Devour The Web

As you may already know, keywords are an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO). And the usual approach recommended to finding the right keywords to target with one’s site involves the ideas of demand, supply and KEI (and/or CID). I would like to propose that one thing is missing in this research approach.

What is missing is a consequence of one of the major advantages of the Internet. Let me explain . . . When I use the Internet to look for information, or software, . . . I don’t care about what country is hosting the site, nor do I care about the nationality of the owner of the site. I am only concerned about finding what I am after. So, for me, when I use the Internet, the fact that the world is made up of countries is not something I think about, nor is it an issue because the Internet has in some ways effectively removed the existence of country borders.

Yet, it is this very positive aspect of the Internet that, I believe, leads us to perform incomplete keywords research when we look for keywords to target with our site.

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There are today search engine and internet marketing services, in fact a new industry has materialised to exploit the fear of low search rankings.

This is not a new trend, back when simply resubmitting your website to the engines resulted in keeping your site at the top of the index, there was an accompanying boom in resubmitting “companies”, as we know, these were just men in back bedrooms with a host of CGI and Perl submitting scripts and a timetable.

Search Engine optimisation or “SEO”, is the latest incarnation of this bedroom profiteering, the important difference is that now the webmaster’s are not just passively involved but are being forced to adopt totally artificial and unsocial practices that ultimately serve only to help damage the Internet!

SEO is supposedly the methodology and processes related to designing search engine “friendly” web content, the basic premise is something like “If I follow all the engines formatting and connectivity criteria, then my website will rank higher then a comparable website that does not”.

All other things being equal, this seems quite positive given that the quality of a search engines database (index) directly effects its output; then webmaster’s optimising their content so that search engines can correctly categorise the internet should logically improve the speed and quality of “the crawl”.

You probably do this already - complete regular searches in Google for your key phrases and see how high you rank. It’s well known that the first three results are far and away the sites that get the most clicks. If you can get one of the top three results in your key terms then you will have more targeted visitors coming to your site. If you can get the first result, well that is even better. Of course all your competitors want to do the same.

One of the great things about Google is that is updates quite frequently. That little GoogleBot is busy 24/7 indexing the web to make sure everyone gets the best answers to their search questions. I’ve recently been playing with a technique that I thought might be worth testing and because Google has updated so quickly I’ve been able to get a result within a few weeks, and I got the perfect result - a number one ranking for one of the key phrases I was after. In fact this technique worked so well that I got the number one result for a related search phrase too!

A Quick and Easy Google SEO Trick

Making effective use of the Internet is increasingly about creating better and more intelligent applications and search engines. Here is a brief introduction into how search engines work:

01) Define the corpus, search space/data;
02) Separate the corpus into documents;
03) Generate features for each document;
04) Generate a representation of each document;
05) Study the feature/vector space;
06) Cluster documents;
07) Reduce dimensionality;
08) Accept input Queries;
09) Find the cosine angles against the query vector;
10) Find the sought vector column;
11) Output results to user in some way;

Each document in a corpus (database) is described by a set of keywords called index terms. We assign weights to index terms according to their relevance (frequency of occurrence for instance), this is how we go about creating the index, that we can then search.

Corpus preparation:
Web pages of interest are analysed and cleaned by removing hypertext tags or any other hyper language; Pages are then broken down into documents where each document is scanned through searching for words/terms of interest: those which make a document unique, not standard words.

Top 10 search engine rankings. Everybody wants it but a few achieve it. Search engines have always been an important source of traffic for many marketers. Achieving high search engine rankings should be one of your goals because it can be profitable in the long run.

But what is it that prevent some people from obtaining their coveted rankings?

It’s true that some years ago, getting high rankings was very easy. You could just set up a site, heavily optimize it on the page itself and bam, you can appear in the top listings quickly and easily.

Nowadays, this has totally changed. It is becoming more and more difficult to secure and even maintain good rankings on the major search engine result pages(SERPs) like Google and Yahoo. Some of the reasons are:

(1) Competition

There is more and more competition. More and more websites are popping out everyday and everyone is trying to promote their websites, hence increasing pages and websites in the SERPs. An example, Google has more than 8 billion pages now in its index.

(2) Search Engine Algorithm Change

Google uses an algorithm to determine the search engine results (SERPS). The algorithm is based upon certain factors that include keyword density, Meta Tags, anchor tags, image tags, back links, etc etc etc.

If your site is optimized for specific keywords than you will rank better in the search engines. There are many factors but onsite optimization is a must. You can research and fine out the information yourself or hire and SEO. I have put together some Free Basics on www.seo4dummies.com

Overture shows you the bid price of certain keywords. Wordtracker show you the amount the term is searched. You can use www.nichebot.com a free tool to see all this at once.

You can research keywords free online with these various tools.

www.nichebot.com ( my personal SEO Favorite)

http://www.webmasterautomation.com/cgi-bin/keywordtool.cgi

http://www.keyworddensity.com ( Keyword density analyzer )

Adsense / Adwords.

Google Adwords have a bid price to display certain "keyword terms". Think of Adwords as TV commercials. Webmasters can put Adsense on there websites. Think of Adsense as the TV Program. If a viewer of your webpage clicks on one of your ads, you get a commission. That commission is based upon the price of the Adword. Google keeps about 60% of the bid price and passes about 40% to the webmaster or Adsense account.

Duplicate content penalty. Ever heard of it? This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your website is largely the same as what is found elsewhere on your site or on other websites across the internet.

Search engine spam has been common ever since search engines were first invented. Search engine spam describes the practice of making changes to your website that gets you listed high in search engines at the expense of readability by humans. Years ago, you could get ranked high on a search term simply by repeating it as many times as possible in a document. The primitive search engines of the past ranked the importance of a keyword simply by counting the number of times a term appeared on a page. Today’s search engines are much more complex.

Google has been waging war against all kinds of search engine spam and especially against duplicate content in all forms. There are two main types of duplicate content that Google is concerned about.

We know that each and every website page is assigned a Google Page rank, based upon a mathematical algorithm. Pages rank on a scale of 0 (zero) the lowest, and 10 (ten) the highest. Linking between websites both internally and externally pass a value or Page Rank.

If site A links to site B, a percentage of Site A’s Page Rank is passed or credited to site B. Nothing is lost from site A in terms of Page Rank unless the link is to a banned area, or bad neighborhood.

The amount of Page Rank Site A passes is determined by the amount of Outbound links of site A’s page. The more Outbound links, the smaller percentage of Page Rank is passed. Pages with large amounts of outgoing links pass very little Page Rank and in some cases may cause more harm than good. Try to avoid linking to pages that have large amount of outgoing links, Like Link Farms etc.

A real life true example. Site A had a Page Rank of 4, there were only 2 outbound links on Site A. One of those outbound Links was to brand new Site B. Brand new Site B had 3 out going links, and NO other Incoming Links, besides the one from Site A. Google awarded Site B a new Page Rank of 4.

Ask any business person who’s website is at the top of the search engines if his/her site is making money, and the answer is almost always “yes”.

An example is Glenn Canady, the author of “Gorilla Marketing” who employed only one of these strategies, and it made him over $1 million dollars.

The fact is, search engines can get you an enormous amount of traffic, and it’s traffic to your sites that’s free. However, in order to ethically and effectively market in the search engines, you need to use strategies that actually work.

Below are three different ways to effectively, and ethically, raise your rankings in the search engines. I’ve included seven different resources that you can use that will help you implement these strategies, and do it quickly and easily so that you can begin to see an increase in your traffic almost immediately.

1. Optimize your site. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you need to make sure that you are marketing using the right keywords. This means optimizing your site to make sure that the keywords you have on your site are the keywords that your site is actually optimized for.

I get half of the world traffic for the term “dirtbagging,” on one page of my backpacking site, but that only means ten visitors a month. Without decent keyword demand you can’t ever get much traffic. Total demand is just one factor to consider, though. Here are some others.

1. Demand/supply ratio. There were 289,000 searches for “fishing” last month, but could you compete against the 35,000,000 results on a Google search? “Bass fishing tips,” with 3,700 searches, and 31,000 results is a more likely winner.

2. Total supply. For “dirtbagging,” Google shows 240 results, and there may be 20 searches monthly for the term. It was easy to get on the first page of results. On the other hand, a keyword with a demand of a million, and a million search results has a better ratio, but can you really get in the first few pages of results? Whatever the ratio, you have to be able to compete against the supply. If you are on the tenth page of results, virtually nobody will find you.