SEO – Writing Quality Content For Optimization

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Eran

by Guest Author Michael Russell

If you are a marketer or just trying to earn an online income, then you probably have heard the terms “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization”. Everyone knows that getting a good page rank or just ranking high in the search engines is probably the most important aspect of driving traffic to your website. What people don’t know or don’t tend to realize is that these are important aspects, but should not be focused upon as much as creating good quality content for your website. If the content of your website is looked upon by your reader as “valued” then your website will thrive. Way too many website owners give little thought to their content. This happens much more frequently than one expects with people who claim to be web professionals. However, without good content on your site repercussions can be immediate. If you want better web site traffic results then make the creation of good content for your web site your first priority. Whether you write the content yourself, or hire professional writers to develop it for you, it needs to be quality writing.

If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might have more than one. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Always make your title “rich” in keywords. Make your articles pertain to your title. Be sure to add some keywords throughout your article as this will help the “spiders” that “crawl” your pages and index your information. Don’t just start repeating the keywords throughout your article. This is called “stacking” and this too can lead to your pages not being indexed or to a possible banning. How long will it take? Nobody knows the answer to that question, but, as long as you are writing content that appeals to people, the traffic will come.

As traffic begins to flow to your website, this will start to increase your link popularity. Link popularity is starting to become a major tool for the search engines. This “linking method” helps the engines decide if your content is good or not. Don’t just go to a website and “copy-and-paste”, that is infringement. Go and research your topics and put them into your own words. As long as you are doing your own work, and gaining popularity of people reading your articles and content, then you stand no chance of being in “non-compliance” with the search engines. These engines “crawl” and “index” your website pages, and if they determine that the content is “copied” or not “highly” valued, then you stand the chance of no ranking at all, and this could lead your website into being banned by the engines.

So to sum it all up, you must first focus on the amounts and quality of content you are providing on your site. The engines love “soaking” up new, fresh content. Once you get some pages built up, then start turning your focus to some quality links that pertain to your pages. Just do a basic search on your titles and write to the owners of the websites asking if you can provide them with a link, and in return, if you could receive one back. This will give your website the first boost you will need for the site’s search engine optimization.

Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to SEO

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Optimization, SEO | Leave a comment

Google Adsense is still working

Posted on April 2, 2006 by Eran

I keep seeing & hearing rumblings about Adsense earnings going down across the net, especially from the adsense site builder brigade. At times, I have also expressed concerns about what’s going on with adsense, and whether its even worth hitching your trailer to their wagon…

Well, I just want to let you know that it is DEFINITELY still working, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

I have a client at work to whom I suggested he use adsense on his site. He has been trying to crack Google, Yahoo & MSN for a while, but he’s playing in a very competitive market, and its taking a lot longer than he had hoped for, to achieve the results he would like. Hence, my suggestion that he put adsense on his site, and hopefully collect a small token from the Adwords clicks he has been paying to send people to his site.

He started slowly, with a few bucks here & there and it picked up a little, but nothing drastic.

However, he rang me on Friday to ask me how much he is spending on Adwords at the moment. When I told him the figure, he gleefully told me that his adsense earnings for March have finally surpassed the amount of money he spends on adwords. In other words, his earnings from adsense are going UP, and even though he spends money on Adwords PPC ads to send traffic to the site to purchase his product, he is getting a proportion of them clicking on his adsense ads as well, and has now managed to jump ahead of the cart!

My next experiment is to see if we can better integrate his ads into the site so that his CTR goes up (it’s currently below 5%). If this happens (and I have every reason to believe it will), he may well double his earnings per month, without increasing his traffic by 1 new unique visitor per month!!! My adsense sites average about 10-12% CTR, so if we can at least double his CTR, potentially he will get a huge ROI on his current free & paid traffic!

Here’s the basics of his situation:

1) He has 1 website (not 10 or 100).
2) It is built around a specific niche topic and looks nice and has some good content on it – most of it unique.
3) He only gets about 2000 visitors a month so far, and he pays for nearly 50% of them via Adwords PPC - yet, he has almost earned twice as much in adsense income this month as what he paid for the clicks!
4) His site is now self sufficient

My lessons for the day:

1) Build sites around a theme
2) If possible, have a significant percentage (20%+ if possible) of the content be unique
3) Grow slow but steady (drip feed)
4) Publish articles & get 1-way links to your site (do this slowly but steadily. A mad rush of links & articles that die out quickly tends to spook the SEs)
5) Integrate adsense properly into your site, so that it is not so obvious that they are ads.
6) Have a big site – lots of content is GOOD… Small sites rarely rate well on google, except perhaps for a semi-unique keyword.
7) It takes time to get results
8 ) Experiment to see if quantity or quality is better when it comes to how many sites you build. Quality takes longer but usually pays heaps more per site AND doesnt get kicked out of the SE index’s so quickly, if at all…

Experiment with your sites people. Don’t just make them cookie cutters of each other with the same 50 articles that everybody else uses, etc. Try different ideas. Track your results and see what works best.

I’m even earning money implementing adsense on mainstream commercial websites now, thanks to what I have learned from building my own Adsense sites. If you want some help doing this to your site, or someone you know, send me an email and I’ll be happy to chat with you about it.

Posted in Google, Google AdWords | Leave a comment

Company tries to sue Google for being penalized

Posted on March 24, 2006 by Eran

Poor Google! At times, you just got to feel sort of sorry for them. Now that they are mega-successful and a major player in the online economy, they have also become a target for every wacko, wierdo, crook and scumbag out there hoping to make a quick buck!

I just read (on Search Engine Roundtable) that:

“Late Friday news came down that Google has been sued by KinderStart.com, a parental advice site, for being demoted in the search rankings. KinderStart is trying to create a class action lawsuit for all Web site owners who have been blacklisted by Google since January 2001.”

Geeze, what a pathetic attempt at getting some free publicity. I am quite sure they are hoping all the other google whingers, haters & complainers out there will jump on the bandwagon and put their hand up to join a frivilous class action.

America TRULY IS the land of the lawsuit in preference to taking responsibility for one’s actions.

While I don’t worship Google or anything silly (hey, some of my sites don’t get much action from Google, but I don’t bitch about it), I just am blown away with how many moaners & complainers there are out there, blaming Google for all their woes.

For pete’s sake people, let’s get a grip on reality here and remember that there are plenty of other SEs to optimise for AS WELL AS offline marketing.

The way I look at it, ANY free traffic I get from Google, Yahoo & MSN is a gift, not a right! If I don’t like them, I can take my site/s out of their indexes, and I am welcome to find other ways to get traffic to my site, just the same as the offline world does now and has done for hundreds of years!

Grow up all you babies and deal with it!!! :-)

Posted in Google | Leave a comment

Don’t Fight Google’s Success – Take Advantage Of It

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Eran

Hey there Website Owner, I just have a quick question for you…

While I realise you are ranking well for some of your main keywords on MSN & Yahoo, how are you doing for that and other more appropriate keywords on Google?

The traffic you’ll get for high rankings on Google will be more than Yahoo & MSN added together and then some, so it’s MUCH MORE value-for-money in terms of pursuing high Search Engine ranking results on Google than the #2 & #3 Search engines offer.

According to the statistics I’ve recently read, Google has nearly 81% of ALL the search engine traffic in Australia (and is similarly high in many other countries), which gives you an idea of how much traffic you are currently missing out just relying on Yahoo & Ninemsn.

If you do some quick searches and your web site doesn’t rank in the top 3 pages for your main keywords on Google (anything below the top 3 pages is pretty much a waste of time), then you’re leaving LOTS of traffic (and potential paying clients) on the table.

If you were to get (in particular) a first page ranking for one or more of your main keyword phrases in Google, you would be blown away with the amount of traffic and enquiries you get at your site, compared to what you currently receive.

Something else that’s important to consider when you review rankings is the amount of TEXT content on your site. The higher ranking sites almost always have lots of text content (articles, news, reviews, etc) on their site and the lower ranking ones don’t have much.

Here’s a quick experiment you can try for yourself. On Google, Yahoo & MSN, do a search for your top 1 or 2 keyword phrases, and note the sites that come out in the top 10.

Then, go to each of those 3 search engines and see how many pages of these sites are indexed, compared to yours. It’s easy to do this by just entering the following command in at each Search Engine:

site:www.domainname.com

(obviously substituting your site URL and the other top 10 site urls where appropriate)

If the number of pages in the index for your site is significantly lower than the competition, there’s one of your main reasons for a poor ranking (there are other factors, but this is an important one).

I often have prospective search engine optimisation clients give me the excuse that they are getting decent results from Yahoo & MSN, and anyway funds are tight, so they don’t want to invest in getting results in Google. You know, the old classic “Call me again in 6 – 9 months!”

However, what they don’t realise is that the additional income they would receive for a higher ranking on Google (from the ensuing customers it brought you) would not only well and truly pay for our SEO services but give them plenty of ongoing new clients, which would take care of any cashflow concerns they might have for a while to come.

Consider that many of the big companies in your market niche spend large sums of money to advertise on TV, Radio & Print to drive traffic to their web site/s & retail location/s, but a good SEO strategy will bring visitors to your site for literally cents on the dollar – a much higher ROI. According to Google’s statistics, a quality Search Engine strategy can achieve similar results but be 20 times CHEAPER than direct mail (for one example).

I guess the lesson here is not to be penny-wise and dollar-poor. Work out how many additional new paying clients you would need to get via Search Engine Optimisation results to break even with the SEO firm’s fee, and then go after the main game in town: Google.

Your return-on-investment for good Seach Engine rankings is way ahead of most any other form of advertising and marketing you can come up with, but you need to see the big picture first. Don’t wait until your competitor sees the light and takes action before you, or you’ll miss out.

Author: Eran Malloch is an Internet Marketing  Consultant at WCR Internet Marketing, a specialist Australian Search Engine Marketing company. Visit our site to get a free web site analysis.

Posted in Google, MSN, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Yahoo | Leave a comment

Dashes vs Underscores in your URL : Matt Cutts speaks

Posted on March 17, 2006 by Eran

I just read this interesting article by the rather famous Mr Cutts last week and have been passing it onto my clients for future reference. Rather than lose it to the vagaries of my failing memory :-) I have decided to add it to my blog for you to read, learn and enjoy…

Dashes vs. underscores

August 25, 2005 @ 12:29 am

I often get asked whether I’d recommend dashes or underscores for words in urls. For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes. Why? To find out, let’s take a trip in the Google Time Machine. Set the dial for 1999, the year Matt first discovered Google. Matt was using, I dunno, maybe HotBot at that point? The curtain rises:
Matt: Hmm, this search for [FTP_BINARY] didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I got a couple scuzzy looking urls, and the other documents just have the words “FTP” and “BINARY” but the term “FTP_BINARY” doesn’t actually appear. (Note: Matt was a bit of a nerd, as you can tell.)
Some Random Person That I Don’t Remember: Have you tried Google?
Matt: What’s that?
SROTIDR: It’s a search engine written by nerds for nerds! They index numbers! Sometimes they even index punctuation, like “C++”. Try your underscore search there.
Matt: Okay, here goes. Whoa! They actually return pages with the literal string “FTP_BINARY”! That’s wicked cool! (Did I mention Matt was a nerd? Big-time nerd.)
SROTIDR: Yeah. The wild thing is that they wrote a paper about how they crawl the web and rank pages.
Matt: Well, now that’s just silly. I wonder why they didn’t keep it a secret? I bet those papers will make great reading for my information retrieval class.I’ve stylized the conversation quite a bit, but I remember how impressed I was that Google indexed numbers and some punctuation (come to think of it, search engines have come a long way in five years). With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.

Posted in Google, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Optimization, SEM | Leave a comment

EranMalloch.com Blog goes live

Posted on March 14, 2006 by Eran

Welcome! This blog is the musings (and occasional ramblings) of an Australian guy working in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) fields.

I’ll discuss my thoughts on these subjects, hopefully on a daily basis. Since I work as an Internet marketing consultant for WCR Internet Marketing, I get a lot of opportunities to explore and experiment on how to get successful search engine rankings on behalf of my clients, as well as set up, run and manage their Google Adwords PPC campaigns.

Drop by, or subscribe to my RSS feed, and you’ll get all the latest goss on my Net Adventures.

Eran

Posted in Pay Per Click (PPC), SEM, SEO | Leave a comment