Web Promotion Articles

Predicting Search Engine Algorithm Changes

Predicting Search Engine Algorithm Changes

 by: John Metzler

With moderate search engine optimization knowledge, some common sense, and a resourceful and imaginative mind, one can be able to keep his or her web site in good standing with search engines even through the most significant algorithm changes. The recent Google update of October/November 2005, dubbed “Jagger”, is what inspired me to write this, as I saw some web sites that previously ranked in the top 20 results for extremely competitive keywords suddenly drop down to the 70th page. Yes, the ebb and flow of search engine rankings is nothing to write home about, but when a web site doesn’t regain many ranking spots after such a drop it can tell us that the SEO done on the site may have had some long-term flaws. In this case, the SEO team has not done a good job predicting the direction a search engine would take with its algorithm.

Impossible to predict, you say? Not quite. The ideas behind Google’s algorithm come from the minds of fellow humans, not supercomputers. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy to “crack the code” so to speak because the actual math behind it is extremely complicated. However, it is possible to understand the general direction that a search engine algorithm will take by keeping in mind that any component of SEO which is possible to manipulate to an abnormal extent will eventually be weighted less and finally rendered obsolete.

One of the first such areas of a web site that started to get abused by webmasters trying to raise their rankings was the keywords meta tag. The tag allows a webmaster to list the web site’s most important keywords so the search engine knows when to display that site as a result for a matching search. It was only a matter of time until people started stuffing the tag with irrelevant words that were searched for more frequently than relevant words in an attempt to fool the algorithm. And they did fool it, but not for long. The keywords meta tag was identified as an area that was too susceptible to misuse and was subsequently de-valued to the point where the Google algorithm today doesn’t even recognize it when scanning a web page.

Another early tactic which is all but obsolete is repeating keywords at the bottom of a web page and hiding them by changing the color of the text to match the background color. Search engines noticed that this text was not relevant to the visitor and red- flagged sites that employed this method of SEO.

This information is quite basic, but the idea behind the aforementioned algorithm shifts several years ago is still relevant today. With the Jagger update in full swing, people in the SEO world are taking notice that reciprocal links may very well be going the way of the keywords meta tag. (I.e. extinct) Webmasters across the world have long been obsessed with link exchanges and many profitable web sites have existed offering services that help webmasters swap links with ease. But with a little foresight, one could see that link trading had its days numbered, as web sites would obtain thousands of incoming links from webmasters who may have never even viewed the web site they were trading with. In other words, a web site’s popularity was manipulated by excessively and unnaturally using an SEO method.

So with keyword meta tags, keyword stuffing within content, and now link exchanges simply a part of SEO history, what will be targeted in the future? Well, let’s start with what search engines currently look at when ranking a web site and go from there:

On-page Textual Content.

In the future, look for search engines to utilize ontological analysis of text. In other words, not only your main keywords will play a factor in your rankings, but also words that relate to them. For example, someone trying to sell NFL jerseys online would naturally mention the names of teams and star players. In the past, algorithms might have skipped over those names, deemed them irrelevant to a search for “NFL jerseys.” But in the future, search engines will reward those web sites with a higher ranking than those that excessively repeat just “NFL jerseys.” With ontological analysis, web sites that speak of not only the main keywords but other relevant words can expect higher rankings.

The conclusion: Write your web site content for your visitors, not search engines. The more naturally written sites can expect to see the better results in the future.

Offering Large Amounts of Content.

This can frequently take the form of dynamic pages. Even now, search engines can have a difficult time with dynamic content on web sites. These page usually have lengthy URLs consisting of numbers and characters such as &, =, and ? The common problem is that the content changes so frequently on these dynamic pages and the page becomes “old” in the search engine’s database, thus leaving the search users seeing results that contain old information. Since many dynamic pages are created by web sites displaying hundreds or thousands of products they sell, and the number of people selling items on the Internet will obviously increase in the coming years, you can expect that search engines will improve their technology and do a better job indexing dynamic content in the future.

The conclusion: Put yourself ahead of the game if you are selling products online and invest in database and shopping cart software that is SEO-friendly.

Incoming Links.

Once thought to be a very difficult thing to manipulate, incoming links to one’s web site have been abused by crafty SEOs and webmasters the world over. It is finally at a point where Google is doing a revamp of what constitutes a “vote from [one site to another]” as they explain it in their webmaster resources section. Link exchanges are worth significantly less now than ever to the point where the only real value in obtaining them is to make sure a new web site gets crawled by search engine spiders.

Over the years, many web sites reached top spot for competitive keywords by flexing their financial muscle and buying thousands of text links pointing to their site with keywords in the anchor text. Usually these links would appear like advertisements along sidebars or navigation areas of web sites. Essentially this was an indirect way of paying for high Google rankings, something which Google is no doubt trying to combat with each passing algorithm update. One idea of thought is that different areas of a web page from a visual point of view will be weighted differently. For example, if a web site adds a link to your site within the middle of their page text, that link should count for more than one at the bottom of the site near the copyright information.

This brings up the value of content distribution. By writing articles, giving away free resources, or offering something else of value to people, you can create a significant amount of content on other web sites that will include a link back to your own.

The conclusion: It all starts with useful content. If you are providing your web site visitors with useful information, chances are many other sites will want to do the same. SEO doesn’t start with trying to cheat the algorithm; it starts with an understanding of what search engines look for in a quality web site.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

Search Engine Optimisation: How Accurate are Keyword Tools?

Search Engine Optimisation: How Accurate are Keyword Tools?

 by: David Touri

In search engine optimisation, it is a crucial element to select the right keywords when optimising a website. The obvious reason being, if you have keywords with no search volume, you will not receive any traffic. Secondly, if you have keywords that are too competitive, you will find it very difficult (almost impossible) to win high ranks. So how do we find the in between balance for both obstacles? This is where keyword tools would come into place, but how accurate are they?

To start, the main keyword research tools that are found on the market today are Wordtracker, Overture Keyword Tool and Trellian Keyword Discovery. Now I bet many of you are pulling your hair out over which keywords are going to be suitable for optimisation. What makes it probably even more stressful is the varying results between the three different keyword tools i.e. one keyword tool may show a particular keyword to be very good, while another tool may suggest a whole different result for the same keyword. Well stop stressing right now! The truth is that we don’t really know how accurate these keyword tools are and we should only use their search volume figures as an indication as to whether a keyword is popular amongst search engine users.

Let’s say a keyword phrase, “dog products”, has a search volume of 5,000 searches per month on the Overture Keyword Tool. To make an assumption that “dog products” is a good keyword for optimisation, based ONLY on the Overture figure, would be a very bad assumption. However, it gives us a rough idea of the search volume for that particular keyword. The next step would be to use Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery to see if a similar amount of search volume is present for “dog products” (remember to convert searches for each tool to a common time frame i.e. monthly or daily). If we have a very low search volume in BOTH Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, then I would be very skeptical about using “dog products” for optimisation. The whole idea is to get at least two of the three keyword tools to reflect reasonable / high search volumes before considering that keyword to be suitable for optimisation. If you have all three keyword tools returning reasonable / high search volumes for “dog products”, then the chances are that this keyword is reasonable / high in search volume and definitely worth considering for optimisation.

Once a good set of keywords have been agreed upon through the use of the keyword tools, you should then focus on the keywords that have a low / reasonable amount of competing web pages. There is no point trying to compete for a keyword that has 1,000,000 web pages in competition for it. If you are good at SEO then you could achieve high ranks for that keyword, but it would require a lot of time and investment which could be spent on better things. The lower the competition is, then the more chance of achieving higher ranks.

To recap, there is no indication to say that keyword tools are 100% accurate. Whilst the reseller of the tool may suggest otherwise, I highly doubt it. The results should be taken like a “grain of salt” as they are only useful to give you an idea as to what the search volume might be like for a particular keyword (high, moderate or low). With each tool obtaining its results using different algorithms, in some cases their results will not support each other. Provided you use two of the keyword tools to investigate the search volume for keywords, you should be able to make a good decision as to whether a keyword might be worth optimising for. With that in mind, it would also be wise to use your common sense to determine if a keyword is one that YOU would actually use in a search. Otherwise, what would be the point of optimisation in the first place?

Add comment August 1st, 2006

What They Never Told You About Adsense!

That’s right! Many webmasters are getting suckered into joining adsense in hopes of earning quick cash. What they aren’t being told is that it’s harder than that.

Though google adsense is still one of the best programs out there to earn revenue from your site, there is more to it than that. For example if you think you can just past the links in your site content and watch the money flow in well… In truth few people ever get that lucky some of have to work at it for a while before we get our cash. One of the few mistakes people ever make is thinking google adsense does all the work for you.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

How Real SEO Analysis Works

If you’re serious about SEO, you need to know how to analyze the information you uncover.

A decade ago, businesses were wondering whether they need to be part of the Internet. By the late 1990s, plenty signed up and did the basics like placing keywords in the META data.

Unfortunately, that’s all some companies do ? pick out keywords that may or may not be appropriate and pack them into the META keyword data set that search engines pretty much ignore.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

Creating A Search Engine Copywriting Plan

Search engine copywriting has become an extremely important part of the overall search engine optimization process. However, in addition, search engine copywriting has developed into a misunderstood craft.

Shoving keywords in anywhere they can possibly go is not considered search engine copywriting. The process is more defined than that. Successful SEO copywriting takes planning. Any half-hearted efforts at writing copy geared strictly toward the engines will usually result in a decline in your customer’s experience at your site.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

Measuring and improving the performance of a website

Measuring and improving the performance of a website

 by: Fernando Macia

The return on investment (ROI) for the implementation of a website is directly related to the level by which the website is able to achieve its objectives. Even though this concept may sound trivial to the majority of business owners, establishing a series of objectives for a website and putting in place a methodology for measuring how well these goals are being met typically become more challenging tasks.

Traditional business managers and economic strategists have always had at their disposal a variety of methods for measuring and evaluating the degree of success of business objectives. For example, an increase in productivity, cost reduction initiatives, meeting certain sales goals, or the impact of an advertising campaign are all objectives that can be methodically measured and directly linked to a quantifiable level of success within a specific timeframe. Then, as businesses successfully accomplish their short-term goals, they are able to establish and pursue mid or longer term initiatives.

When those same business managers and strategists that are used to operating in traditional environments, and therefore are very familiar with managing and classifying clients, calculating penetration ratios, measuring profitability and forecasting sales, are now faced with the new paradigm of a virtual business, they seem to forget that most of what they already know and do, including the use of common sense, is equally applicable to an online economy. However, in many cases, it is very difficult to see how a company’s website aligns with its general business strategy and in extreme cases, a website’s only purpose is to provide the company with a presence on the Internet.

This reality is even more paradoxical if one looks at the fact that the Internet, due to its technological foundation and highly interactive nature, provides the ideal ground for quickly testing new ideas, inexpensively measuring their results, and effortlessly obtaining direct customer feedback to guide future changes or improvements. Let’s therefore take a look at some factors that will allow us to measure the performance of a website in terms of its ROI, and also at some strategies that our traditional business managers will have to establish to guarantee that the same level of success that they are accustomed to is also achieved in a virtual online economy.

1. A website must be fully aligned with the corporate strategic objectives

The objectives for a website must closely follow the general strategy for the company, as established by their executive management. Therefore, when the term website is used, it should not be interpreted as a piece of the company’s Information Technology (IT) or computer systems. Instead, the term website should trigger and be identified with concepts such as Marketing, Sales, Human Resources, Customer Service, Product Support, etc. In other words, if IT is the department responsible for your company’s website you should have plenty of reasons to worry.

2. A website must establish tactical objectives

After the general strategic planning has been completed for the website, each department must then establish the objectives for their own area of responsibility as an integral part of the overall plan.

For example, a department responsible for customer support could help alleviate the load of their customer-calling center by adding to their website a section that contains frequently asked questions (FAQs), or by simply implementing an e-mail based help page where customers’ questions could be answered during non-peak periods. As a matter of fact, many people would rather fill out an e-mail form with their question than waiting on hold for 25 minutes listening to the same melody or sales message.

In the above example, the objective is clear: to reduce the workload of our customer-calling center and improve customer satisfaction. We should be able to measure the performance of this objective by tracking the ratio between the number of calls experienced by the call center and the number of customer inquiries registered by the website.

As another example, the department responsible for buying pre-owned properties in a real estate agency would like to concentrate their efforts in purchasing those properties with the highest customer demand. The objective of that department, in this case, would be to optimize and adapt the agency’s property portfolio to include those profiles with higher customer appeal. This objective could be measured by calculating the percentage of successful inquiries experienced by the website’s property locator.

3. Identifying the Key Performance Indicators

Once each department has established their own tactical objectives, a web-based methodology must be implemented to measure the degree of improvement experienced. Although it might be interesting to know the overall web traffic statistics of a website (items such as unique visitors, pages visited, referrers, etc.) it is pretty obvious that special attention must be given to those visits that directly contribute to the success of the established objectives (buying, asking for an estimate, soliciting information, setting up an appointment, etc.)

This concept is very easy to explain by analyzing the behavior of visitors inside an online store. From all the visitors that access the homepage of an online store, only a portion will use the site’s product locator. Out of that group, only a few will add products to their cart, and from those, only a percentage will eventually complete the online payment process. The relationship between the total number of visitors that accessed our site and those that successfully completed a purchase can provide our website’s client conversion ratio. It goes without saying that the higher this ratio the better the performance of the website will be. This ratio is therefore an excellent Key Performance Indicator (KFP) for an online store.

But even if a website is not an online store, other KFPs, just as easily identifiable and measurable, can still be defined to evaluate the site’s objectives. For the customer-calling center objective mentioned above, the percentage of visitors that access the customer help page after having visited the FAQs could be considered a KFP. In other words, the fewer inquiries the help center page registers the better the FAQ page is probably performing and the less work the customer-calling center is therefore receiving. In the case of the real estate agency objective, a good KFP could be defined as the percentage of successful visits registered by the website’s property locator. Other effective KFPs for that website could be defined by measuring the number of visitors that access property specification sheets, or by calculating the percentage of visitors that eventually set up an appointment to tour a property, for instance.

4. Measuring a website’s performance

The identification of Key Performance Indicators allows us to implement two fundamental processes that will improve a website’s performance:

A “translation” of the website’s traffic statistical data into concepts and values that can be easily recognized by the individuals in charge of a department or area;

A “transformation” of that data into knowledge that will allow a department head to make decisions and take actions.

Let’s look at each process separately. Web traffic statistics, in general, contain technical information in a highly specialized language, and they measure an endless set of parameters, most of which lack any relevance to a department business lead. That is why, typically, this information is only accessed by IT professionals or webmasters, and even then, only sporadically.

If, on the other hand, we were able to identify only those pieces of information that are needed to calculate and measure the KFPs that have been identified to appraise the performance of a website, we would be “translating” the vast set of traffic statistics into a language that department heads could easily recognize and relate to. For example, someone in charge of a customer service department would not see that http://www.mydomain.com/customer/client_form.aspx has registered 23,547 hits. Instead, the information presented to that individual would convey that the number of users that submitted an inquiry to the customer help page has decreased by 10%.

By only serving to each department the data that is relevant to calculate their own KFPs, the task of decentralizing a website’s huge traffic statistical data and converting that information into a series of executive summaries, customized for the each department head, becomes a much simpler endeavor.

Implementing the translation process described above also guarantees a higher degree of involvement on the part of those responsible for each department. By providing familiar and recognizable data, these individuals will be equipped with the information necessary to “transform” the data received into knowledge that they can use to propose changes or improvements. This process will be most effective if the KFP changes are monitored over short periods of time (e.g., every two to four weeks.) It is in this manner that the executives will be able to observe trends, anticipate changes and notice the effect of recently implemented improvements. By providing this constant feedback, these decision makers will be kept involved and motivated, supporting a continuous improvement process.

5. Improving a website’s performance

Once the Key Performance Indicators have been identified, the gauge for each KFP is thought of being reset to zero. From that moment, each department is free to propose and develop strategies that will improve the performance of their own area. Since each department has a set of KFPs and a methodology to consistently and continuously measure their performance, they have the necessary tools to “test” new strategies and evaluate their positive or negative effects almost immediately. At the same time, this feedback will stimulate new decisions and/or actions for implementing improvements in each area. Finally, the changes measured by the KFPs will be excellent indicators for determining the level of alignment between our website’s objectives and the global strategy of the company.

Conclusion

The performance and ultimate success of a website is for the most part based on the efforts of individual departments working together towards a common set of corporate goals. It will be the improvements made by those individual groups, in order to achieve their own objectives that will drive the overall increase in Internet performance. If we then establish a relationship between the cost associated with each of the proposed improvements and the return expected from them (for example, in terms of a workload reduction, or an increase in the customer conversion ratio) we will be able to not only measure the ROI for our entire corporate website initiative, but also collect the necessary data to justify future Internet investments. After all, the World Wide Web is just one more avenue for conducting business. An avenue, nonetheless, that still requires us to establish objectives, measure their achievement, and act when necessary to provide improvements. We must also be aware that those same principles that we have so heavily relied upon in a traditional economy still apply in this new virtual business world.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

How to Grow Your Affiliate Commissions by Being Different

How to Grow Your Affiliate Commissions by Being Different

 by: Jinger Jarrett

Remember high school?

I still shudder when I think about it. We all want to fit in. I know I did. If I could just fit in, maybe I could be popular too.

Now that I’m an adult, being different is more important. The reason why is that by being different, by being me, it has helped to improve my business.

You can use it to improve yours too.

It doesn’t matter if you sell affiliate programs, MLM, or even your own product, how you will benefit is that by being different, you are offering your potential customers something no one else is offering.

This is especially true with affiliate programs and MLM programs.

How can you be different from thousands of others who may be promoting the same program you are?

A few tips:

1. Write articles about your industry, resources that relate to the product or service you are selling, and tips about how to use your product or service.

This is probably the most overlooked way to market affiliate programs and MLM. By providing valuable content, you are offering your readers something new, something different, that makes your product or service more valuable than others selling the same product or service.

2. Build a website and buy a domain.

This will really help you because not only can you offer your primary product, affiliate program, or MLM, but you can also write reviews about other products or services that compare, as well as complement your current offering.

This is another way of building content and getting buyers to trust you, as well as diversifying your streams of income.

Having your own website can also help you with the search engines.

3. Write a free report to get subscribers.

Offer potential visitors a free report. Again, you can do the same with this report that you do with articles: write about your industry, tips about your product, etc.

Give away your report in exchange for the subscriber’s email and name. This allows you to build your own list so that you can recycle your traffic.

What makes the internet so much different from traditional offline advertising is that buyers are looking for information. Traditional advertising doesn’t provide the information the buyer needs.

By offering your potential buyers real information, you can build your business and increase your profits online.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

Top 3 Free Marketing Techniques

If you have zero budget then this is the article for you. In this article I will discuss the best ways to market your website for free.

#1. Articles:

Add comment August 1st, 2006

How To Create an Offer Your Buyers Will Love

With the creation of the Internet, it has become easier than ever to start a business, especially online.

You can automate all of your business processes, and with a professionally done web site, you can have a 24/7 salesman handling most of the work for you.

The downside is that business is becoming more and more competitive. Especially if you are marketing affiliate programs, you can be competing against thousands of others to sell your products or services.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

7 Essential SEO techniques

1) Title Tag ? When we’re talking about SEO Technique, the Title tag is one of the best and most powerful tags that you can use. Every page should have it’s own title tag, each tag should include the keyword that you are targeting, along with sub-keywords associated with the main keyword that you seek to drive traffic from.

Add comment August 1st, 2006