Google is Updating PR Now
September 28, 2008
Looks like Google start updating the PR for all the sites. What’s yours now?
5 Thing You Should Know about SEO
September 19, 2008
Today, I see a post from “Search Engine Journal” that “SEO is like the Doctor, War, Cricket“. The article looks fun but very reasonable.
According to that article and some thoughts from me, below are 5things you should know about SEO:
- SEO is just like Doctor, both of them will tell you how “Healthy” your web sites are from the areas of the web site, web design, Internal Link navigation and external link bulding. All those will be reflected in your SEO result.
- SEO is a game defined by Google, the game rule is defined at “Google Webmaster Guide”, they might change the rule as they want, and your SEO results are managed by them. You can make the result different, but cannot decide your postion
- You cannot feel about the benefit of SEO immediately, it takes something for Google to know about it. So, please be patient in SEO. But you will need to change your SEO strategies if you don’t see any change after 1-2 months, just like you have to look for another doctor if your current one cannot bring you good result. Good or not, you have to try it first and then wait for about 1 month
- SEO is a team work, there are a lot of factors which might influence your SEO result, from web design, web content, link building, web site maintenance, etc. It’s hard to be done by only one person. Want to get the best result in SEO, think about how to leverage the strength of the others.
- Be a smart player in SEO. SEO is just like a War, you need to know what you need to fight for, should you spend time on “rural area” (less competitive key word, but easy to win), etc? A good key word strategy will help you win in SEO
Do you have more want to add?
Internet Marketing 101 - Effective Key Word Strategy
July 28, 2008
SEO game is fun and excited, during which you can see a page goes from nothing to something in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). People tend to spend a lot of time to manually build the links and optimize the pages for optimal search engine placement, and overall it’s paid off in a big way.
It isn’t really all that hard to obtain a higher ranking in SERPs if you follow some good SEO practice, but maintaining that position is a whole different story.
If you have started promoting your web site and track your positions in SERPs. You will find that your pages can stay quite stable in some key words once you get there, but for another group of key words, they will be rolled out further and further till disappeared in the result.
So, what makes them so different?
Usually, the key words are categorized as Long-Tail key words and Competitive key words. Competitive key words are the popular key words which will bring you a lot of traffic if a page can list high against them. It’s competitive since a lot of web site optimize their page and try to get a better position. For those Long-Tail key words, they are related to the competitive key words, but much fewer page talking about them or no too many webmaster would like to optimize their page for them. An example here is that “web hosting” is a competitive key word, but “family web hosting” is much less competitive.
If your page ranks high in the SERPs against a competitive key words, it will drop down quickly if we don’t continuously promote your site with that key word. But for the long-tail key words, once you get to the top page, it would be hard to be second since there are less competitors.
A lot of successful stories have told us that obtaining front page rankings for several long-tail keywords can actually drive more traffic and be more profitable in the long run than ranking for a competitive phrase and not having the patience to keep it up there!
Strategy for Competitive Key Words
“Natural link” is the best way to win a better position against the key words. When another site owner links to your site/pages simply because they are a good resource, then you’ve just received a natural link. When you manually build the backlinks and no one else is linking to you then you are manually ranking your own site and if the keyword(s) you are targeting is very competitive, you simply will not hold that ranking for long, unless you constantly build those links and never stop!
Strategy for Long-Tail Key Words
Obtaining front page rankings for several long-tail keywords can actually drive more traffic and be more profitable in the long run than ranking for a competitive phrase and not having the patience to keep it up there!
The reason for this is because your competition, in most cases, for a long-tail keyword will be far less competitive, meaning it will retain top 10 rankings for far longer without constantly having to build links!
Summary
Use article marketing, link exchanges and other link building and SEO strategies to obtain top 10 rankings for long-tail, niche phrases, but don’t spend your time manually ranking a site or page for a competitive niche, it just doesn’t pay off in the long run! If the content isn’t compelling enough to rise on it’s own, it’s not worth your time to manually push it to the top.
There is nothing wrong with using articles etc. to get a site off the ground that is targeting a competitive phrase, but it should be the user’s interest in the content that brings it to the top, not the Webmasters will to be on top!
If you want to achieve top 10 rankings for a competitive phrase, write good content that invites natural links. It’s far less stressful and you’re much more likely to hold that ranking for an extended amount of time!
BrowseRank vs PageRank
July 27, 2008
Recently, some Microsoft researchers in partnership with some Asian academic fellows published out a research report BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, in which they come out an idea to ”Let Web Users Vote for Page Importance”.
This new ranking method is called as “BrowseRank”, which is designed against PageRank from Google.
In the report, they talk about some problem of PageRank, one example is that people can game on PageRank through link farms.
And the core of BrowseRank is that “The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance.”, which will avoid the issue PageRank is facing right now
This sounds very reasonable, and the research is still on a continuing process and the researchers hope to further elaborate on the BrowseRank method of measuring the importance of website.
Although, pensonally, I would to see BrowseRank can be a competitor to PageRank (I like to challenage Giant), below are just some recommendations from me to BrowseRank research team:
- PageRank is important, but it has become less and less important in Google’s algorithm to determine a page’s ranking in the search result against a given key word (SERP).
- The ways Google used to determine the PageRank is changing, which means Google is continuously improving its algorithm to generate the more reasonable PageRank. I believe they will take above issues into consideration sooner or later
- PageRank has been used for so long and it’s also quite successful right now. BrowseRank hasn’t leverage any advantage of this method and come out a total new one. It comes back to my old saying that “You fix 10% issues, but you might introduce 20% more in at the same time”. How BrowseRank avoid this happen.
- Last and the important one is that PageRank is running now, and BrowseRank is still something in the air. Who and when are going to promote it - will this be Microsoft?
But no matter what, glad to see this new concept show up.
Google PageRank Update Coming
July 26, 2008
Yesterday, Matt Cutts from Google announced on this blog that a New Toolbar PageRanks coming, and in this updating, Google will be expiring some older penalties on the website.
This is a good news for those who have been punished by Google last year for this or that kind of reason. But Google hasn’t revealed why they did this.
You can see the change of PageRank today actually, one of my site has increased from PR3 to PR4. And Centeurlife just get a PR2, this is not a good data, but considering I just launched my blog 1 month ago, this is still reasonable.
What’s yours …
5 Ways to Get Listed in Search Engine
June 8, 2008
Getting listed in the search engine is the first step to the success of your web site. Considering about 85% of the people use search engine to look for the information they want, if your web site can be listed in the results with a higher position, you can image that a lot of potential free and high quality traffic will be driven to your site. But this is too beautiful to think about before your site is found by the search engines, since after it, you will still have a lot of work to do.
Submit Your Web Sites to Search Engines
Submitting your site to search engines is a good method to get it listed in the search result. It’s not the fastest way but it’s absolutely necessary. And there are hundreds of search engines in the world, should you submit your site to all of them? The answer is NO. This is a time-consuming process, some people choose to purchase a service from 3rd party to submit the site to them. But actually, you will only need to do it manually for some major search engines and for the rest, they will automatically index your web site when you promote your web site and build the inbound links.
So, what’s the major search engine you should submit to? They are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can follow below link to do it:
For Google, you can get your web site indexed even faster by declaring the ownership of the site and submitting the sitemap of it to them.
Get Inbound Links from Other Related Sites
The best way to get listed in any of the major search engine is getting links from other related sites that point to your site. It’s not hard to get an inbound link and it could be free (actually, search engine doesn’t like the paid one). But in terms of getting listed in search engines fastly, in below, we will introduce the methods to get the link from the sites which search engines crawl frequently (daily or even hourly), so that your site will be found and indexed quickly. And for the other long run ways, they will be introduced in Web Promotion.
Submit an Article to Ezine Directories
There are some many web sites that Google crawl everyday, and Ezine article directories are part of them. Submitting a well-written article to Ezine article directory with a link pointing to your web site will greatly accelerate the progress for search engine finding you. You can go to Promote Web Site by Writing Articles to know more about the most popular Ezine Article directories and how they work.
Submit Your Site to Free Classified Sites
There are many free classified sites indexed by Google hourly, and the most famous one are classfieldsforfree.com and usfreeads.com. If your site are talking about the business or selling the product, placing a free classifield advertisement on them should be a good idea.
Join the Forum Related to Your Web Site
Forum is a place that Google crawl very frequently, but each forum has its purpose. Join the forum with the same topic as your web site. When registering in it, you will be allowed to put your web site in your profile. By doing it, your site will be found by Google in soon. But what you should keep in mind is that, not all forums are crawled by Google all the time, you will need to figure out the most popular forums related to your business.
Summary
Getting listed in the search engines is not something hard. By doing it properly, your site will be able to be indexed within 1-2 days. Even if you just submit it to the search engine without doing anything else, 7-14 days later, you will see your site is found by them. But the earlier your site is indexed, the better your business could be.
Make Your Blog Search Engine Friendly - Blog SEO Skills
June 4, 2008
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of achieving a high search engine ranking for the given key words. There are many benefits to be on the first page of a search, and the most important one will be to get a lot of free and valued traffic.
What follows are 4 tips for using blog SEO.
1. Including Key Words in Blog Title
Blog title is used to attract the attention of people, and this can be applied to Search Engine as well. If you want to rank high in a search for a specific key word, please make sure you have get this key word included in the blog title if you can come out one which makes sense to human-beings.
2. Optimize the Key Words Density in the Post
As a general SEO practice, you need to optimize the key words density of your post by
- Keywords Are in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text
- Include Your Keywords in Header Tags H1, H2, H3
- The Keywords are Shown in the Post for 10-20 Times.
3. Using Lots of Links
In addition to articles and posts outside of your blog, be sure to link to post inside your blog as well. If you wish for certain posts to come up with certain keyword phrases, “anchor” those keywords to the post. For instance, if I wish to have www.onlinemoneyclue.com rank high in searches for “Make Easy Money Online”, I will use a link with those words every time I use this piece as reference. For this case, it would be Make Easy Money Online
4. Build the Link-Popularity
One of the best ways to catch the attention of search engines is to have lots of back links. Create link-worthy content and encourage others to link to your blog and posts. There are many ways you can refer to in articles Top 6 Web Promotion Strategies .
When building your link popularity, don’t forget to anchor the key word to your link, this will be help in making search engine associate your desired key word with your blog post.
How I Write Blog
Here is what I do. I write my post first and then when I am done, I recap what I have written to title my article. In the process of titling my article, I ask myself, “What keywords would I want someone to type in a search engine to find my post?”. After I give an appropriate title to my post. I will go back to optimize the keyword density in the post and then publish it out.
