In this article, I want to answer all of those questions and outline the various strategies and steps you can take after you achieve your #1 rankings.

Like it or not, obtaining #1 rankings for a bunch of competitive keywords is not the end of the road for your SEO campaign. If you’re lucky enough to even be in a situation like this, there are still quite a few things you can do to solidify your position for the long term and further increase traffic and conversions.

1. Increase the page’s “linkability” – reinforce your position

As you know, SEO at its core is all about good content and inbound links. If you have both, you’re more likely to rank favorably in the engines. That being said, the competition (ranked 2-10) is out to get you and you can’t afford to sit on your hands.

At the bare minimum, you need to increase the “linkability” of your ranking page. If you’re on top for a popular search keyword, you’re probably getting a lot of targeted traffic. The good news is that high SEO rankings are essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re ranking #1, more people will see your content and potentially link to it, thus reinforcing your position at the top spot.

What you need to do is encourage these natural links that come about from a top listing. A lot of people trust Google’s rankings so they search to find resources to link to (e.g. bloggers). Your job is to improve “linkability” by proving to everyone that Google isn’t making a mistake by ranking you first.

Here are a few ways you accomplish this:

• Improve your site’s design. When it comes to attracting links, looks do matter.
• Expand your content and make it head and shoulders above the rest (i.e. something that can’t be found anywhere else)
• Temporarily remove advertising. I’m sure you’d want to monetize your rankings, but too many ads can be a turn off for links, especially if you overdo it. It might be a good idea to limit the ads for a while until you try to get some more links. This will help you to make even more money later on.

2. Aggressively seek out links

Once you have a top ranking for a competitive keyword, you can leverage your position to gain even more links. For example, a link you add to a relevant Wikipedia page is more likely to stick. You can also contact bloggers and ask them to link, especially if they have the related content on their sites already.

Look for opportunities to gain links whether it be through guest posting, article marketing, or just plain begging. Not only will the added links make it more difficult for others to overtake you in the rankings, but you can also mix up the link anchor text to try and get the same page to rank for other related terms (more on this in point 4).

3. Optimize click through rates and conversions

Are you maximizing the benefit of your #1 ranking? Chances are, you’re not. There’s always room for improvement, especially with click through and conversion rates. Below are some tips for each.

Click through rates
Just because you have a #1 ranking doesn’t mean you’ll get X number of visits per day. While positioning is definitely important, you can still greatly increase the chances of your listing being clicked by tweaking the following items.

• Title tags. This is the bolded link text that you see in the search engine results pages. Try adding a symbol like “*” or “->” to the beginning of the title to attract attention. Alternatively you can play around with the actual title text to see how it affects CTR. For example, you can shorten the title to make it an exact match of the search query or you can make it a little longer by adding catchy phrases like “Read This First!” The title tag is by far the most important on-page SEO factor so make sure your targeted keyword has the most prominence. Also keep in mind that the search engines need at least a few days or weeks to adapt to your changes. You don’t want to change things too much or too frequently or else you risk dropping in the rankings.
• Meta descriptions. This is the blurb that shows up with your search listing. While Google will oftentimes change this up depending on what’s being searched, you can specify your preference by inserting the meta description tag in the head section of your page. Add in a descriptive sentence with your targeted keywords and a call to action to pique users’ attention/curiosity.

Conversion rates
So you have a #1 ranking and the searcher clicked through to your site. Now what? You want them to convert! In other words, you want them to do whatever it is you want them to do on your site, whether it be signing up for your newsletter, clicking on ads, or buying your product/service.

Take advantage of the steady stream of traffic by constantly testing what works and what doesn’t on your site. For example, does having an orange button convert better than a green button? Now’s the time to test, test, test. Besides performing A/B split testing, use a service like Crazy Egg to see where users are clicking most.

4. Expand on ranking opportunities

#1 rankings in Google are nice, but there’s opportunity for even more visibility. What can you do? Well first, you can expand the keyword scope of the ranking page to target even more keywords. For example, if your title is “Blue Widgets” you can expand it to something like “Blue Widgets for Sale in New York”. That should allow you to get even more rankings for various more-specific keywords. Sure you may be diluting the keyword density of the title tag for your main keyword, but if you’ve been adding links as I suggested in points 1 and 2, your ranking should be able to hold. Remember that the majority of searches are long-tail so don’t be stuck narrowly focusing on just 1 keyword.

Additionally, you can add a second indented listing to your search result. If you have 2 rankings on any search engine result page, Google will bump up the second one to show up right under the first. For example, if you have a #1 ranking and a #10 ranking for a keyword using the same domain name, Google will automatically bump up the #10 ranking to #2. So essentially you only need to get to #10 for a #2 ranking. This is definitely worth the effort. Create a related page and go for it. In case you haven’t seen it before, here’s how it looks.

Targeting misspellings of your keyword might also be a good way to get additional exposure. Just make sure there is significant search frequency so you’re not wasting your time.

Finally, if your #1 organic listing is driving a lot of traffic and conversions, the logical next step is to bid on that keyword in paid search. Since you know the value of each visitor (from your analytics), you’ll know exactly how much to bid while remaining profitable. It’s a no brainer. Furthermore, supplementing your #1 organic listing with a paid search ad has the potential to have a 1+1=3 effect, meaning the presence of one can improve the effects of the other.

5. Future-proof your SEO rankings

SEO as an industry is extremely volatile and your rankings could easily change or even be wiped out as a result of algorithmic shifts based on new technology and trends. So what can you do to prevent this? The key is to future proof your SEO by building your campaign around long term signals of quality. Exploiting loopholes or using tricks to rank might work now, but probably won’t stand the test of time. Solidify your position now so that you can continue to reap the rewards later.

In addition to the good content and quality links, below are some of the types of things search engines will look for in the near future to determine the authority of a site.

• Traffic / user engagement. Google has a lot of information on user behavior and it’s only a matter of time before they start using it to influence the search rankings. Work on building a popular site that fulfills user demand and the search traffic will come naturally.
• Branding. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that “brands will clean up the Internet cesspool of misinformation”. Do you want to build a brand or be part of the cesspool?  Don’t just build a generic site that’s replacable in the SERPs. For example, if you’re getting the majority of your traffic from search, that just looks unnatural and could set off some red flags. Build a strong brand and business. That way, if Google doesn’t rank you highly, it looks bad on them.
• Social media. Social media is all the rage these days – and for good reason. Networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have a ton of user data and all of this can be leveraged to figure out popular news stories, blogs, and websites. Be sure to be active in these areas promoting your site if you’re not already.

That pretty much sums it up – the 5 steps you should take after achieving a top ranking in Google. Can you add anything to the list? What have your experiences been in maintaining and improving your #1 rankings?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



5 Strategies to Maintain and Improve Your #1 Rankings in Google – After You’ve Reached the Top

• A Headline Title Trick to Maximize Social and SEO Traffic – The One Two Punch
• inLinks Review – An Arrow to Google’s Achilles’ Heel?
• 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit
• Stop Building Invisible Links – 3 Ways to Find Them
• Ranksense Review – Point & Click SEO Software

Or is there?

Despite my urge for spelling perfection, it turns out that a significant percentage of web users are sloppy with their language – particularly when using search engines like Google.  There are around 10 million misspelled search queries every single day.

For example, below are the local search volume numbers (USA, January 2010) according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the common misspellings of “jewelry”.

Sure, there’s a huge difference between “jewelry” (3 million searches) and the misspelling “jewlery” (60,000 searches) but 60,000 monthly searches is nothing to scoff at. This is especially true because misspellings generally have much less competition and are thus easier to rank for. After all, most webmasters use spell check and wouldn’t go out of their way to intentionally spell a bunch of words incorrectly.

This is where you can capitalize with your SEO efforts, particularly in competitive industries where it would be nearly impossible for you to realistically compete for the main keywords (spelled correctly).

Since SEO is all about optimizing for keywords that people are actually searching for, misspellings present a pretty big opportunity to gain visibility in search. You could potentially get more traffic and make more money from organic search by targeting a few strategic misspellings. Just don’t tell your 5th grade English teacher about it.

An important thing to note is that in the past few years, Google has changed the way it displays search results for misspellings. They now show “Did you mean:” with a link to the correct search query and its top 2 results.  See the screen shot below.

While this change significantly decreases the benefit of ranking for misspellings, there is still a lot of opportunity.  In my view, a #3 ranking for a popular misspelled keyword is better than no ranking at all.  And if you’re lucky enough to have a top 2 ranking for a competitive keyword, you can gain even more visibility by adding another ranking on the same results page by optimizing for the misspelled version.

Finding High Potential Keyword Misspellings

Now that you know about the advantages of targeting misspellings in your SEO campaigns, how do you identify the keywords with the largest opportunity and traffic/money potential?

Below are the three different types of misspellings.

• Common misspellings. These are words in the English language that are difficult to spell and are frequently butchered. Examples include “jewelry”, “archaeologist”, and “etiquette”. For more, see this list of common misspellings.
• Proper nouns. These include names of people, places, and things with ambiguous spelling. For example, Google previously ran a 3 month experiment to analyze misspellings of “britney spears” in its search engine. The result? There were 593 different variations with 20% of all queries misspelled. The misspellings “brittany” and “brittney” accounted for 16% of searches.
• Typos. These are simply typographical errors that lead to misspellings. For example, check out thisd awesomew sentnce. Obviously, I know how to spell those words, I was just in a rush and my fat fingers refused to cooperate.

So how do you find high potential misspellings for your targeted keywords? Start a list using the 4 methods below.

• Research. If you know your market, you should be able to identify popular misspellings. Scour blogs and forums and do a search in Google for keyword + “misspellings” to see what comes up.
• Internal search logs. What better way to identify keyword misspellings than to get them straight from your current visitors? Check your analytics to see what people are searching for. Of course this works best if you have a high volume site.
• Trial and error. Try and think like a bad speller. What are some variations that might occur? Add these to your list.
• Keyword typo generator. Finally, plug your targeted keywords into a keyword typo generator. This will get you a comprehensive list of all the different variations that might occur as a result of typos.

Once you have a pretty long list of misspellings, the next step is to find out how often they’re being searched for in Google. There’s no point in optimizing for and ranking for a keyword that no one cares about – especially if it’s a misspelling. You’ll just look like a fool.

Plug your keywords into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to analyze the search frequency numbers. Be sure to use Exact Match so that you get data specific to each keyword.

Find any gems? In the next section we’ll go into how you can appropriately integrate your targeted keyword misspellings into your SEO campaign.

6+ Ways to Optimize For Misspellings

1. Use SEO best practices as usual – not recommend
The first and most obvious option is to optimize a page for your targeted misspelling as you normally would for any keyword. This means including it in your URL, title tag, header tag, content, and navigation. However, having misspellings on your site front and center is very unprofessional and could cost you a lot of links and credibility. This hurts you in the long term and isn’t really worth the immediate gains you get from ranking for misspelings. I don’t recommend you do this.

2. Turn the misspelling into a brand name – get the exact match domain
An alternative is to get creative and use a common misspelling of a popular keyword as the brand name for your site. Isn’t that what Flickr.com does? By utilizing this method you get the best of both worlds – optimization for your targeted keyword and a popular misspelling. Plus you don’t sacrifice any credibility in the process (as long as the misspelling isn’t blatant). If you do decide to go this route, be sure to pick up the exact match domain for the misspelling (more on this in the next point).

3. Build microsites using exact match domains for your targeted misspellings
Google and the other search engines tend to give websites with the exact match domain for a keyword a significant boost in the rankings. For example, regardless of links and site authority, Cars.com gets an advantage in Google rankings just because it’s domain name exactly matches the search query. Use this to your advantage for misspellings of your keywords. Buy up the most popular misspellings of your targeted keywords (if available) and build out microsites for each. It’ll be much easier for you to obtain #1 rankings for the misspellings this way and then you can add links back to your main site.

4. Add in a “commonly misspelled as” section
Another way to add misspellings into the body copy of your pages is to add a phrase or section that states “…commonly misspelled as…”. Of course the effects of this method won’t be huge because the misspellings won’t actually be in important elements like the title tag, but it can still be effective when coupled with links to the page using the misspelling as the anchor text (more on this in point 6).

5. Add the misspellings in user-generated content on your site
This one’s my favorite way to get misspellings on a site. If you have a blog or a forum as part of your website, simply add in a few fake comments or forum replies that make use of the misspellings. This won’t take away from the credibility of the site because it’s someone else making the errors, not you. This happens naturally with user-generated content anyway. Extra bonus if you can create a forum thread with a misspelling that shows up in the title of the page.

6. Build links using the misspelling in the anchor text
If you remember, a bunch of bloggers engaged in something called “Google bombing” a while back to get President George Bush’s website to rank #1 in Google for “miserable failure”. All they did was simply link to that page using the “miserable failure” keyword as the link text. Well the same principle can be applied here with misspellings. First, try to get the actual misspelling on the page you’re trying to rank for by using tip #4 or 5. Since Google has put filters in place to prevent Google bombing, having the actual misspelled keywords on your page will help. Once you’ve done that, build links to that page using the misspelling in the anchor text. Blog comment links (without nofollow) and links in blog and forum posts are the easiest and should help you move up in the rankings.

Additionally, you can even create links on your own site using the the misspellings as the anchor text.  Of course you wouldn’t want this version to show publicly, so what you can do is place the link in a noscript tag so that only search engines see it.

Bonus Tips

Here are a few more tips related to optimizing for misspellings…

7. Forget about the meta keywords tag
There was a time when search engines actually used the meta keywords tag to determine the relevancy of a page. No more. This was once a good place to insert keyword misspellings, but it’s pretty much useless now.

8. Bid on misspellings in paid search
Similar to SEO, there is opportunity to drive traffic and make money with keyword misspellings in paid search. Since competition is generally very low for these terms, clicks will be very very cheap. Add some of your misspellings in a PPC campaign and test it out. You might be surprised at some of the keywords that drive traffic and convert well.

9. Buy up typo domain names for type-in traffic
Finally, look into buying up misspelled domain names for their type-in traffic potential. For example, a domainer named Kevin Ham shrewdly bought up the .cm domains (Cameroon country code, misspelling for .com) for popular websites like the New York Times. Needless to say, he’s doing very well for himself. The potential payout for domain name “typosquatting” is huge. Google supplies about 60% of the ads on these types of sites and makes $497 million per year. Wow.

Have you discovered any opportunities with keyword misspellings in SEO or PPC?  If so, how much traffic and revenue are they driving? Share some of your experiences and tips in the comments below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



6 Ways to Optimize Your SEO for Misspellings – And Why It Pays to be a Bad Speller

• The Incredible Value of an Exact Match Domain Name
• 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit
• How to Find the Perfect Name for Your Website Business
• 5 Strategies to Maintain and Improve Your #1 Rankings in Google – After You’ve Reached the Top
• Shoemoney Tools Review – SEO, PPC & Link Building Tools

As you know, Google is the search engine and controls an obscene amount of traffic on the web. In fact, it’s not uncommon for many users to spend at least 25% of their time online on Google properties like Gmail, Google maps, and news. With a cash cow business model (a monopoly in search advertising) and a killer brand (“google” it), Google is living large and seemingly invincible. But is this really the case? Is the Google search engine as stable as it seems?

With the rise of social media, the search game has changed dramatically. Users no longer just want a single source telling them what to look at. Instead, they want recommendations from real people with similar interests and experiences. That’s precisely the reason why social networking is so hot right now and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Social media isn’t just a fad – it’s here to stay and will revolutionize the web in the process.

Twitter, in particular, is interesting. I’ve written before that Twitter is the future of search and I still stand by that claim 100%. In fact, both Google’s and Bing’s recent partnerships with Twitter to incorporate real time status updates into the search results is a clear step towards that direction. More and more people are starting to use Twitter, and the social platform will play a pivotal role in shaping the web and the online community. And no, not even the mighty Google is immune to the coming changes.

Mark Cuban explains it well…

TWITTER AND FACEBOOK are platforms that allow the news sources, like newscorp to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not. In other words, if I trust a newspaper, tv or any brand, I can follow it on twitter and expect the news to come to me. The concept of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day. If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow.

Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.

The solution for Google? If it wants to remain the dominant online powerhouse that it is today, it needs to adapt to the shifts in the social landscape and buy up Twitter before it’s too late. Sure, Google’s own social innovations like Wave, Social Search, and Search Wiki are nice – but they’re way too late to matter, especially during this critical stage of shifting user behavior.

Back in March 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt questioned the usefulness of Twitter and called it the “poor man’s email”. Boy, was he wrong. It’s a mistake that could cost Google $6 billion or even more, especially if they fail to swoop up Twitter any time soon.  Google as well as Facebook have tried to buy up Twitter in the past, without success. Twitter is resistant to a sell off, even at $1 billion, but anything can be bought if the price is right.

Here are the 3 main reasons why Google needs to buy Twitter in order to survive. The price tag will not be cheap, but if there’s any company that can afford it right now it’s Google.

1. Twitter gaining fast – huge amount of data

Twitter is mentioned and promoted everywhere these days – CNN news broadcasts, popular radio stations, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Shaquille O’Neal, the majority of blogs big and small, and even the ESPN homepage.

Everyone and their grandmothers are on Twitter and the rapid growth will only accelerate as Google and Bing incorporate status updates into their search results. In fact, we’re only a few years away until Twitter receives mainstream acceptance as a communication channel – just like email addresses, phone numbers, and website URLs. People are already placing their Twitter usernames on their business cards.

So why does this matter? Twitter is essentially collecting the daily life streams of millions of people around the world – breaking news, opinions and reviews, interesting links, connections between people, interests, etc. Once a larger percentage of the population starts using the service, it’s scary what’s possible. With the right technology, Twitter could potentially mine that data to pretty much find out about anything important happening in the public world. It could also figure out which websites are the most popular and trustworthy sources.

Hello…Google..?

2. Google’s ranking algorithm in danger of being outdated

Google’s current search ranking algorithm relies heavily on link analysis to determine what’s important and what’s most relevant to a given search query (e.g. a link from CNN implies that the page is important and worthy of high rankings). While this technology was revolutionary to the search industry in the mid 90’s, it’s in danger of quickly becoming outdated in the current landscape.

First of all, users now want information in real time – especially for things like breaking news. Because Google works by indexing web pages, the search engine is clunky and unable to keep up with real-time queries.

Secondly, user behavior is changing online and links are becoming less and less reliable in terms of determining the authority of a page. Webmasters represent only a tiny fraction of the overall population and some hobby bloggers are leaving their own sites for social media sites like Twitter. So why let the few in power control the rankings with their links? Link manipulation is a common tactic used by search marketers and a relatively new site with regurgitated content could potentially rank #1 for a competitive keyword simply by buying some under-the-radar links. It’s a glaring weakness in Google’s algorithm.

Once Twitter goes mainstream and is used by the masses (not just the tech savvy), imagine all of the data that Google could utilize to perfect its search rankings. Compared to links on actual web pages, links found in Twitter status updates represent a larger sample of people.

What does this mean? If Google were able to incorporate Twitter data into its current link analysis algorithm, search results would be better with less spam – something that’s integral to Google’s core business of search advertising. If that’s not a reason to buy, then I don’t know what is.

3. Play keep away from Bing – competitive advantage

Twitter has enormous potential – there’s no doubt about it. But while Google overlooks Twitter, what if it was bought up by Bing? Microsoft has already acquired Yahoo’s search business and seems a step in front of Google in the social sphere. If Google is smart, it’ll block Bing’s moves at all costs and prevent Twitter from springing up with its own search engine in the future.

Let me say it again in case you missed it – Google needs to buy Twitter.

What do you think about a Google acquisition of Twitter? Bound to happen? How would the deal affect the search industry? Leave a comment.

Also, just to clarify, I’m not necessarily for Google buying Twitter and taking over the Internet. In fact, I think it’d be a nice change of scenery and good for the Internet if Google lost some of its dominance and met some fierce competition from Bing and/or Twitter. Time will tell.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



3 Reasons Why Google Needs to Buy Twitter in Order to Survive

• 6 Crucial Steps to Prepare Yourself for the Twitter Facebook Real-Time Search Integration
• 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search – Google Beware
• 5 Crucial SEO Tips For the New Binghoo (Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search)
• The Google-Digg Prophecy – 5 Ways a Deal will Change the Internet
• Twitter SEO – How to Optimize Your Website For Twitter Search

The exact details on implementation aren’t yet clear, but it’s likely that real-time Twitter and/or Facebook updates will be added to the regular search results – particularly for breaking news and queries where articles and blog posts have not yet been written (hence “real time” search).

The services probably won’t go live until at least a couple of weeks, if not months, but you can see an example of what’s to come on the Bing Twitter Search page. Pretty cool stuff.

So is this a game changer for SEO and Internet marketing? I vote yes. I’ve written before that Twitter is the future of search and this real-time search integration is clearly a step towards that direction. The addition of Twitter and Facebook updates in the search results will open up new opportunities to market yourself and your business.

What are the steps you need to take to prepare yourself for this Twitter and Facebook search integration? I’ve already gone over Twitter SEO and how to optimize your site for Twitter search, but this new development further adds to the strategy’s importance. Below is a list of ways you can get the most out Twitter/Facebook once the status updates hit the search engines.

1. Get on Twitter & Facebook and be active, duh
This one’s a no-brainer. If you’re not yet on Facebook and Twitter, what are you waiting for? You’re missing out on boatloads of opportunity. Set up branded accounts on both Twitter and Facebook and make your updates public so that the search engines can access them.

Integration of these tools into Google and Bing will further increase awareness of social media and usage should quickly become mainstream. What does this mean? You’ll be able to market to all kinds of people with different interests and demographics. No more complaining that Twitter’s audience is too tech-savvy blah blah blah. Same goes for Facebook.

2. Use your own branded URL shortener
URL shorteners like tinyurl and bit.ly are commonly used for Twitter and Facebook status updates to save space and track clicks. If you’re linking to your own site, however, this is less than ideal because you’re missing out on a great branding opportunity. How are people supposed to know what’s behind that bit.ly URL? This becomes even more important when status updates are integrated into the search results.

The solution? Use your own URL shortener hosted on your domain. Sure you might lose out on some characters, but in my opinion the branding exposure of having your full domain displayed is worth it. Check out this article for instructions on how to set it up for your blog: How To Easily Create Your Own URL Shortener With WordPress.

In Bing’s initial Twitter search demo, the source domain is shown in parentheses next to the shortened URL. Still, my guess is that having your own domain name in the clickable text of the URL is more effective for showing off your site.

For example, which of the links below do you think is better?

3. Do extensive keyword research for your updates
Much like SEO for your web pages, keyword research will be integral for optimizing your tweets and status updates to get them to rank in the search results. Are you using the best variation of your keyword with the highest search frequency? What other related topics and keywords can you include to maximize the search visibility of your updates? You’ll find the answers to those questions in your keyword research.

Use the Google Keyword Tool to look into top keywords you’d like to rank for. Then use them often in your updates. This research might seem like overkill to write a 140 character message, but the subsequent exposure and visits to your site can make it worthwhile.

4. Write about hot topics and trends
In addition to keyword research, stay on top of the hottest trends related to your niche and write about them on Twitter and Facebook. If you have an authority account (more on this later) and your messages rank for hot topics, you could get a lot of exposure.

Google Trends is a great tool for this purpose. For even more, take a look at my post: The 3 Biggest Sources for Uncovering Hot Topics & Trends Online

5. Avoid duplicate content
Search engines tend to devalue duplicate content in the rankings (i.e. web pages that have the same or similar content to others on the web). That’s why as SEO’s we try to minimize duplicate content as much as possible. So why should status updates on Twitter and Facebook be any different?

In fact, the Twitter integration post on the Bing blog stated that “if a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.” In other words, the ranking algorithms will favor the original source (by timestamp, or by account authority) when it encounters any duplicate messages.

So how do you avoid duplicate content with your Twitter and Facebook updates?

• When re-tweeting updates, don’t just add “RT” to the beginning and repost. Instead, change it around a bit and add your own flavor. That way, your tweet or update is more likely to rank in the search engines (and avoid any duplicate content filters).
• Don’t tie your Twitter account with your Facebook so that the same updates go to both (i.e. duplicate content). Instead, write unique messages on the two accounts so that they have the potential to rank in Bing.

6. Build up authority for your profiles so you can rank
How Google and Bing will rank the fire hose of information from Twitter and Facebook is still a question mark. However, it’s likely that the following factors will be heavily considered.

• Relevance to queries
• Quantity and quality of followers (i.e. account authority)
• Quantity and quality of re-tweets for a specific update
• Links to Twitter profile

I suspect that re-tweets will be the currency of Twittersphere, much like links are the currency of the web. Google and Bing will look at who’s retweeting who to determine which updates are the most important. Your best chance at ranking? Build up a Twitter profile with lots of followers and retweets. See my post: How to Harness the Power of Twitter in 4 Easy Steps

What’s even more interesting is how Google and Bing will use the data from Twitter and Facebook to influence the organic search listings, if at all. For example, now that Google is easily able to index the entire Twitter stream, what’s stopping them from using the links on Twitter as a quality signal for web pages? More on that in my next post…

What do you think about the Twitter/Facebook integration into the search results? Big opportunity for online publishers and business owners? Leave a comment with your thoughts and any other notable strategies you have in mind!

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



6 Crucial Steps to Prepare Yourself for the Twitter Facebook Real-Time Search Integration

• 3 Reasons Why Google Needs to Buy Twitter in Order to Survive
• Twitter SEO – How to Optimize Your Website For Twitter Search
• SEM Rush Review – SEO Competitive Research at Your Fingertips
• 5 Crucial SEO Tips For the New Binghoo (Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search)
• The Incredible Value of an Exact Match Domain Name

A few weeks back, I reviewed SEO Spyglass, a great competitive link building tool that provides you with key insights and metrics on your competitors’ link sources. Definitely check that one out if you haven’t already.

In the same vein, today I want to go over another useful tool for SEO – SEMRush. SEMRush is a keyword and competitor research tool created by the same people behind SEO Digger (the old competitive rankings tool), SEO Quake (a great SEO toolbar), AdsSpy.com (Adsense spy), and SEO Pivot (keyword research).

So what exactly does SEM Rush do? In a nutshell, SEM Rush gives you a clear view of the SEO landscape surrounding a specified keyword, domain, or URL. It does this by tracking over 30 million keywords in Google and tying in important metrics like rankings, search volume, cost per click in Adwords, competition, trends, etc. – all very useful information that you can use to improve your SEO.

Below are some of SEM Rush’s main features.

SEM Rush Features

Site Statistics
When you enter in a domain, the tool outputs some statistics that can help you gauge the size and SEO success of a site. For example, below are the stats for Zappos.com, the big shoe e-commerce site that was recently bought up by Amazon.

As you can see, Zappos is ranked #404 in the SEM Rush database and receives about 2.4 million visitors from Google organic search per month (comparing with my own sites however, this figure seems to be understated, is about 20% of the true amount). If this traffic was bought in Google Adwords, SEMRush estimates the cost to be about $3.13 million.

Furthermore, the tool states that Zappos.com receives 730 visits from Adwords ads, costing $1,000. Again, these number are likely severely understated since SEM Rush’s database isn’t all encompassing. Use the numbers as relative comparisons between sites rather than absolutes.

Google Keywords
My favorite feature of SEM Rush is its ability to track rankings for any domain. Simply enter in a domain name, and the tool will show you many of its Google rankings including the specific ranking URL, keyword search volume, cost per click, etc. Due to the massive amounts of data that needs to be indexed, the rankings could be a month out of date – but still very useful. You can easily find out your competitors’ top volume keywords and create related content to achieve success. I’m sure there are little known keywords out there that your competitor is banking on. SEM Rush is the tool to see it all.

For example, here are some of Zappos.com’s rankings.

With a free account, you can see data for only 10 keywords. Once you upgrade, you can see 1,000, 10,000 or 10,000 results depending on the membership type you sign up for. See the pricing page for more info on that.

Competitors in Google
Not only can you research individual domains to see the keywords that they’re ranking for, but using SEM Rush you can also discover the main competitors by analyzing common keyword rankings between sites.

For example, below is the top SEO competition in Google for Zappos.com.

Adwords Keywords & Competition

In addition to insights in organic search, SEM Rush also allows you to see competitor data for Adwords paid search advertising.

• Adwords Keywords – keywords that the specified site is bidding on in Google paid search.
• Competitors in Adwords – domains that have paid search ads running for the same keywords as the specified site.
• Adwords ad texts – overview of all paid search ads leading to the specified site.
• Potential ads buyers – sites that buy paid search ads on a similar set of keywords.
• Potential ads sellers – sites with the same visitors as specified site’s Adwords paid search campaigns.

Limitations of SEM Rush

SEM Rush is a fantastic SEO competitive research tool that definitely has its key advantages over other similar tools. However, it’s not without weaknesses. Because SEM Rush works with huge amounts of data, most of which is queried from Google, it has to take precautions not to overload the Google servers. As a result, a lot of the information can be outdated – by up to 1-2 months. While this isn’t nearly as big of an issue for slow and steady SEO campaigns, it’s definitely a problem for PPC campaigns which quickly change and are seasonal in nature.

Furthermore, SEM Rush tracks only the first 20 results in Google – and even this is a huge undertaking in terms of computing resources required. While the current set up offers enough data to work off of, I’d still be interested in seeing the top 50 or so results in Google and in other search engines like Yahoo and Bing as well.

Final Verdict

Overall, SEM Rush is a great tool that allows you to dig into your competitors’ SEO rankings and improve your own with the insights you learn. There are similar tools out there, like Spyfu and KeyCompete, but I like SEM Rush because it has a stronger focus on organic search and because it ties in the value of each keyword based on search volume and Adwords CPC data. You can even export the data via API and play with it however you want.

As I mentioned, there are limitations to any third party tool like this that uses huge amounts of data from Google. However, there isn’t much reliable information like this available anywhere else and SEM Rush seems to fill the void nicely.

So how much does it all cost? You can run 10 queries per day with 20 results for free. If you like what you see and want more, you can easily upgrade to the next tiers which range from $19.95 to $499.95. Try out SEM Rush to look into your competitors’ sites. You might learn something.

What do you think of SEM Rush?  Do you use it often to dig into other sites’ SEO efforts?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



SEM Rush Review – SEO Competitive Research at Your Fingertips

• Google Trends 2.0 – New Keyword Research Weapon? Discover My Killer Insights
• Ranksense Review – Point & Click SEO Software
• 6 Ways to Optimize Your SEO for Misspellings – And Why It Pays to be a Bad Speller
• Shoemoney Tools Review – SEO, PPC & Link Building Tools
• SEO Spyglass Review – Ultimate Competitive Link Building Tool, Now Showing 1,000+ Links

A great starting point for building links to your site is to analyze the competition and look at where other successful sites in your niche are getting their links from. How is site X ranking for a competitive keyword in Google? What does the site’s link profile look like? Once you get a better understanding of top-ranking sites in your niche, you can emulate their most valuable links and tweak your link building strategy to get ahead.

A tool that I use for this very purpose is the SEO Spyglass software, a competitive backlink analyzer that allows you to easily evaluate the link profiles of specific sites – including your own. The tool automatically imports links for a site from chosen search engines (Yahoo data is currently the most comprehensive) and outputs useful information on those links (e.g. anchor text, Google PageRank, link location, Alexa rank, etc). Using this data you can then gain valuable insights into what your competitors are doing to achieve top rankings in Google. The tool will also help you to uncover some little-known link secrets in various industries.  In fact, some of my best ideas for links were discovered by using SEO Spyglass.

Here’s a screen shot of the SEO Spyglass interface, with a link report loaded for WinningtheWeb.com.

As you can see, the following data is available for each link.

• Total number of links pointing to the domain. This is the same as using the linkdomain operator in Yahoo.  For example, Winning the Web has 37,294 links.  SEO and link building are more about quality than sheer quantity of links, but still, the more the better.
• Google PageRank of both the linking page and the linking domain.  PageRank (as reported by the Google toolbar) isn’t really a reliable metric anymore, but it can still show how much value pages have in the eyes of Google.  For example, a link from a PR 7 site will generally be much more valuable than a link from a PR 2 site.
• Alexa traffic rank of linking page. Find out which sites are driving the most traffic to your competitors.  Links from high-traffic pages are not only valuable in terms of SEO (especially as Google incorporates user data into the mix), but also help to increase exposure and visits.
• Link anchor text and URLs of competitor links. The text that links use is extremely important when it comes to Google rankings.  What are people saying when they link to your competitors?  Are other sites buying links or influencing link anchor text in some way?  This tool offers an easy way to find out.
• Links back? The link data that Yahoo offers is often a bit dated.  Webmasters will take down certain links, but Yahoo will still report them for weeks or months.  SEO Spyglass checks whether or not a link is still on a page.  It also tells you whether or not a link has the nofollow tag.
• External links / total links. When analyzing the value of a link, link density matters.  If there are 1,000 links on a single page with PR 6, the value that each one of those links pass is diluted.  On the other hand, if there is just 1 external link on a PR 5 page with 10 links total, that link will pass on a lot of SEO value – more than the PR 6 page with 1,000 links.
• Counts of links from forums & blogs. Are your competitors involved in social media promotion?  If so, are they using any strategies you haven’t thought of before?  This data will give you those kinds of insights.
• Counts of links from homepages. Although the home page is usually the most important on a site, it’s often manipulated by link builders.  If this count is high for your competitors, you’ll know why.
• Links from DMOZ & Yahoo Directory. Find out whether or not the site you’re researching has links from authoritative directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory.
• Link value score. SEO Spyglass uses its own algorithm to rank and score links based on a variety of different metrics.  More valuable links will have a higher score.
• Domain IP & country. Find out whether or not the site in question has more links from a specific geographic region (good for ranking on country-specific search engines).  Also, if many links are coming from a specific IP, you can uncover link networks.
• Domain age. Google loves old, crusty sites and tends to give them more value when it comes to SEO and links.  Use this to your advantage!

SEO Spyglass basically aggregates useful data and puts it in an easy-to-read interface. All of the information is freely available, but you won’t be able to correlate it all together without using a tool like this. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have everything in one place so I can focus on my link building campaigns.

Update: The new version of SEO Spyglass (3.11) released yesterday is able to collect more than 1,000 links from Yahoo (the limit of number of links shown, no matter how big the link profile).  This is pretty cool stuff, and I’ll get more into it in the limitations section below.

Limitations of SEO Spyglass

Although I’m a big fan of SEO Spyglass and use it often, there are some limitations that take away from its effectiveness.

Link data is not always up to date.
Since the tool pulls link data from Yahoo, there are generally some links shown that no longer exist (but the tool specifies this) and some existing new links that aren’t shown. Furthermore, if you wanted to get a glimpse of the links your competitors were acquiring in real time, you wouldn’t be able to find it here. Still, Yahoo has the best link data in the industry by far (Google doesn’t release this information) and it’s enough to get a head start on finding good linking opportunities.

Limited number of links obtained
Another limitation, not of SEO Spyglass, but of the Yahoo link data, is that the number of links publicly viewable is capped at 1,000. In other words, you can only see 1,000 of your competitors’ links when using Yahoo Search Explorer with each query. While this number is significant, the data only represents a tiny fraction of the entire picture, especially for larger sites with tens of thousands of links.

Well there’s some good news.  SEO Spyglass just came out with a new version that is able to get around this limitation a bit and obtain a lot more links than the 1,000 Yahoo limit. It does this by aggregating links from a variety of different search engines and by utilizing the “link:” operator to squeeze out as many links as possible (e.g. queries Yahoo separately for link:domain.com, link:domain.com/page1.html, link:domain.com/page2.html, etc).  For example, SEO Spyglass lists out 1,795 links from Yahoo for WinningtheWeb.com.  While this is much more than the 1,000 limit when querying the entire domain at once, it’s still a very small number compared to the overall size of my site’s link profile (37,000 links). Hopefully SEO Spyglass can improve on this feature for even more links (and they say they will).

Another way to remedy the limited view of link profile is to buy a link report from MajesticSEO.com, a link and anchor text database that utilizes its own bots to crawl the web. You’ll get a much more complete list of links, which you can then manually import into SEO Spyglass to see all of the data points.  However, the downside of MajesticSEO.com is that you have to pay for each site’s link report (price depends on size) and the data is not always up to date or accurate since the service uses its own crawlers.  Even so, the prices are reasonable and you’ll be able to get access to thousands more links.

For your own site, you can import links from your Google Webmasters Account, which includes pretty much all links Google sees for your site, straight into SEO Spyglass.

Final Verdict

All in all, SEO Spyglass is all about interface and helps me to easily sort through the data to uncover insights that I normally wouldn’t be able to find otherwise. I’ve tried similar free tools like Link Diagnosis and paid ones like SEO Elite, but this one’s my favorite.

How much does it cost? The pro version is $100, but there’s also a free version that let’s you run all of the reports. Check out the comparison chart that shows the features of the different SEO Spyglass editions.  The prices aren’t bad considering how many great links you can obtain as a result.  Try out the new version of SEO Spyglass.

Do you use the SEO Spyglass tool or anything similar to look into your competitors’ link profiles? What do you like about it and what can be improved? I’m always on the look out for new tools and ideas so be sure to leave a comment below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



SEO Spyglass Review – Ultimate Competitive Link Building Tool, Now Showing 1,000+ Links

• SEM Rush Review – SEO Competitive Research at Your Fingertips
• Shoemoney Tools Review – SEO, PPC & Link Building Tools
• The Incredible Value of an Exact Match Domain Name
• 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit
• 5 Crucial SEO Tips For the New Binghoo (Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search)

The problem is that not all links count for SEO purposes, and if they do, it’s always in varying degrees. Just because you see blue underlined text in your browser doesn’t mean that Google will pass over the SEO link value to the site being linked to. In fact, some links may be completely invisible to the search engines. In other cases, Google may choose to discount the value of links for whatever reason.

How do you know whether or not a link on a certain page passes SEO value? What are the cases in which links don’t count?

If you’re engaging in any sort of link building or online advertising campaign, these are important questions to ask and get clear answers to. You need to prevent yourself from wasting precious time building worthless links that have no impact and instead understand which links have the greatest effect for your SEO rankings in order to maximize ROI. We’ll go into everything about SEO link value in this post.

Links that count for SEO – 2 requirements of all SEO links

In order for a link to pass SEO link value, there are 2 main conditions that need to be met.

1. The link must be hard coded in HTML. As long as the link uses something like < a href=”http://www.site.com” >, it’s fair game. Google has also started to count Javascript links, but HTML is still the ideal. We’ll get more into Javascript later.

2. The page that the link resides on must be indexed in Google. After all, a link can only pass value as long as Google knows about it. You can check whether or not a page is indexed by using the “site:” operator in the Google search box followed by the URL in question. Remember that new pages usually take at least a few days to be crawled and indexed.

Links that DON’T count for SEO, technically speaking

Although the two conditions above are prerequisites for a link to count for SEO, they don’t automatically infer that a link passes value. What do I mean? Below are some technical exceptions that lead to a link NOT counting in the eyes of Google.

1. Nofollow tag
If a link uses the rel=”nofollow” tag, Google ignores the link and does not pass any value (or they say they don’t anyway). This tag is used in the comments section of many blog platforms (to prevent spamming) and is also required by Google on any advertisements or links that are paid for (a hole in Google’s algorithm).

2. Robots nofollow
Similar to the nofollow tag, the meta robots nofollow tag found in the header of a page, leads to all links on that page to be nofollowed. You can easily check for any nofollows on links by using the SEO for Firefox tool.

3. Redirect links
Any time a link goes through an intermediary page to track ad clicks or sales or to put up a disclaimer page, the link will not pass value to the resulting page unless a 301 permanent redirect is used (as opposed to a temporary 302 redirect). You can check for this by using the Check Server Headers Tool.

For example, all banners ads here on Winning the Web go through a OIOPublisher tracking URL (e.g. http://www.winningtheweb.com/wp-content/plugins/oiopub-direct/modules/ tracker/go.php?id=36). If you plug that URL into the header checker tool, you’ll see that it uses a 301 redirect to the advertiser site. This link would normally pass value, but in this case I’m using nofollow as well so it doesn’t.

4. Javascript links
Up until recently, Javascript links were invisible to the search engines. Google has now begun crawling Javascript links – but there’s still debate over whether or not links that use the onClick event (to construct the destination URL) passes value. Use HTML links whenever possible. If you were previously using Javascript to hide advertisement links from the search engines, use HTML and nofollow instead.

Symptoms and signs of devalued links

Okay, so say that the links pointing to your site are technically sound and are supposed to pass SEO value. Does that mean they do? Not necessarily. Below are some symptoms and signs that Google has devalued a link.

1. Strangely low PageRank
Although toolbar PageRank isn’t all that reliable of a metric, it can still point to problem areas on a site where links are devalued. For example, if a site sells obvious paid links, Google will often whack its PR and stop the flow of link value from the site.

2. Slow crawl rate, old cache date
I’ve said before that crawl rate is the new PageRank. If Google trusts a page and considers it important, the bots are going to visit and index it often. Check the cache date of the page your links are hosted on by clicking on the Cache link next to the search listing. If it’s over a month old, that’s a sign that the page is not trusted (bad neighborhood, low authority, etc.) and the links don’t pass value as a result.

3. Link location
Furthermore, sitewide links in the footer or sidebar of pages can be devalued because they are often used as advertisements to manipulate the search results. Google loves editorial links within the content of the page and will usually give the most weight to these links. Location matters.

How to check if a link passes SEO value

Is there a way to check whether or not a particular link passes SEO value? Yes, but it’s not always easy.

What you do is you create a link on the target location with anchor text containing a unique modifier. For example, if I was placing a link to Winning the Web from some random location I was testing, I might try adding a link that says “jibberjab internet marketing”, an obscure but somewhat related keyword that’s not found on any of my pages. If after a short while, the Winning the Web page being linked to ranked for that term, I’d know for certain that it was a result of that particular link passing value. Get the idea?

Let’s try a live example and link to an iPhone blog (iPhoneNuts.com) I run using the link iPhonerific. After a few days, try doing a search in Google for iphonerific. If you see that the iPhoneNuts.com page ranks anywhere on the first few pages, then you know that this article passes link value.

Do you know how to build links that pass SEO value? What are some other considerations that you think are important? Share your stories in the comments section below!

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



How to Develop an SEO Link Building Strategy That Delivers the Goods (Link Value)

• Stop Building Invisible Links – 3 Ways to Find Them
• How to Measure the Value of a Blog Link
• SEO Spyglass Review – Ultimate Competitive Link Building Tool, Now Showing 1,000+ Links
• 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit
• SEO for Charity – Winning Streak Continues

To recap, some of the main terms of the deal are as follows:

• The agreement lasts for 10 years and Microsoft will have exclusive access to Yahoo search technologies and data. Microsoft will then be able to incorporate these technologies into its own search engine, Bing.
• Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search engine for Yahoo, both paid and organic. In other words, all searches on Yahoo will be powered by Bing. Yahoo will, however, have the freedom to display the results and control the user experience however they wish.
• The deal will likely take up to 24 months for full implementation, pending shareholder and legal approval.
• To see the complete details of the deal, see this post: The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal, In Simple Terms

Back in February of 2008 when rumors of a Microsoft/Yahoo deal first surfaced, I wrote about how an SEO can prepare for Microhoo, the MSN and Yahoo combo. A lot has changed since then, and now that the deal is actually happening, I want to provide you with an updated list of SEO tips on how you can prepare for the coming Bing Yahoo merge (Binghoo?).

What are the biggest changes for SEO and how can you best prepare for them? Let’s dig in…

1. Continue to focus on Google
There’s been a lot of hype about Bing and Yahoo over the past couple of weeks, but Google is still the king of search. There’s no doubt about it.

As shown in the comScore chart below, Google has search market share of around 65% in many markets.

Yahoo and Bing combined only account for about 28% of searches. Sure, Bing will become more important in the coming years and will be worth optimizing for, but you should always focus on Google first.

2. Act on Yahoo search services now – or kiss them goodbye
With Bing set to replace Yahoo’s search algorithm, many of Yahoo’s services are up in the air including the following:

• Yahoo Directory (a good link source)
• Yahoo Site Explorer (including link data)
• Yahoo SearchMonkey and BOSS (a great platform for search apps)
• Yahoo Paid Inclusion (pay your way into the Yahoo organic listings)
• Yahoo Maps (will be replaced by Bing Local?)
• Delicious (although new features indicate it will stay)

Whether these services will be up when Yahoo Search is replaced by Bing is yet to be determined. If you want to take advantage of any of these features, it may be now or never. For example, you can enroll in the Yahoo paid inclusion program and hope everyone else drops off in the final months or you can buy a link in the Yahoo directory and hope it stays up in some form or another once the transition happens.

There may be opportunities to profit from these Yahoo services before they fall off. However, I’d stay away from them for any long term marketing strategy.

3. Do your competitive link research before it’s too late
A key Yahoo feature that’s relied upon by many webmasters and SEOs is the Yahoo Site Explorer. The tool offers by far the best link data out of any search engine and can be used for competitive intelligence (i.e. emulate competitors’ link profiles to move up in the search rankings).

If Yahoo were to discontinue the tool, link building strategies would change drastically. Although established sites stand to gain from the absence of public link data (with larger barriers to entry), new sites would find it very difficult to clone competitor links. Furthermore, the absence of public link data would encourage webmasters to buy links because they can more easily do it under the radar.

Of course, Bing may incorporate Yahoo’s link data or Google may come up with its own link source for webmasters. However, my suggestion to you is to take advantage of the Yahoo link data before it’s gone. Emulating competitor links is something you should be doing with your SEO anyway, so this is the kick in the butt you need to get started.

I recommend using the SEO Spyglass tool to analyze competitor link data in Yahoo.

4. Optimize for Bing
Once Bing begins to power Yahoo search, the Bing/Yahoo combo will control approximately 25-30% of searches. That represents significant amounts of traffic that you shouldn’t take lightly. My guess is that the Bing algorithm will change once Yahoo technology is incorporated, but you can still optimize for Bing now by following some of the below tips:

• Obtain exact match domains whenever possible. Both Google and Bing give bonuses to sites with domains that match the search query exactly (e.g. CreditCards.com can rank for the keyword “credit cards” with a lot less links than other more authoritative sites). In Google, the bonus is given to 1-3 word keywords without hyphens only for .org, .net. and .com domains. Bing, however, seems to be a bit more flexible, offering the bonus to domains with and without hyphens for many more TLDs including .biz, .info, and .us. Bing also seems to favor sites with keywords in the subdomain or root domain.
• Get lots of fresh, diverse links as usual.
• Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already done so. The tool offers you insights and data into how Bing views your site – which will help you to optimize accordingly.
• Optimize your digital assets. The search results in Bing are very rich and incorporate more images, videos, and maps than Google. Aim to get yours listed for more visibility.
• Look at the related searches on the left hand column (shown below).
  Since these take up some primary real estate (compared to at the bottom of the page in the Google results), you can bet searchers click on them to refine their searches. Optimize your pages using these keywords whenever possible.
• Look out for any loopholes you can take advantage of. Since Bing will gain in search marketshare, you can expect more spam in the results. Of course I’m not suggesting you spam or engage in blatantly blackhat tactics that will get you banned, but you may be able to find some subtle SEO tricks to gain in rankings. (Hint: monitor competitive keywords in Bing like “buy viagra” and look at what the top sites are doing to get ahead.)

5. Build your SEO for the future
If you remember, I wrote that the window of opportunity is quickly closing for independent webmasters. The coming Bing Yahoo deal only solidifies this trend. With just 2 major search engines in the game, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for new sites to gain in the rankings and establish themselves without a big advertising budget. Barriers to entry in the online world are getting bigger every year and SEO is going to get more difficult for new sites. What are you waiting for?

Hopefully these tips help you to better understand the Bing Yahoo search deal and how you can prepare for the changes. What other SEO tips do you have for the new Binghoo? Leave them in a comment below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



5 Crucial SEO Tips For the New Binghoo (Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search)

• How an SEO can Prepare for Microhoo, the Microsoft-Yahoo Combo
• 6 Crucial Steps to Prepare Yourself for the Twitter Facebook Real-Time Search Integration
• SEM Rush Review – SEO Competitive Research at Your Fingertips
• FutureProof Your SEO Efforts or Be Left Behind
• Shoemoney Tools Review – SEO, PPC & Link Building Tools

Don’t believe me? Learn more about how Google profiles SEOs and treats them like criminals. For example, well-known SEOs Michael Gray and Rae Hoffman were both profiled and had their links taken from them – not because they were marketing any differently than other webmasters, but because Google thought they were doing it just for the links.

The reality is that Google is  a company that makes billions of dollars in revenue each year by selling advertisements around its organic search listings. While Google’s business is to return highly relevant search results that provide value to users, SEOs seek to reverse engineer the algorithm and manipulate rankings for their own gain (in varying degrees). You can see why there’s such a big disconnect here.

As a result, Google considers SEOs as “high risk” and does everything in its power to neutralize SEO efforts and smack them down, even if the associated sites offer real value and are truly deserving of their rankings. Google understands that there will be collateral damage, but honestly they don’t care unless you’re a big brand. There are thousands of similar small sites ready to take your place in the rankings without putting a dent in Google’s quality.

Is this fair for anyone practicing SEO? No, not at all. But you can’t blame Google for protecting its business. The minute it gives SEOs a free pass is the minute that Google’s search results fill with spam and irrelevant pages made for profit.

Look at it this way. SEOs disrupt Google’s algorithm like criminals disrupt society. Much like the government has laws and policies in place to minimize the effects of criminal activity and maintain peace, Google has many systems and filters in place to profile SEOs, neutralize the offensive tactics, and maintain quality.

So what are some of these filters and SEO profiling practices employed by Google? I’ll cover some of them in this article. If you’re an SEO or webmaster who’s working to rise up in the rankings, I highly recommend you stay under the radar and avoid these red flags. Life will be a lot easier for you if Google thinks you’re an innocent and ignorant webmaster who knows nothing about how SEO works.

7 Red Flags to Avoid – Google Profiling SEOs

The last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself and have Google profile you as an SEO. If this were to happen, Google engineers would scrutinize your site more than others and hold you to a different standard. Avoid at all costs! Here are some red flags to watch out for so you can stay under the radar.

1. You have a big mouth about your SEO tactics
A sure-fire way to get the attention of a Google engineer and potentially have your rankings manually reviewed, is to blabber away about all of the SEO tactics and tricks you’re using to get ahead.

For example, John Chow, the infamous make money online blogger, openly exchanged links with his readers on his blog to rank for “make money online”. While it did work initially, Google quickly made an example of him and penalized him hard. John recently got his rankings back after cleaning up his act, but for over a year, he didn’t even rank for his own name.

Similarly, a very well-known SEO mentioned to his readers that his affiliate links were designed in a way to pass weight back to his site. For whatever reason, someone decided to report this to Google spam king Matt Cutts, and unsurprisingly, those links no longer pass any weight.

If you have an SEO blog or are involved in the Internet marketing community, be careful what you tell others – either privately or in public. It could come back to haunt you.

2. Your sites are all tied together = easy target
Like it or not, the big G has a lot of information about you and your sites. Google runs the most popular contextual advertising platform, owns a free analytics package that’s better than most paid versions, has access to all WHOIS information and IP addresses, and can analyze sites that you interlink. Not only that, but Google has access to your email, documents, and browsing history. Sound scary? That’s what I thought.

If you can, it’s best to separate your sites as much as possible (e.g. different IP addresses, no interlinking, etc). Why? If Google suspects something about one of your sites, they’ll probably look into your network for other sites you’re involved with as well. That’s definitely not something you want. If I can find your network of sites using a free tool like SpyOnWeb.com, you can bet Google can easily do it too.

Unfortunately, completely separating your sites isn’t always possible especially with Google’s growing dominance in so many verticals. This makes avoiding the other red flags even more important.

3. Your site is over-optimized for certain keywords
Optimizing the content of a page for SEO has always been pretty simple – target 2 to 3 keywords per page and place them in title tags (preferable the beginning), header tags, URLs, and on-page body content. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy anymore as Google automatically filters and penalizes sites that it thinks are “over-optimized”. This isn’t an exact science, but Aaron Wall of SEO Book explains how he got a ranking filter removed by mixing up the keywords and being less aggressive.

If you’ve tried optimizing a page for a keyword without much success in rankings, try taking this approach. Shift the focus away from your targeted keywords and don’t be so overly aggressive in your on-page efforts (i.e. forget about things like keyword density). Google actively tries to neutralize SEO, so this sort of filter is no surprise. You just need to be able to adapt to improve your rankings.

4. Your link profile is unnatural
In the same way that you can over-optimize for on-page SEO, you can also over-optimize for off-page link building. I wrote about this topic in my article, The Secret to Making Every Link Count For Your SEO Rankings, so be sure to read it before you move on.

In a nutshell, Google filters out sites in the rankings when it thinks the sites’ link profiles seem unnatural. Some examples include:

• too many links too fast
• link anchor text too similar
• not enough deep links to other pages
• too many links from low quality or unrelated sites
• too many reciprocal links
• all links are from the sidebar or footer of a page

Again, it’s Google’s goal to neutralize any sort of manipulation. If you want to be a successful SEO, you have to take this into consideration and appear natural in everything you do. Ask yourself the following question – how would normal webmasters with big sites obtain links?  Then seek to emulate their links.

5. You use the nofollow link attribute to sculpt PageRank
The change in the way Google treats nofollow links has stirred a lot of debate over the past month. As it stands now, the use of the nofollow link attribute as a way to sculpt PageRank and funnel link equity to the most important pages is no longer a best practice.

Regardless, the important question here is whether or not nofollow is an SEO red flag. It’s definitely a valid concern. If you think about it, only webmasters involved in the SEO community know about the nofollow tag at all – and it could easily be used by Google to determine who’s an SEO and who’s not. Hm…

What you do with nofollow is up to you, but I will be removing it from all of my sites, other than the links in the comments section – which comes default in packages like Wordpress. Apparently link consolidation is the new PageRank sculpting.

6. You buy or sell obvious paid links
Back in late 2007, Google declared war on paid links and claimed that any site buying or selling links would be penalized. The paid links issue is a major flaw in Google’s algorithm and is relatively easy to exploit as long as you know what you’re doing.

That being said, you should always buy links under the radar if you plan on buying. Going through some of the link brokers is not recommended (what’s stopping a Google engineer from signing up and seeing all the sites participating?) and obvious paid links should be avoided (e.g. footer/sidebar links, unrelated links) – especially because your competitors can easily report paid links to Google through this form.

7. You use SEO and links to get a spammy site to the top of the rankings
In SEO, quality matters. If you avoid the previous 6 red flags, but miss this one, you’ll still end up in the Google dog house. What do I mean?

Google engineers constantly monitor and QA the rankings. If you manage to get a useless money site to the top of Google, it probably won’t stay there for long – even if you did your SEO under the radar. After all, it isn’t natural for a sub-par website to rank high for a competitive keyword and there usually has to be manipulative SEO practices and artificial link building going on for that to happen. Sure you may think that you did everything right, but Google could still profile you as an SEO and look into your network of other sites.

Don’t do anything that draws unnecessary attention to yourself and warrants a manual review. For example, in the movie American Gangster, Denzel Washington’s character is a low key drug dealer who profits big under the radar. However, it’s not until he wears an expensive fur coat (a gift from his wife) to a public sporting event that the authorities take notice of him and eventually figure him out. Don’t make the same mistake!

Final notes
SEO is getting harder and the days of tricks and manipulation to obtain top rankings are almost over. In fact, you now have to trick the search engines into thinking you’re not using any tricks (i.e. by being as natural as possible).  Provide value to the your users and stay under the radar with your SEO efforts. Sure you might not get the same attention from the SEO crowd, but you’ll make up for it with more sales, conversions, and money.

Have you encountered any of these SEO criminal red flags? How has Google profiled you as an SEO with your sites?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



7 Red Flags that Reveal to Google You’re an SEO Criminal – Avoid These!

• The Secret to Making Every Link Count For Your SEO Rankings
• Stop Building Invisible Links – 3 Ways to Find Them
• inLinks Review – An Arrow to Google’s Achilles’ Heel?
• How to Develop an SEO Link Building Strategy That Delivers the Goods (Link Value)
• 6 Reasons Why You Should & Should NOT Buy Links to Increase Your Search Engine Rankings

Similarly, jobs are not readily available to people who have little or no experience in a particular field, yet people can’t get experience without first getting a job. It’s a no win dilemma.

So how does this relate at all to Internet marketing? Well, I’m beginning to see this same trend happening with the search engines when it comes to SEO.

What do I mean? As the search engines (especially Google) get more advanced, they are working hard to improve the quality of their search results and return listings that are sure to be useful to the searcher. In other words, branded and well-known sites that already receive a lot of traffic are promoted to the top of Google search.

Top search engine rankings could potentially result in a large amount of exposure and traffic. But now it’s coming to a point where large amounts of exposure and traffic result in high search engine rankings. Do you see what I’m getting at here? Small sites with limited budgets depend on favorable SEO rankings to get traffic and exposure, but soon they won’t be able to get those rankings unless they already have the traffic and branding in place. The question will then be “which came first, the traffic or the search engine rankings?”

You can see this happening in Google already…

• Wikipedia and other big informational sites rank #1 for countless general queries
• Google recently gave a boost to big brands in its search results
• Google is making an effort to clean up its results – getting rid of thin affiliate pages, discounting obvious paid links, manually editing rankings, etc. There is bound to be some collateral damage – especially for small sites

With the web becoming more mature every day, more links and optimization are required to get ahead of the competition for keyword phrases across the board. Not only that, but it’s not even just about links anymore. As Google adds new capabilities and data points through its vast network of services, the search engine will look at a variety of additional signals of quality (e.g. traffic, user engagement, social factors) and use them to influence its rankings.

For example, Rae Hoffman aka Sugarrae used buzz marketing and pure traffic alone to get a viral site to rank in Google. Check it out, this proves that you don’t need SEO to rank in Google anymore. Seriously.

It’s much harder now to “fake” authority with a small site and work your way up Google’s search rankings. You can’t just start a new site and get links to move up in the rankings and build traffic. Those days are over. Soon enough you’ll need traffic and exposure, the very things that you’re looking to get, in order to rank at all.

If you’re a small publisher, how do you get that traffic without first being included in the rankings? Sure you can buy some traffic, engage in social media, and employ guerilla marketing techniques, but it will all be much more difficult and expensive 5 years down the line.

It’s not my intention to scare anyone, but this is exactly what I meant when I said that the window of opportunity for independent webmasters is quickly closing. Search is a HUGE part of the web, and the big players are now being solidified for long term placement.

Don’t miss the boat. There’s still time for you to build up your sites and use SEO tactics like on-page optimization and link building to greatly improve your search rankings. However, the key is to build your brand in the process and prove to everyone (including Google) that you have a site that deserves its high rankings. Once the shift occurs, you’ll have the audience and numbers to back you up.

Conclusion? In the near future, you’ll need traffic already in place to rank in the search engines, so you might as well utilize the search engines to build your traffic and exposure while you still can. For more specific strategies on how you can do this, download my free e-book, The Winning Way, and sign up for my membership site, Winners Circle, for exclusive Internet marketing case studies.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Which Came First, the Traffic or the Search Engine Rankings?

• 6 Reasons Why You Should & Should NOT Buy Links to Increase Your Search Engine Rankings
• The 3 Strategies of Link Building – Why & How You Build Links
• 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit
• The Shrinking Window of Opportunity for Independent Webmasters – Get In Before It’s Too Late
• 6 Things You Don’t Know (but think you know) about SEO