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SEO? Oh, I’ve heard of that before!

June 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

seo Earlier this week I was headed down the elevator and a guy made small talk by asking what I do. As an entrepreneur it usually takes a bit of effort to get people to understand what is that I actually do. I told him that I run a bunch of websites that bring in visitors using search engine optimization techniques.  To my surprise he responded by saying: “SEO? Oh, I’ve heard of that before.”

After thinking about it for a little while, I realized that for the past 6 months, whenever I mention “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” to people not directly involved in the internet marketing industry the majority of them actually have a pretty good idea of what I am talking about. This was not the always the case. When I first started doing SEO in 2007 people always seemed convinced that I either worked for Google (especially if I mentioned AdSense) or they would just say something along the lines of “I’m horrible with computers” to hint that they weren’t quite following me.

What I have realized is that most people that have heard of SEO associate it with some news story, such as the J.C. Penney’s SEO story in the NY Times or Overstock getting caught buying .edu links off students and faculty. Many people have even heard of Google’s Panda algorithm change because it had enough of an impact on the average online business owner (either positive or negative) for it to spring up stories in major news outlets.

Here’s a Google Trends graph for the search term SEO over the past 6 years. While the top graph does seem to flatten off a bit in the past year I do find it interesting to also look at the bottom graph for “news reference volume” which shows a big jump starting in 2007.

 

What does all this increased publicity towards our industry mean? It means that we are in the right industry. It means that more businesses are seeing the value in showing up in Google, Bing, and Yahoo for search terms related to their own industry. Companies are hiring more SEO consulting firms and expanding their own in-house SEO teams and it means that companies are now searching for more well rounded marketing candidates that can also integrate SEO and social media into their marketing strategies.

As companies hire more SEO professionals and media outlets pay more attention to algorithmic changes the more likely it is that the next time you offer your business card to somebody they will understand what it is that you do.

The next time you are in an elevator ask the person next to you if they have heard of search engine optimization and then post your findings in the comments section!

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

Spending a Little Time Upfront

December 23, 2008 By 6 Comments

One of the horrible habits I have established since early on in my marketing career is that I quickly move from one project to the next, and left by the waist side is typically design.

I have begun a new project in which I will review a large amount of “digital products” such as those sold via ClickBank. Since I intend to go through hundreds of different products, I might as well make my time count in the long run by optimizing my site upfront. Even the slightest error I am going through and correcting, whether it be a slight malformation in URL’s or one of the many Joomla! plugins that I have installed. So far my first experience with Joomla has been very positive, while it is somewhat self explanatory once you add in a bunch of components then your .htaccess file as well as many PHP files become incompatible so it takes patience.

Thankfully I have jumped over most of the hurdles, and I consider the design portion to be almost complete (I am still searching for a better template for the site), but all the behind the scenes work for optimizing load times and intrasite linking for SEO has been done.

I am looking forward to see how this works out, as I will essentially be targeting a list of 3000 long tail keywords I have spent the past days researching.

Once again I am sorry that I don’t post as often as I should, I am working full time on top of marketing during the Winter break from school so it kills the majority of my free time. If you would like to check out my site conceptually at least (since it has no content), it is http://www.productscamreviews.com

Happy Holidays everyone!!

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , , ,

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: , , , , , ,

Finding link partners and link exchanges

November 7, 2008 By 6 Comments

Link exchanges are one of the most popular ways to gain links today, but the thing I do not understand is why people waste their time creating useless exchanges.  If you are going to do a link exchange, then do yourself a favor and don’t make it obvious to Google by creating a “links” page and sticking your partners on there.  The value to your partner from this will be abysmal at best, and will also draw the gaze of Google.  People doing these types of exchanges are also more likely to back out of a link exchange without mentioning it, so make sure to check up on them to see that your links are still present.

So that’s the way most people do it, but what are better ways to create link exchanges?  Well first start off by finding reputable sources in the same niche as you that work as complements rather than competitors.  If you find them by searching for the keyword you are aiming for, then it would be stupid to expect an anchor text that will help you rank for that term.   Do a search of semi-relevant terms, such as when I want links for my “online money making” website, I would look for people in the “paid surveys” niche as the content keywords will match very closely and I get great conversions on my survey products.

One alternative to a direct link exchange is a 3-way link exchange, which are somewhat better received by Google.  These involve you linking to one site, they will link to another site, and that site will link back to you.  For my time, these aren’t worth it simply due to the additional effort in coordinating two other people not to mention finding three websites in the same niche, with similar traffic and backlinks, that will work with you.

Googles headquarters (Wikipedia)

Google's headquarters (Wikipedia)

For bloggers, the link exchange world opens up even more.  Links are the currency of the web, and as a result if you find a blog you like, then you can put them on your blogroll then post a few comments on their blog and see if they notice themselves.  This is the informal form of a link exchange, because many times they will give you a link back, as a result you each have sitewide links bouncing between each other as well as related traffic.  While I do occasionally get requests via email for link exchanges, I would prefer these informal gestures, and they are also what I do on my other blogs.  By actually becoming friends with other bloggers in your niche you will find that blogging becomes more enjoyable, and based on game theory it will also be more profitable for each of you to work together.

Moral of the story: play fair with others and it will help your reputation, and if you do nice things online, then people will often be kind in return.

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