra relevant word before or after your desired name.

Some times it is easier getting your Squidoo lens ranked high in the search engines than your main web site due to Squidoo’s high page rank and its tens of thousands of pages, many of which are new every day. The search engines are crawling all over Squidoo constantly, and they will find your new lens very soon after you publish it.

Once you have created your title, you need to fill in the introduction module. Here you want to repeat your keyword/title in anchor text with a link to the page on your web site you want to drive traffic to. So if you are Shar Sitter, one of my Home Staging Clients you may introduce your lens as: “Rooms with Style is a Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging firm specializing is serving the South Metro Area etc etc…”

If you did a good job creating your web site’s meta tag description, you may want to use that here. It should have your keywords in it, and be a pretty good sales pitch while including the key geography you serve.

By using HTML code to create a link on “Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging” as I did above, the search engine bots learn that the end link is about Minneapolis and St Paul Home Staging and they have good memories. This is called anchor text and we went over how to set up this HTML code a few messages ago.

This is one of the advantages of Squidoo. Since you are creating the link yourself, you can control the way the link is created. You always want to use anchor text links. The only exception is when you are specifically letting people know what your web site address is and even then, make sure you use anchor text elsewhere in the posting.

If you go to Shar’s site via the link above, you will see it doesn’t go to her home page. It could have, but instead I set it up to link to her page titled “services.” This is called internal linking because it links to an internal page on her web site. Google in particular likes this, and you get a little extra juice for your overall site because of it. Since you have control of the link creation on sites like Squidoo, it makes sense to create these internal links whenever you can.

At any rate, the goal is to use anchor text right away in the introductory portion of your Squidoo lens. That will serve as a powerful back link to your web site. Complete the first module with what other introductory material you feel appropriate.

I’m already at book length for this post. So let me quickly say that the rest of the lens can be simple or complex. It’s up to you. Squidoo uses modules. I tend to use their text modules and fill them with text and pictures. To insert pictures you will need to learn a tiche of HTML code, which is not difficult. You can search on Squidoo for a lens on HTML, there are several good ones. Alternatively, I publish an inexpensive ebook called HTML in Simple Terms for under $10. The advantage of the ebook is that you can print it out and keep it handy by your computer. I find it easier to look things up in print than online.

I also publish an eBook called Squidoo Basics. It costs $17 and will help get you acclimated to Squidoo quickly.

The thing to keep in mind about Squidoo, is that you can publish as many lens as you want. For link building purposes they don’t need to be fancy or even complete. But spend a little time on them and focus on one topic about your business. Create another lens to discusss another aspect. If you serve more than one town, you can be DryCleanersOmaha and OmahaDryCleaners or SouthOmahaDrycleaners. Etc. Each additional link of this sort will help increase your ranking for Omaha Dry Cleaners.

If you are a home stager, you might want to create a lens just for Realtors, and use the Lens as the place you make your special pitch to them. Just be sure to link back to the Realtor page on your main web site.

Once you get the hang of putting up pictures, and I promise you that learning the little bit of HTML code to do that is not difficult, you may want to create a before and after lens for each of your projects.

Just be sure to include back links in each new lens to your web site’s various pages and in no time you will discover than not only is your web site on the top of the search engines, so too will be a number of your Squidoo lens.

When your prospects find you not just on the top, but also number 2, 4, 6,7 & 8 on the listings, they get pre-sold pretty fast that you are the dominant player in your community.

Yes, it will take a little work. You may need to learn a couple new tricks, but with a bit of persistence you can do it.

Next week, we will look at a similar site called Hub pages and maybe a couple of others. If you have questions about today’s post be sure to leave a comment. As I did today, I will incorporate any questions into the next posting.

How Many Backlinks do you have? Getting to the top of the Search Engines IX

Getting to the top of the Search Engines IX

How Many Backlinks do you have?

A bit of a detour today. I have had several people ask how they can find out how many backlinks they have to their web site. A good question and one I can answer.

First thing you want to do is go to Yahoo.com rather than Google or MSN and search for the term “linkdomain:” and then the web site you want to inquire about using the Yahoo search box. This will take you to Yahoo’s Site Explorer site.

When you do this for your site you will see two boxes at the top of the page. One will show the number of pages on your website, and the second will show the total number of inbound links to your site. These are your backlinks.

Now if you want to see what you need to do to outrank that pesky competitor of yours, it wouldn’t hurt to enter their domain name the same way and see how many backlinks they have. You might want to check out who they are, because there is a good chance you should be able to get back links from some of the same places.

Now as we mentioned before, not all backlinks are created equal. Some have higher page rank and are thus weighted more than others. So it’s possible that someone with fewer backlinks could rank higher.

As an experiment, go to Google and enter the keyword “Home Decorating” in the Google Search Box. When I did it for this article the top three “organic” listings were www.home-decorating-made-easy.com ; www.tuscan-home-101.com and www.hgtv.com

I looked at each site with the Yahoo Site Explorer and found the top ranking site had 627 pages of content and 1726 back links. The second ranked site, the tuscan one, had 88 pages of content and 794 backlinks. I believe the number of backlinks to be the major determinant in the higher ranking by home decorating made easy site.

But what about the third place site, HGTV? It has 203,974 pages and 7,285,773 backlinks. A behemoth by anyone’s standards. This is where relevance plays a role. HGTV has a lot of pages and backlinks, but not all of them were specifically relevant to the keyword term “Home Decorating.” At least not in Googles eyes.

If you enjoyed this exercise, play around with a few other keywords, and see if the number of backlinks doesn’t seem to play a role in most of them. As you do, you will come to appreciate how important backlinks are to ranking.

In our next article we will discuss some easy ways to get a bunch of high value backlinks. ( I should be charging for this. )

SEO Off Page III What is a backlink?

SEO Off Page III

What is a backlink?

I’ve already spent a couple articles talking at least in part about back links without specifically explaining what a backlink is.

According to Wikipedia, Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Thus when I create a hyper-link in this blog post to one of my Home Staging clients, Jane Ann Lance and her web site http://enhancedbylance.com it appears blue in most web browsers and you know that when you click on it, you will be taken to her web site. This is thus a back link to her web site and when the Google bot or one of the other search engine bots scans this page it will follow that link to her site and note it as a backlink. Notch one up for Jane Ann’s site.

Now even better would be a link to another of my home staging clients if instead of using her web address, I just sent you to this link: Hamptons Home Staging. In this case, the link is being made to http://www.styledandsold.com/home.html in the form of what is known as anchor text. This anchor text, “Hampton’s Home Staging” tells the bots that this back link is about Home Staging in the Hampton’s and reinforces the keywords on Allegra Dioguardi website. While both are backlinks, the second is more powerful.

Unfortunately, since we are now dealing with off page factors, you no longer have direct control over how others will link to you.

Thus we come to realize that not all backlinks are equal. Some are more important that others. A backlink from a blog that’s been published regularly for many months is going to have a somewhat more valuable link than one started today with just a single entry assuming the new blog is even visited by a bot. Even more valuable is a link from a site Google considers to be an authority site. Google has devised a series of page rankings that it uses to provide guidance as to the relative standing of various major web sites. A back link from a site with a 6 rank may be worth dozens of back links from dozens of unranked sites. That said, there is still a great deal of value in having back links from a large number of sites even if smaller.

So while we will be talking about some places where you can get some relatively highly ranked backlinks, don’t neglect getting links from lesser lights as well.

In our next session, we will show you how to get some backlinks with anchor text that you can control and that have high page ranks. The best of both worlds.

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines V

In our last discussion we talked about keyword density and the need to have your keywords appear on your page, frequently but not too frequently. The need to do so early on your page, and some suggestions on making sure you had enough words overall to appear substantive to the search engines and pointed out a need to have keywords that appear in your meta tags also appear on your page.

These are all important factors visible on your page. Today we will talk about three more elements of on-page importance. Your URL, the originality of your content and finally internal links.

You probably already have your URL or web site address. So this first topic may seem pointless, but let’s dig in anyway. If your business is counseling women going through a divorce on their financial matters, you may be better off trying to get www.DivorceeFinancialAdvice.com as your URL rather than www.JBBrown.com.

Way too many business web sites use meaningless business names as their URL in the hopes of creating some branding value. While some will take issue with me here, a URL that includes your major keyword may do you a lot more good, unless your brand is already deeply ingrained in your marketplace. Similarly, MinneapolisChiropractor.com
may be superior to WellnessClinic.com, although MinneapolisWellnessClinic may be worth a shot.

If you are wedded to www. your name.com you might still want to consider buying domain names of the better combinations of your major keywords and geographical areas and redirecting them to your web page. This serves a defensive purpose of keeping them out of potential competitor’s hands. Once you own these domains you can have them point to your existing web site. It’s not the ideal from an SEO standpoint but will help drive traffic to your site for the relatively minor cost of the domain name.

Originality of content shouldn’t be a problem for most business websites. But if your website is a template and you are using essentially the same text as another website, you may not get your site indexed at all. Google and the other search engines want to see unique new content, and not a duplicate of the same old thing. They will index the first copy they find and ignore the duplicates. You don’t want to have your site ignored. Make sure you are not using a carbon copy of someone else’s web site.

They also like to see new content. You can do that by adding new pages on occasion, or by making changes to existing pages. Is there a portion of your page that can be updated from time to time? If so, make sure you do so. This lets the search engines know that your site is active. That said, if you are going to do it, make sure you do. No one is impressed with a site that is talking about an upcoming holiday from two years ago.

Internal links are the links on your site to your various pages on the site. Most web sites have a home page and links on almost all their pages to “Home.” A better strategy is to use your major keyword, be it “Minneapolis Dentistry Home” or “St. Louis Sewer Repair Home.” By adding your keywords, you let the search engines know that that’s what your pages are about. It reinforces all your other keyword efforts.

This may be a bit tricky in some cases where space is tight, but where you can include links within the text of your pages to other pages, you should be sure to use anchor text links like this. Next week we will discuss off page factors. There we will go into more detail on linking to your site. When you are off page you have very little control on what links others will have to your site. When you have complete control such as on your own page, it behooves you to make maximum use of your ability to use internal links that let the search engines know what your pages are about.

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Don’t forget about my WART Analysis program. For next to nothing I will do a diagnostic of your web page and provide you with my personal advice on steps you could take to make your web page more effective in terms of search engine ranking.

Getting to the top of the Search Engines IV

In our last article, we discussed the hidden or invisible “on-page” factors that can help or hinder your ability to rank high on the Search Engines. Today we will look at some on-page factors that matter as well. By on page I am talking about the text that people can read on your home page.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, the key factor for any web site is your selection of keywords. These are important in both the visible and hidden portions of the page. They should be in your meta tag title tags, keyword list and description. They must also be on your page.

If the search engines see keywords in the hidden code that aren’t on your page, they will discount them and possibly even penalize your site.

Specifically you want to have your primary keywords appear in the first 50 words of your page text at least once. In the past some internet marketers tried to game the system. They would stuff their keyword on the page over and over to get a high ranking. Such tactics worked for a short while but Google and the other search engines changed their algorithms to punish keyword stuffing. The rule of thumb now is that you want your main keyword to appear between 1-4% of the time. If you have a thousand words on your page that would mean you would use your primary keyword from ten to forty times. For five hundred words of text that would be five to twenty times. This is called keyword density in the trade.

This is usually not a problem for most sites, but it does require keeping in mind which keyword you want your web page to rank for, and them being sure to use it when you are writing your page. When working with a home staging client, I noticed one occasion where they used the term “home stager” repeatedly, while the focus may have been better put on the term “home staging.”

By the way, if you have a top three or four keyword variations that people search for, you may want to have one page of your site optimized for one term, and another for the second, etc.

So, my home stager above might have stressed the term Home Staging on her home page, but talked about House Staging or Home Stagers on another page talking about services provided, or a third page on her certifications, Qualifications etc. This takes a bit more time, but helps raise your sites ability to rise to the top not just on your main keyword but on other keywords as well.

The final topic we will discuss today is total word count. It appears that the magical number of words on a page that the search engines like to see is 425. In my experience most business web sites don’t have that many on their home pages, while most information sites do. The search engine bias is toward sites that provide more information, so it’s not hard to understand that they would tend to reward sites that appear to be “meatier.”

For many of the sites I have reviewed in my WART Analysis program I have had to suggest they add a paragraph or two of text to their front page. And since I am an advocate of using geographical keywords in the meta tags I encourage them to consider adding their geography to their home pages as well.

Many of them have followed this suggestion and added a final paragraph on each of their pages. A butcher for example might include on the bottom of each page a phrase like the following: “South Minneapolis’ premier source of quality meats serving Minneapolis, Richfield and Bloomington as well as the Highland neighborhood and the rest of St Paul.” This adds some words to the page, and also the geographical keywords to complement those in the meta tags.

One final comment on words on the page. Words that are placed on images or graphical elements such as on your header are usually invisible to the search engines and don’t count as keywords on the page, or in the total page or first 50 word counts. If you put your cursor on your header and right click and do not see View Source or View Page source in the box that appears, you are probably on an image that cannot be read. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need to keep it in mind when designing your page so it can compete in the search engines.

That’s it for today. We will continue with on page visible factors in the next article. After that we will explore off page factors.

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines 3

The hidden essentials to attract the search engine bots are your title tags, your keywords and your meta description. In addition, your keyword should appear on your page in an <h1> tag. We will discuss each in this article.

First let’s talk about where to find your hidden code. Go to a place on your website where there is text and not an image. Right click, and a box will appear with a number of options. Look for one that says View Page or View Page Source, click on it. It should bring up the HTML code that is behind your web page.

Near the very top will be a header tag. It looks like this <head>.

A variety of different types of code can be placed here. For our purposes, the three important items are the title tag, the keywords, and the description. Sometimes one of more of these will be missing.

This section of code always ends with an end tag that looks like this: </head>

The next section of the code starts with the body tag, <body> and this is where the parts of the page that are visible appear. But except for the <h1> tag we won’t be dealing with that today.

Title Tags.

Each page of your web site has a title tag. The title tag will show at the very top left of your browser when you are on the page. When you go to some people’s web page you will see the word “Home” in the top left. That’s because they named their home page “Home.” More frequently you will see the company name, ABC Jones & Company or something similar.

In terms of search engine optimization, you would be better off to include your primary keyword and your primary geography. So if you were ABC Jones, I would consider putting “ABC Jones & Co San Diego Home Staging Experts” or “ABC Jones New Jersey’s Best Wedding Arranger.”

The title goes between the <title> and the </title>

Each page has a different title so you might add a Pipe sign after that and use, About us, Contact us and your other page names on the relevant page.

Keywords:

You should also see a line of code that starts with, <meta name=”keywords” content=” and then a series or word separated by commas.

Most businesses have more than one keyword that people use when they are trying to find you. Hopefully you have identified the primary one or ones. Keyword research is a major topic on its own, and one you should pay attention to. For example, while home staging is the dominant keyword to use in the home staging business, about 10% of people will type in “house staging” when looking for a home stager. You want to include the keyword “house staging” in your keywords.

Note that this two word phrase is still a keyword. Internet marketers have long know that you want to use keyword phrases, because that’s what some people type. Two and three word phrases and sometime longer yet can generate positive results for them. If you are the only person who puts “best specialty cold cuts in Chicago” in your keywords, and also in the body of your site, there’s a pretty good chance you will pop up pretty high if someone actually searches for that term. Now don’t go hog wild, as relatively few people will use the phrase.

The key here is to focus on what people who don’t really know what to ask for are likely to use when they are trying to find you.

Finally, I recommend that you use not only “fresh cut flowers” as a keyword but “Toronto fresh cut flowers” if you are a Toronto florist. Use the suburbs you sell to as well. When someone searches for Pizza in the search engines millions of sites appear. When they search for Pizza, 55417 a zip code, they get those closest to home.

Description
Similar to the Keywords, you should see a line of code in the meta tags called description. This should be kept to 160 characters. Some search engine results display this description when your site comes up in their listings. As such you may want to make it a sales pitch. You want to come up with a coherent statement using as many of your best keywords as possible, especially including your primary geographical reference points.

If you say, “Dog Walker in Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, Edina….etc.,” even though you might not come up number one on the listing yet, a person from Edina or St Louis Park will recognize that you are in their bailiwick. They may check you out before the top guy, just because they see that you are local to them. This is a side benefit, worth getting, but your primary intention is to rank high when the search for “dog walker Edina,” rather than “dog walker Minneapolis.”

While you want to focus your site on your largest geographical target, consider using the smaller ones as well, but don’t get carried away, you only have 160 characters. When consulting with others, I try to include at least the top three keywords and then work as much geography as I can all the while trying to make a strong sales pitch. It’s an art form.

<H1> Tags

You may have a header on your web site that may have been designed as an image or may be in HTML code. Many web sites will consider this their headline and launch right into the body of their message on their main page. This is a mistake.

Start you page with a headline. That headline should include if at all possible your primary keywords including you primary geographical market. This is done by using <h1> tags in the HTML code for the headlines. Thus while the headline is visible the code isn’t.

So if you are a Hair Salon in South Omaha, you might top you page with </h1><h1> South Omaha’s Premier Hair Salon </h1> in the meta tags. This will automatically make it headline size on your actual page. More importantly, it will let the little bots searching your page that these are important words and what your page is all about. And that is what you want.

The four steps outlined above are crucial first steps to getting your page optimized for the search engines. We’ve covered a lot of material here. If you have any questions, let me know.

In the next issue we will talk about some of the visible on page factors. This ran a bit long today, so I may break the next section into two parts.

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If you would like to have me take a close and personal look at your web site, I am offering a special deal on my new diagnostic service. The price is incredibly low, and the service a great value. I will look and see what if you need to make any changes to your site and actually call you and discuss them with you. For more info go to www.askearlabout.com/WART/index.html