After years of running websites and earning a full-time online income, I am constantly reminded that it all comes down to keywords. Actually, it all comes down to obtaining top rankings for your profitable keywords in the search engines, mainly Google.

And that statement has to be refined even further, it’s all about obtaining top keyword rankings and keeping them at the top. You must consistently keep your keywords in the top spots on that all important first page of SERPs since your keyword rankings can make or break your online marketing.

If you’re targeting extremely competitive and profitable keywords you will have your work cut out for you; unless you have tons of money to buy your way (links) into the top spots, expect to spend months if not years, getting to those top listings. Google has frowned upon link buying and has taken steps to fight it, but this practice is still widespread throughout the web. Continue Reading »
Useful Keyword Marketing Tools

Old school media people are increasingly vilified by those of us who wear skinny jeans and throw out references to social media as casually as we breathe, but I’m quickly discovering that they really have their heads on straight with one major point about links: they’re also good for traffic (ahem).

If you’ve never argued with a site owner about where exactly on a page they should place the link they’ve so lovingly agreed to give you for what is — naturally! — a reason borne only of sheer relevancy, you probably will soon.

For many, the primary focus of a link building initiative is indeed to move a site up in the rankings but why not kill two birds with one stone and milk a link for all it’s worth? How likely is a user to click on a link that’s a few page scrolls down on a site, in font so tiny that anyone with even a slight amount of myopia will immediately develop a headache upon trying to read it? If that link were instead placed in a nice prominent place on the site, it would thus be capable of potentially driving traffic to the site in question …. something that tends to make site owners dance like Gene Kelly on their way to the local animal shelter to volunteer.

Now obviously there are times when may not want a link to be visible, such as getting a link from a site that’s not that relevant to your area and where you fear you’d get called out if Google spam fighting chief Matt Cutts hand reviewed things. For our purposes here, of course, let’s assume that you’re doing nothing like that, since you’re all nice people who put quarters in the parking meter even when there’s time left on it.

Link placement on a page is tricky business, too, even though you might just assume that you could easily tell a site owner where to put your link in order to maximize its click rate. Human intuition is helpful here, as most people can determine the difference between a truly horrible section and one that delicately says “click me” with high accuracy. However, if you’re dealing with seriously high volume and quality link placement has the potential to bring someone utter loads of relevant traffic, it’s worth taking this seriously enough to do some research into click heat maps, eyetracking, human factors, and all that New Age-sounding stuff.

During the course of any day, my link builders will show me links that are truly poorly placed, ones in tiny font at the bottom left corner of the screen in some weird zone that is barely noticeable unless you happen to be looking for the link that you asked for, sadly. These links will pass juice, hopefully, but the odds of someone clicking through to the targeted site from this are quite slim. A nicely placed text link in a paragraph near the top, well that’s another story, potentially.

When you’re going after a link, hopefully you’re doing things like trying to make sure it’s placed on a page with decent page rank, one that’s indexed, one that’s been crawled since John Lydon was Johnny Rotten, etc. Think of what your call to action should be, and figure out where you’d tend to look to find it if you were a user and not some dirty little link buyer. If you’re going to all the trouble of being nice to the site owner and negotiating (not to mention taking the risk of link buying), why not specify exactly where you’d like the link?

In my experience, many site owners are quite happy to do whatever it takes to get that $100 out of you so they can buy more geeky T-shirts, but some of them, especially the old school ones who wrote their site in Cold Fusion and still brag about it, aren’t going to be easily persuaded to do anything nice for you. Now is a good time to fake some Southern charm.

Eyetracking and click heat research tell us that users of a site tend to view content in an F-shape, moving across a page for two horizontal lines near the top, then down to what could the left nav with proper placement. This same research tells us the least likely places for a user to look as well, and that’s mainly anywhere other than the above-referenced F. Bearing this information in mind, it makes sense to specify where you’d like your link, gaining as much prominence for it as possible, provided it’s relevant, of course. If you’re doing anything sketchy, all bets are off with link placement, as I’ve said earlier.

Obviously you’ll get links for the simple fact that they do tend to help a site move up in the rankings, which should technically bring in more traffic anyway, but if the site you’re getting that link from is a high volume one and everything is on the up and up, you really should go the extra mile.

In an official post on the Google Blog called Introduction to Google Ranking, Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team, has revealed some fascinating insights into the way Google search results are collated and ranked. In the process, he’s also busted a few common myths surrounding their elusive algorithm.

Here are some of the tidbits from Amit’s post that I found most interesting:

• While web search is the most used Google search service, the same ranking algorithms are also used, with modifications, for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search and Book Search.
• Amit claims there is no manual intervention of search results, meaning that the final ordering of the results is decided by their algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by Google.
• Whenever Google return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country, they use that as an inspiration for future improvements. In Google’s opinion, a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to their ranking algorithm.
• Google make about ten ranking changes every week and their engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query.
• Google stand by their clear written policies for websites and do take action on sites that are in violation of those policies or for other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

On Thursday, we broke the news that the Yahoo Directory had no PageRank via a WebmasterWorld thread. Matt Cutts of Google quickly commented saying that the Yahoo Directory has a PageRank of 8. Matt was referring to the home page, which we said did have a PR value but not the internal pages.

Since then I have been tracking the discussion to find out that Matt added more details to the WebmasterWorld later on June 6th, saying although it appears the deeper pages do not have PageRank, they actually do. Matt said:

It looks like it’s just a matter of canonicalizing upper vs. lowercase as to why some of the subdirectories look the way they do in the toolbar. I just wanted to reiterate that the Yahoo Directory has plenty of PageRank in our internal systems.

This just seems very weird to me. I guess it just proves that what we see in the Google Toolbar as a PageRank score can be very very wrong.

In any event, it is good to know that the Yahoo Directory has PageRank to pass around.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld