It’s true. They don’t.
That’s why you should look at the numbers whenever you’re searching for answers.
Let me explain…
A lot of times, I’ll start cruisin’ the forums and I’ll notice folks saying their web sites aren’t selling.
They’ll complain, “I’ve had my site up for six months and have only sold four ebooks. This blows.”
They’re right. That *does* blow.
Add comment July 27th, 2006
Competition is fierce on the Internet. There are a multitude of people selling products that are similar to yours. How in the world you you get customers to buy your product instead of your competitors?
The keys to outselling your competition is to compare your product to theirs. When you find the differences between products, use your findings to improve your product. Below are 12 things you can compare and improve upon to outsell your competition.
Add comment July 27th, 2006
OK, so you’re making some sales, either of your own products, or through affiliate sales. What you may not know is that you’ve got a virtual gold mine in your possession, and all you have to do is follow a few simple steps to turn these one-time sales into lifetime customers, and to potentially create more and more customers simultaneously.
Here are ten simple ways.
1. Consistently give your customers plenty of quality, information-rich content, thereby earning their trust, and creating a dependency for what you have to offer.
Add comment July 27th, 2006
In today’s world of website promotion and traffic building, a whole new set of terms and definitions have developed. To be a successful webmaster and/or website owner, it is important to know the meanings of some of the most popular link exchange and search engine terms.
1. Algorithm: The mathematical computation used by major search engines to determine which web pages will be displayed in query (search) results.
Add comment July 27th, 2006
You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on advertising to build an effective campaign. In fact, you can get great publicity that will drive customers to do your door absolutely free of charge!
One of the best ways to do this is to attract press coverage. You don’t have to pay for advertising space to get written about in a newspaper or magazine, or on a website. All you have to do is interest the editor or webmaster in your story. Today’s media is huge - and it’s hungry for news. If you present a publication with a ready-made story that will interest their target audience they will snap it up.
Add comment July 27th, 2006
Yahoo! allows you to set up your own front page called ‘My Yahoo!’. Even if you don’t use Yahoo! as your search engine, you need a My Yahoo! page which you log onto every day. That’s because having a My Yahoo! page that is set up correctly can do wonders for your search engine ranking.
Add comment July 27th, 2006
If you are looking at ways to increase traffic to your website there are many things you can do. Here are 10 tips to avoid getting ripped off by the mounting army of web traffic experts. Most of them will just take your money and waste your time.
Add comment July 27th, 2006
Don’t share this with people of a nervous disposition because I really can’t restrain myself any longer.
Picture the scene if you will…
[A conversation last week though it could be this week or the next - it happens all the time…]
Anon: “We want lots of people to find our website but it doesn’t seem to be happening for some reason.”
Michael: “Can you tell me some of the methods you’ve been using to market your website?”
Add comment July 27th, 2006
Should You Buy Text Links?
by: Matt Colyer
You can rank number one (Or at least in the top ten) for just about any search phrase by just buying text link ads, even if the web site isn’t related to the search phrase in anyway, it can still rank in the top ten of the search results. Some web site owners see this as the only true way to the top ten. So, should you buy your way to the top? Or should you play it safe?
Some say it’s better to be safe than sorry. While others say if you play it safe and never make it to the top ten of the search results, your losing anyway. So, it must be much better not to play by the rules and get a top ten ranking and make a little money before you get banned from the search engines. Well, it’s not that easy and you can see the cons and pros in both ways.
First let’s look at the pros of playing it safe. The first one is obvious and it’s that you have a lot less chance of getting banned and much safer. At the same time you can peacefully sleep at night without worrying whether you’ll be banned the next day you wake up. It also allows you to save money and spend it else where, such as PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines, banner advertisement, mailing list and offline advertising.
You can also rank number one without buying text link ads if you provide good content because many other webmasters will link to you just because you have good content and it provides their users with valuable information. You could also exchange links with other web sites. If you correctly SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your web site you can get a fairly good search engine ranking.
There are also several cons of playing it safe. Besides the fact that text link ads help improve your search engine ranking, they also bring in a good amount of traffic. In order to get a good amount traffic from links you would need more than just a few backlinks, but since you won’t be buying them, you will not being getting that many web sites linking to you and most of them are from web sites that are not popular among internet users.
All the major search engines see backlinks from quality sites as a vote for the web site being linked to, by playing it safe it will take much longer to get a top ten ranking because of the lack of backlinks. It can take years before you will rank for any popular search term because you will only be getting links the natural way. Without many backlinks you’ll also have a hard time getting in the search engines.
Now the pros of buying text link ads. Buying text links ads will help improve your search engine ranking, which can bring more traffic than from a link from any web site because. Each link acts as a vote your web site in the search engine’s eye, so the more you buy, the higher you’ll rank. If you buy an enough text link ads your web site can rank number one for just about any search term.
Text link ads can also send a fair amount of visitors that’s targeted. Resulting in more and new customers. Getting a link from a web site that’s trusted and well known can help build your web site’s brand and increase your credibility because visitors will see the link as a recommendation to your web site. Which will also help bring in new customers because they trust you more than they did before.
The cons of buying text link ads make many people think twice about buying text link ads. It will cost a lot of money to buy text link ads. You need to pay for your link to stay on a web site for at least two months before you will see any major boost in your search engine ranking. You may never get your money back because there’s so many things that can go wrong.
It can also hurt your search engine rankings if you don’t do it correctly and safely. You should never buy a lot of text links ads all at once, some search engines can detect this and may ban your web site from the search results due to this. There are other ways the search engines can find out that the links are being sold, meaning some links on certain web sites may never count in the search engines.
The Conclusion - Now that you have seen the pros and cons you can decide for your self whether you should buy them or not.
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About The Author
Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded http://www.superiorwebmaster.com in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.
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Add comment July 27th, 2006
Google and Jagger’s Aftermath
by: Jason OConnor
Starting somewhere between September 22 and November 17, 2005, Google launched a major update to their search algorithm which shook up the search engine optimization (SEO) community and millions of website rankings. The update has been named Jagger and is apparently finished.
The keywords that people used to find your site with in Google may not be producing as many visits any more because the Jagger changes caused your rankings to plummet. Of course many people have seen their rankings stay the same or improve in Jagger’s aftermath too.
If your site’s rankings have decreased, what can be done to get back to where you were or better in the post-Jagger Google world?
There are still a lot of questions to be sure, but there are some good beginnings of answers as well. Since this update was rolled out over months and in three distinct phases, it has been much more difficult to determine what factors have been given more weight or less.
For instance, IBL (inbound links to your site) have always been important to achieve high rankings in Google. But there are many different kinds of IBL’s. Link trades, where you put my link on your site and I put your link on my site may be less valuable than a one-way link. This has been the case for a while, but is the importance of each changed now since Jagger? Probably. I don’t know all the answers, and I don’t think anyone knows all the answers save the people at the ‘plex (short for Google-plex).
What are some theories? Here are some of the top ones, but I am not saying they are necessarily true or false. And this is not a full list, there are most likely numerous other factors that affect Google rankings after Jagger that no one has recognized at all yet. The following list consists of ideas I have read online, which I spend hours each day doing, or some of our own hard-earned observations using the large number of clients’ websites in many different industries to learn from. Read the following with a grain of salt, which is always a good idea when reading any articles or forum posts about SEO or Jagger.
Things That Could Possibly HELP You More In Jagger’s Aftermath
* Aged Domains - Sites with domains that are older rank better now - the older the domain, the better its rankings with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree).
* Very Relevant Links - IBL (inbound links) and OBL (outbound links) relevancy is more important after Jagger. This means that if you point to related sites or you get links from other sites that are related to your website, you may rank better after Jagger with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree as well).
* Links From Trusted Sites Help - TrustRank (or a similar concept) is more important than ever after Jagger. TrustRank is a concept that says if you get a link pointing to your site that is highly trusted by Google (trusted either programmatically or by human editors), then you will rank better with all other things being equal. (See http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF).
* Variety of Links - Links from .edu and .org websites are good for increasing your rankings and are more important than ever. (It’s vital to get links form a wide variety of websites. Just like your investing, you need to diversify your IBL’s. (This has probably been true even before Jagger).
* Aged Links - The older the link that points to your site, the more weight it’s given now. (This also has probably been true even before Jagger).
* Embedded Links - Links that are embedded in sentences and paragraphs instead of stand-alone links are weighted more heavily now. (This may be true soon if not already).
* Article Links - Articles are what directories had been a year or two ago for link building. Links from the author by-line or within the article that point back to your site will positively affect your rankings. (And this is one reason I’ve chosen to write this article).
* Fresh & Unique Content - Now, more than ever, regularly updated and added ordinal content will help your rankings. (This is almost definitely true.)
* Be a Big Guy - If you are a big behemoth site like Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL, Ebay, Amazon, etc., you will rank better than you did before Jagger.
* High Traffic & Stickiness - User popularity statistics now, or will soon, affect rankings. In other words, user actions on your website, like how long they stay (stickiness), how many pages they visit, and even how many people visit your site in a given period, can all affect how Google ranks your site. (This may be true soon if not already).
Things That Could Possibly Not Help You Anymore, or May Even HURT You More In Jagger’s Aftermath
* Duplicate Content - Any kind of duplicate content can hurt your rankings. Some say this only refers to other sites having the same content as you while others say even duplicate content within your own site can be bad. I find the latter hard to believe since all sites have repeating slogans, phrases, checkout instructions, or any number of other duplicate sentences within the same site. (Use http://www.copyscape.com/ to find people who are stealing your original written content and publishing it on their site).
* Hidden Text - Hidden text within your html, in tags, CSS, or comments, can negatively affect your rankings. (This is something you should never do).
* Footer Links - Some say links in the footer are disregarded now. (This is one we have found no evidence for).
* Directory Links - Links from directories are weighted less now. (This is one we have found no evidence for, but is most likely true or will be soon)
* Decreased Rate of Link Building - The speed and volume of inbound link creation to your site from other websites, if changed, can negatively affect your rankings more so now. (This one is most likely true too).
* Reciprocal Links - Reciprocal link trades are worth less then they were before or are worth nothing now. (It’s probably true that they are at least worth less now).
* Linking to Bad Neighborhoods - Reciprocal link trades hurt your rankings when you link to sites that are considered ‘bad neighborhoods’ by Google, such as link farms or sites that are banned by Google. (This is most likely true and has been for a while).
* Link Schemes - Participating in link schemes such as Co-ops or Link Vault can hurt your ranking more than help them. (I have not found any evidence of this so far for my client’s sites, but this could be true).
Again, I don’t think anyone outside Google knows which of these factors above are true or false, and how each one affects a given keyword phrase’s ranking. In fact, that’s the idea. Google doesn’t want people ‘gaming’ their system. There are so many variables that need to be considered that it is very difficult to figure out which ones affect what.
So, what do you do now if your site’s ranking have dropped since Jagger?
If your site was ranking well in the Google SERP’s (search engine ranking position) before Jagger, then it was nowhere to be found right after Jagger hit, and now your site has still not bounced back at all, then you probably tripped a filter, got penalized or even banned. You may have duplicate content on another site, or someone copied a lot of your content, or you may have canonical issue (where yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com are considered two different sites by Google causing it to look like duplicate content). You may have hidden text, or keyword stuffed your pages or any number of other things. You’re definitely going to need more knowledge than this article can give you to get your rankings back.
Some say that Google updates have happened before around the same time of year, and many sites that tanked came back after the first of the year. I don’t know if this is true, we’ll just have to wait and see. For those who have still not rebounded, this may be nice to know.
Interestingly, most of our clients’ sites either stayed the same or improved after Jagger. Our own company site improved. But unfortunately, a few of our other clients saw some decreases in their rankings right after Jagger, and have since rebounded, but not at quite the same pre-Jagger levels. Here’s what we did for them:
* Scoured their site for bad outgoing links and made sure that each site they linked to was indexed by Google and was not trying to game Google. Any questionable links were deleted immediately. But we did not get rid of all our link partners, we just culled.
* Determined the ratio of the different types of incoming links to learn where improvements were needed. In other words, we determined the percentage of links to their site that were link trades, one-way links from related sites, one-ways from unrelated sites, link advertisements, directory links, forum signature links and more. We then advised them to increase their one-way related inbound links that are embedded in sentences, and not concentrate so much on link trades and stop getting one-way unrelated link development altogether.
* Cleaned up the HTML on every page, made sure all tags were closed and that there was no extraneous code on any page. And we put CSS and JavaScript’s in separate files.
* Took out any inadvertent hidden text. One client had keywords in comment tags in their HTML that we deleted.
* Decreased file size of pages, by taking out old links and superfluous verbiage, and by re-optimizing the .gif’s and .jpg’s.
* Wrote much more succinct Meta descriptions and on-page verbiage.
* Made sure that every title tag on every page within the site was different.
* Coached them about the importance of continually developing good, quality, original content.
* Brainstormed ways in which their sites could entice other webmasters to link to them because of what their site offers, such as good content, free Web tools, articles and many other things. This is called natural linking and what Google regards as the only legitimate way to build links. Therefore, this is vital.
We tried to look at the overall link development strategy, the value of their site, and the quality of the site, both the content quality and the html quality. A clean, simple, fast-loading site with natural links pointing to it from a variety of other related websites, some .org’s and .edu’s, others from trusted authority sites, and many from small related websites, that adds fresh and unique content daily, will rank well in Google over time and won’t be affected by any update, including Jagger.
The best way for you to learn what to do in Jagger’s aftermath is to read articles like this, participate in forums that discuss these topics, and most importantly, by experimenting with your own sites to see what works. This takes time and patience. So does building quality sites that have things to offer and that subsequently get natural links. But it’s all worth it.
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About The Author
Jason OConnor is president of Oak Web Works, LLC http://www.OakWebWorks.com, a full-service Web firm. He also runs Get Your Tickets: http://www.BestShowTicketsLasVegas.com.
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Add comment July 27th, 2006
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