You are here: Home / Archives for Google

Google Creates a Search Engine Optimization Guide

November 15, 2008 By 12 Comments

Well this was a shocker for me, I never thought I would hear of Google encouraging search engine optimization but sure enough they created the “Search Engine Optimization Guide” and posted it on the official blog.  This is one of those moves that I won’t completely understand but it does make you wonder; why would a search engine want to teach you how to manipulate their algorithm?

My analysis on this would be that they are fully aware that the sites that rank well in their algorithms are due to people gaming the system, so by logic the most skilled internet marketers will be the ones that rise to the top.  As a result, the best content will typically go with these marketers as all sides are trying to maximize their profits, but they realize this creates a system where it becomes extremely difficult for an average person to climb through the hierarchy.

In short, I view it as a move that signals the start of a trend of decentralization of power as they try to give some of the smaller websites a shot at some of the keywords that haven’t spent as much time building links.  As the ebook is heavily focused in on the various on-page SEO factors I feel it plays into the trend I have been noticing in which Google has started putting far more emphasis on the on-page factors than they have in the past.

One way or another, it was certainly an intriguing move and it looks like it will work out to be a good resource for new webmasters.  Hopefully they add it to their webmaster guidelines so that all new marketers can see it and get a little boost in the right direction.  Since I’m sure you guys would like to read it yourself you can either visit the official Google blog, or download the ebook.

On that note feel free to download my own ebook, which goes into the SEO topics that Google will never share with anyone else.

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to Get your Site Indexed in Under 2 Days

November 11, 2008 By 7 Comments

I have been bombarded with emails lately from people asking me how to quickly get a new site in Google, so this post is for those of you with new sites or old sites that need some new love.  Typically when I create a new website I see it indexed the day I post it, and I have seen sites get indexed within 1-2 hours of their creation.  While getting indexed quickly is always fun, just remember that being in the index doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank for any valuable keywords, or even for the name of your own site for that matter.

The first thing you should do once your website is live is post the domain to Google and other search engines.  I have always used AddMe for my search engine submission just because it was the first thing on Google when I created my first website and they have never let me down.  I wouldn’t sign up for the newsletter though, it is basically just all advertisements.

The second thing you should do is create a sitemap and submit this to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this will ensure that all of your content gets included in the index, not just your homepage.  There are plenty of free tools out there to create a sitemap, I typically just use whatever is at the top of a Google search.

The third step is to check your website’s onpage search engine optimization, especially check to see that every page links to another page in some way, try to have as many pages link to each other as possible to give a more thorough distribution of PageRank and spidering later on in the process.

The fourth step is pretty simple, create a robots.txt file for your website.  Without a robots.txt file search engines are not allowed to index your website, and as a result you won’t ever get indexed.  Just create a blank text file that says “User-agent: *” then next line “Disallow: ” named robots.txt and put it on the domain level directory on your server.  Leave disallow blank unless you have pages you don’t want indexed.

The fifth step is the most fun, because this is where you will get your first backlinks to your website.  This is the key to getting indexed in hours.  The way that Google determines when to index your site is either by putting you in a line via webmaster tools, or by finding your site via their crawler.  It can take months to get indexed without any backlinks, so it is essential that you build backlinks pointing to your site.  The way I typically do this is by submitting my site to StumbleUpon, Digg, and Furl then I go onto all of the forums I post on, and change my signature to have a link to my new website.  As a result, I rarely have to wait more than 5 hours to get indexed.  To make this even more likely to be successful, post on popular do-follow blogs as well.

Sixth step is simply checking the results, a day or so after following these steps try typing site:www.yourdomain.com and see whether you have made it into Google.  If you are, congratulations, start working on your content and building relevant links to start ranking for keywords.  If you aren’t wait 3 days and if you still aren’t then start commenting on more blog posts, especially new ones.

With this site, I typically see my new posts indexed within half an hour, I have seen them indexed in as little as 7 minutes before (As a side note, this post got indexed 5 minutes after it was posted).  To get more tips and tricks download my new ebook which is an internet marketing ebook with a focus on blogging, “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why Digg Users Don’t “Digg” You

October 29, 2008 By 1 Comment

In one of my first posts on this blog, Using Social Bookmarking Responsibly, I talked about how people far too often abuse the system rather than work with it.  Lately I have been seeing more and more “Digg exchanges” both on Digg itself and various social blog networks such as BlogCatalog.  It isn’t quite to the point it was when DigitalPoint was running rampant with digg exchanges or the glory days or DiggBoss, but it also isn’t a pretty scene.

The thing I always find funny, is that the people that are trying to exploit this Digg traffic are typically submitting stories so far from the Digg base that it is comical.  I wish I could find one that I saw a month ago, because commentary on it would definitely make it to the front page.  It was a post a travel website that was about visiting Puerto Rico that randomly injected “We use Linux for our server and we love Obama AND Ron Paul!”, which at least shows they get the concept.

These are the reasons why your post will NOT make it to the front page of Digg, despite the fact that you would really like that:

  • Your post is plastered in affiliate links
  • You are a travel agency, cable company, fake rolex salesman, pharmaceutical company, or “mak mone on internet!” website.
  • You are far too obviously appealing to the Digg crowd by overstating your love for the current Digg fad.  (I love: Obama, Ron Paul, Linux, Macs, internet meme’s, hacking, microchips, Nader, Google, trashing Palin, sharks [don't ask me, lately that keeps making front page], Nvidia, dissing Fox News, video games, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, anti-creationism, people “fail.”ing).
  • You cannot consider your mastery of the English language to even be “conversational” (Kind of like how my roommate speaks “conversational Spanish” on his resume).
  • You don’t include one of the above topics.
  • You post something with no chance of going viral, you need quality content such as Sneezing Panda
  • You are over the age of 60
  • You are under the age of 15
  • You are part of either: “The Establishment” or “The Problem”
  • Your posts all include that really annoying embedded Digg button despite none of them being interesting
  • You smell like a Republican
  • You can’t recognize any of the top 100 Digg’ers
  • You are “too cool for school”
  • Nobody cares about what you are trying to get people to Digg, since it is bogged down in ads.
  • Most important of all: You actually don’t realize that this post is sarcastic yet true.

So there you have it, if you wish to see 75,000 visitors on your website so they can crash your servers and then point you towards a Digg post on why you shouldn’t use Windows hosting, study this list and make the necessary modifications.

*cough* And on that note: My Barack Obama.

Feel free to sign up for my RSS feed or comment on this post :-)

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Monitoring Your Backlinks

October 8, 2008 By 3 Comments

One of the most enjoyable parts of internet marketing is checking your statistics, I try to limit how often I do it so that I don’t waste time on it yet we all know the joy of checking your ClickBank account and seeing some cash tacked onto your monthly check.  When I am creating a static website that has stand-alone content that is not often updated I love checking the number of links leading into it.

Often on forums I hear people asking where to get a good backlink checker, search engine results placement checker, etc.  I am a big fan of new tools, so if you know of a great tool feel free to post it in the comments and I might stick it into this post.  Here’s the list of tools that I typically use once a week for my websites:

Yahoo Site Explorer – A tool that displays all of the backlinks to your website that are in Yahoo’s index, as the second largest search engine this results in a very good overall picture of your backlinks.  Google’s “link:” command is basically worthless but Yahoo is willing to divulge the extent of their link discoveries.

Search Engine Genie Google Position Checker – One of my absolute favorites, this is a tool that you can use unlimited times (free!) for checking where your website ranks in Google for a given search term 1000 rankings deep.  I use it all the time, so they deserve a free link, I highly recommend it.

SmartPageRank Backlink Checker Tool – This is another great tool, it checks the number of backlinks to your site and then gives you the option to also get the PR of those pages, anchor text, and presence of “nofollow” tags on the links.

Google Blog Search – A great tool for bloggers as it shows the links incoming to your site from other blogs.  Not everything that links to you will generate a ping, so this is a great way for bloggers to check how they fare in the blogosphere.

For traffic checking I typically use Google Analytics and MyBlogLog, I prefer the layout of MyBlogLog to G.A. so I typically check that more often than analytics.

Remember not to get too caught up in statistics, many people will literally spend hours checking how much money they are making, traffic they are gaining, etc.  A watched pot never boils, and the time you spend checking stats will take away from the time you spend building links and traffic.

If you have any other great tools, feel free to post them.  If not, subscribe to my RSS feed :-)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,