GaryTheScubaGuy - PPC Manager Expert & Company

Quicksilver £1000 Snowboard Giveaway for posting a Twitter Follow.

2011-12-30T14:01:00.000Z

Quicksilver Games has a £1000 Snowboard Giveaway for posting a Twitter Follow.
Quicksilver

G+ and +1 for SEO

2011-12-20T07:06:00.000Z

Social Media SEO - Google’s G+, +1 and SEO
It has been over a year now since Google Plus was released and lots of juicy information has come out so I thought I would hit on the high-points for those that do not follow SEO or Social Media the way we SEO Freaks do.
Assuming this article will be read by a mix of people with different depths of knowledge about G+ and +1 and what it is all about I’ll briefly explain all you need to know.
I’m not going to go into the non-SEO elements like Google Stream or Google Sparks that are meant to follow topics of interest. I want to keep this article strictly SEO and tell you how these can be used to help increase your traffic and your rankings.
The concept behind G+ and +1 is simple; copy what Facebook did.
Google saw an opportunity as well as the growth of all social networks and decided to try and get in on it.
There are actually three distinct parts to G+ & +1;
Circles and other Social Media Elements
The first part is a more personal page like you see on Facebook, the difference being you create “circles” of friends and classify them into each group accordingly. When you come across an interesting piece of content you simply share it with individual circles (e.g. Friends, Family, or a custom group that you create)
+1 Button (this is actually a separate tool but I have added it here)
The second part of G+ is a "+1 button" to allow people to recommend sites and parts of sites, similar in use to Facebook's Like button. If you have the feature turned on you will see a little button at the end of each result when you are using Google to search, provided your pointer is hovering over the URL. If you perform a search and a site that someone in your circle has clicked the G+ button on you will see their name below the listing;

You will also want to add the +1 badge to your website. Google+ will gain more users and websites will integrate them more in the future, meaning that the information we share will be pushed to more and more people. This presents an excellent opportunity to promote our websites, much in the way that Twitter and Facebook have done up until now.
The G+ Page
And last but not least, the best element from an SEO’s standpoint; The G+ Page.

In the beginning it was only made available to non-business related applications and Google even went as far as to shut down pages that were obviously there for business related reasons. Even Sesame Street fell victim to Google’s wrath.

Google finally released its features to everyone a few months after its original release and the dashboard lit up.

Okay so you are saying, “So how can I use this in terms of SEO?”

After excruciatingly testing various aspects of G+ and +1 I determined that in terms of actually boosting your search engine rankings G+ and +1 have not yet been integrated into the algorithm. An example of this is taking one of my ranking sites, adding the G+ badge, then going to Fiverr.com and buying a bunch (100’s) of G+ votes over the period of a few months and from different networks. Nothing.

Then I tried setting up a network of unique IP’s and over the period of about 60 days each of these hundreds of individual searches ticked the +1 button that showed up in the search. Nothing.

In terms of the SEO benefit from either the +1 or the G+ buttons it’s a matter of the size of your network. Those sites with the G+ badge or those that have received a ‘vote’ or +1 click from someone in your network were featured more prominently as seen in image 2.

Additionally, Google pulls in data from other social networks. So let’s say you or someone in your circle did a Twitter post. Google may even show that in their results if you are signed in to your Google account.

I’m curious to see over the next 12 months what Google’s long term plan will be with G+ and +1 as they both parallel Google’s other tools nicely. Although I wasn’t able to identify any real effect on rankings while testing the thresholds of G+ and +1 for SEO, I think Google will definitely be using this as a metric in the future. After all, they are already allowing it to alter the way their results appear and losing real estate at the same time. Oh, plus there’s this that they let slip a couple months ago;

Google is encouraging web publishers to start adding +1 buttons to their pages, and the message in this meeting was clear, “Put a Plus One button on your pages or your search traffic will suffer.” Interview with Google Guys Posted on August 18th, 2011 on Forbes site (just before they removed it)

My thoughts at this point is better safe than caught behind the eight ball. Prepare for everything.

I would (at the very least) add a multiple choice Social Bookmark bar onto your sites. At the end of the day Social Media as a whole benefits your rankings and your traffic to an extent. I have tested Twitter and Facebook to see if they enhanced search rankings and both definitely did. This leads me to believe that Google just hasn’t turned on the tap yet and better things are yet to come.

On a side note there are some great programs that can automate your Facebook and Twitter account. TweetAdder and Facebook Adder are two, but shop around. They are cheap and very functional.

You can contact me at garythescubadiver gmail

Gary R. Beal is the Head of Search at Blueclaw Media in Leeds, UK. He has been in the Search Engine Optimization field for 12 years. He attended Ohio State University in the US and holds a Masters Degree in Biometrics and Mathematical Statistics. He specialises in SEO for very competitive markets; primarily in Gaming, Dating, Travel, Insurance and Financial Industries. He has spoken at many SES, SMX ,CAP, AAC, EIG, G2E, AIG, GPWA, CAC and A4UExpo conferences around Europe and has also been on dozens of expert SEO panels. Gary has written specialised articles for multiple online marketing publications and Moderates on 3 separate Affiliate forums and as an Affiliate has great insight. He is known best for his free 1-on-1 sessions during conferences and his non-commercial, plain talk delivery. The online world knows him as GaryTheScubaGuy and his Top 12 SEO Tips.
Gary can be contacted at Blueclaw offices at 0113 234 3300

Blocking Bad Back Links and blocking IP's or Bad Neighbourhood Links

2011-11-22T08:51:00.001Z

Blocking Bad Back Links and IP's

Here is the process I mentioned yesterday to block bad back links;

The problem; Google bowling or bad SEO created multiple bad back links from porn sites but you can't contact (or don't want to spend the weeks it could take) them to get them removed.

The Solution; Download the back links from Majestic SEO. Run them through the bulk URL check at SearchMetrics. Isolate the url's that you want to block.

If the site is on an Apache server you can build the block into the htaccess file from the cpanel. I believe you can also configure a mod rewrite for this but haven't done it myself and you would only want a 403 to be returned for specific IPs.

If you have control of the server you can use pre-built GUI programs like PG2, Peerblock or ProxyBlock

Last option is to contact the ISP (like with domains that will not allow cpanel/backend access) directly and ask them to block the list of IP's. This is a bit more difficult because the last time I went through it (4 yrs ago) many of the tech guys didn't know how to do this without detailed instructions.

I have also built the htaccess file with bad IP's already in it and sent it over with simple instructions to look it over and then upload it and this seems to work if they understand what you are doing it for.

You can find more tips From an SEO Company at www.BlueClaw.co.uk. We are located in Leeds, UK.

Paid links

2011-09-17T16:17:00.000+01:00

Paid links

Simon on the Streets

2011-09-12T10:07:00.000+01:00

Blueclaw is trying to raise £500 for Simon on the Streets, can you help us meet our target?

Published: September 9th, 2011 By: Martin Woods In: charity

On the night of September 29^th, some of the Blueclaw SEO team are doing their bit for charity and will be sleeping on the streets of Leeds for ‘Simon on the streets’. Simon on the streets is a charity that aims to help those who don’t have anywhere to live, especially those with sleeping issues who cannot get access to other services. In a city where there could be hundreds of homeless people it’s really important to us to do our bit and try and make a difference to these people’s lives.
Do you want to get involved?
If so it’s not too late to sign up at www.simononthestreets.co.uk or if you don’t fancy that why not drop us a few quid on our just giving account.

Marketing Success TV Video Search - gary beal

2011-08-30T06:49:00.000+01:00

Marketing Success TV Video Search - gary beal:

'via Blog this'

The Canadian Gambler Casino Review Site

2011-06-27T01:03:00.001+01:00

One of the best gaming review sites I have senn in awhile; www.thecanadiangambler.com. Way to go Todd.

Confirmed: Google Showing Google +1 Counts To Logged Out Users

2011-06-23T08:14:00.001+01:00

Confirmed: Google Showing Google +1 Counts To Logged Out Users

http://selnd.com/jiNIgC

20/200 poker challenge - Google Search

2011-06-18T08:56:00.000+01:00

20/200 poker challenge - Google Search

20 poker hands in 200 seconds against 20 top poker pros.

http://www.poker-codes.net

2011-06-17T02:55:00.001+01:00

Screaming Frog

After a fellow member of the GPWA SEO forum mentioned an oddity with Screaming Frog, a brilliant piece of software, I have to say I am puzzled by why must be obvious.

I get 2 separate figures when I do a back link search for URL's with and without the trailing slash.

WEBSITE WITHOUT TRAILING SLASH

According to Apache and Microsoft if an inquiry arrive without the / it is redirected to the non / version.

But why the difference in backlinks?

Download Screaming Frog - It's free

Download Windows Version — Download Mac Version

Please note – The standard ‘Lite’ version of the tool is completely free, however this version is limited to crawling a maximum of 500 URI and it does not give you full access to the configuration options of the spider. These include crawl options for images, css, javascript, external links, follow ‘nofollow’, limiting search total and depth, ignoring robots.txt directives, exclude list and the custom source code feature.

Canonicalisation Tag

2011-06-15T06:10:00.001+01:00

I actually ran some testing on this a couple years back and url's with trailing slashes tended to be prominent, but with the canonical rel tag it ended, which is what you should be using anyhow. Even worse is when I see a site with multiple/duplicate pages with variable extensions like .com, .com/index, .com/index.htm, etc. because not only does this confuse Google but they may also pick the wrong page as your primary because of internal and external links pointing to it. I see this happening mostly with internal links though, but either way if you have 100 links with half going to one and half to the other you are splitting the benefits they offer. On your index page go into WMC and name your primary domain selection.

Choose one URL as the preferred version. If your site has a directory structure, it’s more conventional to use a trailing slash with your directory URLs (e.g.,example.com/directory/ rather than example.com/directory), but you’re free to choose whichever you like.
Be consistent with the preferred version. Use it in your internal links. If you have aSitemap, include the preferred version (and don’t include the duplicate URL).
Use a 301 redirect from the duplicate to the preferred version. If that’s not possible, rel=”canonical” is a strong option. rel=”canonical” works similarly to a 301 for Google’s indexing purposes, and other major search engines as well.
Test your 301 configuration through Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools. Make sure your URLs:
http://example.com/foo/
http://example.com/foo
are behaving as expected. The preferred version should return 200. The duplicate URL should 301 to the preferred URL.
Check for Crawl errors in Webmaster Tools, and, if possible, your webserver logs as a sanity check that the 301s are implemented.
Profit! (just kidding) But you can bask in the sunshine of your efficient server configuration, warmed by the knowledge that your site is better optimized.

Online Casinos & Responsible Gambling

2011-06-13T13:28:00.000+01:00

Online Casinos & Responsible Gambling

Gambling is a form of entertainment enjoyed by millions of people every day. Gambling offers a form of excitement that other activities just can’t touch no matter if it is playing the slots, watching the spin of the roulette wheel, or pushing “all in” while playing poker. Casino gambling is fun and exciting but it can also be risky and gamblers need to be cautious with their play.

Most importantly players need to avoid gambling addiction, a very serious problem that can ruin your life. Like any addiction, gambling addiction means that you just can’t stop yourself from playing one more hand of Texas Hold’em or taking one more pull on the slot machine. People who are addicted will lie to loved ones, risk money that they need for bills and mortgages, and put their homes and jobs at risk. Online gambling addiction is serious but nothing to be ashamed of. If you feel that you are having problems staying away from the casino web site seek help from an addiction support center immediately.

There are dozens of places to play casino games online. No matter if your game is poker, slots, roulette or blackjack there is a web site that will give you the game you want to play. Because of the incredible amount of money the online gambling industry rakes in every year, there are sites that are far less reputable than others. Online casino fraud is a real concern and you should protect yourself against it as much as possible. Make sure to check out reviews of the site from actual players on gambling forums. If there is a site that is trying to scam players out of money, the best way to find out about it is from other players.

Bankroll management is also important if you want to play at an online casino. Managing your bankroll simply means taking steps to insure that you do not spend more than you are comfortable with. Always keep your gambling funds separate from your household funds and be strict with yourself about not dipping into the house fund to rebuild the casino fund. Gambling is not going to go away anytime soon, so if you run out of money today the games will still be there next month when you have some more cash to play with.

Finally you want to be careful not to get swindled into purchasing any sort of gambling “systems”. For centuries hucksters have been trying to scam desperate gamblers by offering them a guaranteed roulette or blackjack system that just can’t lose. Some of these systems are simply ridiculous and others actually could work if the casinos hadn’t already taken steps to prevent them from working. There is no such thing as a sure fire way to win at any game, no matter how much fancy math and testimonials someone tries to show you. If someone says they have a gambling system they want to sell you, walk away.

With the proper precautions, online gambling can be as safe as it is fun. There is no reason why you can’t enjoy a few pulls of the slots or a long night of poker every month when you manage your money and avoid the scammers. Just remember that gambling taps directly into the pleasure centers of your brain and if you are not careful, addiction can set in. If you feel that you have a gambling problem, seek help immediately before you lose your entire bank account.

Video:+Google+Panda+2.2+Update,+Bing+Webmaster+Tools,+Uncle+Sam+Search+&+More

2011-06-13T06:14:00.000+01:00

Video:+Google+Panda+2.2+Update,+Bing+Webmaster+Tools,+Uncle+Sam+Search+&+More

Marketing Success TV Video Search - vanguard

2011-04-16T06:32:00.000+01:00

Marketing Success TV Video Search - vanguard: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Article Posting Websites

2011-02-12T14:30:00.002Z

EA: 7% of mobile gaming done on toilet Mobile News - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

2011-02-12T14:28:00.000Z

EA: 7% of mobile gaming done on toilet Mobile News - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Sandton Convention Centre - 20 to 22 July 2011 | SAOMA

2011-02-10T15:33:00.000Z

Sandton Convention Centre - 20 to 22 July 2011 | SAOMA: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Play smartphone casino - free casino or real money big bonus casino!

2011-02-09T23:51:00.000Z

Play smartphone casino - free casino or real money big bonus casino!: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Caribbean Gaming Show & Conference March 3-4

2011-02-09T23:49:00.000Z

Caribbean Gaming Show & Conference March 3-4: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Google Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

2010-10-04T02:33:00.000+01:00

Theresub domains things to consider here.

[B]First off, Google sees sub domains as completely different sites[/B] and you can rank both in top 10 (provided everything else is in order of course).

Another gem is that if you create a new sub domain and link to it from the primary TLD it will pass a significant amount of PR or trust and authority almost immediately.

This give you a jump start in the SERPs.

Taking this a step further I would get a new A-address from your provider and host it in your target country.

Saturating the UK and the US is one of the most difficult combination in any market so I recommend all the above, plus use geo-targeting In WMC and at the least use country based meta tags.

[B]Next, as far as duplicate content goes[/B] using subdomains rather than TLD's will resolve this issue.

Just like I mentioned above Google sees these as separate domains - when it comes to SERPs; but as far as content they know that it is a sub domain and will understand based on the metas, hosting and geo-targeting that there is no duplication penalty.

Duplication penalties are caused by separate websites being identical with none of the above steps being taken, and are usually deserved.

Since you own the co.UK domain, rather than waste it away with a non-beneficial 301 (since you mentioned the lack of back links), pop a word press or php BB/vBulletin with RSS feeds on it.

You could even use a combination of automated programs like scrapebox, sick, market samurai, x-rumer (since its a brand new unpopulated forum) to auto-create profiles and populate it with posts. Set up 4-5 primary forums with random rss feeds 9in other words mix them up so they are not the exact same feed someone else is pushing).

Over time this self populated, cruise-control forum/blog will gain rankings, an you could even build a few links to it from your other sites.

I should also mention that [B]now that Google UK WMC allows geo-targeting of subdomain[/B]s you could also use this to your advantage. Create a /UK sub directory (right under the root) and put up a 300 word article referencing the UK, UK terms, and even link out to significant UK sites. Use UK meta tags and add a link in the content to the sub domain.

Do some social bookmarking on the new sub domain and ping it through 1-3rd tier ping tools like [URL=http://goo.gl/pH4h]scrapebox[/URL] . This tool also has an RSS submitter you could use for your RSS feed .co.uk forum/blog I mentioned earlier.

If you buy links, buy co.uk links to the sub domain and .com links to the US domain.

You can also use nofollow's to siphon your index PR directly down through to your sub domain. I did a post of why and how to use [URL=http://www.garythescubaguy.com/53/]nofollows here[/URL]

Google Reinclusion

2010-02-07T07:11:00.001Z

Found a good bit of info on Google Reinclusion;

dofollow forums

2009-08-09T08:50:00.001+01:00

1. http://forums.digitalpoint.com
2. http://www.vuju.com/
3. http://checkthisup.com
4. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums
5. http://www.thewebmasterforum.net
6. http://www.webmasterforums.com
7. http://www.allcoolforum.com
8. http://www.warriorforum.com
9. http://forums.webicy.com
10. http://thehyipforum.com
11. http://www.webmasterforumsonline.com
12. http://www.webmasters.am/forum
13. http://www.webmasterforums.net
14. http://www.devhunters.com
15. http://www.webmaster-forum.net
16. http://www.geekvillage.com/forums
17. http://www.zymic.com/forum
18. http://www.webmastershelp.com
19. http://www.webmasterdesk.org
20. http://www.webmasterground.com
21. http://developers.evrsoft.com/forum
22. http://www.websitebabble.com
23. http://www.elancetalk.com
24. http://www.talkingcity.com
25. http://www.australianwebmaster.com
26. http://www.wtricks.com
27. http://www.forums.webzonetalk.com
28. http://www.htmlforums.com
29. http://www.searchbliss.com/forum
30. http://www.webmasterize.com
31. http://www.webmasterserve.com
32. http://www.freehostforum.com
33. http://www.seorefugee.com/forums
34. http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums
35. http://forums.seo.ph
36. http://forums.delphiforums.com
37. http://www.web-mastery.net
38. http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/index.php
39. http://www.webproworld.com
40. http://www.bzimage.org
41. http://www.v7n.com/forums
42. http://www.dnforum.com
43. http://www.webcosmoforums.com
44. http://forums.webicy.com
45. http://forum.hittail.com/phpbb2/index.php
46. http://www.affiliateseeking.com/forums
47. http://siteownersforums.com/index.php
48. http://www.webmaster-forums.net
49. http://www.geekpoint.net
50. http://www.smallbusinessforums.org
51. http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com
52. http://www.experienceadvertising.com/forum
53. http://opensourcephoto.net/forum
54. http://forums.seochat.com
55. http://forums.searchenginewatch.com
56. http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums
57. http://dishnews.medianetwork.co.in/yabb2/YaBB.pl
58. http://www.businesss-forum.com
59. http://www.9mb.com
60. http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums
61. http://forums.seroundtable.com
62. http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs
63. http://www.startups.co.uk/6678842908486596004/forums.html
64. http://www.webmaster-talk.com
65. http://forums.comicbookresources.com
66. http://www.clicks.ws/forum/index.php
67. http://www.acorndomains.co.uk
68. http://forums.onlinebookclub.org
69. http://www.ableton.com/forum
70. http://www.davidcastle.org/BB
71. http://www.webtalkforums.com
72. http://www.bloggapedia.com/forum
73. http://www.bloggertalk.com/forum.php
74. http://paymentprocessing.cc
75. http://www.directoryjunction.com/forums
76. http://www.internetmarketingforums.net
77. http://www.lex224.com/forums/index.php
78. http://forum.joomla.org
79. http://forum.mambo-foundation.org/index.php
80. http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php
81. http://www.namepros.com/index.php
82. http://loanofficerforum.com/forum
83. http://iq69.com/forums
84. http://forum.hot4s.com.au
85. http://forums.mysql.com
86. http://forums.amd.com/forum
87. http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-us/Forums
88. http://forums.cnet.com
89. http://seotalk.medianetwork.co.in
90. https://www.computerbb.org
91. http://forum.vbulletinsetup.com
92. http://www.irishwebmasterforum.com
93. http://www.app-developers.com
94. http://forums.stuffdaily.com
95. http://forums.seo.com
96. http://www.webdigity.com
97. http://www.inboundlinksforum.com
98. http://forums.gentoo.org
99. http://ubuntuforums.org
100. http://forum.textpattern.com
101. http://talk.iwebtool.com
102. http://www.frogengine.com/forum
103. http://www.capitaltheory.com
104. http://www.smsbucket.com/forums/
105. http://www.seoin.info
106. http://vidberry.com
107. http://www.teamaguilar.com/forum/
108. http://www.discuss4fun.com
109. http://www.fightagainstrecession.com
110. http://www.golivewire.com
111. http://www.hdrkid.com/hdrkid

Casino Bingo Slots

Gary R Beal - Top 12 SEO Tips for 2010 - VanguardSEO

2009-08-07T10:11:00.002+01:00

GARY R BEAL, SUE MACGRATH, EIFFEL TOWER PROPOSAL

2009-08-07T09:05:00.002+01:00

I PROPOSED TO SUSAN MCGRATH AT THE TOP OF THE EIFFEL TOWER A FEW WEEKS AGO WITH THE HELP OF MY SON

RSS

2009-06-13T06:43:00.000+01:00

http://www.feedmil.com/addfeed.jsp
http://www.feedest.com
http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php
http://www.feedgy.com/Submit.aspx
http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php
http://www.feedbees.com/add.php
http://rssmountain.com/submit_anonym.php
http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html
http://feedfury.com/submit
http://www.rssmicro.com/FeedRank/?Fe...com%2frss.aspx
http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php
http://www.rss-network.com
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://www.rssmad.com/index.php
http://www.feedbomb.com/
http://www.plazoo.com
http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com __________________

Change of Address Tool

2009-06-13T06:24:00.000+01:00

Hi All,

In-line with the changes Google has made outside of the US recently with the ability to use geotargeting for regions versus language based content and Google having to sort out content for regionally based searches or those of you that use IP delivery or do not use language based subdomains with geotargeting, Google has now added a few things.

First, if you ar moving your site (let's say to host a french subdomain in france - as this becoming a more significant technique in gaining in the SERP's) the issue has always been that it can take from hours to days for Google to sort this out and you end up losing days of traffic if not longer.

Google now has a tool that allows you to tell them about the move.

You can se it here; Change of Address Tool

__________________

Subdomain

2009-05-22T08:00:00.005+01:00

Results from 4 months of SEO on the subdomain

Follow Me on Twitter for Free SEO Tips

2009-04-22T08:14:00.001+01:00

My new Twitter is @scubaGary

Online Casino, Bingo and Online Gambling in Kentucky

2008-10-19T06:16:00.000+01:00

The state of Kentucky's attempt to block resident's access to 141 online gambling sites has proceeded to the next level, as a Franklin County Circuit Court judge refused Thursday to dismiss the case. Judge Thomas Wingate denied pleas by the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association and the Interactive Gaming Council. Arguments will be heard on November 17 before a ruling is made in this case that has been ongoing since September.

The civil action brought by Michael Brown, Secretary of Justice and Public Safety, and endorsed by Democratic Governor Steve Beshear, seeks seizure of 141 domain names of popular online gambling websites. The action claims these sites, including AbsolutePoker.com, CakePoker.com, FullTiltPoker.com and PokerStars.com, "promote or provide" illegal gambling in the state of Kentucky. It is within Kentucky's rights to seize any and all illegal gambling devices.

Defendants have 30 days to block access to Kentucky residents. If they do not comply, the case will proceed with the site's name on the hit list, and the site could potentially face permanent shut-down.

Kentucky v. 141 Internet Domain Names has the potential to strike a fatal blow to the heart of Internet gambling, a phenomenon that has riled the Congress and Senate and been an ongoing debate for years. If it passes, other concerned states could follow in its footsteps and bar Internet gambling from residential servers on the basis that it damages the state's own lottery and/or casino industries. Then if it spreads across the United States, it could herald the death of online gambling as we know it.

1. The ruling says that the owners of the domains will have to establish to the court (in person, I am assuming) that they have blocked access to residents of Kentucky. Many of these owners will not step foot within the United States for fear of being arrested, so you could see how this might be a problem.

2. Which state will be next? Are all of the remaining states going to follow suit?

There is no word yet as to what the next step will be for the defendants.

People are also anxiously awaiting the reaction of the Kahnawake Gaming Commission to this ruling. They warned Governor Beshear before the hearing that a seizure of the listed domains would "adversely affect the members of our community and that is not acceptable." Many of the domains listed in the seizure order are licensed by the Commission, so they will predictably be furious over this ruling.

I would expect that the news of this ruling will spread quickly throughout the mainstream media. This is not just an online gambling issue - it is an issue that could end up influencing many different industries.

It will be interesting to see what happens between now and November 17th. Some of the companies involved (Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker) planned ahead and will simply ignore the ruling. Some of the companies will be forced to set up alternative domain names (with foreign registrars) and redirect traffic to the new domains. It will be interesting to see if anyone will show up in court to prove that they have blocked the residents of Kentucky from accessing their domain.

All in all, a disappointing ruling, but one that will surely be challenged. Online Casino, Bingo and other gaming portals featuring Online Gambling and casino gambling are realing.

I think issue here is taxes. Many Internet gambling sites are based overseas and do not contribute to individual state's economies. So while politicians such as Gov. Beshear may disguise the issue as damaging the morality of youth, a fine read between the lines tells a tale of money and competition -- ironic given the nature of the case.

Keyword Density

2008-09-17T08:42:00.000+01:00

I'm asked about keyword density and what is the optimal keyword density for a page.

Keyword density doesn't matter as much as the theme. This is where LSI comes into play. Each page should have many variations of the same keyword/kw phrase, so the SE's know what its about. Theming downwards like this gambling>>>online gambling>>>online gambling reviews

This is why I target online gambling reviews as one of the keyword phrases. The link juice will funnel upwards to all related phrases. The key is to mention the primary keyword on each page more frequently than the other related terms, and to link out from this page to the page below it, within the content (text). So If page 1 was targeting gambling I would mention 'online gambling' in the content, but not more frequently than gambling. Then in sticking with the theming principal I would include 'online gambling reviews' on the 'online gambling' page, again, not more frequently than 'online gambling'.

So there is no right or wrong density. I've even read when there is only one instance of a keyword on a page that ranks well for it. The key is the navigational structure, link sculpting and theme of your site.

Can you over-do it? Yes, so don't go crazy. That's called keyword stuffing.

SMX London 2008

2008-09-15T23:08:00.001+01:00

Guess who's speaking at SMX?

Gary R. Beal speaking at SMX London 2008

Top 12 SEO Tips for 2008 - GaryTheScubaGuy

2008-02-27T10:58:00.003Z

Top 12 SEO Tips for 2008
It drives me nuts when I come across an article, or even worse spend good money on going to a conference and someone spends an hour of my time telling me about their company or what their company can do to make me #1, when what I came for was some in-depth knowledge or recommendations, or even just an idea or two that I hadn't thought of to improve my SEO knowledge. I'll bet you have been there too, eh?
Even worse is spending time in the wrong forum and getting bad advice or propaganda-led guesses.

I have made it a mission (much to the dislike of my employer, Stickyeyes), to give away the great information that you can actually take away, implement, and see almost immediate results. Do a search for 'GaryTheScubaGuy' or take a look over at the Stickyeyes training feedback page and have a read through the comments. I give it away because I know next week there will be something else.
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, but these tips will give you a definite advantage over your competition.

1.Get your page titles 100% optimised for search. Page titles are the single best element of overall on-site optimisation that you can control, and one of the top things that a search engine, with its almighty power, uses to decide the destiny of the page. Will it rank your page or send it to the depths of the supplemental results where a bloodhound would find it difficult to sniff out?
Theories vary on how best to format the title for 100% optimisation. Long tail titles, key word stuffing, commas, density, bars and dashes have been tested and debated for many years.

I have found the best performance using the following method; First, I sit down and pick my top keyword, then I run it through one of many keyword tools out there that will show me the number of queries, demographic and geographic data, annual search trends, competition stats and so on. I take these results and start classifying them by this information to establish the pages that I will build. I continue to do this until I get down to 4 or even 5-word phrases.

From here I'll start diagramming the navigation of the new section using themed-based threads from the top to the bottom. In some cases I also use buffer words to control keyword weighting. So if I had a "blue widgets" page the next might be "Find Blue Widgets" and below that "Find Blue Widgets in Akron" and maybe even one more "Where Can I find Blue Widgets in Akron Ohio?" if it's been searched to some degree.
This is called going after the longtail and some friends of mine over at a company called Hittail made a cool little tool that I put on all my clients’ websites. It gives you real time results for the keywords that people are typing to find your site, as well as the search engine they are using.

Traditional logfile analysis can be expensive and difficult for the inexperienced and many times if you have a site getting 10,000 unique visitors a day or even a week you lose many of the prime longtail key word strings in the piles of data. It’s also a good way to monitor related buzz on your product/service/offering. It is perfectly okay to have the following title: Buy Widgets | Blue Widgets in Akron. I try not to stuff the title tags at all, but I always make sure I use it twice and I don't duplicate the page titles. Then when you are building content in the next steps you will have unique but relevant text to use in the link.

2. Optimise your content
There are many on-page elements that can enhance the way the search engines rank your website. Assuming you have completed #1 above, the next step is to optimise the content based on the title that you have used for the page. In some cases where dynamic insertion is used, or an application like Wordpress is installed, you can optimise the way these elements are pulled into the on and off-page fields such as alt tags for images. If you don't use anything like this or you wrote it with Dreamweaver, there are other plugins and ways to make this process less painful, but I assure you it's worth the TLC. Here is a general list of the on-page and off-page SEO elements that I concentrate on;
In the URL - they become highlighted in results and increase click through rate.
In meta keywords (2-3 max.) - doesn't hurt to use so why not.
In the first and last sentence of the body content, and in bold as well.
In several places throughout the content but in a different form(I.e. plural )
In header tags. If it makes sense using h1, h2, h3 and then h4 in the hierarchy of a page then use them.
In alt tags for the images.
In the title tags for the images.
In html comment tags.
In meta description - see #5 for more more details
In an external link on the page - see #4 for more details
In a variation of the key word (i.e. plural) pointed to another internal relevant page (I.e. Concert Tickets page with Concert Tickets in Akron as the linking text linked to a page optimised for concert tickets in Akron)
Generally speaking I like to try and keep the pages with at least 250 words of relevant and themed content. This is a very important element to invest your time in because search engine robots parse, or remember your template if its static, which most are. Any optimisation that you have within the template won't have a significant factor on the SERP's (Search Engine Ranking Positions)so optimising your content is the best way to make sure your pages are not dropped into what in essence is the dreaded "sandbox" or supplemental results on Google.

It's also worth mentioning that even if you have an existing site, there are still many different bolt-ons you may find useful. Add a community section, a "widget" news area, or anything similar you can drop these new pages into.

Hot Tip#1 - Do a search for the name of your website and copy the URL string and use it as the link for your logo. It is a popular belief that the number of searches for your brand and the number of end-users that navigate through to your website influences Google results, and I have to believe that it is a ranking factor that all the search engines use. I can't say exactly how much, but I think long-term this is a good strategy and have seen it work with no reduction in any of my traffic stats other than reducing the bounce rates throughout.

3. Optimise internal linking
Internal link structure is a lot about getting the end-user to the conversion point. It can also be used for search engine optimisation in several ways. If you are using a content management system (CMS) that has a keyword tagging feature you can have it search for keywords within the content and link to other pages. This will increase conversions and increase the time the end-user spends on your website. Robots also like internal links within content that point to other, unique relevant content and they follow these links. Wordpress and other applications like VBulletin with the SEO upgrade can also accomplish this.

This is where the use of a "nofollow" attribute comes in handy. According to Wikipedia, the nofollow was intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen from Blogger created it around 2005.

What it does is tell the search engines that you do not endorse the page you have linked to. Using this on internal links like your About, Contact or other pages will increase the "linkjuice" that is passed on to the important pages. A good example of this is if your template navigation is always the same; add nofollow attributes to all of the links beyond the front page so that the key word links I talk about in #1 and #2 that you place in your content will get all of the benefit of the "linkjuice".
Just be sure not to confuse the search engines by using the same keyword anchor text as the key word you are optimising the page for (don't link "buy blue widgets" in anchor text on your "buy blue widgets" page and link out to the "blue widgets" page.

Hot Tip#2 - Another great way to use this tip is when you are creating new pages based on the keyword selection I mentioned above, you can link to them from the front page or an internal doorway page built for 'closer-to-the-root-file' navigation. Put nofollows on everything except your anchor text that points to these new pages. If your homepage carries a good Page Rank (PR) it will pass it down to the new page and will give you a boost in the SERP's. The goal is that you want to find a niche or longtail keyword phrase, build an optimised page for it, add a link to it from a well ranking page and suddenly your ranking at the top for the term.

4. Use external linking wisely
Whilst people who link to you can't affect your website’s credibility or SERP's, who you link to does. For good measure I try to add one outbound link using relevant anchor text on each page. I don't use the nofollow attribute on this as I want to be associated with it. I do a Google search and use the allinurl function and my keyword to search for .edu or .gov websites related to my page and start there. You would be surprised what you'll find. If that fails I'll do one of two things; I do a search for the keyword I am optimising for and find a non-competitor that ranks well and link to them; or I'll link to the definition page in Wikipedia.

Another thing, while a bad neighbor (Spammer/blackhat/porn/etc.)that links to you will not affect your SERP's, who you link to will. I tested this 3 years ago and again at the end of 2007 and the impact hasn't changed.

What is more important to know, and more disturbing considering the amount of work it could cause, is that its not just who you link to, its who the website you link to links to as well.

We are working on a tool to track this but imagine the bandwidth usage if your client has 10k links?

This is a task that you should add to your monthly SEO health check. It takes awhile, but I tested 6 websites and my conclusion was that even having as many as 100 outbound links to reputable websites is dampered by an unsavory outbound link which is pretty scary.

Send me an email and I'll keep you updated on the status of this tool, but I'll tell you right now, it won't be a free tool. Even using EC2 via Amazon will get pricey but this is a pretty critical when considering the different algorithmic parameters used to assign trust and authority.

If you have the top spot in your sights for your kw/kw phrase, you'll need to do this just after paying your mortgage...once a month.

Considering the implications, the top spot is even more scrutinized and the minute details such as this one are (IMHO) being used to micro-analyse top ranking sites.

5. Write your meta descriptions smartly
Meta descriptions are part of the off-page code you find when you go to a page and look at your source code - usually near the top you'll see 'META NAME="Description" CONTENT='. This is another element the search engines look at to determine the theme of the site. More importantly they almost all use it to describe the page in your search results. So if you are searching for 'blue widget', the results you will get have that keyword in bold. This will make it stand out more and increase conversions. It will also bold the partial word (I.e. buy blue widgets in Akron) in the title and the URL as well.

6. Check your internal canonicalisation
Websites can have more than one URL. (e.g. http://www.bluewidgets.com and http://www.bluewidgets.co.uk). If you have been around for a while and people are linking to you they could be linking to either URL. By designating a primary it gets 100% of the above benefits. Go to Google's Webmaster Central and in the tools section designate one as your primary. Do a 301 redirect on the non-primary page to pass on any backlink juice, PR and authority that the page has to the primary page. Internal navigation needs to be checked to be sure all links go to the correct version as well. Bad navigation is common, especially with websites constantly being populated or worked on by many individuals. Pick one and use it throughout.

7. Finding What Terms Are Converting Into Sales/Tracking Keywords to Conversion With Weighting
Having 100,000 unique visitors a day really doesn't matter in the end if you aren't getting any conversions (new members, info requests, sales).

Measuring successes and failures for landing pages, on-page content like CTA's, and especially ‘keyword to sale’ are some of the most important pieces of information that you can gather and use to improve and optimise your website.

Here are two scenarios to better illustrate this point;
Paid Advertising – A car insurance company starts a paid advertising campaign on Google and after a week or so they see that the name of their company or their 'brand' seems to be converting the majority of their sales. Because of this discovery, they target the majority of their budget on their brand terms like ABC Insurance and ABC Insurance Company.

A week later they see that their CPA (cost per acquisition) has sky-rocketed almost two-fold and can't figure out why this is. When they look at Google analytics and other third-party tracking software, they both say the same thing.
So why is this?

Let's take a look at the buying process (also called funnel tracking) to see where they went wrong; Mrs.INeedInsurance hopped online while enjoying her morning java to look for insurance because last night when Mr.INeedInsurance opened his renewal notice he got a significant premium hike.

At dinner they decided to start shopping around for insurance. Mrs.INeedInsurance searched 'car insurance' between 6-8am that day, going in and out of different companies websites, learning what she was up against…tens of 1000's of results. So at work (11am-2pm is the #1 time people shop online – not necessarily making purchases) Mrs.INeedInsurance has learned a bit about search and decides to add her city in the query. This time she searches 'car insurance London', and still gets several thousand results, but at least they are localised, and there are a few that she recognizes from this morning so she goes in and fills a few of the forms out to get quotes.
Throughout the rest of the day she gets the quotes either immediately from the website or via email. Now she's getting somewhere. Jump forward to after dinner that evening. Mr.INeedInsurance looks through the notes his wife brought home and decides that ABC Insurance offers the best deal for the money, then goes to Google and searches for ABC Insurance and makes the purchase.

See what happened here? I use this as an example because this is exactly what I identified for a client a few years back that inevitably led to changes that doubled their conversions.

The problem is that all the data pointed to ABC Insurance's brand name as being the top converting term, so that's where they concentrated the bulk of their budget. In actuality, 'car insurance' and then 'car insurance London' were the terms that actually led up to the sale.

The reason that this is important for PPC campaigns, or any paid advertising, is that many will allow you to do keyword weighting. This is where you increase your bids or decrease your bids by a percentage according to day parting. Day parting is turning your ads up or down according to the time table that you put in place.
In this instance I would turn my bids up to 125% on 'car insurance' and 'car insurance London' in the morning and afternoon, then down at night. On 'ABC Insurance' I would turn the bids down in the morning to 50%, and then back up to 125% in the evening.

Keyword weighting also allows you to weight your keywords and track them to conversion. It places a cookie on the end-users computer to track what keyword brought them to the sight, what keyword resulted in a quote, and what keyword resulted in a sale.

This is beneficial because I can further adjust my bidding strategies according to demographics and geographical metrics.

With these cookies I can also successfully measure and establish LTV (Lifetime Values) of the average customer. This allows me to adjust the conversion value, which allows me to go back to my company/client and potentially get a higher advertising budget.

Using this same insurance company as an example; initially they gave me a conversion value of $25. Now, since we were able to identify other sales made by this customer, the conversion value is $40.

Offline this company spends 100,000 on advertising through different venues, acquiring customers at a cost average of £/$56. Guess what happened the next month? They increased the budget by 100,000.
Organic Advertising – Same scenario as above, except ABC Insurance Company identifies through log files or Google Analytics that his top converting keyword is ‘car insurance’.

In light of this, the decision maker decides to create a landing page that is fully optimised so that the relevancy grade that all 3 search engines use will increase their organic positions, which it will.

The problem here is that the term that was actually bringing them to the website to buy was 'cheap car insurance'. If they had identified this they could have built the page around the term, 'cheap car insurance' rather than just 'car insurance'. This would have served double-duty and acted as a great landing page for both keyword phrases.

This is why tracking your keywords to conversion is so important. It can save thousands on paid advertising and identify the actual keyword phrases that need separate pages built around them to improve organic rankings.

If you are experiencing a high bounce rate or what you feel is high cart abandonment, you might be surprised to find that many didn't buy elsewhere; they actually came back to you and bought. This is also helpful in refining your stats. Rather than show this customer as 3 separate visitors, it identifies (through the cookies) that they were actually just one visitor, and the bounce rate or cart abandonment is significantly reduced. This information can be invaluable as well.

For instance, maybe I was getting high unique cart abandonment from unique users that was significantly higher once they went to checkout. I know that happens when I add shipping costs into the total. So I might try to do some A/B testing with and without shipping costs listed separately, added into the price initially and adding it during checkout and see which converts better. Or I may set the website up to recognize the cookie and create a drop down that offers free shipping today with any purchase over $/£XX.XX.

You can use this information in countless ways.

8. Bump Your Competitors Multiple Listings Out of Google and Pick up a Position or Two
Every wondered why during a search you find a competitor that has two pages listed above you? I call them kicker listings. The home page is always the second listing, and the first is an internal page that actually has relevant content.

Here is why this happens. When you submit a query Google looks at its rank and if they are close to each other in their results, they group them together. If you are showing up in the SERP's first couple pages then it is most likely that you are listed again much deeper in the results. But when two pages are close, like top ten, or top 20, then Google shows them side-by-side. The second, usually the index page, will be listed below and also indented.

By going into 'advanced search' the number of default results can be changed, or you can add a bit of code to the end of the url string that is shown after a search for your keyword. The results will thus be more refined. Add this 'num=8&' to the end of the url. This number may change the results, if not reduce the number. This will show you where your competitor's second page should actually be.

Okay, so now you should go back to the original search that showed the double listing. Within the search results look where your competitor is showing up, then look below his listings for a non-competitor. It could be anything, a video, a news story or a Wikipedia or eBay listing. Use the guide in Tip #11 to do some social bookmarking, or even link to the page from your website (preferably on a second level subdirectory).

What this will do is add a little boost to the non-competitive website and bump the 'kicker' listing that your competitor has, back to where he belongs, below your listing.

This is surprisingly easy and quick using a combination of bookmarks and back links. It may even boost your trust rating with Google by having an outbound link to a high ranking website.

Using this method on eBay sometimes provides a double-boost because if it is an auction rather than a store item it may drop off the SERP's once the auction is over.

9. Avoid common penalties
HTML Validation/W3C - may cause crawl issues with the spiders. If they can't get past the error then the pages beyond it may not get crawled, and therefore they won't get indexed. There are free W3C compliance tools on the web.
302 redirects - Black Hatters use these for a variety of unintended reasons and you may end up getting a penalty if you keep one in place over time. Do a site crawl with Xenu and verify that any 302 (temporary) redirects are identified and changed to 301 (permanent) redirects.
Duplication - As mentioned in point #6, be sure you only have one primary URL, but if you already have more than one in the search engines, be sure to do a page strength comparison (You can use Firefox browser with the SEOQuake extension for this) and use a 301 with nofollows everywhere to pass on the maximum amount of linkjuice.

Some websites, especially older websites may have several versions of the same page, and some search engines may have cached versions of both pages as well. You may have a .com, a .com/index and a .com/index.asp all in your root and wide open to be crawled.

If these are duplicates I believe that all of the pages will suffer a penalty to some extent so do a 301 redirect to pass on any backlinks, PR and authority that the page has to one primary page. Internal navigation needs to be checked to be sure all links go to the correct version as well. Especially with websites constantly being populated or worked on by many individuals, bad navigation is common. Pick one and use it throughout.

The other problem with onsite duplication is many sites are using product feeds to populate their stores. Others may populate their content with an RSS feeds. The problem with these and other dynamic websites is that other websites may be using the same content. If this is the case you run the risk of being penalised for duplicate content. Use Copyscape to search for other duplicate content on the web. If you are not ranking well for the term/terms you'll need to change the content on the page, especially if you are not the originator of the content.

XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt - Universal XML Sitemaps - Providing an XML sitemap is one of the easiest things you can do to help search engines traverse your site. Google, Yahoo and MSN have all adopted this "standardized" tool.

Having a sitemap and then submitting it through WEBMASTER Central will tell you not only when the crawl (usually 1-2 days) is complete, but also if there are any errors that the bots found.

Robots.txt file - By defining rules in this file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files and directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it's both meaningless to you and a waste of your site's bandwidth.

Spiderability - There are many tools available (Google's Webmaster Central for one) that will crawl your site and identify any problems. This like javascript, java applets, and flash navigation all create spiderability issues, as well as many others. Be sure to check these.

10. Use social bookmarking websites for short-term ranking boost and blogs/forums to establish long term trust and authority
Social Bookmarking - Wikipedia defines it: In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

GaryTheScubaGuy defines it this way:
One of the best free ways to get increased ranking, back links and traffic, for very little time commitment other than setup.
This very moment most search engine algorithms are placing a ton of weight on end-user 'bookmarking', 'tagging' or one of various types of end-user generated highlighting.
Before doing any of this run a rank report to track your progress. I have tested this on terms showing on page one, on terms ranked 11th through 12th and others buried around pages 5-10. It works on them all in different time frames, and they last for different periods of time. This you will need to test yourself. Be careful because you don't want to be identified as a spammer. Be sure to use genuine content that provides a benefit to the user.

Here is how I recommend using social bookmarking;
1. Download this; Roboform. (It says it will limit you but I've had as many as 30+ passwords created and stored in the trial version) This will allow you to quickly fill out signup forms and store passwords for the 10 Bookmark sites that I am going to be sending you to.

2. Within Roboform go to the custom area and put a username and password in, as well as your other information that sites usually ask for to register. This way when you are using these different bookmarks it's a 1-click login in and becomes a relatively quick and painless procedure.

3. Establish accounts with these Social Bookmark Sites;
a. Digg
b. Technorati
c. Del.icio.us
d. NowPublic
e. StumbleUpon
f. BlinkList
g. Spurl
h. Furl
i. Slashdot
j. Simpy
k. Google Toolbar (w/Google Bookmarking)

4. Internet Explorer, Firefox and most other browsers have an "add a tab" option, but I use Firefox because I can bookmark the login pages in one file, then "open all tabs" in one click. From here I click on each tab and in most cases, if you set it up right, Roboform will have already logged you in. Otherwise you're on the login page and by clicking on the Roboform button everything is prefilled, all you need to do is click submit. (some of the bookmark sites will allow you to add their button into your browser bar, or you can get an extension from Firefox like the Digg Add-on to make things quicker)

5. Lastly, Install the Google Toolbar. It has a bookmark function as well, and you can import all your bookmarks from Firefox directly into it. Google looks at many different things when assigning rank and trust. For instance, when you search for something and go into a website, Google will remember how long you stayed, how deep you went, and if you came back out into the search to select another site, which means you didn't find what you were looking for. This is all part of the Privacy Issues that have been in the news.

Here's what Google actually says!

"The Google Toolbar automatically sends only standard, limited information to Google, which may be retained in Google's server logs. It does not send any information about the web pages you visit (e.g., the URL), unless you use Toolbar's advanced features."

They practically spell it out for you. Use their bookmark feature just like you were doing the social bookmarking I outlined above. This is just one more click.
Some of the elements that Google looks at when grading a website are;
• How much time did the average visitor spend on the site?
• What is the bounce rate on the landing page?
• How many end-users bookmarked the page?
• How many users returned to the search query and then on to a different site?

Each time you publish an article put a Google Alert on a unique phrase. Each time Google sends you an alert, bookmark it on every bookmark site. This will take some getting used to, but will eventually become second-nature. Remember what I said in the beginning; "One of the best free ways to get links and traffic, for very little time commitment other than setup".

When you start seeing traffic coming in and your SERPs getting better you will use the heck out of this. I'm waiting for someone to come out with software that will automate this process completely, but by the time that hits nofollows may come into play. But for the time being it works and it works well.

(Update: Found one) Bookmark Demon and Blog Comment Demon. It automates the process.
Blogs - When looking for blogs to post on I use Comment Sniper. It takes your chosen keyword and will search through MSN and Google blogs (Wordpress too!) for your keyword and come back with a long list of blogs that it found your keyword on. You can then sign up to monitor it and every 15 minutes or so it will update you on any posts that have been made the forums that you selected. You can then find out if it is a post that you can reply to and maybe get a link to one of your sites. This generally works great because these are aged pages that have earned page rank so you immediately reap the benefits on a backlink on a relevant page. Many have said that with some blogs, they have a nofollow, but that doesn't take away the fact that you have a link to your site, just that the sender (blog/page) doesn't endorse your site.

One more thing regarding posting to blogs and forums. When I create an account I sign up and use a very unique member name (eg. GaryTheScubaGuy). This is because many blogs and forums have a no-follow, which means the link in your signature or on your member name won't show up. So I also sign, or add my member name to the bottom of my post, then add a Google Alert on my signature so that when Google finds the post, it will alert me, and I will then start bookmarking the forum page.

Hot Tip#3 - Comment Sniper can be used to find aged blogs that have been abandoned but have great PR. Posting on these is a quick way to get a boost in the SERP's. Many of these older blogs were created before the addition of the nofollow tag and were not updated when this (blogger) update was released so you get 100% of the benefit rather than just the link. You can also filter the results that it returns by PR so you spend your time posting on pages with PR.
Forums - I use the search engines 'allinurl' feature and "my keywords" to locate these forums. This will take a bit more time to establish as you need to sign up and become a member in good standing before posting any links. Some will allow you to have a screen name that you can link back to your website from, so I'll use my keywords or just a unique name (Like GaryTheScubaGuy) so that I can identify the links as they become indexed.

I recommend spending the time to find a few good forums and regularly post good recommendations or advice. I've done this on SEO forums (like SEO Chat) for a long time and I have 1000's that link to my websites and forum.

11. Optimise Your 404 Page
The search engines look at traffic in their algorithms to "grade" a page. If you have a complicated URL, one that is commonly misspelled, or do something else that could endanger losing any existing links that are published out on the WWW, this is the landing page the visitor will get sent to. If it has your template and navigation from the rest of the site it will get indexed like a normal page. Change your title and meta to one of your keyword strings, add an image and relative content that reflects your keywords as well. I avoid placing the actual term "404" on the page.
Some of the ways 404 pages are reached are:
Bookmarked sites that have since been moved
The end-user made an error when typing in a url
A moved page is still indexed in the SERPS
There are broken links in your link structure
Some tips when customizing your 404 error pages?
1. Put a link to your FAQ page
2. Put a link to your top level categories
3. Put a link to your sitemap
4. Create a template 404 page that blends with your site
5. Add a search box
6. Make your 404 pages look as close to your site theme as possible
7. Add true navigation to it.
8. Optimise this page with the same elements as your other pages (See Tip #21)
A simple statement like, "You have found this page in error, please select from the menu on the left side of this page" will do here, and you will retain more traffic.

12. Get Your Pages Out of Supplemental Results – What They Are, How to Find Them and How to Get Out of Them
"Supplemental sites are part of Google's auxiliary index. Google is able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than they do on sites that are crawled for the main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in the main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to Google's supplemental index.
The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank."
Nonsense!
At the time of this article Google was already starting to eliminate their search results showing supplemental results. Until recently, all you had to do was go to the last few pages of your query and locate the pages that had ' - Supplemental Result' just after the page size. They aren't showing these anymore. Here's what they had to say,
"Since 2006, we've completely overhauled the system that crawls and indexes supplemental results. The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We're also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.
The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we've been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we've decided to stop labeling these URLs as "Supplemental Results." Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google's supplemental index being deeper and fresher."
Google then said that the easiest way to identify these pages is like this; "First, get a list of all of your pages. Next, go to the webmaster console [Google Webmaster Central] and export a list of all of your links. Make sure that you get both external and internal links, and concatenate the files.
Now, compare your list of all your pages with your list of internal and external backlinks. If you know a page exists, but you don't see that page in the list of site with backlinks, that deserves investigation. Pages with very few backlinks (either from other sites or internally) are also worth checking out."
Nonsense!
The easiest way to identify your supplemental pages is by entering this query 'site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf'
Okay so now you have identified the pages that are in supplemental results and not showing up in the results anywhere.

Now we need to identify why they are there. The main reasons that a page goes to supplemental results are;
1. Duplicate Content
2. 301's. Redirected Pages that have a cache date prior to the 301 being put in place
3. A 404 was returned when Google attempted to crawl it
4. New Page
5. Bad Coding
6. Page Hasn't Been Updated in Awhile
7. Pages That Have Lost Their Back Links
8. And according to Matt Cutts of Google,"PageRank is the primary focus determining whether a URL is in the main web index vs. supplemental results"
Now this isn't the end-all, but it covers about 95% of the reason that you may be in the supplementals.
So now we know what they are, how to find them and why they are most likely in the supplemental results. Now let's get them out of there.
Here are the different methods that I use when I find that a page has gone supplemental;
1. Add fresh content to the page
2. Add navigation to the page from the main page
3. Move the pages to the first subdirectory if it is not already there
4. Get a back link to the page and/or create a link from an existing internal page with the anchor text containing the keywords for that page
5. Do some social bookmarking on the page
6. Make sure the page is included in my xml sitemap and then resubmit it to Webmaster Central.
7. Lastly, if none of the above seem to be working after 90 days, and I have another page that is relevant and does have PageRank and isn't listed in the supplemental, I do a 301 (permanent redirect) to it from the supplemental page.

I've utilised these techniques on the betting site WSN.com with great success.

So there you are. If you take these recommendations and run with them I guarantee you will see great things happen.
If you would like to learn more give me a call over at Stickyeyes at 0113 391 2929, email me at gary@stickyeyes.com, or you can find me hanging out at SEO Chat sharing more good stuff that you can actually use.

Good Rankings to You!
Gary R. Beal
Head of Search and Training
Stickyeyes.com

PPC and Google Adwords Hacking

2008-01-02T11:09:00.000Z

I've been doing PPC since around 2000 when Google Adwords launched. Interestingly enough, the same time the data mining/collecting database coined as the Google Toolbar was also launched. So I have been responsible for millions of dollars and pound in spends on Google, keeping under Google's radar for many reasons.

I spent the best part of the last 72 hours doing some testing provoked by boredome and messing around with some free rebate cash from Google the other night. What I found was a little disturbing.

Google's recent Quality Score seems to be "hackable" from a very novice level. I'm wondering if this has been disovered anywhere else, but I have been unable to find any "real evidence" of this. So despite the potential repurcussions, I'm calling them out. I hope they prove me wrong because this may cause many of my past and current clients to ask some serious questions that I cannot answer...and I don't like to not be able to answer questions, that's why I'm a data miner, mathmatician, and have strived to become an expert in biometricss...I want conclusive answers...not theories, best guesses, unsubstantiated claims based on propaganda and heresay, or basic bullshit.

What I have observed in a large mix of PPC accounts (old, new, large, small, UK, US, great conversion rates and poor conversion rates, and many other variables) is that you can actually manipulate Google's PPC algo and get a Great Quality Score ranking every time you add a new keyword with the correct initial settings. Of course if you don't do it right, you can end up getting a Poor keyword level Quality Rating before you ever activate the campaign, adgroup or keyword , and this Quality Rating cannot be changed or adjusted to have google revisit the keyword and your bid and budget settings and change your Quality Grade...Why???

Think about what it takes to get a keyword ranking on PPC in the coveted top 3 positions that then become syndiacted across Google's "Partner Network" that includes AOL (6% conversions - average - 2x the industry average), Netscape, Ask, and many other popular search engines powered by Google. Answer? More money.

The more shocking part is that you can delete the keyword , the adgroup holding the keyword , or the entire campaign, but as soon as you create a new campaign, or an adgroup within an existing campaign, or just add the keyword into existing adgroup thinking that you'll get a fresh look from google and get the Good or Great Quality Rating the keyword Quality Rating comes back the same.

No matter if you enter the exact settings from the campaign awarded the Great Score (to keep thing equal I used duplicate budgets, existing conversion ratios and product/service offerings, as well as the exact same ads, adverts, landing pages and so on), the keyword word will carry the previous Quality Rating with it. It also works in reverse as well.

I did everything I mentioned above, but I adjust the minimum campaign level CPC default and the budget to the settings that got a Poor Quality rating on the other account, but that made no difference either. I take the account and keyword with the Great Quality rating and start altering every possible influencing factor; no keyword in the advert or URL, all of these test point to Stickyeyes.com home page whether it was the destination page or display URL. I moved the keyword into a terrible adgroup, changed adverts, changed landing page, I even cancelled the damn thing, logged out and activated an IP cloaker. I logged back into the account (which I had completely deleted at this point because I tried every other scenario) then uploaded a huge account with 15 campaigns, 150 adgroups and over 20,000 keyword's.

I picked one out randomly and added the keyword (oh, by the way, the keyword was 'mesothelioma attorney'), and set the budget to £5 and the minimum CPC default to 0.01 and the damn thing came back with the same Grade.

Then I went to an entirely different account that I had never introduced this keyword into, took the exact same huge account with everything being identical and loaded it into this fresh account setting the budget to £500 daily and £50 minimum CPC default and the Quality Rating was Poor I have a long list of tests that I want to see the results for, some are short term and others are potentially long term depending on whether Google revisits or runs it through an auto-editor the next day and if it restores the correct Quality Rating based on the new settings, or they come back eventually, but only with time and good ctr.

Landing page content is supposed to factor into the Quality Rating as well, Of course I used the same URL and landing page (Stickyeyes) for every test. But I imagine that is something that plays into the PCP algo as time passes and Google collects, stores and compares that information ( I.e Time in site, landing page bounce rates back into the search result and into another site within the same set of results, high conversions, etc.)

What I am MOST anxious to establish is what effect these issues have on a MCC account. I have 12 gambling properties from 5 different companies, 5 debt consolidation companies, two moble phone companies with completely different metrics a demographics, in the same MCC account, two solicitor sites and that's just 1 MCC account. We have all sorts of other strategies that coule be affected by this.

I have already ran multiple tests, and I did them myself, so I know they were run correctly. But to be absolutely sure I ran them again, and then additional duplicate tests using different factors like US versus UK accounts, keeping everything exactly the same as the above conclusive testing, except lowering the budget on the adgroup ranked Great and testing them in a fresh account, keeping everything exactly the same as the above conclusive testing,except changing 1 variable like daily campaign budgets and minimun CPC default bids.

There are many scenarios that can play out here, but I'll just name the first one that comes to mind so I don't drag this out even further without doing proper testing;

Company A is a finance company with a £200 conversion goal for IVA and Consolidation Loan applications. They do refinance loans, but these are worth a fraction of the Iva's, and therefore not a priority to them.

Company B is a different finance company with a $125 maximum conversion goal for IVA and consolidation loans. They have a stable, well converting campaign, well under their conversion goal. They decide to partner with a broker that will pay them £350 for every cashed out refinance loan.

Both companies are managed by us and both are in the same MCC Account

1. Company A has a low-converting landing page for remortgages because they want Iva's and consolidations. Google ranked it as Poor and since their bids are low and the budget is limited and runs out by noon everyday, they spend more than they make and decide to pause or delete the keyword permanently.

2. Having made a great deal with the broker, Company B calls and advises me of the new offering so I create an adgroup. I do the research while creating the campaign in an external excel file or Adwords Editor with the correct budget and default minimum CPC bids and upload it. Google tagged this keyword in the individual account with the Poor rating because I had a lazy ppc manager create Company A's initial campaigns.in an excel file and rather than do the research prior to uploading, he thinks he's slick and sets them all to 0.01. So Company be will now need to pay a significantly higher amount to keep the keyword in the top 3 using position preference. But the budget need to be high enough to keep him there or the ad delivery will be slowed.

After all, once the key words are in the account you can go into the ad diagnostics tool within Adword Tools and search each of them individually and google will show which ones are not showing, and tell you why. Interstingly enough it always either the Quality Score isn't high enough or the bid isn't high enough.

Hmmm Google, why not automatically change it for me, highlight it, and give ME the option to okay it or drop it?

I'll tell you why, because a Poor Quality score will require a higher bid long term to get better positions so that the conversions happen at a significantly higher bid, and you'll get this as long as it takes me to buy my way to the Great Grade. My CPC may come down and keep me in the position I had to buy my way back into because although I set my account up perfectly to get a Great Grade, your ppc algo said "hey wait a minute, we like that bid, but that budget will run out by noon. We need our money so despite all thing being the same, we'll drop his Quality Rating and slowly milk the money out of him while he tries to get a better quality score. Well hell yes I'm going to raise the bid. My keyword i with all the exact same element that I set up back in the US 2 days ago on a UK-only campaign converted fantastic at #3. Okay so I spend a few days babysitting this one keyword because I know it creates 30% of my online sales! Okay so Google say to either raise my bid or improve the quality right? That's odd because I set everything up exactly as I did in the US 2 days ago, except that I was in the US and could afford twice as much. Shoot they even told me it was Great. I think I'll call my wife up at home and have her add the EXACT SAME keyword AND IDENTICAL CAMPAIGN SETUP, ADTEXT and even the LANDING PAGE IS EXACTLY THE SAME....but i think I'll try setting the budget to what I did in the US and see what Quality Rating it gives me.....Hmmm, that's weird, that one says Great too?!?!? I'm confused. Let me see what Google says. I thought I followed the instructions to a tee.

Here it is, its in your Adwords Help Center (Damn Yanks, its spelled Centre!) Glad I'm from Ohio

Google AdWords

AdWords Help US help YOU spend more money!

Change Language:

Google Help Spend My Money! > AdWords Help Can Show You the Quickest Way To Blow Through Your Budget > About AdWords - How a 90 Million Dollar Payout Made a Company Billions! (in the 3 months that followed)) > Glossary of Smoke and Mirror Terms Like "Quality Score"

Quality Score for Google and were throwing in the search network to really confuse you

Quality Score for Google has also been discovered to be a confusing acronym, that when properly decifered by the team of Google Founders Sergey and Larry actu7ally refers to whenone of the pair lost his (cough, cough,Virginity) . Neither will fess up, and even after splitting into seprate rooms, each filled to the ankles with

Kettle Corn and M&M's.

The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether your convinced in your mind that its real

* Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors. If these aren't present, were just going to throw shit randomly out to suck each precious advertising dollar that you have.

* Quality Score for position is something the guys seem intent on speaking of all the time, but always in a whisper, All i have been able to make out were the words, hands and knees.

Note that Quality Score is calculated separately for the content network because if we added the extra revenue that it generates to our normal revenue, our calculators would explode. Plus our accountant (Vito and Big Louie) created that cushion to slowly absorb the 90 million dollar payout in 2005 that we weren't allowed to pass to our new stockholders by going public. WE define our definition of Quality Score as we see it, we own the company, we could buys and sells you 10,000 times biiaatches.

Google, Google Partners and its employees and affiliates take no responsibility for the lack of information or made up definition (hey it sounded good at the time) provided by Girl Scout Troup 8059 - Silicone Valley. The information was available in many obscure 3rd party search engines before too many people started reading it and asking really hard questions.

AdWords Help Center

Change Language:

Google Help > AdWords Help > About AdWords > Glossary

Quality Score for Google and the search network

Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user's search query. The higher a keyword's Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.

The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it's calculating minimum bid or ad position:

* Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google [Hmmm that's weird. I haven't activated it to establish any kid of CTR yet], the relevance of the keyword to its ad group [I ran the test across mutiple Adwords campaign using terms like mesothelioma in a 3 year old campaign for credit cards, and another for beds, a third that had many different unrelated ecommerce products, and one for adsl service, I created IDENTICAL adgroups with everything the same as the rest. I then opened all 4 account across two screens and tested different daily budgets from £5 to £5000 and minimum CPC default bids from 0.01 to £50 (which also had 4 other high cost terms related to legal issues like divorce and personal injury with the same results] , your landing page quality [I pointed out above that all my tests were run using Stickyeyes home page as the destination URL as well as the display text], your account's historical performance [they are brand new and have to history, except that you didn't like my minimum CPC default bid so you said it was a Poor Quality Ad, I even bowed to your Google Godlikeness and deleted that terrible terrible old ad and did everything you suggested; I raised my minimum CPC default bid for the entire adgroup just to get my top performer to actually show up, and you warned me the ad delivery would be slowed GoogleGod, yes you did, yessiree. I don't know why it didn't sink in. In the past you told me when I was creating the account by hitting the suggested budget in campaign settings ( of course I only want it on this ONE keyword . All 20+ reps over the years have told me to just create its own little campaign. I did that, but your saying its Poor Quality. How much more, and for how long will I have to pay for my mistake during the initial setup to get a Great quality score? submitted the most I could afford, in a little note below my adgroup taht suggestion 'optimisation suggestions' , when I used your tool to find out why my ad wasn't showing, for the adgroup, and other relevance factors.

* Quality Score for ad position is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors.

Note that Quality Score is calculated separately for the content network. Learn more about Quality Score.

Was this information helpful? Yes, now i understand how you thought this whole thing through so well. Don't force the minimum adgroup default CPC to give me the best possible chance at making this campaign successful and give me the option to keep it there, or maybe play with day parting or any of the other money sucking settings that replace the good ones like shadow bidding and gap bidding. Beside the only one that helps is me. Ah, it did feel good though when you said your were putting new enhancements in place to help defend us from those evil doer's that learned how to use advanced bidding tools to keep our costs down. What do you think Sergy and Larry? Huh? Hide the bids and add an option where I can blindly have you increase my bids 200% higher during my peak times? welllll, oookkaakyyy, but I need you guys to keep a close eye on the traffic your sending me and where your posting my ads. You made me increase my budget so my ad delivery doesn't slow and take another month to get a Good Quality Score so I can pay a couple pence/cents less per click for my top 3 listing. The last time that happened I went into the office the next morning and all my money was spent, and I didn't get one sale. You don't remember? My rep told me that you had things in place to prevent that from happening, but GaryTheScubaGuy has been documenting rampant click fraud through his log files froyears. Heck he gets several thousand back from you an a regular basis. I spent a couple days going through 3gb of raw data and found the same IP's in clusters, big clusters. You didn't see that? Oh yea, my rep-of-the-month said you had caught them before you took billed my card every even numbered day. Ok, well I spend a million pounds/dollars/yen/euros every month with your company. How about you send me a basic list of IP's that you sent, and highlight the ones that you had already given me credit for prior to my call last Monday when you said you'd look into it and get back to me. Yeah all I need is something to assure me that you value my businees and are truly concerned and committed to prevent the theft of my money. Oh wait, you're just an unknowing enabler to those adsense publishers and the companies I have read about that employ rooms full of people just for the purpose of helping my nasty competitors attack my advertising budget so they can be in the top 3 and in your exceptional network of enablers like AOL, Netscape, EarthLink, Compuserve, Shopping.com. At&T, ASK.com. About, Lycos, and the many others,

Oh and I even found a place to pay extra for clicks on my adsense ads over at ebay. So all I do is pay around £1.50 or $3.00 extra and I can get an extra 1000 clicks on my adwords ads? Heck this is even a better deal; 10,000 Adsense clicks for just £14.99! Do you have a package that will send traffic too? Send me some AOL traffic, I hear their users buy twice as much as the average ecommerce sites. Is this part of the network you get me in if I pay enough to stay in the top 3 Adword positions?? Don't worry, I'll keep my minimum CPC's up to where you feel your making enough money and hopefully one day I'll get a better quality score so I can save a little money. Hey maybe one day I'll get to where I would have been if I had read your instructions on how to set up a campaign without permanently affixing a Poor Quality Score (no, that's not a link) to my keyword because I wasn't able to spend what you told me to ....oh wait. You never really did tell me how to do that when you implemented that cool Quality Score. No worries, I'm sure it just slipped your minds. But hey, at least you prevented those darn thieves from bid gapping me. Wonder where they are today? I'm sorry, maybe these guys over at ebay will give my wife a work from home job like the ones I found using your search engine. Let's give it a quick try here --- Hey!! you guys are as good as you've always said you were good, you found me 1,560,000 results!! Are these guys part of your content network? C'mon you can tell me!! Well I'll have to give them a call, then with the extra cash I could possibly afford your fee for a good quality score so can eventually pay less and then she wouldn't have keep working just to make up for my lack of attentiveness the 11 times you told me to spend more money. Hey look!, my adwords account has another message from you about slowed ad delivery because of a limited budget. Dang it, I put it up to what you said. Oh I Know, your ebay network probably got my Paypal payment. I can't wait for the sales to come rolling in!! You know it just warms me up inside to see three major companies like Google, Paypal and ebay working together so nicely. It reminds me of a crime syndicate, only legal...kinda. Oh ha ha ha, I forgot you guys MADE the rules, Great forward thinking! At least you are slapping the wrist and teaching the real criminals that you won't stand for their shenanigans and criminal conduct. And for you to take your sincerity to the next level by voluntarily offering 90 million dollars from the meager 6.14 billion you made in 95. That was a great business move on your part.

I was excited when you started gettin busy on click fraud this past February giving us the opportunity to Meet the Click Fraud Team. I gotta meet Julian some day. I found Sarah. the author of the article she wote on Julian - (sorry) The Click Fraud Team, but she is in your Inside Adwords crew. I thought they were called 'damage control"? Anyhoo, tell Julian thanks for doing such a great job, but he's probably on vacation having no work to keep him busy.

I am a llitle curios about why you called them the "Click Fraud" Team though. Matt said in this post on his blog just last year that you said ,"Google prefers the term invalid clicks to click fraud" on page 17 of Dr. Tuzhilin document discussing invalid clicks

I have been asked to evaluate Google's invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Google's campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Google's employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Google's invalid click detection system.

But I wasn't sure about the truth behind this rumour I heard. I mean even Matt Cutts put this disclaimer on his blog above an excerpt from Dr. Tuzhilin's independent and unbiased report he wrote up after spending the day at the Googleplex , "The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer." And if matt says says so you'd better listen. Proof and More Proof.

It's such a shame, before getting appointed the Official Spam Buster at Google years and years ago, Matt used to be such a nice young man. Even when he turned into a paper doll and a little supermatt, he still had that boyish grin. Rumours flowed like wild fire after this photo was realesed after a Chippendales show in a seedy club in Silicon Valley. We first started seeing the change come on when he went after Aaron Wall as seen here. If get up real close you'll see that Matt's power was just starting to blossom. Look closer. You can clearly see Aaron starting to fade under Matt Spam Bustin PowerClaw. Dang Matt, its just one book. And here Matt show his LA Crips gang sign. Wish he were around so I could get him to explain a few things that are confusing me. Last I heard he was holed up inside one of the wings at the GooglePlex. Thousands of Cuttlet's are shown here outsite the Plex.

So I decided to go to THE source for definitions after I tried to follow your instructions and could

Yes No

Now I can understand that you want to in your own confusing way that either my daily budget and/or my minimum CPC isn't quite enough for you to split your stocks at the end of the next fiscal year,

Here are just a few more tests I ran after 10 straight hours of testing, no sleep, and 20 minutes to get ready for work; (yeah, I was late)

I'll attach the unfinished brief that I will be distributing to my internal people,and I will probably send it over to DevShed and SEOChat once I do additional testing to test the ranking positions and cost of duplicate keyword across individual accounts, that are rate the 3 different ways (Poor , Good, and Great) as well as how long it takes each duplicate keyword with different Grades to gain the Good and then the Great Quality Rating back, and any additional costs that the lower Grades experienced in that time frame. and as I haven't submitted an article in months, but than they haven't payed me for any either. -

Google says account, campaign and adgroup performance does not affect Quality scores. I have found that they do when I attempt to create a completely new campaign, adgroup or keyword within a non-spending and low converting (when it was spending) account. I'm not exactly sure (but I will be after additional testing) why this occurs, but it absolutely does.

A few things that have stood out in this testing, but not entierly 100% conclusive;

Account quality score is an overall Grade of all the keyword quality scores in your account. These quality scores aren't averaged, they are weighted by impressions and clicks, and then averaged. Of course this is AFTER you account has performance data to measure, and not visibly or accurately measured during the new account setup.

Initial account setup settings are the only thing I have seen affecting individual keyword Quality Score that has no historical data to base the score on. So if the overall Quality Score of an account is factored into the account Quality Score based on the individual Quality Score at the key word level, (of which neither have historical data to base its formula on) and the initial account settings affect the Quality Score of individual keywords, then incorrect account settings during the initial setup can affect the overall Quality Score, and further the placement and cost of a keyword. Further, the initial overall account Quality Score can affect not only cost and placement of each individual key word, but require an inflated strategy and budget over time to improve lower Quaity Scores at the key word and account level up the Good or Great Quality level, so that positions are high and cost is low.

SEO Tools

2007-10-10T12:54:00.000+01:00

MPS Links Browse - Firefox - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/?from=getfirefox WYSIWYG - KompoZer - http://kompozer.net/ Information - SEO Quake - http://www.seoquake.com/ Link's URL	Link's anchor text
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http://www.google.com/analytics/	Google Analytics
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http://garyrbeal.bryxen1.hop.clickbank.net/	SEO Elite
http://www.webceo.com/cgi-bin/go/clickthru.cgi?id= ...	WebCEO
http://garyrbeal.bookdemon.hop.clickbank.net/	Bookmark Demon and BlobCommentDemon
http://www.google.com/webmasters/	Google Webmaster Central
http://www.softwarekey.com/products/info.asp?A=566 ...	Agent Web Ranking
http://garyrbeal.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net/	Keyword Elite
http://affiliate.wordtracker.com/r/699/a/132944/l/ ...	Wordtracker
http://keyworddiscovery.com/	KeywordDiscovery
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-optimizer ...	Keyword Optimizer
http://www.google.com/analytics/	Google Analytics
http://labs.google.com/suggest	Google Suggest
http://www.spyfu.com/default.aspx	SpyFu
https://adcenter.microsoft.com/Default.aspx	Hittail
http://www.google.com/trends	Google Trends
https://%20adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolEx ...	Google Keyword Tool External
http://www.inceptor.com/self_feature.php	BidCenter
http://www.seosleuth.com/	SEO Sleuth
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/roi-calculator/	ROI Calculator
http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/cgi-bin/adwra ...	Adwords Wrapper
http://garyrbeal.softproj.hop.clickbank.net/	Virtual Webmaster
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/class-c-checker/	C-Class Checker
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-rati ...	Code to Text Ratio
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/	Future PageRank
http://www.internetofficer.com/redirect-check.html	Internet Officer
http://livepr.raketforskning.com/	Live PR
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-cloud/	Keyword Cloud
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficult ...	Keyword Difficulty Check
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/	Page Size
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/site-link-analyze ...	Site Link Analyzer
http://oy-oy.eu/page/links/	Link Analysis
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/	Spider Simulator
http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.c ...	Keyword Misspelling Generator
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/	Keyword Density Analysis Tool
http://tools.seobook.com/hub-finder/	Hub Finder
http://tools.seobook.com/general/ultimate-seo-tool ...	Page Text Rank Checker
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/aff/idevaffiliate.php? ...	XML Sitemaps
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/	PageRank Toolbar For Mac
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/XENU.ZIP	Xenu Link Sleuth
http://netsol.ready.mobi/	Mobile Readiness Report
http://oy-oy.eu/page/jscode/	Javascript Content Hiding
http://www.softwarekey.com/products/info.asp?A=566 ...	Agent Web Ranking
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteovervi ...	Google Webmaster Central *Tool
http://labs.google.com/	Google Labs *Tool
http://oy-oy.eu/google/supplemental/	Check For Google Supplemental Results
http://spyfu.com/	SpyFu for Google Bidding
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/	Google Future PR
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/	Google Sandbox
http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php	Google Dance Watch
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py	Google Reinclusion Request
http://forums.seochat.com/attachment.php?attachmen ...	Banned by Google?
http://www.yourcache.com/check.php	Google Data Center Pages Indexed Check
http://livepr.raketforskning.com	Google Page Rank Check (All DC's)
http://www.googlerankings.com/	Google Keyword Ranking Check
http://web-professor.net/tools/bidstats/	Check Google Keyword Prices
http://forums.seochat.com/open-directory-project-1 ...	Getting into DMOZ
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/meta-tag-generato ...	Meta Tag Generator
http://www.roboform.com/?affid=kjhgy/	RoboForm - A MUST-HAVE!
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/	Keyword Density
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-c ...	Redirect Checker
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/	Robots.txt Generator
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/domain-age/	Domain Age Check
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-rati ...	Code-to-Text
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/	Spider Simulator
http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipc ...	Who Supplies Who with Search Results
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	Abuse IP Checker Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	IP Information Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	IP, City and reverse IP Lookup *Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	Ping Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	Traceroute Tool
http://garyrbeal.delfilerec.hop.clickbank.net/	Data Recovery Software
http://garyrbeal.digishine.hop.clickbank.net/	Create MultiMedia Pdf EBooks
http://garyrbeal.msincome.hop.clickbank.net/	Streaming Video For Your Website
http://garyrbeal.esscripts.hop.clickbank.net/	Add YouTube or Arcade Scripts
http://garyrbeal.1160290.hop.clickbank.net/	WordPress Auto Content Generator
http://garyrbeal.alkhtcsh.hop.clickbank.net/	Next Generation RSS (SEO) Software
http://garyrbeal.bookdemon.hop.clickbank.net/	Bookmark Demon and BlobCommentDemon
http://www.traffictravis.com/go.php?aff=YGL4JML2&t ...	Traffic Travis
http://www.stickyeyes.com	Stickyeyes
http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/london07 ...	SES London 2007
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3036/	(1)
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/	(2)
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2233/	(3)
http://www.google.com/analytics/	Google Analytics
http://www.axandra.com/go.to/garythescubaguy/4	IBP
http://garyrbeal.bryxen1.hop.clickbank.net/	SEO Elite
http://www.webceo.com/cgi-bin/go/clickthru.cgi?id= ...	WebCEO
http://garyrbeal.bookdemon.hop.clickbank.net/	Bookmark Demon and BlobCommentDemon
http://www.google.com/webmasters/	Google Webmaster Central
http://garyrbeal.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net/	Keyword Elite â€“ I use this within my arsenal of keyword tools Wordtracker
http://keyworddiscovery.com/	KeywordDiscovery
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-optimizer ...	Keyword Optimizer
http://www.google.com/analytics/	Google Analytics
http://labs.google.com/suggest	Google Suggest
http://www.spyfu.com/default.aspx	SpyFu
https://adcenter.microsoft.com/Default.aspx	Hittail
http://www.google.com/trends	Google Trends
https://%20adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolEx ...	Google Keyword Tool External
http://www.inceptor.com/self_feature.php	BidCenter
http://www.seosleuth.com/	SEO Sleuth
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/roi-calculator/	ROI Calculator
http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/cgi-bin/adwra ...	Adwords Wrapper
http://garyrbeal.softproj.hop.clickbank.net/	Virtual Webmaster
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/class-c-checker/	C-Class Checker
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-rati ...	Code to Text Ratio
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/	Future PageRank
http://www.internetofficer.com/redirect-check.html	Internet Officer
http://livepr.raketforskning.com/	Live PR
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-cloud/	Keyword Cloud
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficult ...	Keyword Difficulty Check
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/	Page Size
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/site-link-analyze ...	Site Link Analyzer
http://oy-oy.eu/page/links/	Link Analysis
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/	Spider Simulator
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting/	URL Rewriting
http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.c ...	Keyword Misspelling Generator
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/	Keyword Density Analysis Tool
http://tools.seobook.com/hub-finder/	Hub Finder
http://tools.seobook.com/general/ultimate-seo-tool ...	Page Text Rank Checker
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/aff/idevaffiliate.php? ...	XML Sitemaps
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/	PageRank Toolbar For Mac
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/XENU.ZIP	Xenu Link Sleuth â€“ Use to find broken links. Supports SSL sites and also reports on redirects. Mobile Readiness Report
http://oy-oy.eu/page/jscode/	Javascript Content Hiding
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteovervi ...	Google Webmaster Central *Tool
http://labs.google.com/	Google Labs *Tool
http://oy-oy.eu/google/supplemental/	Check For Google Supplemental Results
http://spyfu.com/	SpyFu for Google Bidding
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/	Google Future PR
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/	Google Sandbox
http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php	Google Dance Watch
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py	Google Reinclusion Request
http://forums.seochat.com/attachment.php?attachmen ...	Banned by Google?
http://www.yourcache.com/check.php	Google Data Center Pages Indexed Check
http://livepr.raketforskning.com	Google Page Rank Check (All DC's)
http://www.googlerankings.com/	Google Keyword Ranking Check
http://web-professor.net/tools/bidstats/	Check Google Keyword Prices
http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html	Rank
http://forums.seochat.com/open-directory-project-1 ...	Getting into DMOZ
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/meta-tag-generato ...	Meta Tag Generator
http://www.roboform.com/?affid=kjhgy/	RoboForm - A MUST-HAVE!
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/	Keyword Density
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-c ...	Redirect Checker
http://forums.seochat.com/attachment.php?attachmen ...	Robots.txt Generator
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/domain-age/	Domain Age Check
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-rati ...	Code-to-Text
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/	Spider Simulator
http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipc ...	Who Supplies Who with Search Results
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	Abuse IP Checker Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	IP Information Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	IP, City and reverse IP Lookup *Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	Ping Tool
http://www.dnsstuff.com/	Traceroute Tool
http://garyrbeal.delfilerec.hop.clickbank.net/	Data Recovery Software
http://garyrbeal.digishine.hop.clickbank.net/	Create MultiMedia Pdf EBooks
http://garyrbeal.msincome.hop.clickbank.net/	Streaming Video For Your Website
http://garyrbeal.esscripts.hop.clickbank.net/	Add YouTube or Arcade Scripts
http://garyrbeal.1160290.hop.clickbank.net/	WordPress Auto Content Generator
http://garyrbeal.alkhtcsh.hop.clickbank.net/	Next Generation RSS (SEO) Software
http://garyrbeal.bookdemon.hop.clickbank.net/	Bookmark Demon and BlobCommentDemon
http://www.seobook.com/2288.html	Aaron Walls SEO Book
http://www.traffictravis.com/go.php?aff=YGL4JML2&a ...	Traffic Travis â€“ Another Unique SEO Tool with its Own Unique Merits Half Again.com

GaryTheScubaGuy’s Top SEO Tools

2007-09-24T16:42:00.001+01:00

My Top SEM Tools
This is a comprehensive list of tools that my team and I use daily at
Stickyeyes.
The first one, Firefox with the three extensions, are the tools that I spoke about at SES London 2007. I encourage you to install it and check it out. Its one of the better tools I have used.
I use all three of these applications; IBP, SEOElite and WebCEO . Each has it own best tool and each are indispensible.

Firefox SEO Add-Ons (1) , (2) & (3) (Density, links, code cleaner, W3C Compliance, etc.)
Google Analytics - Provides deep analysis on all traffic, including paid search.
IBP - Several tools for checking rank positions, basic SEO page analysation and link building tools
SEO Elite – Excellent for Link Building, analysis, finding where competitors are advertising
WebCEO - Site optimization, promotion and analysis.
Back Linking/Bookmark Tools
Bookmark Demon and BlobCommentDemon – Automates the process of Bookmarking and Posting to Blogs
Link Building 101 - Basic Link Building Instructions and Tips.
Link Baiting - Good Link Baiting Tutorial
Google Webmaster Central – Statistics, diagnostics and management of Google's crawling and indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission and reporting.
Comprehensive Link Building 101

Link Baiting *Instruction
Pay Per Click Tools
Keyword Elite – I use this within my arsenal of keyword tools
Wordtracker -Data is based on the Metacrawler and Overture search engines.
KeywordDiscovery - Data is based on the number of search engines.
Keyword Optimizer - Enter a list of keywords and this tool will remove any duplicate entries and re-order the list alphabetically.
Google Analytics - Provides deep analysis on all traffic, including paid search.
Google Suggest - As you type, Google provides the top 10 most popular keywords that begin with the keyed-in letters, in order of popularity.
SpyFu - Find out what competitors are biding on and estimates for the cost of PPC advertising and others bells and whistles.
Hittail – Finds and easily groups the actual terms being used to find your site into an excel format. Great for finding niches and long keyword strings.
Google Trends - Graphs historical trends of various Google searches.
Google Keyword Tool External -Historical trends in keyword popularity.
BidCenter - A good tool for comparative analysis and easy to use
SEO Sleuth - Find what AOL users search for (AOL produces 2x the retail conversions as any other engine)
ROI Calculator - This calculator measures the ROI (return on investment) of a CPC (cost per click) campaign.
Adwords Wrapper – Concatenates multiple words into a usable format in Adwords
PPC Hijacking *Information
PPC 101 *Instruction
PPC 102 *Instruction

Site Tools
Virtual Webmaster – This is a great tool for the 'Do-It-Yourself" type.
200 Web Developers Will Complete Any Website Change Request in 48 Hours
C-Class Checker - Use the Class C Checker if you own several cross-linked sites. If you do, it may be more efficient (for SEO purposes) to host them on different Class C IP ranges.
Code to Text Ratio - This tool will help you discover the percentage of text in a web page (as compared to the combined text and code).
Future PageRank - This tool will query Google's various data centers to check for any changes in PageRank values for a given URL.
Internet Officer - Checks for Redirects
Live PR - The Live PageRank calculator gives you the current PageRank value in the Google index, not just the snapshot that is displayed in the toolbar.
Keyword Cloud - This tool provides a visual representation of keywords used on a website.
Keyword Difficulty Check - Use the Keyword Difficulty Check Tool to see how difficult it would be to rank for specific keywords or keyword phrases.
Page Size - This tool will help you to determine HTML web page size.
Site Link Analyzer - This tool will analyze a given web page and return a table of data containing columns of outbound links and their associated anchor text.
Link Analysis - Find out about all links on a page, including hidden ones and nofollow-markers
Spider Simulator - This tool simulates a search engine spider by displaying the contents of a web page in exactly the way the spider would see it.
URL Rewriting - This tool converts dynamic URLs to static URLs. You will need to create an .htaccess file to use this tool.
Keyword Misspelling Generator - allows you to generate various misspellings of a keyword or phrase to match common typing errors. Useful for creating keyword lists around your most important keywords to bid on.
Keyword Density Analysis Tool - finds common words and phrases on your site.
Hub Finder - finds topically related pages by looking at link co-citation. post about tool
Page Text Rank Checker - tool allows you to check where your site ranks for each phrase or term occurring on the page.
XML Sitemaps - makes XML sitemaps for sites.
PageRank Toolbar For Mac - A widget to show PageRank for the site you are on.
Xenu Link Sleuth – Use to find broken links. Supports SSL sites and also reports on redirects.
Mobile Readiness Report – See how well your site is formatted for mobile phones. Includes Visualisation.
Javascript Content Hiding – Hide content on your site from search engines and other crawler/bots

Google Tools
 Google Webmaster Central *Tool

 Google Labs*Tool

 Check For Google Supplemental Results
 SpyFu for Google Bidding

 Google Future PR

 Google Sandbox

 Google Dance Watch

 Google Page Rank Formula and Sandbox Explanation

 Google Google Information and FAQ

 Google Reinclusion Request

 Banned by Google?

 Google Advanced Search

 Google Data Center Pages Indexed Check

 Google Page Rank Check (All DC's)

 Google Keyword Ranking Check

 Google "Need-To-Know" Info

 Beginner Adwords Tips
 How Google Analytics Work
 Check Google Keyword Prices
 Hit Tail *Advanced Adwords

 Hit Tail Documented
 Fake Page Rank Detection Tool
 Adwords Click Fraud Study *Information

And Even More SEO Tools
 Getting into DMOZ

 Meta Tag Generator

 RoboForm - A MUST-HAVE!

 Keyword Density

 Redirect Checker

 Robots.txt Generator

 Link Popularity

 Domain Age Check

 Code-to-Text

 Spider Simulator

 Who Supplies Who with Search Results

 Abuse IP Checker Tool

 IP Information Tool

 IP, City and reverse IP Lookup *Tool

 Ping Tool

 Traceroute Tool

Other Useful Tools
Data Recovery Software – Powerful Data Recovery with 'on-the-fly' viewing
Create MultiMedia Pdf EBooks – Great for eTailers. This creates search engine optimised customer-facing Pdf documents as mentioned in Tip #5
Streaming Video For Your Website - Add Streaming Audio Or Video To Your Website Easily And Quickly
Add YouTube or Arcade Scripts - Entertainment Scripts Which Allow You To Start Your Own YouTube, MySpace, Break Or Arcade Website.
WordPress Auto Content Generator – Auto Generates Fresh Content for Your Blog
Next Generation RSS (SEO) Software – Add Rss Feeds To Your Site Easily
Bookmark Demon and BlobCommentDemon – Automates the process of Bookmarking and Posting to Blogs
Aaron Walls SEO Book – Yea I know, why am I listing this…I guess because it's a great resource that provides a few thing I haven't listed here.
Traffic Travis – Another Unique SEO Tool with its Own Unique Merits
Half Again.com – Content, Blog and Rss Generators

Supplemental Results – What They Are, How to Find Them and How to Get Out of Them

2007-09-21T13:56:00.001+01:00

Supplemental Results – What They Are, How to Find Them and How to Get Out of Them

"Supplemental sites are part of Google's auxiliary index. Google is able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than they do on sites that are crawled for the main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in the main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to Google's supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank."

Nonsense!

At the time of this article Google was already starting to eliminate their search results showing supplemental results. Until recently, all you had to do was go to the last few pages of your query and locate the pages that had ' - Supplemental Result' just after the page size. They aren't showing these anymore. Here's what they had to say,

"Since 2006, we've completely overhauled the system that crawls and indexes supplemental results. The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We're also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we've been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we've decided to stop labeling these URLs as "Supplemental Results." Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google's supplemental index being deeper and fresher."

Google then said that the easiest way to identify these pages is like this; "First, get a list of all of your pages. Next, go to the webmaster console [Google Webmaster Central] and export a list of all of your links. Make sure that you get both external and internal links, and concatenate the files.

Now, compare your list of all your pages with your list of internal and external backlinks. If you know a page exists, but you don't see that page in the list of site with backlinks, that deserves investigation. Pages with very few backlinks (either from other sites or internally) are also worth checking out."

Nonsense!

The easiest way to identify your supplemental pages is by entering this query 'site:www.yoursite.com/&'

Okay so now you have identified the pages that are in supplemental results and not showing up in the results anywhere.

Now we need to identify why they are there. The main reasons that a page goes to supplemental results are;

Duplicate Content
301's. Redirected Pages that have a cache date prior to the 301 being put in place
A 404 was returned when Google attempted to crawl it
New Page
Bad Coding
Page Hasn't Been Updated in Awhile
Pages That Have Lost Their Back Links
And according to Matt Cutts of Google,"PageRank is the primary focus determining whether a URL is in the main web index vs. supplemental results"

Now this isn't the end-all, but it covers about 95% of the reason that you may be in the supplementals.

So now we know what they are, how to find them and why they are most likely in the supplemental results. Now let's get them out of there.

Here are the different methods that I use when I find that a page has gone supplemental;

Add fresh content to the page
Add navigation to the page from the main page
Move the pages to the first subdirectory if it is not already there
Get a back link to the page and/or create a link from an existing internal page with the anchor text containing the keywords for that page
Do some social bookmarking on the page
Make sure the page is included in my xml sitemap and then resubmit it to Webmaster Central.
Lastly, if none of the above seem to be working after 90 days, and I have another page that is relevant and does have PageRank and isn't listed in the supplemental, I do a 301 (permanent redirect) to it from the supplemental page.

Finding What Terms Are Converting Into Sales/Tracking Keywords to Conversion with Weighting

2007-09-17T09:55:00.001+01:00

Finding What Terms Are Converting Into Sales/Tracking Keywords to Conversion With Weighting

Having 100,000 unique visitors a day really doesn't matter in the end if you aren't getting any conversions (new members, info requests,
sales).

Measuring successes and failures for landing pages, on-page content like CTA's, and especially keyword to sale are some of the most important pieces of information that you can gather and use to improve and optimise your overall website.
Here are two scenarios to better illustrate this point;
1. Paid Advertising – A car insurance company starts a paid advertising campaign on Google and after a week or so they see that the name of their company or their 'brand' seems to be converting the majority of their sales. Because of this discovery, they target the majority of their budget on their brand terms like ABC Insurance and ABC Insurance Company.
  
  A week later they see that their CPA (cost per acquisition) has sky-rocketed almost two-fold and can't figure out why this is. When they look at Google analytics and other third-party tracking software, they both say the same thing.
  So why is this?
  Let's take a look at the buying process (also called funnel tracking) to see where they went wrong; Mrs.INeedInsurance hopped online while enjoying her morning java to look for insurance because last night when Mr.INeedInsurance opened his renewal notice he got a significant premium hike. At dinner they decided to start shopping around for insurance. Mrs.INeedInsurance searched 'car insurance' between 6-8am that day, going in and out of different companies websites, learning what she was up against…tens of 1000's of results. So at work (11a-2pm is the #1 time people shop online – not necessarily making purchases) Mrs.INeedInsurance has learned a bit about search and decides to add her city in the query. This time she searches 'car insurance London', and still gets several thousand results, but at least they are localised, and there are a few that she recognizes from this morning so she goes in and fills a few of the forms out to get quotes. Throughout the rest of the day she gets the quotes either immediately from the website or via email. Now she's getting somewhere. Jump forward to after dinner that evening. Mr.INeedInsurance looks through the notes his wife brought home and decides that ABC Insurance offers the best deal for the money, then goes to Google and searches for ABC Insurance and makes the purchase.
  See what happened here? I use this as an example because this is exactly what I identified for a client a few years back that inevitably led to changes that doubled their conversions.
  The problem is that all the data pointed to ABC Insurance's brand name as being the top converting term, so that's where they concentrated the bulk of their budget. In actuality, 'car insurance' and then 'car insurance London' were the terms that actually led up to the sale.
  The reason that this is important for PPC campaigns, or any paid advertising, is that many will allow you to do keyword weighting. This is where you increase your bids or decrease your bids by a percentage according to day parting. Day parting is turning your ads up or down according to the time table that you put in place.
  In this instance I would turn my bids up to 125% on 'car insurance' and 'car insurance London' in the morning and afternoon, then down at night. On 'ABC Insurance' I would turn the bids down in the morning to 50%, and then back up to 125% in the evening.
  Keyword weighting also allows you to weight your keywords and track them to conversion. It places a cookie on the end-users computer to track what keyword brought them to the sight, what keyword resulted in a quote, and what keyword resulted in a sale.
  This is beneficial because I can further adjust my bidding strategies according to demographics and geographical metrics.
  With these cookies I can also successfully measure and establish LTV (Lifetime Values) of the average customer. This allows me to adjust the conversion value, which allows me to go back to my company/client and potentially get a higher advertising budget.
  Using this same insurance company as an example; initially they gave me a conversion value of $25. Now, since we were able to identify other sales made by this customer, the conversion value is $40.
  Offline this company spends 100,000 on advertising through different venues, acquiring customers at a cost average of £/$56. Guess what happened the next month? They increased the budget by 100,000.
2. Organic Advertising – Same scenario as above, except ABC Insurance Company identifies through log files or Google Analytics that his top converting keyword that is getting sales is car insurance.
  
  In light of this, the decision maker decides to create a landing page that is fully optimised so that the relevancy grade that all 3 search engines use will increase their organic positions, which it will.
  The problem here is that the term that was actually bringing them to the website to buy was 'cheap car insurance'. If they had identified this they could have built the page around the term, 'cheap car insurance' rather than just 'car insurance'. This would have served double-duty and acted as a great landing page for both keyword phrases.
This is why tracking your keywords to conversion is so important. It can save thousands on paid advertising and identify the actual keyword phrases that need pages built around for improving organic rankings.
If you are experiencing a high bounce rate or what you feel is high cart abandonment, you might be surprised to find that many didn't buy elsewhere; they actually came back to you and bought.
This is also helpful in refining your stats. Rather than show this customer as 3 separate visitors, it identifies (through the cookies) that they were actually just one visitor, and the bounce rate or cart abandonment is significantly reduced.
This information can very invaluable as well.
For instance, maybe I was getting high unique cart abandonment from unique users that was significantly higher once they went to checkout. I know that happens when I add shipping costs into the total. So I might try to do some A/B testing with and without shipping costs listed separately, added into the price initially and adding it during checkout and see which converts better. Or I may set the website up to recognize the cookie and create a drop down that offers free shipping today with any purchase over $/£XX.XX.
There are endless possibilities to use this information for.
There are many good tools out there to measure these variables and that will let you set up rules and keyword weighting, as well as many other great features. Some of these are;
WebTrends
DirectTracks
BidBuddy

Automate xml Sitemaps

2007-09-14T09:50:00.001+01:00

Automate XML Sitemaps – In the past you had to create several version of your sitemap for the different search engine bots. They required these to properly crawl your website's content for indexing (inclusion in their results)

Since then, two major changes have been made.

A universal sitemap format was adopted: xml (this even includes Ask.com)
A tweak was added that tells the bots to go to your robots.txt file first and look for a path to the xml file so that it knows where to go, and additional features that allow you to prevent the bots from crawling and indexing unnecessary files such as cpanel, administration or even image files.

You can specify the location of the Sitemap using a robots.txt file by simply adding the following line:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

The <sitemap_location> should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn't matter where you place it in your file. If you have a Sitemap index file, you can include the location of just that file. You don't need to list each individual Sitemap listed in the index file.

There are lots of places that have a free xml sitemap generator;
SourceForge.net
xml-sitemaps.com
auditmypc.com

I think GSoft also has an Open Source program that will automatically create the xml sitemap and upload it via your ftp if you set it up.

Because of the ever-changing content of a properly optimised site, as well as sites with CMS's (content management systems) and the millions of static sites out there, this is the method that I recommend.

Additionally, fresh content will keep the robots coming back to index your site. Most of these programs will insert the creation date in to the file to document that it is a revised version, but the most important part is that whenever you change anything within the site (and based on this article you may have a few changes to make) this will assure you that it will be picked up by the engines automatically without having to spend the time that we did in the past to expedite this process.

Part of the problem is that if you add navigation to this new content and put it in the site template, as I mentioned earlier, search engines will parse (remember) the content and skip over it to preserve its allotment of data that it can crawl on each url. They want to crawl deep and get as much content as possible, so they skip pages that provide no new content.

SBM Test (Start 29.8.07

2007-09-10T18:01:00.004+01:00

BINGO Effects on Google Ranking Pages and Yahoo/MSN Non-Ranking Pages
		Google UK		Yahoo UK		MSN UK
URL	KW	Before	After	Before	After	Before	After	SBM DATE
/home/news.php	online bingo	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	29.08.07
/bingo/promotions.php?section=bingo	online bingo cash prize	4	2	n/a	n/a	n/a	1	29.08.07
/bingo/onlinebingo.php	free on line bingo games	10	6	n/a	1	n/a	2	29.08.07
/community/	uk bingo	25	16	n/a	n/a	n/a	4	29.08.07
/community/mystic.php	free online bingo site	13	6	n/a	n/a	n/a	4	29.08.07

Effect on Supplementals
		GOOGLE RANK		YAHOO RANK		MSN RANK
URL	KW	Before	After	Before	After	Before	After	SBM DATE
/html/freestakepage.shtml	bonus bingo offer	na	79	na	94	na	94	31.08.07
/html/bingo.shtml	bingo win	na	62	na	na	na	68	31.08.07
/html/slots.shtml	slot games	21	11	6	6	23	23	31.08.07
/html/numbers.shtml	keno games	na	79	17	15	na	na	31.08.07
/html/casino.shtml	play gold	na	na	न	na	na	na	31.08.07

SBM Results 12 Days

2007-09-10T17:57:00.001+01:00

BINGO
		Google UK		Yahoo UK		MSN UK
URL	KW	Before	After	Before	After	Before	After	SBM DATE
/home/news.php	online bingo	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	29.08.07
/bingo/promotions.php?section=bingo	online bingo cash prize	4	2	n/a	n/a	n/a	1	29.08.07
/bingo/onlinebingo.php	free on line bingo games	10	6	n/a	1	n/a	2	29.08.07
/community/	uk bingo	25	16	n/a	n/a	n/a	4	29.08.07
/community/mystic.php	free online bingo site	13	6	n/a	n/a	n/a	4	29.08.07

Bump Competitors Multiple Listings

2007-09-10T10:11:00.001+01:00

Bump Your Competitors Multiple Listings Out of Google and Pick up a Position or Two

Every wonder why during a search
you find a competitor that has two pages listed above you? I call them kicker listings. The home page is always the second listing, and the first is an internal page that actually has relevant content.

Here is why this happens. When you submit a query Google looks at its rank and if they are close to each other in their results, they group them together. If you are showing up in the SERP's first couple pages then it is most likely that you are listed again much deeper in the results. But when two pages are close, like top ten, or top 20, then Google shows them side-by-side. The second, usually the index page, will be listed below and also indented.

By going into 'advanced search' the number of default result can be changed, or you can add this bit of code to the end of the url string that it shows after a search for your keyword, just after the search? And the results will be more refined. Add this 'num=8&' to the end of the url. This number may change the results, but if not reduce the number. This will show you where your competitor's second page should
actually
be.

Okay, so now should go back to the original search that showed the double listing. Within the search results look where your competitor is showing up, then look below his listings for a non-competitor. It could be anything, a video, a news story or a Wikipedia or eBay listing. Use the guide in Tip #11 to do some social bookmarking, or even link to the page from your website (preferably on a second level subdirectory).

What this will do is add a little boost to the non-competitive website and bump the 'kicker' listing that your competitor has, back to where he belongs, below your listing.

This is surprisingly easy and quick using a combination of bookmarks and back links. It may even boost your trust rating with Google by having an outbound link to a high ranking website.

Using this method on eBay sometimes provides a double-boost because if it is an auction rather than a store item it may drop off the SERP's once the auction is over.

Finding/Identifying buzz words

2007-09-07T16:23:00.001+01:00

Finding/Identifying 'buzz' words (like Dove's Pentapeptides) and How to Dominate Search and Turn New Words into Huge Traffic Sources

What are pentapeptides?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEyJK3JVB50
I've seen this
commercial
no less than 20-30 times
in just the last couple weeks. I'd like to think I was fairly intelligent, at least to the point that I would have heard this word before, but I haven't. A search on Wikipedia turns up absolutely nothing. My brand new version of Microsoft Office (Word) 2007 doesn't have it in its dictionary either. Google only shows 135,000 results. Of the results that Google is showing, the top 3 have either a 2 or 3/10 PageRank, and only a few have back links. The #1 result for pentapeptides has a 2/10 PageRank and only 2 Google backlinks showing.

The point I'm trying to make here is that new words are invented every day, whether by scientists naming a drug, a car company naming a new model, or a company creating a new product. If you put the tools in place to monitor for these you can use them to corner a new market.

My first thought here if I were an online marketer would be to find a product that you can remarket for a commission like through an affiliate site. I could create a page within my affiliate website for pentapeptides. The homepage holds a PageRank of 5/10 so that page would soon hold a 4/10 and immediately be front page, and eventually with a little social bookmarking and link building it will dominate the SERP's, as well as be concreted in the top positions. Imagine what would happen if Pentapeptides takes off!

Better yet, if I had a current site or a page that was ranking and had at least one back link showing in a 'link:yoursite.com search on Google', I would go in and integrate 'pentapeptide' into the content according to the checklist in Tip #21.

If your one of the lucky ones reading this first, this is a real-life example that you can actually go out and implement what I've said and actually make it happen!

I use Google Alerts to find potentially new 'niche' phrases related to one of the sectors that I market in. It is fairly vast considering we cover financials, insurance, casino, bingo, travel, airlines, mobile phones, cars, furniture and bedding, clothing and many more.

Watching the mobile phone industry is taking the above and turning it up a few notches because I want to actually have our people contact them and find out what the 'next hot phone' is and what its called. Of course industry experts are already utilizing this technique.

This goes for paid search as well. There are currently only 2 Adwords advertisers in the search for pentapeptides and one is eBay.

Comprehensive Link Building

2007-09-04T16:57:00.001+01:00

Link building is the single most important element to obtaining high rankings in all of the major search engines. It is vital that continual efforts be made and long-term plans be laid out to insure a web sites continued success in organic search results, and reduced costs in paid placement (PPC).

Google created the most successful information retrieval device of all time based on sending spiders to follow each and every link they can find on each and every web document they come across. Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and all the other search databases have acquired the vast amounts of information they contain in similar fashion. Links play important roles in the ranking formulas of all search engines, especially Google, by providing numerous pieces of data for their algorithms to chew through.

The best links a web site can have are natural, one-way inbound links. These are links that are posted by other web sites, forums or blogs. These show a natural interest in something the linked web site offers such as valuable information, news, a tool or some other resource.

The more one-way links a web site has, the more reliable the search engine algorithms consider it to be. Google has gone as far as to rank a web site in terms of PR, or page rank. This is a sliding scale of 0-10. The more important Google considers a web site, the higher the PR that it awards it. (PR also includes visitors as well).

You can check the number of back links to a web site in many different ways. The Firefox browser has an installable extension that allows users to "right-click" and scan down to "back links" to see the number of back links a site has. There are several toolbars that you can install (Google, Yahoo, etc.) that allow you to see this, and there are various web sites that offer tools to do this.

(Google is unique in its approach to back links as it will only show a percentage of the actual back links, whilst Yahoo and MSN show all. Google also will delay showing back links in order to attempt to weed out purchased back links or schemes to affectively fool the algorithms into awarding a higher PR, and thus a higher position in the SERP's – Search Engine Ranking Positions.)

These will check the number of back links that a page has: http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-checker.html

This will check the number of back links that the top 10 sites have based on your selected keyword (this will help you find relevant sites);
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/whoischeck-bykeys.pl

Or you can even use the free version of IBP – Arelis to do this. Arelis will;

Search for Link Partners by Keyword
Search for Link Partners by Finding Who Already Links Back to You
Find Out Who Links to Your Competition

Types of Link Strategies

Natural Link Building – Adding quality content or something that benefits the end user that they would want to link to

One-Way Linking (Purchase) – Buying one-way inbound links to your web site

Reciprocal Linking – Exchanging links with another web site

Link Farms – Companies like linkmarket.net (but not directories, FFA's, or obvious abusers of linking)

Three-Way Linking – Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to site A (www.three-way-links.com/)

Forums and Blogs – Links from forums and blogs

News Articles (PR Web) – Typically created by web site owners to promote their site. These are effective after 2-4 weeks when Google has crawled them and indexed them within their search results. Never put more than 1 link to any one page per article.

One of the tools mentioned above, linkmarket.net is a good tool, which has spawned many other linking tools that do similar things.

Here's how it works; you search through their categories for relevant categories. Once you drill it down to the category and click on it, a list of other members will come up as well as their Google PR. You add their link to your website and send them a request. This request will also provide a link for them to insert into their web site. The downfall is that you need to check that the link remains there or even that it's placed in the first place. This is where the work begins.

You need to track all of the links to verify they aren't taken down. There are tools (Web CEO for one), that will do this for you, but you will still need to record the link page URL so that you can enter it into the tool so it can do the check.

There are many ways to gain back links from a web site. You can offer valuable information on something that an end-user finds useful, such as a map to, or of a destination, a tool such as a mortgage calculator, or even a coupon or shopping tips. This is the way the search engines want you back links to occur…as this is the Natural Link Building process; An end-user finds something on a web site that they feel is useful and they create a link to it.

Another method is purchasing One-Way Links. You must be very careful when attempting this strategy as many things can go awry, and the search engines (especially Google), are looking very hard at how to avoid awarding web sites higher SERP's based on link building efforts attempting to obtain a more favourable position in their search engine.

Whilst Google Page Rank doesn't directly affect your SERP's, the back links from trusted sources do. The way this works is that Google looks at the PR of the referring web site and passes on PR. The influence of this "bleeding" affect is determined by:

The PR of the referring site
The number of outbound links on the page containing your back link
The "trust" rating of the referring web site, according to Google, which is based on the registration date and consistent content, as well as the web sites own back links and these same parameters

This, put in basic terms, means that spending the time that it takes to obtain a back link from a site that has no PR is minimal.

Here is an example of Google's "weightedness";

Site 1 with a PR5 has 50 links (the max you want on 1 page) = bleeds .0012 PR

Site 2 with a PR5 has 10 links = bleeds .430 PR

Site 3 with a PR5 has 2 links = bleeds .776 PR

Additionally, Google seemingly awards back links from .org's slightly higher, and back links from .edu's and 'gov's significantly higher. This opens many vertical possibilities when taken into consideration whilst planning your long-term back link strategy. Ask me about these if you're willing to do a lot of hard work.

The following is the same example above, but is based off a back link from a .edu and a .gov

.org/.edu Site 1 with a PR5 has 50 links (the max you want on 1 page) = bleeds .4352 PR

.org/.edu Site 2 with a PR5 has 10 links = bleeds .88721 PR

.org/.edu Site 3 with a PR5 has 2 links = bleeds 1.176 PR

So this means that it is important to get back links from high PR sites, as well as sites that have related content.

The Link

Just as important as the back links, the actual content of the back link is as important.

Because of the overwhelming problem the SE's are experiencing with Spammers and Black-Hatters overtaking their results and therefore skewing the quality of the overall purpose of their primary intended function, which is search and providing relevant results, each of the main three search engines have introduced, or are soon to introduce an entirely new algorithm that, in purpose, is meant to eliminate the bad, and provide genuine, relevant results, which is what the end-user is looking for.

So Google tweaked their algorithm to place an increased weight on not only back links, but the actual content that surround the back link. So be sure that when you spend all this time on link building you do it the right way. Put your link inside relevant text, with other keyword strings that contain your primary keyword set.

What this means is that if I were optimising a web site and one of its keyword phrases were "debt consolidation", I would create a back link that used "debt consolidation" (actually I would use "Get Debt Consolidation" because you need a 'grey' word before your keywords in ANY circumstance when doing optimization to avoid obvious SEO red flags), and the link description would also include that phrase. So, a good example of this is here:

Expert Debt Consolidation – Get Cheap Debt Consolidation Now.

This is a basic example. Every web site and back link offer/tool will have different parameters stating how many characters you can use, the length, content, number of caps, number of expletives like "best", "cheapest", or "lowest" type. The point I am making here is that you need to take full advantage of the link. You do this with carefully selected anchor text and descriptions. These links need to be carefully created and linked back to SE optimized landing pages that mirror your anchor text and description. These elements are EXACTLY what ALL search engines, especially Google, use to weight or grade the link.

This, coupled with quality content and the correct keyword density and other SEO elements, are core in the future of obtaining high rankings with all SE's organically, and PPC at a cost well under what the competition is paying.

Link Tools

Alexa (Part of IBP 9.2), WebCEO and many other tools are available that work in an efficient way, and can be very effective if utilized in the correct fashion. These tools will take your selected keyword and based on the parameters that you set up, crawl the search engines and the top ranking web sites that come up for that particular query. They then pull any available emails from the site, if available, or if there isn't one available, it will default to whatever you select (i.e. webmaster@ or info@).

So lets say you are searching for back links from sites that are related to women's under garments for Bravissimo. I would enter "women's clothing" into the search box and these tools come back with the number of sites that you request. The tools give you the amount of back links a site already has, the PR strength, a relevancy grade and so on.

These tools have other optional settings to help in your link building schemes.

Find web sites to link to by keyword
Find web sites that link to your competitors
Find web sites that already link to you (to possibly change the anchor text or add additional deep links)

IBP, for instance, will scrape the results of these searches and scan the website for email addresses. This is a big timesaver.

Investigate the many tools available to find the one that suits your needs the best. Stay away from the cookie cutter approach if possible as link building has been going on for years and most web site owners have received thousands of "canned" requests over the years.

Things to avoid when link building

Stay away from link farms (http://www.jimprice.com/jim-lnk.htm#people)
The site has no possible connection to your subject matter whatsoever. The page they put your link on isn't linked to FROM any page, meaning it's floating out there in never-never land and is a ploy to get you to link to their site.
The page where they put your link is on a URL a mile long and several directories deep so engines will never find it.
The page looks like a farmer's field with nicely arranged rows of links to hundreds of sites which aren't necessarily organized in any logical manner, but that doesn't matter because someone told them the link is all that counts.
It's a link and a link only. No description. No proof the person ever actually reviewed the site.
Signs they'll accept anything that shows evidence of being a "live" link. A true Directory has criteria, frets about the quality of sites it links to and doesn't have people out begging for links. Instead the reverse is true, with people begging to be let in.
Watch for scams such as sub-domain one-way traffic feeders where the page your site is linked to isn't part of the main website. Study the URLS carefully before you decide to accept a link request.
Stay away from FFA sites (Free For All)
Avoid being on a web site that has pages and pages of links. This is viewed as a Link Farm.
Stay away from sex oriented, gambling, RX and other unsavoury sites.
Be aware of the possibility of bad neighbours. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you're not on a proxy server with a spammer or banned site. (This is a tool available in Tip #20)
Don't waste your time getting a link from a non-ranking page within a site. The page needs to hold a rank of a minimum PR value of 1 below your landing page, particularly if there are going to be other outbound links to other web sites. If there are not going to be other outbound links, or just a few, then a PR of 2 and above will still boost your ranking and benefit your SERP's as well as your own PR.
Stay away from link pages called "Link Partners", "Links" or the like, especially if the term "link" or "links" is part of the URL
Stay away from pages that have more than 50 outbound links

If you are looking to build long-term rankings, it takes more work and creativity than just sending out automated emails or joining a linking program. Create a daily "hit list" outlining exactly what you will do.

Don't be afraid to pick up the phone. This is the best way to get and keep a link. You can usually find this information at Network Solutions or the web sites "About Us" page.

Lastly, keep at it! Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. You've been given what is probably the most important job that influences search engine results. The work you do today, will put a web site at the top of the rankings tomorrow, and keep them there.

50 Ways To Get Links

1. Build a "101 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these (hint, hint). Like mine at http://www.ppc-manager.blogspot.com. I did a PPC 101 and PPC 102 lists.
2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.
3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).
4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.
5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an "authority".)

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link To
6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It's an accessibility thing.)
7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.
8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.
PPC as a Link Building Tool
9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication
10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.
11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.
12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.
13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.
14. Trade articles with other webmasters.
15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.
16. Write about, and link to, companies with "in the news" pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].
17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking
18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.
19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.
20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deep linking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.
21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.
22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.
23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular and spreading ideas with plenty of original content, (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Business Links
24. Join the Better Business Bureau.
25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.
26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (easier in some countries than in others.)
27. List your site at the local library's Web site.
28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.
29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other's business cards.
30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional "normal" links.

Easy Free Links
31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.
32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.
33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.
35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.
36. Submit a story to Digg
that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.
37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links… unfortunately, some will not).
38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews
39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.
40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.
41. Create product lists on
Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).
42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.
43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.
44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere
45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.
46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.
47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.
48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati
tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.
49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.
50. Start all over again.

Rss Feeds and Search Optimisation

2007-09-03T09:48:00.001+01:00

Create A Multi-Source Rss feeds to Internal Pages – When I say multiple
its because the majority of people who add rss feeds, add one, and this will eventually look like duplicate content if the moons line up correctly, or if you simple get a feed that doesn't refresh that often and Google crawls your site and someone else's site and sees the same content. Although there is only a remote chance of this happening, I would still take the extra step to feed it via multiple feeder sites.

This content should be placed on-page (within your content) rather than in your navigation. Most search engines will parse (remember) your navigation anyhow so the benefit of having the content in your navigation is minimal. Put it within the content, preferably near the bottom of the page above the footer. This means that each time the spiders return they will crawl through to the end to get to the fresh content. (Be sure your page is under 30-40kb)
I use Power Rss for this. Or, if you have a Joomla site, this has a built-in feature that you can read about here: Joomla Simple RSS Feeder.

Create a Small Google Adwords Account

2007-08-29T10:03:00.001+01:00

12.
Create a Small Google Adwords Account - 5 Great Reasons Why

Creating a small Adwords account will give you valuable information quickly, whether you are getting traffic or not. Look around for a $50 promotional coupon. Start out with a £/$100 account. Use this tool Keyword Elite to build your keyword list. This is the best tool I have used in close to 7 years of managing over 10 million in adwords campaign across all sectors, competitive or not. I won't get into the particulars; I'll just say get it and learn it. Put all your max bids at the minimum. Be sure to set up Google Analytics (add a dummy file to your server) and the conversion tracking (one line of code) into your thank you page to monitor what keywords are converting.

This will give you valuable information that you can use to improve your site like what keywords are converting into sales rather than just traffic,

5 Great Reasons Why
1. Test navigational elements for the best CTR
2. Track keywords to conversions to designate individual page creation
3. Identify primary and secondary keyword
4. Establish estimated conversion costs
5. Get a head start on traffic and sales

THE SECRET WEAPON - Social Bookmarking

2007-08-28T10:27:00.000+01:00

11. THE SECRET WEAPON - Social Bookmarking
Wikipedia defines it this way:
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.
GaryTheScubaGuy defines it this way:
One of the best free ways to get increased ranking, back links and traffic, for very little time commitment other than setup.
This very moment most search engine algorithms are placing a ton of weight on end-user ‘bookmarking’, ‘tagging’ or one of various types of end-user generated highlighting.
Before doing any of this run a rank report to track your progress. I have tested this on terms showing on page one, on terms ranked 11th through 12th and others buried around pages 5-10. It works on them all in different time frames, and they last for different periods of time. This you will need to test yourself.
Be careful because you don’t want to be identified as a spammer. Be sure to use genuine content that provides a benefit to the user.
Here is how I recommend doing this.
1. Download this; Roboform. (It says it will limit you but I’ve had as many as 30+ passwords created and stored in the trial version) This will allow you to quickly fill out signup forms and store passwords for the 10 Bookmark sites that I am going to be sending you to.
2. Within Roboform go to the custom area and put a username and password in, as well as your other information that sites usually ask for to register. This way when you are using these different bookmarks it’s a 1-click login in and becomes a relatively quick and painless procedure.
3. Establish accounts with these Social Bookmark Sites;
a. Digg
b. Technorati
c. Del.icio.us
d. NowPublic
e. StumbleUpon
f. BlinkList
g. Spurl
h. Furl
i. Slashdot
j. Simpy
k. Google Toolbar (w/Google Bookmarking)

4. Internet Explorer, Firefox and most other browsers have an “add a tab” option, but I use Firefox because I can bookmark the login pages in one file, then “open all tabs” in one click. From here I click on each tab and in most cases, if you set it up right, Roboform will have already logged you in. Otherwise you’re on the login page and by clicking on the Roboform button everything is prefilled, all you need to do is click submit. (some of the bookmark sites will allow you to add their button into your browser bar, or you can get an extension from Firefox like the Digg Add-on to make things quicker)
5. Lastly, Install the Google Toolbar. It has a bookmark function as well, and you can import all your bookmarks from Firefox directly into it. Google looks at many different things when assigning rank and trust. For instance, when you search for something and go into a website, Google will remember how long you stayed, how deep you went, and if you came back out into the search to select another site, which means you didn’t find what you were looking for. This is all part of the Privacy Issues that have been in the news.
Here’s what Google actually says! "The Google Toolbar automatically sends only standard, limited information to Google, which may be retained in Google's server logs. It does not send any information about the web pages you visit (e.g., the URL), unless you use Toolbar's advanced features.”
They practically spell it out for you. Use their bookmark feature just like you were doing the social bookmarking I outlined above. This is just one more click.

Some of the elements that Google looks at when grading a website are;
How much time did the average visitor spend on the site?
What is the bounce rate on the landing page?
How many end-users bookmarked the page?
How many users returned to the search query and then on to a different site?
Each time you publish an article put a Google Alert on a unique phrase. Each time Google sends you an alert, bookmark it on every bookmark site. This will take some getting used to, but will eventually become second-nature. Remember what I said in the beginning; “One of the best free ways to get links and traffic, for very little time commitment other than setup”.
When you start seeing traffic coming in and your SERPs getting better you will use the heck out of this. I’m waiting for someone to come out with software that will automate this process completely, but by the time that hits nofollows may come into play. But for the time being it works and it works well.
(Update: Found one) Bookmark Demon and Blog Comment Demon. It automates the process.
Since I am sure someone is going to refute this claim based on the fact that if the site has a no-follow on it, the results will be nonexistent, I’ll just add that - yes it does still get indexed, and it does still help.
One more thing regarding posting to blogs and forums. When I create an account I sign up and use a very unique member name (eg. GaryTheScubaGuy). This is because many blogs and forums have a no-follow, which means the link in your signature or on your member name won’t show up. So I also sign, or add my member name to the bottom of my post, then add a Google Alert on my signature so that when Google finds the post, it will alert me, and I will then start bookmarking the forum page.

Use Press Releases and Syndication

2007-08-24T09:41:00.000+01:00

10. Use Press Releases and Syndication

Press Releases are a fantastic way to get natural one-way links, and also attract fresh traffic. If they are done correctly they can be the main source for building traffic, gaining ranking positions and building trust with the search engines. But don’t just write them, send them to the right places.

In the United States I use PRWeb, and in the UK and Europe I use SourceWire to syndicate articles. Both originally started as PR companies before the web came around so they have excellent connections with real syndicated sources. The websites that they send the articles to, will re-syndicate them to even more websites. You will pay between £20-£40/$20-$60 depending on the amount that you send them.

The articles that you syndicate should be authoritative or about something that will attract people to it, like Top 12 SEO Tips for 2007, or Ten Reasons Why ______________. You should quote trusted authorities and always reference the source when possible. I use Wikipedia or news sources like Google News, BBC, or CNN. I believe this actually adds trust to an article and in 3-6 months when Google pushes out Page Rank, the probation period for giving you full value is reduced.

Valuable content will be a natural link bait and you will also get real traffic from it.

Pull a unique phrase from the article (mine is GaryTheScubaGuy) and add a Google Alert to it (#9 above). Choose to be alerted “as it happens”. When you get an alert (typically within 6-12 hours), go to the page and place a Social Bookmark on the page. (I will talk more about this technique in the next tip.)

Google Custom Desktop and Google Alerts for Content

2007-08-23T10:52:00.000+01:00

9. Google Custom Desktop and Google Alerts for Content

If you are not using Google Customized Desktop, Google Reader, or some type of rss feed reader already, you should definitely start using one. The easiest way to accomplish this for a complete novice (but is actually the way I do it), is with your GMail account. This is something else you should already be using. For the data storage alone you should be using it. If you need an invitation to open one, send me a request and I’ll send an invite (garythescubadiver@gmail.com). You will need a GMail account to use this tool.

With a GMail account you can go to the Google homepage and login using your email. In the top right corner is a link for “Add stuff”. It allows you to add specific URLs and it will pull the last 1-10 entries from that page and populate your Google Desktop. Here’s a snapshot of what mine looks like;

It isn’t the best snapshot but I wanted to show as much as possible. This is actually only about 1/3 of what I have on mine. These are different places that I used to go to individually to find information.

Google Alerts is a fantastic tool. You enter your search term and whenever Google finds your term while crawling the web it will send you and email with a link to it. I have alerts on everything from “google datacenters” to “DMOZ” and “Matt Cutts” to “Danny Sullivan”.

When I look for content, I use these as reference tools. They are not meant to be used to scrape content or plagiarize other websites.

There are many other uses for these if you put your head to it. :o)