Thursday, March 29, 2012
A word of caution
There has been a lot of positive feedback but my advice is this. Take your time and do it piece by piece don't overwhelm yourself. The techniques are tried ,tue and proven to work over and over again when done properly. Your site will move up maybe a couple of thousand places , then a half million, million and so on. You also need to keep in mind to add new content to keep your site fresh for the search engines.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
How To Skyrocket Your Website To The Top Of Google With Properly Planned Offpage Optimization
"How To Skyrocket Your Website To The Top Of Google With Properly Planned Offpage Optimization!"
I don't know about you, but I get extremely excited when I see my new websites at the top of Google for the very first time. Making big changes in ranking is primarily done by what is called offpage optimization.
Earlier I mentioned there were two types of search engine optimization.
Important! Properly planned offpage optimization will make the difference between your website ranking #900 on Google, to ranking #1.
So, what is offpage optimization anyway? Offpage optimization basically consists of all of the offpage ranking factors like:
Copy The Top Ranked Websites To Get A #1 Position
The goal here will be to copy exactly what they're doing, and then do things slightly better. We want to give Google exactly what they want, by making our linking strategy as close to the top ranked websites as possible, but as I said, slightly better to edge them out. The keyword we'll use in this example will be a highly popular term. We'll use "diet pills" so I can show you just how powerful offpage optimization is, and what kind of rankings it can get you, if you do it correctly.
First, we need to open up a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel. You should create the following columns
Next, we need to visit Google and enter the keyword "diet pills". We'll then visit the top 10 websites for this keyword and collect the information above. You should create 1 spreadsheet for each of the top 10 websites.
Note:
Linking Website is the specific website linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm, which is the #1 ranked website in Google for the term "diet pills". In order to find all of the websites that link to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm you can do a couple of things. The most common way is to go to Google and enter this search command: link:www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.
Once you do this Google will return a large list of websites that link to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.
Over the past several months, Google has cut down on the number of backlinks that it will show you, so you may be better off going to Yahoo and entering link:http://www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm to get a larger list of websites that link to them. Note that for Yahoo you must include "http://".
Anchor Text is the actual text used within the link linking to the specified website. For example, the anchor text in the following link would be "diet pills".
diet pills website
Page Rank is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm. In order to see the Google Page Rank, you'll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free from:
http://toolbar.google.com
Link Popularity is just the number of links that are pointing to each of the webpages pointing to practicalweightloss.com. You can find their Google link popularity by entering this search command into Google: link:www.thewebsite.com then counting the total number of results that are shown OR you could go to a website like www.linkpopularity.com to find each link partners link popularity much quicker.
Page Title is the title of the page that is linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm. Does it contain the keyword "weight loss stories", "weight loss" or "weight"? If so, you should note which links pages those are. You'll want to approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.
Note: Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook.
Number of Outbound Links is the number of links located on the webpage linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm. The less links located on the page, the more a link from them would increase your ranking.
Once we've collected all of the information, we now can see www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm's linking strategy.
We'll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the keywords "diet pills", "diet", or "pills" in the page title.
We'll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the keywords "diet pills", "diet", or "pills" in the actual anchor text linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.
We'll then need to mirror these numbers, as close as we can, for our linking strategy. This may take awhile to do, but once you've done this...
You'll Have The Exact Blueprint You Can Give Google
For A #1 Ranking!
Once the blueprint for our linking strategy is complete, we need to contact each of these websites individually and ask them if they will add our link to their website in exchange for us adding their link to ours.
Tip: The more personalized you can make the email, the better. It is always best to include a blurb stating that you liked "X" about their website and was very impressed with "Z" etc...
Now, if all of that seemed like it would take many days to do, you're right... it would. It works, but it does take A LOT of time.
I have more good news though, there is a specific software program out there that can do ALL of this for you in a matter of minutes. It's what I use on a daily basis and it works very well.
In fact, to prove this program works very well, let me show you an email from one of the companies that I promote their products as an affiliate. Here's what they had to say:
"As an affiliate manager, I count the day I found Brad Callen as being one of the luckiest days in my career so far. I knew he was very good at optimizing for weight loss products because I kept running across his name during my searches on Google; however, I have been amazed at how quickly he is able to take over the #1 spot in Google for practically any term.
Within the past three months, Brad has become one of the leading revenue generators for several of our products. Brad has proven that, within a matter of days, he can get to the #1 position for any keywords that relate to our products. Whenever we launch a new product or offer, I make sure to get it to Brad right away because I know I'll see him at the top of the search engines within 1 or 2 weeks at the most. I have never encountered anyone else in SEO who can come close to Brad when it comes to efficient and effective optimization."
-- Sue SharpSales & Marketing
1800patches.com
If you haven't figured out what program I'm talking about is, you'll need to stay tuned to tomorrow's MOST POWERFUL LESSON YET!
Not to sound cliche, but what I will share tomorrow will likely change your entire business forever...
I don't know about you, but I get extremely excited when I see my new websites at the top of Google for the very first time. Making big changes in ranking is primarily done by what is called offpage optimization.
Earlier I mentioned there were two types of search engine optimization.
- Onpage Optimization
- Offpage Optimization
Important! Properly planned offpage optimization will make the difference between your website ranking #900 on Google, to ranking #1.
So, what is offpage optimization anyway? Offpage optimization basically consists of all of the offpage ranking factors like:
- Which websites link to you
- The number of websites linking to you
- The Google page rank of the website linking to you
- The page title of the website linking to you
- The anchor text used in the link linking to you
- The number and type of links linking to the website that's linking to you.
- The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
- The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
- Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.
- Plus some other things that we'll get to later...
Copy The Top Ranked Websites To Get A #1 Position
The goal here will be to copy exactly what they're doing, and then do things slightly better. We want to give Google exactly what they want, by making our linking strategy as close to the top ranked websites as possible, but as I said, slightly better to edge them out. The keyword we'll use in this example will be a highly popular term. We'll use "diet pills" so I can show you just how powerful offpage optimization is, and what kind of rankings it can get you, if you do it correctly.
First, we need to open up a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel. You should create the following columns
- Linking Website
- Anchor Text used
- Page Rank
- Link Popularity
- Page Title
- Number of Outbound Links
Next, we need to visit Google and enter the keyword "diet pills". We'll then visit the top 10 websites for this keyword and collect the information above. You should create 1 spreadsheet for each of the top 10 websites.
Note:
Linking Website is the specific website linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm, which is the #1 ranked website in Google for the term "diet pills". In order to find all of the websites that link to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm you can do a couple of things. The most common way is to go to Google and enter this search command: link:www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.
Once you do this Google will return a large list of websites that link to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.
Over the past several months, Google has cut down on the number of backlinks that it will show you, so you may be better off going to Yahoo and entering link:http://www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm to get a larger list of websites that link to them. Note that for Yahoo you must include "http://".
Anchor Text is the actual text used within the link linking to the specified website. For example, the anchor text in the following link would be "diet pills".
diet pills website
Page Rank is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm. In order to see the Google Page Rank, you'll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free from:
http://toolbar.google.com
Link Popularity is just the number of links that are pointing to each of the webpages pointing to practicalweightloss.com. You can find their Google link popularity by entering this search command into Google: link:www.thewebsite.com then counting the total number of results that are shown OR you could go to a website like www.linkpopularity.com to find each link partners link popularity much quicker.
Page Title is the title of the page that is linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm. Does it contain the keyword "weight loss stories", "weight loss" or "weight"? If so, you should note which links pages those are. You'll want to approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.
Note: Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook.
Number of Outbound Links is the number of links located on the webpage linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm. The less links located on the page, the more a link from them would increase your ranking.
Once we've collected all of the information, we now can see www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm's linking strategy.
We'll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the keywords "diet pills", "diet", or "pills" in the page title.
We'll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the keywords "diet pills", "diet", or "pills" in the actual anchor text linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.
We'll then need to mirror these numbers, as close as we can, for our linking strategy. This may take awhile to do, but once you've done this...
You'll Have The Exact Blueprint You Can Give Google
For A #1 Ranking!
Once the blueprint for our linking strategy is complete, we need to contact each of these websites individually and ask them if they will add our link to their website in exchange for us adding their link to ours.
Tip: The more personalized you can make the email, the better. It is always best to include a blurb stating that you liked "X" about their website and was very impressed with "Z" etc...
Now, if all of that seemed like it would take many days to do, you're right... it would. It works, but it does take A LOT of time.
I have more good news though, there is a specific software program out there that can do ALL of this for you in a matter of minutes. It's what I use on a daily basis and it works very well.
In fact, to prove this program works very well, let me show you an email from one of the companies that I promote their products as an affiliate. Here's what they had to say:
"As an affiliate manager, I count the day I found Brad Callen as being one of the luckiest days in my career so far. I knew he was very good at optimizing for weight loss products because I kept running across his name during my searches on Google; however, I have been amazed at how quickly he is able to take over the #1 spot in Google for practically any term.
Within the past three months, Brad has become one of the leading revenue generators for several of our products. Brad has proven that, within a matter of days, he can get to the #1 position for any keywords that relate to our products. Whenever we launch a new product or offer, I make sure to get it to Brad right away because I know I'll see him at the top of the search engines within 1 or 2 weeks at the most. I have never encountered anyone else in SEO who can come close to Brad when it comes to efficient and effective optimization."
-- Sue SharpSales & Marketing
1800patches.com
If you haven't figured out what program I'm talking about is, you'll need to stay tuned to tomorrow's MOST POWERFUL LESSON YET!
Not to sound cliche, but what I will share tomorrow will likely change your entire business forever...
The Secret To Getting Listed In Google In Under within 48 hrs
You may or may not have heard people claim they can get listed in Google in only 1-2 days. It seems that nearly 100% of the people you run across in forums act like in order to get indexed by Google within 48 hours is some miracle feat that can only be accomplished by doing some "top secret" marketing tactic or advanced optimization strategy.
Well, the truth of the matter is...
Getting listed in Google in under 2 days is quite easy!
First let's talk about what NOT to do. This drives me absolutely crazy when I see people doing this, and is actually what I did at one time as well. After you read this lesson, DO NOT waste your time doing this. I repeat... DO NOT waste your time doing what I'm about to tell you.
The following URL might look familiar to you:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
This is Google's actual website submission form. They state that you can use this form to submit your website to their index of websites and it can take up to 6 weeks for your website to be placed into their index.
I don't know about you, but 6 weeks is a heck of a long time to just wait to be placed in their index rotation, let alone get a top ranking!
Never Use The Google Submission Form!
You should never use this form, or any other of the top search engine's submission forms. These search engines include Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alltheweb.
So, how do you get your website indexed within 48 hours?
There are many methods, but for someone that has a new website and doesn't have tens of older websites already indexed by Google, there are 2 main ways I would suggest to get indexed into Google quickly. Note, when I say "Google", I'm basically referring to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Method #1
First thing's first, before I can teach you how to get indexed quickly, you need to know how search engines find websites. It's very simple.
The way that search engines find new websites is they will visit 1 website that is already in their index, then from that site, they'll follow all of the links on that site, to visit the next site. Then they'll visit that website and visit all of the links on that page and so on... This is called "crawling". Search engines will "Crawl" your website to find new information and place it into their index of search results.
In the example below, if Google were to visit this webpage, it would then "crawl" all links on this site, to find other websites like:
Ok, so let's think about this for a minute... Let's say that you have a new website (www.MyCoolWebsite.com) and you just created it. It's not indexed by any of the search engines. Meaning, the search engines don't know this website exists yet.
So, how would the search engines find out about this site? Easy... They need to find your site by following links on websites that are already in their index. Make sense?
Alright... now, once we know this, all we need to do is find websites that are already indexed by the search engines and get them to link to us. That's all fine and dandy, but it can be a little tricky getting others to link to your site, if they have no incentive to do so...
No problem, that's why we'll use this method I'm about to teach you, to get TONS of websites to link to your site quickly.
All you'll need to do is write 1 article based on the topic of your website. Because our website is called www.MyCoolWebsite.com, we'll write an article called, "10 steps to becoming the coolest guy on the block". At the bottom of our article, we'll include a link to our website (http://www.MyCoolWebsite.com)
Once we've done this, we'll visit many of the popular article directories on the web, and we'll simply submit our article to those directories. Once they've added our article AND link to their site, the search engines will visit their website, and then follow all the links on their site. 1 of those links will be a link to our site, and BAM! We're indexed by the search engines.
The more article directories that we submit to, the more links we'll get back to our website, and the more times that search engines will visit our site. The more links you get, the quicker you'll get indexed.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it is!
That's really all there is to getting indexed by Google within 48 hours. Ok, now let's move on to another method of getting indexed by Google quickly.
Method #2
Let's go back to our weight loss website from the previous lesson for now. First...
If you can manage to get 1 PR6 website to link to your website, you should be indexed by Google in under 3 days. If you can get 1 PR7 website to link to you, then, in most cases, you will be in Google's index in under 24 hours!
Well, the truth of the matter is...
Getting listed in Google in under 2 days is quite easy!
First let's talk about what NOT to do. This drives me absolutely crazy when I see people doing this, and is actually what I did at one time as well. After you read this lesson, DO NOT waste your time doing this. I repeat... DO NOT waste your time doing what I'm about to tell you.
The following URL might look familiar to you:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
This is Google's actual website submission form. They state that you can use this form to submit your website to their index of websites and it can take up to 6 weeks for your website to be placed into their index.
I don't know about you, but 6 weeks is a heck of a long time to just wait to be placed in their index rotation, let alone get a top ranking!
Never Use The Google Submission Form!
You should never use this form, or any other of the top search engine's submission forms. These search engines include Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alltheweb.
So, how do you get your website indexed within 48 hours?
There are many methods, but for someone that has a new website and doesn't have tens of older websites already indexed by Google, there are 2 main ways I would suggest to get indexed into Google quickly. Note, when I say "Google", I'm basically referring to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Method #1
First thing's first, before I can teach you how to get indexed quickly, you need to know how search engines find websites. It's very simple.
The way that search engines find new websites is they will visit 1 website that is already in their index, then from that site, they'll follow all of the links on that site, to visit the next site. Then they'll visit that website and visit all of the links on that page and so on... This is called "crawling". Search engines will "Crawl" your website to find new information and place it into their index of search results.
In the example below, if Google were to visit this webpage, it would then "crawl" all links on this site, to find other websites like:
Ok, so let's think about this for a minute... Let's say that you have a new website (www.MyCoolWebsite.com) and you just created it. It's not indexed by any of the search engines. Meaning, the search engines don't know this website exists yet.
So, how would the search engines find out about this site? Easy... They need to find your site by following links on websites that are already in their index. Make sense?
Alright... now, once we know this, all we need to do is find websites that are already indexed by the search engines and get them to link to us. That's all fine and dandy, but it can be a little tricky getting others to link to your site, if they have no incentive to do so...
No problem, that's why we'll use this method I'm about to teach you, to get TONS of websites to link to your site quickly.
All you'll need to do is write 1 article based on the topic of your website. Because our website is called www.MyCoolWebsite.com, we'll write an article called, "10 steps to becoming the coolest guy on the block". At the bottom of our article, we'll include a link to our website (http://www.MyCoolWebsite.com)
Once we've done this, we'll visit many of the popular article directories on the web, and we'll simply submit our article to those directories. Once they've added our article AND link to their site, the search engines will visit their website, and then follow all the links on their site. 1 of those links will be a link to our site, and BAM! We're indexed by the search engines.
The more article directories that we submit to, the more links we'll get back to our website, and the more times that search engines will visit our site. The more links you get, the quicker you'll get indexed.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it is!
That's really all there is to getting indexed by Google within 48 hours. Ok, now let's move on to another method of getting indexed by Google quickly.
Method #2
Let's go back to our weight loss website from the previous lesson for now. First...
- Go to Google and enter the broadest keyword you can think of that's related to your website. In our example, it will be "weight loss". Once you've done this, you'll see a list of Google results.
- Browse through each website and pay particluar attention to the Google Page Rank of the website.
- So, as you're looking at these top ranked websites for the search term "weight loss", you should try to find websites with a Page Rank of 6 or higher.
- Once you've found several websites like this, you should search their website for their contact information.
- Once you find their contact information you should send them an email asking if they will link to your website in return for you linking back to their website. If you do this correctly and professionally, they will respond and will place a link on their website to yours.
If you can manage to get 1 PR6 website to link to your website, you should be indexed by Google in under 3 days. If you can get 1 PR7 website to link to you, then, in most cases, you will be in Google's index in under 24 hours!
How Changing One Single Onpage Optimization Factor Can Boost Your Rankings By Over 350 Positions!"
- weight loss story
- weight loss picture
- safe weight loss
Let's Optimize Our Webpage ...
The first thing we need to do is select a page Title for our website.
Add a Title
The page title should:
Include ONLY our main keywords. The least amount of words you can place in the title, the more weight Google will give to each of the keywords and the higher you will rank.
Note: When I say "Google", I'm really referring to all the major engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). But I am saying Google because this is the search engine you should really focus on optimizing for because Google gets roughly 50% of all the searches on the web. Yahoo receives about 30% and MSN about 20%.
When creating your page title, it should not look like this:
- Welcome to our website!
- This is the html code used to create this title: <title>Welcome to our website!</title>
It should not even look like this, which does contain our main keywords, but contains an unnecessary number of words:
- weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss
- This is the html code used to create this title: <title>weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss</title>
This would be a perfect title for your webpage:
- Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture
- This is the html code used to create this title: <title>Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture</title>
- Taken out all of the "ands"
- Replaced one of the "ands" with a "|" character (Note: You can add this character by holding the shift key on your keyboard and pressing the backslash key above the enter key.)
- Combined the keywords "Safe Weight Loss" with "Weight Loss Picture"
of words that are in your title!
Always Combine Your Keywords In The Page Title!
When Google looks at our title, it will see all 3 of our keywords only. Combining keywords to cut down on the total number of keywords displayed in the title is a great way to boost the strength of each individual keyword, which will have an immediate impact on your ranking.
Add <h1> header tags
Next we'll need to add 1 <h1> header tag and place our most important keyword there.
The <h1> header tag should be as far towards the top of the page as possible. When Google reads a webpage, it views the text from the top left hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page.
Note: Here's a neat free tool which allows you to visually see how the search engines view your webpage: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml
So, it's best to place your <h1> header tag on the top left hand or top/middle portion of your page. You can think of an <h1> header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page.
For example, the <h1> header tag of this lesson would be:
"How changing 1 onpage optimization factor can boost your rankings by
over 350 positions!"
... and the html code would look like this:
<h1>"How changing 1 onpage optimization factor can boost your rankings by over 350 positions!"</h1>
Of course, I would have changed my lesson title to contain my main keyword if I was actually trying to optimize this page for Google. Also, if possible, it's ideal if you can include ONLY your main keyword within the h1 header tags. <h1>Weight Loss Story</h1> would be perfect.
Add <h2> header tags
Next, we'll need to create an <h2> header tag. This can be thought of as a sub heading for our webpage. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the <h2> header tag. The <h2> tag should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage.
A good <h2> header tag for our example would be:
- <h2>safe weight loss<h2> (Usually it's best to place your primary keyword in your <h1> tags and your secondary keyword into the <h2> tags.
Try to mention each keyword in a natural way as you are writing, but be sure to include at least one of the keywords per 1-2 paragraphs, depending on how large your page is.
Tip: Make sure to mention your main keyword at the very top left and the very bottom right hand side of the webpage. A trick I like to use is to include this in the copyright information line at the bottom of the website. For our example, this would be a good example:
© 2005 copyright www.domain.com a weight loss story
Notice that it flows and doesn't really look too strange.
Bolding, italicizing and underlining ...
Once we've finished writing the copy, we should go through and bold, underline, or italicize some of the keywords only 1 time each, maximum. Only do 1 per keyword or it will hurt you more than it helps. This isn't crucial to do, but it's good to maybe do this to a couple keywords...
Properly include <alt> image tags ...
Next, click on the very top image of your webpage (This is usually your website's header graphic) and include an <alt> image tag using the text "weight loss story header" if you're adding this alt text to your website header graphic. Click on 2 more graphics throughout your webpage and enter your other 2 keywords, plus an extra word like "graphic" or "image"... For example, we would use "weight loss picture graphic" and "safe weight loss image". This ensures that Google won't view this as spam.
For example, if we have an image on our webpage called: picture1.jpg
The code that would be used to insert the image would look something like this:
<img src="picture1.jpg" width="250" height="80" border="0">
Now, if we were to add an alt image tag called "Weight Loss Story Graphic", we'd simply do this:
<img src="picture1.jpg" width="250" height="80" border="0" alt="Weight Loss Story Graphic">
Force Google To Read Your Keywords First!
Now, remember I stated above that Google views your webpage from top left, to bottom right? Well, in general they do. But because most websites contain a left hand column which contains all of their navigation links...
Google WILL View all of the text in the left hand column Before The Body of the webpage
To show you what I mean, look at the image below to see the order of information that Google will view this webpage. because of the way the person has created the tables containing their content. I've added red lines so you can visually see the way the site was designed, has they not made the table borders invisible.
How can you get around this? I've come up with a neat little trick that will ensure that Google reads the actual body of your webpage before the left hand column containing your navigational links.
Here is what you need to do:
Rather than creating a table that looks like this:
navigational links
You body text...
You should create a table that looks like this:
You body text...
navigation links
See how I've changed the website above, so that Google now sees our content BEFORE our navigation menu:
By doing this, Google will read the top left hand row/column first... BUT will see that it is empty or only contains a couple words in this case, so it will then read the body of your webpage and then read the 2nd left hand row/column which contains your navigational links! :-)
That's all there is to it!
In summary, I really want to point out the fact that, although good onpage optimization is something you'll really want to do, it is NOT how you make dramatic changes in your search engine ranking!
Important! Let me repeat that again, onpage optimization... which is what I've taught you thus far, will make small changes in your ranking, but WILL NOT help your site make dramatic jumps in ranking.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions in the search engine world. Many believe that by getting your keyword density just right, or by moving your keywords around on the page in just the right places, you'll really move up in the search engines.
That is not the case at all. It is the offpage optimization factors that will get you high rankings. I will teach you exactly what offpage optimization factors are, AND how to make sure you optimize these factors perfectly for Google!
What Is Seo?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a webpage in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and news search engines.
As an Internet Marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO, search engine poisoning, or spamdexing, uses methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the quality of user-experience with search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices, and may change their ranking algorithm to display more relevant results.
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date
Before you begin, if you're NOT 100% serious about getting your website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, don't read another word. Close this page, grab a back of potato chips and go watch the television or something. Only read on if you plan to put everything I will be teaching you into action.
At the top of this lesson you'll notice a download link. I like giving readers this option so that you can print off each of the lessons and take notes as you go along.
Ok, now on to lesson 1...
If you're anything like I was when I first began online, you may have started online by doing the following:
You've probably created a brand new website. Then maybe even submitted that site to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.
A couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website. If you're one of the "smart" few, you might have even tried to "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in one of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck. No visitors... and no money. What a complete waste of your time!
At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, that is NOT the way to go about doing things. These days you can't just create a bunch of websites and expect people to just show up at your website and buy your "stuff".
This was possible back in the late 90s and even early 2000s, but not anymore, as you've probably found out by now.
Let's go through a VERY specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website... no matter what the subject matter.
Note: As you go through this course, you'll find that I don't teach theories. I don't beat around the bush about things. I like to give specific, real life examples using both descriptions AND screenshots (pictures). I'm a visual person, so I learn best with picture examples.
If you're also a visual person, you're going to learn quite a bit in these lessons, so pay close attention.
In this example, let's create a weight loss related website. I just picked this topic at random because I do some things in the weight loss market, so it makes things easier for me to explain to you. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website, we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to, first, visit a few websites.
The first of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com/.
They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it's free!
Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be "weight loss".
You'll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "words" column will show us the top 100 search keywords that contain the words "weight loss".
The "count" column will show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for in the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.
This step is critically important because we need to know if there is a market for whatever topic we choose to sell. This tool will quickly show us if people are looking for what we want to sell!
You'll notice that the keyword weight loss was searched 817,038 times during the previous month.
DO NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "weight loss"
Why, you ask? If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank in Google will be extremely fierce.
Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it... How targeted is the keyword "weight loss" anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword "weight loss" could very well be looking for free information on weight loss. They might be looking for the definition of weight loss. It's really hard telling. Chances are, they're not looking for anything specific about losing weight.
The keyword "weight loss" is not something you should try to take on.
As a side note, when I first started online, that was exactly what I did... and I did it very well. I ranked #2 on Google, out of over 66 million websites for the term "weight loss". I ranked #1 for many other terms like "weight loss program", "lose weight" etc. Although I was getting a TON of traffic, the product I was trying to sell was not converting very well at all... and now you know the reason why. I was targeting the WONG group of people; a keyword phrase that was way too broad...
For a brand new website, or one you're just beginning to optimize, it's better to select more specific "long tail" keyword phrases. I'll talk about this a bit later.
Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword.
If you were to optimize your website for this keyword, you'd be competing against over 66 million other websites! I don't know about you, but that's an aweful lofty goal to start with.
By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target super high traffic, targeted, keywords, but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN as your website gets older and you build some authority in the search engines you can focus on optimizing for the larger keywords.
Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target.
If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like "weight loss story", "weight loss picture", "free weight loss plan", and "safe weight loss".
These are potential keywords we should target to begin with.
Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.
Disclaimer: You'll hear a lot of people talk about how "onpage optimization", which are the things I'm going to be talking about below, aren't as important as they once were. While that is true. It IS important to look at onpage optimization factors to determine if your competition really knows what they're doing in terms of optimizing their websites.
Chance are, if they have good onpage optimization, their offpage optimization will also be good. Think of these steps as a quick and easy way to determine how competitive a market is before you jump straight into it. There's my disclaimer. If you're new to SEO and that didn't make sense, that's ok. Just ignore it. It's not important, but was said for those people that like to nit pick at every comment made :-) Moving on!
We'll begin with the keyword "weight loss story"
If we go to Google and type in the keyword "weight loss stopry", without quotes, you'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" is: (Side note: rankings can change in the search engines, so if this site is no longer ranked #1 when you view this yourself, chances are their competition has optimized their site better, and passed them up.)
http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm which is not a top level webpage, meaning it's not simply http://www.runwalkjog.com/ . It is a sub page off of their main homepage: weight_loss_success_story.htm
This is good news for us because, typically, if a website's subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). For now, just take my word on this, as I will go into more detail why it's usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website.
You'll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 5.
Note: Here's a quick definition of Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular a website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for another website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to another website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is one of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.
In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: http://toolbar.google.com/
Moving on...
Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is pretty good news for us, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain.
After you install the Google toolbar and browse through websites, you'll notice that most websites online have between a 2 and 5 Page Rank. The extremely popular, high traffic websites tend to have Page Rank's of 6 and 7. A select few will have Page Ranks of 8 and 9... and only a couple websites on the entire internet will have a Page Rank of 10. Those websites would be sites like google.com themselves. If a website has a Page Rank of 7 or higher, it would be best to not try to outrank them.
Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us.
* Critical: Later, I'll teach you the right way to get hundreds of links pointing to your website in a matter of several days... and I'll go into more detail about Page Rank.
View The Source Code
Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "view", then "source" optoin within our web browser as shown below:
Note: Source code is simply the code that was used to create the web page. You don't need to know html, which is the progamming language used to create most websites, so don't worry. You just need to know a few things to look for when viewing the source code.
This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their "Onpage Optimization factors" for their website.
Note: There are 2 types of optimization which most highly ranked web pages contain, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in future lessons, but for now, we're going over the onpage optimization.
Note: An eay way to check whether or not the website is using any of the tags mentioned below is to simply click the "edit" button within notepad, and then select the "find" option.
Then just enter the specific tag you're looking for. For example) In the first bullet point below, we're looking for, what's called, an h1 header tag. The specific code for this is <h1>, so just enter <h1> into the "find textbox" and click search. If the tag is in the source code, notepad will find it and highlight it. If it's not, it will tell you it's not found. Piece of cake.
As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things, which include:
"on page ranking factors" for this #1 ranked website
... that Google deems as important. The reason we know we can out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by analyzing their website:
REMEBER: This is only PART of the equation. There are still many other things that Google deems as critically important when ranking websites. Those things are mostly the Off Page Ranking factors, which we've not covered yet.
We'll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we've found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it's probably best to not shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum, and authority, like I mentioned before, by ranking well for the longer keyword phrases that have less competition.
As an Internet Marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO, search engine poisoning, or spamdexing, uses methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the quality of user-experience with search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices, and may change their ranking algorithm to display more relevant results.
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date
Before you begin, if you're NOT 100% serious about getting your website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, don't read another word. Close this page, grab a back of potato chips and go watch the television or something. Only read on if you plan to put everything I will be teaching you into action.
At the top of this lesson you'll notice a download link. I like giving readers this option so that you can print off each of the lessons and take notes as you go along.
Ok, now on to lesson 1...
If you're anything like I was when I first began online, you may have started online by doing the following:
You've probably created a brand new website. Then maybe even submitted that site to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.
A couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website. If you're one of the "smart" few, you might have even tried to "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in one of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck. No visitors... and no money. What a complete waste of your time!
At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, that is NOT the way to go about doing things. These days you can't just create a bunch of websites and expect people to just show up at your website and buy your "stuff".
This was possible back in the late 90s and even early 2000s, but not anymore, as you've probably found out by now.
Let's go through a VERY specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website... no matter what the subject matter.
Note: As you go through this course, you'll find that I don't teach theories. I don't beat around the bush about things. I like to give specific, real life examples using both descriptions AND screenshots (pictures). I'm a visual person, so I learn best with picture examples.
If you're also a visual person, you're going to learn quite a bit in these lessons, so pay close attention.
In this example, let's create a weight loss related website. I just picked this topic at random because I do some things in the weight loss market, so it makes things easier for me to explain to you. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website, we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to, first, visit a few websites.
The first of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com/.
They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it's free!
Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be "weight loss".
You'll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "words" column will show us the top 100 search keywords that contain the words "weight loss".
The "count" column will show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for in the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.
This step is critically important because we need to know if there is a market for whatever topic we choose to sell. This tool will quickly show us if people are looking for what we want to sell!
You'll notice that the keyword weight loss was searched 817,038 times during the previous month.
DO NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "weight loss"
Why, you ask? If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank in Google will be extremely fierce.
Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it... How targeted is the keyword "weight loss" anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword "weight loss" could very well be looking for free information on weight loss. They might be looking for the definition of weight loss. It's really hard telling. Chances are, they're not looking for anything specific about losing weight.
The keyword "weight loss" is not something you should try to take on.
As a side note, when I first started online, that was exactly what I did... and I did it very well. I ranked #2 on Google, out of over 66 million websites for the term "weight loss". I ranked #1 for many other terms like "weight loss program", "lose weight" etc. Although I was getting a TON of traffic, the product I was trying to sell was not converting very well at all... and now you know the reason why. I was targeting the WONG group of people; a keyword phrase that was way too broad...
For a brand new website, or one you're just beginning to optimize, it's better to select more specific "long tail" keyword phrases. I'll talk about this a bit later.
Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword.
If you were to optimize your website for this keyword, you'd be competing against over 66 million other websites! I don't know about you, but that's an aweful lofty goal to start with.
By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target super high traffic, targeted, keywords, but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN as your website gets older and you build some authority in the search engines you can focus on optimizing for the larger keywords.
Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target.
If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like "weight loss story", "weight loss picture", "free weight loss plan", and "safe weight loss".
These are potential keywords we should target to begin with.
Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.
Disclaimer: You'll hear a lot of people talk about how "onpage optimization", which are the things I'm going to be talking about below, aren't as important as they once were. While that is true. It IS important to look at onpage optimization factors to determine if your competition really knows what they're doing in terms of optimizing their websites.
Chance are, if they have good onpage optimization, their offpage optimization will also be good. Think of these steps as a quick and easy way to determine how competitive a market is before you jump straight into it. There's my disclaimer. If you're new to SEO and that didn't make sense, that's ok. Just ignore it. It's not important, but was said for those people that like to nit pick at every comment made :-) Moving on!
We'll begin with the keyword "weight loss story"
If we go to Google and type in the keyword "weight loss stopry", without quotes, you'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" is: (Side note: rankings can change in the search engines, so if this site is no longer ranked #1 when you view this yourself, chances are their competition has optimized their site better, and passed them up.)
http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm which is not a top level webpage, meaning it's not simply http://www.runwalkjog.com/ . It is a sub page off of their main homepage: weight_loss_success_story.htm
This is good news for us because, typically, if a website's subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). For now, just take my word on this, as I will go into more detail why it's usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website.
You'll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 5.
Note: Here's a quick definition of Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular a website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for another website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to another website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is one of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.
In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: http://toolbar.google.com/
Moving on...
Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is pretty good news for us, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain.
After you install the Google toolbar and browse through websites, you'll notice that most websites online have between a 2 and 5 Page Rank. The extremely popular, high traffic websites tend to have Page Rank's of 6 and 7. A select few will have Page Ranks of 8 and 9... and only a couple websites on the entire internet will have a Page Rank of 10. Those websites would be sites like google.com themselves. If a website has a Page Rank of 7 or higher, it would be best to not try to outrank them.
Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us.
* Critical: Later, I'll teach you the right way to get hundreds of links pointing to your website in a matter of several days... and I'll go into more detail about Page Rank.
View The Source Code
Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "view", then "source" optoin within our web browser as shown below:
Note: Source code is simply the code that was used to create the web page. You don't need to know html, which is the progamming language used to create most websites, so don't worry. You just need to know a few things to look for when viewing the source code.
This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their "Onpage Optimization factors" for their website.
Note: There are 2 types of optimization which most highly ranked web pages contain, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in future lessons, but for now, we're going over the onpage optimization.
Note: An eay way to check whether or not the website is using any of the tags mentioned below is to simply click the "edit" button within notepad, and then select the "find" option.
Then just enter the specific tag you're looking for. For example) In the first bullet point below, we're looking for, what's called, an h1 header tag. The specific code for this is <h1>, so just enter <h1> into the "find textbox" and click search. If the tag is in the source code, notepad will find it and highlight it. If it's not, it will tell you it's not found. Piece of cake.
As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things, which include:
- Whether or not they are using <h1> header tags and are placing the keyword "weight loss story" within those tags. In this case, when we do a search for this tag/text, we find that they are not... AND not only are they not using the keyword "weight loss story" inside of their h1 tags, but they aren't even using <h1> header tags at all. Another great thing for us.
- Whether or not they are using their main keyword in the <title> tags of the website. In this case, they are, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for "weight loss stories". There title is "Weight Loss story stories" and the html code they used is:
<title>Weight Loss story stories</title>
The <title> tag is simply the text that appears at the top of the browser window as shown below:
- Whether or not they've bolded, underlined, or italicized the words "weight loss story" anywhere in the body of the webpage. In this case, yes... they have. They've actually bolded the keyword "weight loss stories" 4 different times throughout the webpage.
Bolding is something we can do right away, so now we know that we should also bold some of the keywords throughout our copy. Notice I said they've bolded "weight loss stories" 4 times, rather than "weight loss story" (singular). You should always look for both the plural and singular form of the keyword, as the search engines view them as "almost" the same word.
The html tag for bold is <b>. For italics it is <i>. For underlined it is <u>. Below you'll see that I did a quick search for the <b> tag and found that they're using bold tags that include their keyword, "weight loss stories". It actually says "weight loss success stories", but does include all of the words (weight, loss, and stories) within the bold tags.
- Whether or not they are using <alt> image tags and placing the keyword "weight loss stories" within that tag. In this case, that answer is easy because they're not even using any images at all!
Note: An alt image tag is because text that is inserted into the html code of an image on the website. It allows blind people to know what images are on the page, because there are programs out there that will read, outloud each alt image tag on a web page.
This is definitely something we can do when optimizing our website. And another thing we can do to "one-up" this #1 ranked website. It is best to add images that are actually named after our main keyword. For example, we could insert an image and call it weight-loss-stories-graphic1.jpg and so on.
- The final thing we want to note is whether or not they've placed the keyword once towards the very beginning of the web page, and once at the very end of the web page. In this case they have placed it near the beginning and also at the end. Not to worry, we can do this as well.
"on page ranking factors" for this #1 ranked website
... that Google deems as important. The reason we know we can out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by analyzing their website:
- The website is not using the keyword "weight loss stories" in an <h1> header tag.
- The website did not use <alt> image tags containing the keyword "weight loss stories".
- The website has a Page Rank of 5, which can be beaten. With a little work, we can achieve a Page Rank of 5 or better. I'll show you the exact steps for this in the coming lessons.
- The website is ranked with their subpage (weight_loss_success_story.htm). By optimizing our index page for this keyword, we should be able to naturally get more websites to link to our website, thus getting more quality links than this website..
REMEBER: This is only PART of the equation. There are still many other things that Google deems as critically important when ranking websites. Those things are mostly the Off Page Ranking factors, which we've not covered yet.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Yes It's possible
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