How Does a Search Engine Rank Your Page?
May 20, 2008
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Every smart Search Engine Optimiser starts his or her career by looking at Web pages with the eye of a search engine spider. Once the optimiser is able to do that, the journey becomes a lot easier. |
The first thing to remember is that the search engines rank "pages", not "sites". What this means is that you will not achieve a high ranking for your site by attempting to optimise your main page for twenty different keyword phrases. However, different pages of your site will appear up the list for different key phrases if you optimise each page for just one of them. If you can’t use your keyword in the domain name, no problem – use it in the URL of some page within your site, e.g. in the file name of the page. This page will rise in relevance for the given keyword. All search engines show you URLs of specific PAGES when you search – not just the root domain names like www.marketing-scamfree.com but the paths like www.marketing-scamfree.com/products.html
Second, understand that the search engines do not see the graphics and JavaScript dynamics your page uses to captivate visitors. You can use a graphic image of written text that says you sell 20 red roses at $47. But it does not tell the search engine that your website is related to the sale of red roses– unless you use an ALT attribute where you write about it.
Therefore you could easily have a wonderful graphic with a picture of roses followed by the text “20 beautiful red roses at only $47”, but the search engine will only see the following:
<img src="http://marketing-scamfree.com/images/sale_red_roses.png" width="250" height="100" class="image" />
As you see there’s nothing in the code which could tell the search robots that the content relates to "Red Roses", "Sale", or "Beautiful". The situation will change if we rewrite the code like this:
<img src="http://marketing- scamfree.com/images/sale_red_roses.png" width="250" height="100" alt=”Sale of Beautiful Red Roses” class="image" />
As you can see we’ve added the ALT attribute with the value that corresponds to what the image tells your visitors. Initially, the "alt" attribute was meant to provide alternative text for an image that for some reason could not be shown by the visitor’s browser. Nowadays it has acquired one more function – to bring the same message to the search engines that the image itself brings to human Web surfers.
The same concerns the usage of JavaScript. Look at these two examples:
- Visit our page about discounted floral arrangements!
- <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!–document.write("Visit our page about " + goods[Math.round(0.5 +(3.99999 * Math.random()))-1]); –> </script>
The first example is what visitors see, the second is the source code script that produces the output. Assume the search engine spider is intelligent enough to read the script (however, actually not all the spiders do); is there anything in the code that can tell it about the discounted floral arrangements? Absolutely none!
As a rule, search engine spiders have a limit on loading page content. For instance, the Googlebot will not read more than 100 KB of your page, even though it is instructed to look whether there are keywords at the end of your page. So if you use keywords somewhere beyond this limit, this is invisible to spiders. Therefore, you may want to acquire the good habit of not overloading the HEAD section of your page with scripts and styles. Better link them from outside files, because otherwise they just push away your important textual content.
There are many more examples of relevancy indicators a spider considers when visiting your page, such as the proximity of important words to the beginning of the page. Here, as well, the spider does not necessarily see the same things a human visitor would see. For instance, a left-hand menu pane on your Web page. People visiting your site will generally not first pay attention to this, focusing instead on the main section. The spider, however, will read your menu before passing to the main content – simply because it is closer to the beginning of the code.
Remember: during the first visit, the spider does not yet know which words your page relates to! Keep in mind this simple truth. By reading your HTML code, the spider (which is just a computer program) must be able guess the exact words that make up the theme of your site.
Then, the spider will compress your page and create the index associated with it. To keep things simple, you can think of this index as an enumeration of all words found on your page, with several important parameters associated with each word: their proximity, frequency, etc.
Certainly, no one really knows what the real indices look like, but the principals are as they have been outlined here. The words that are high in the list according to the main criteria will be considered your keywords by the spider. In reality, the parameters are quite numerous and include off-the-page factors as well, because the spider is able to detect the words every other page out there uses when linking to your page, and thus calculate your relevance to those terms also.
When a Web surfer queries the search engine, it pulls out all pages in its database that contain the user’s query. And here the ranking begins: each page has a number of "on-the-page" indicators associated with it, as well as certain page-independent indicators (like PageRank). A combination of these indicators determines how well the page ranks.
It’s important to keep this in mind: after you have made your page attractive for visitors, ask yourself whether you have also made it readable for the search engine spiders. In the lessons that follow, we will provide for you detailed insight into the optimisation procedure; however, try to keep in mind the basics you’ve learned here, no matter how advanced you become.
Search Engine Optimisation - The Power of Video
May 19, 2008
The time is now for many online businesses to utilise online video in their search engine optmisation program. It has become a powerful tool in the world of e-marketing, and with so many powerful video software packages available there are simply no excuses for a website not to have some video content. The problem however is that videos should be of high quality and not take up too much space on your website.
Video is changing the way we use the internet for such things as education, blogging, product promotion and so many other forms of content. Services like YouTube , Metacafe, Google Video, AOL Video and a host of others have created an enormous online viewing audience by making it easy for anyone to upload, search and share videos.
Online video viewings increased by more than 66 percent in just one year, coming to an average of more than 10 billion views per month in 2008, according to comScore estimates. Major entertainment companies, marketing experts and advertisers are all scratching their heads trying to figure out the best way to turn a profit on such a huge viewing audience, and many industry leaders are investing heavily in producing content exclusively for the Web. However, the real beauty of the current status is that anyone can create and post a video on the Internet and have a potential viewing audience of millions.
So why is that so important? Like written content, video content has become a powerful form of viral marketing material as well as link bait for search engine optimization.
Visibility Online
Viral marketing has always been a difficult marketing effort to quantify, but through the Internet, visitors and viewers are more traceable by Web analytics than the Nielsen Ratings could ever be. MarketingExperiments Journal investigated whether viral video content could actually produce click results. It pulled in more than 80,000 views in only one month by producing and posting 28 amateur-style videos for the Web. After two months, that number grew to 300,000 with no further work or investment.
A viewing audience of 300,000 is fantastic for brand recognition alone, but MarketingExperiments took it one step further by tracking where visitors clicked next. Out of 300,000 views, more than 4,000 people continued to explore the Web site hosting the video and, unlike a story or advertisement on television, these videos continued to draw views and attract visitors without the threat of going off the air or having a limited runtime.
This is not the only means that video can assist in online visibility. The creation of blended search by Google and other search engines made it possible for videos to actually find their way into search rankings for specific keywords. For example, a search query for the keyword "running" produces typical Web site results along with images, book results and, yes, a video by No Doubt. In this way, video can do something that written content like blogs and articles could never do, dramatically increasing the value of video content for both online visibility as well as search engine optimization.
SEO experts have been using content as a standard strategy for obtaining inbound links for years. Quality content will always receive links as long as it actually receives an audience. SEOs make it their business to produce valuable content, syndicate it and bookmark it to sites where the material will be seen. Video can easily be used as a similar form of link bait and possibly have an even greater chance of success due to a rapidly growing online viewer base, but just like any off-page online marketing effort, there are certainly some SEO strategies to keep in mind in order to effectively utilize video content in a link-building strategy.
Content of Your Video
The most important element in video creation is the content itself. The quality of content will directly impact the rest of the campaign, just as the quality of written content attracts links. However, with video creation, there are two key facets of quality to consider. The actual narrative content and visual imagery certainly equal one part of the equation. Successful video content features everything from humorous happenings and comedies to educational series and documentaries. Depending on the subject matter of the industry, creative and entertaining material will almost always have greater success.
Video content can also be judged by production quality. The image resolution and audio clarity are extremely important. If viewers are unable to understand the dialog or have trouble making out the images due to bad lighting or pixilation, they are unlikely to watch the video. Though amateurs have produced some of the highest-viewed online videos on YouTube and other posting sites, the audio and image quality is always such that the message is clear.
In Post-Production
Depending on the style of video, some editing is usually required. There are a number of editing software interfaces to choose from, such as Final Cut Pro. The goal is to produce a clear, concise and entertaining video relating to the Web site’s subject matter. Five minutes should be the maximum length for an Internet video. Some of the most successful videos are as short as 30 seconds in length. Web users are known for their impatience, so the video should be edited as short as possible. No length is too short.
Exporting the video and optimising it for search engine crawlers is the next step in the post-production process. Possibly the most valuable piece of information connected to online videos is the file name. File names should include target keyword phrases similar to title tag optimisation. Search engines are able to read these file names and index them accordingly. The appropriate metadata should also be encoded into the video file in order to provide more information to search engine crawlers. The length of the video and key frame data are somewhat standard for most encoding metadata, but some specialized software may be needed to inject the titles and basic key phrase data into the video file.
Publishing of Your Video
Videos should first be published on the Web site they were created for. Each video posted on the Web site should have an individual URL (uniform resource locator) that is fully optimized according the key phrase targeted by the video. For example, the page should include targeted keywords in the title tag with a corresponding h1 tag, along with image alt attributes and any other keyword associated on-page optimization. It is also becoming popular to include a transcript of the video on the same page, thus adding a great deal of written content to that page. Once the page is created, the addition of a video site map will help search engine crawlers to better index and rank the content. Posting the video on the author’s Web site first will also prevent any contest over the origin of the content.
Videos should also be posted on a number of video-hosting and video-sharing Web sites like those mentioned earlier. YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe and AOL Video are the most important sites for submission as they have the most common results in blended search. However, videos from many other submission sites are finding their way into high page ranks as well. Videos should be submitted to each of these by hand with keyword-rich titles and tags, as well as unique and interesting descriptions.
By sharing videos on sites like these with friends and colleagues, more views will begin to accumulate, bringing more validity to the content. The higher the number of views a video receives on these sites, the more likely it is to gain a high page rank.
Social Media
Bookmarking and social networks are now major players in search engine optimization, with major search engines indexing this user-based content. The specific URL of the video should be bookmarked on social media sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Digg and others, and will appear as an actual image icon with a new specific URL on the corresponding site.
Though YouTube is the most likely platform for obtaining a large number of views, creating buzz through social media Web sites will bring more direct traffic and provide deep links to the optimised Web site. Achieving traffic through these methods is optimal because it drives traffic directly to the Web site. For this reason, it is also a reasonable practice to install basic bookmarking buttons on the specific video page so that visitors can easily add it to their favorites and bookmarks.
Utilizing video content in Internet marketing and optimization campaigns is a very young strategy that will continue to evolve along with the continued development of search engine technology. These strategies basically follow a previously established and proven link-building model, already widely used to optimize written content.
By following these basic protocols and constantly seeking new avenues for attracting viewers, video can be an extremely successful form of online marketing. The time is now to begin creating videos for the Web. The opportunity is there for you to connect with your audience within a matter of minutes. If you can show your customers that there is more to your website than just product placements then you are on your way to business success!
Create Your Own Internet Business
May 13, 2008
Derek Gehl (from the Internet Marketing Center - IMC) decided that it was time to show ordinary people that making an online business work was more than just a pipe dream.
In late April 2008 he went about documenting how you could set up a online business in just 4 days. In a series of videos he went through every stage that is required in order for you to set up your own online business. In these videos Derek talks about everything from Market Research to receiving traffic to your website. In short these videos are extremely powerful, and can be used by beiginner and intermediate online marketers.
It has always been difficult to know where to begin in running an online business, and this is where Derek really does put things into perspective. These videos are perfect for so many people that are new to online business. If you have always been waiting for that perfect time to enter the online marketplace, this is that time. Have a look at these videos and start profiting from your online presence! Good luck!
Online Marketing - Learn from the Past
May 11, 2008
In 1923 Claude Hopkins published a book titled "Scientific Advertising, and to this very day it is seen as the orginal source of marketing concepts that assist in a succesful direct response marketing campaign. This is where I would say that you should never dismiss the past and what is classed as history and nothing else.
What’s interesting is how the so-called new paradigm of online marketing has seduced so many otherwise rational people into ignoring, forgetting, or never-even-learning these basic concepts of salesmanship-in-print. Still today, there are plenty who believe that top search engine ranking is the solitary key to online success. They’re wrong!
Search engine ranking is only one ingredient in the online success formula. Yes, it’s an important building block – perhaps even the cornerstone of a successful online endeavor. But, there are so many other pieces that help create the kind of success that’s flexible, self perpetuating, and lasting.
Let’s face it, we all know that the engines are fickle. Stategies that work one year are out of favor the next. While it’s true that NEW customers tend to seek out services through searching the engines, repeat customers like to do business with companies they already trust. That said, it’s clear that it’s important – invaluable really – to understand your customer. . .
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1. Customers like to be courted.
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2. They expect to be appreciated – treated as though they’re special because, in their mind, they are special.
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3. They like to be assured – they want YOU to take the risk. They want a guarantee!
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4. Customers buy benefits, not features.
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5. They are influenced by endorsements – they’re looking to hear the opinions of people they trust and respect.
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6. Once they’re looking to buy, customers respond to headlines. They want to hear the whole story and they don’t mind spending the time it takes to hear it all – but, they will not tolerate being bored!
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7. They are turned off by negative advertising.
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8. The right name can make or break a sales campaign.
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9. Most importantly, what works and what does not is always determined by testing – not guessing, not opinion. Testing.
By the year 1923, these facts, and many, many others that underpin the foundations of advertising, were well-established, and the ensuing decades rightfully etched them in stone.
Sure, the nuances may change, but these principles of advertising do not. Yet in saying this how many people still follow these basic principles?
Take some time to think about what really makes a good marketing campaign. Look after your clients and they will inturn look after you. Remember that repeat business can really be the difference between being successful and being amazingly profitable!
Read the entire book by clicking here
The Truth About Search Engine Optimisation
May 9, 2008
Google especially has cracked down hard on paid links in the last few months. To put it succinctly, they don’t pass page rank. If you want to buy a link from a site, only do it if you believe the link itself will be a good source of traffic — in other words, only do it for legitimate advertising purposes. Do not do it if your purpose is for that link to transfer page rank or increase your ranking, as it likely will not.
Get the Facts
Myth: All I need to do is figure out the magic bullet, and I will be at the top of the search engines.
Fact: Search engines use over 200 factors to rank sites. No one factor will get you to the top. To get to the top, you must have a balanced search engine strategy encompassing many factors, both on page and off page. There is no magic bullet.
Myth: Search rankings are about link popularity. Get as many links as you can. Join Web rings, "free for all" (FFA) link exchanges, and get as many sites as you can to link to you through reciprocal linking back to them.
Fact: While link popularity is important if done correctly, Google is placing links under increasing scrutiny, and sheer volumes of inbound linking without regard to the source of the link and other factors hasn’t worked in years. It is not the raw number of links that matter, but the type of links. Links from trusted sites, relevant to your industry, with proper anchor text and relevant surrounding text and page content, to original content on your site are the ones that will help you.
FFA linking will most likely get you in trouble with the engines as they could interpret that as an attempt to spam the results. In addition to bleeding away all of your page rank to other sites, FFA linking will increase your chances of linking to a "bad neighborhood," another thing which can get you into trouble. Never link to sites you do not know or with which you are not familiar. Remember, Google is smarter than you, you can’t fool them with unnatural linking schemes.
Myth: It’s all about "keyword density." Be sure to repeat your keyword numerous times on your Web site. Keyword repetition increases keyword density and inflates your search engine ranking.
Fact: Structuring your page around some magic formula for key phrase density does nothing for you. Yes, your target key phrases should be included at least once on the page, as well as in your title and meta description elements, and in an H1 or H2 tag if possible. Other than that, forget about key phrase density. Create your Web content for human readers and write it so it makes sense to them. Whatever you do, avoid key phrase repetition, a known spamming technique sure to get you into trouble.
Increasing Your Odds
Myth: Repeated submissions to the search engines increase your rankings. It is a good idea to sign up for an automated submission service, which will regularly resubmit your site to 1,000 or more search engines each week.
Fact: Automated submissions are a violation of major search engines’ Terms of Inclusion and can get you into trouble. Search engines don’t need you to submit to them, set up a blog and get a few links to your site, and they will find you very quickly. Using Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, usually can get a new site indexed within a week. Just be sure to put a link on the blog to your site.
Myth: The meta keywords tag must include your target keywords. Search engines place heavy weight on this tag and use it to determine which keywords for which to rank your site.
Fact: Search engines that matter, such as Google, place zero weight on the keywords meta element due to historical spam. Yahoo appears to give it some small weight. In any event, use of the keyword meta element is of so little use, many SEO’s ignore it altogether.
Myth: Because links are so important to search rankings, I should go out and purchase a large number of paid links and submit to hundreds or thousands of directories in order to get more links to my site.
Fact: Google especially has cracked down hard on paid links in the last few months. To put it succinctly, they don’t pass page rank. If you want to buy a link from a site, only do it if you believe the link itself will be a good source of traffic (in other words, only do it for legitimate advertising purposes). Do not do it if your purpose is for that link to transfer page rank or increase your ranking, as it likely will not.
Additionally, hundreds of useless directories have been harshly penalized as well, so that links from within them are either not counted at all or given very little weight. Get links from a few well respected directories such as dmoz.org, Yahoo directory, Business.com, JoeAnt and others which have a manual review process. Automated submission services which submit to hundreds of directories are a waste of money.
Myth: I should write articles and submit them to article directories, because links from article directories have high page rank and are given great weight by the engines.
Fact: Article directory links in and of themselves carry little to no weight. The engines are smart and know that people spam these directories with useless content just to get a link. If you want to get relevant, trusted links to your site that actually mean something, create useful, informative, or educational content that people will want to link to. Articles are one form of such content, but only if they are good enough to get picked up by other sites. Other content which can serve as link bait is video content, tools and widgets, product reviews, top 10 lists, and interesting or entertaining blogs.
Affiliate Marketing - Remain Focused
May 2, 2008
When it comes down to it there is no doubting the fact that Affiliate Marketing is harder than it looks. The problem some people have is that they try and sell too many products, and before long they lose focus on what they were trying to do in the first place - make money online!
The Marketplace
What most Affiliate Marketers do is to find that perfect product to sell. It sounds easy, especially when sites like Clickbank have all their products listed in different categories and you can also sort by popularity etc. Before you know it you have found your particular category and have also found out which products are most popular. Easy, next step is to start selling this product (or even the top 10 products in that category by popularity). Wrong!
Commission Rate ($/sale)
When you are looking at each product that you wish to affiliate with the commission rate is especially important. If the publisher (seller)is offering less than $30 per sale to each of his/her affiliates then it is most likely that your profit margins are going to be low (unless you can sell the product in bulk!). Remember however that you can still ask for a higher commission rate by emailing the actual seller of the product. You will be amazed at the response you can sometimes get back. Of course if there are future dollars to be made through the sale (e.g commission from ongoing memberships) then a $/sale of less than $30 can be acceptable.
% of Total Sale (%/sale)
This is again another important piece of information that should tell you how generous the publisher is. If you can keep to a figure of 70% or above then you know you are being given the best possible chance of actually making a profit from the sale. Remember however that if the product has high conversion rate, the total commission per sale can be less than 70%. We’ll come to that in a minute.
% Referred (%refd)
This reference is related to the % of total sales made for that product that have been made directly though an affiliate site (link) or as Clickbank says : "Fraction of publisher’s total sales that are referred by affiliates". There is no rule to say that a higher % in this category is bad, however you have to remember that the higher the figure the more competition you have from other affiliates. If this figure is higher than 70% then you are going to up against some strong opposition.
Gravity (grav)
This is based on the number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks Clickbank will add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added. Again there is no set rule about what this number should be, but you should be looking for at least 100.0 +. This would suggest that the product is actually being sold in the marketplace (e.g people actually want to buy the product!). Sales figures can be misleading however, and you should be selling products that you are comfortable in selling.
Where to Now?
Now you have filtered out the good from the bad, the next step is to be satisfied that the product is linked in with the theme of your website. I’m always puzzled to see a website that is based around the sale of car insurance acting as an affiliate for cleaning products (do you get my drift!). It simply makes your site look like less of an authority site and more of a mismatch of unrelated products.
There is no doubt that there are some very good products out there that require good affiliates, but remember who your competition is and remain focused. Don’t simply promote a product because it is the most popular in Clickbank!
