SEO | Web Hosting Plans

5Oct/110

the future of SEO

Its along way through 2011 now and there is still a bit to go but the big G does alot to help itself to the top of its own rankings but is there anything that a humble SEO can do?

If you look at the top 10 of alot of searches on google these days and you will find that many of the the spots are filled with their own products and businesses. If it is not direct ownership then it is through very big brand names like Amazon. What hope does the small player have in 2011 or 2012?

If I run a small business selling some small product like say targetted clothing then have a look at the results here.

7 for all

You have no hope of being at the top of the rankings. They are flooded. But if your customers were say in Europe but still looked at Google.com then you might have a better chance.

7 for all europe

So there is a much better chance for getting a better spot in google if you are absolutely not obsessed with local USA searches or local USA traffic.

So one part of 2012 will be to have a look at your business model and see where is the traffic coming from and does it stay around.

Unfortunately most USA businesses will not ship overseas. So Change you site around a bit for the special overseas visitor.... even go crazy and offer some sort of shipping overseas.

the US$ is low at the moment. Make the most of the international traffic. Go out now and find out how to ship to the other side of the world. go and look at how other businesses do it.

All is not lost you just have to think outside the box while doing your SEO work.

When the goal posts move dont sit back and complain think...and think hard... What happened when cars started on the roads? I can bet you all the people in the horse industry and the carriage industry started to complain about the big bad Ford. Isnt that what we are doing today about Google? what about the blacksmiths doing horse shoes? If it had been me I would have started to use the metal for the shoes to repair things on cars... maybe learn to weld? What about all the shops where you could develop film? They have all gone. In my highstreet there used to be many offering 1hour turn around. the only one that survived went online and prints those fancy photo albumns. he also now sells telescopes, batteries, replacement parts, cameras and videos etc. He is not out of business yet but he is not driving a ferrari. If your business model is dying because Google has released Panda v 2.5 then think of other options. Google will come with Panda v 9999. Dont cling to the hope that cars will die out and horses will be back!

SEO 2012 will be about finding a new angle. Spamming Google to death with backlinks WILL NOT GET YOU ABOVE THE FOLD! dont bother trying. Wikipedia, You Tube, Ebay and Amazon are the only ones allowed above the fold......and of course............the premium Adwords. So go and think out of the box , in the mean time walk around the streets looking for those $100 Google vouchers!

Forum promotion

One of our clients did an experiment for fun a few months ago after one of our blog posts. That experiment took a no named website, made a forum and an auto blog that generated a few thousand posts. Out of that came 500 inbound links, an Alexa rank of 300k, 700 unique visitors a day but what can you use that for? The Page Rank has not been update so we have no idea what it is. But what should happen next? Adsense? Some other targetted advertising? What can the site be used for? Well he is open for ideas and he is not saying what it is! So he is oging to run some of the ideas and will report back through us.

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Is an autoblog a good idea?

Should we turn this blog into an Auto Blog? Should we just go and get an Rss feed from some obscure location or language have it translated (incorrectly) and post it here? Will that generate the traffic? And if it does is it the traffic we really want? What do you want to do with the traffic? Do you want people to hang off every word you write as if you are a journalist or do you want to sell them something? Or are you writing for the sake of it like this entry?

Whatever the reasons make sure you know who the audience is as why you want them to go to your site and then make sure the message gets through.

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Adding Value to blog posts

How can you write a blog post that adds value to the internet community when nobody is following? How can you come up with the next viral post? There is so much pressure out there to perform on blogs. There are so many blogs coming on line each day but the amount of people reading is dropping as people are blogged out and spending the time on You tube and other such sites. We have no magic solution and dont post that often. We try and only post when we have something interesting to say. Some of our most popular posts on this blog are actually posts designed to help. So they are very specific. We draw alot of our inspiration from our clients support questions. how to backup... various different error messages.. etc.

So dont chase the big fish. Try and get some slow and steady traffic from the long tail and then on a specific post dealing with a specific topic then add some targetted traffic from one of many affiliate sources.

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focussed link bulding

If you every try to research link building on the internet you will end up spending a whole lot of time reading and reading. You will also end up following links to programs and plugins that someone swears is the best there is. By spidering your way through web pages you will end up with 20 new applications and 20 new plugins for wordpress that you will have to buy for $20 each. At the same time you will also see what other people say they are doing to make money on the internet. This will result in you thinking of 20 other projects to begin – you may even go as far as suddenly registering a whole lot of must have Exact Match Domains in money making niches.

Just remember be aware, that whilst it is fine to suddenly have a whole lot of new projects, just try and complete the ones you started. You still have to get backlinks and there are a few shortcuts but the work still has to be done.

So don't jump around creating 20 different projects because that's then 20 times as much link building you need to do.

Stay focused!!!

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Google Speeding Fine

To get to the top of the search engines you need backlinks – everyone knows that – but it is hard work- everyone knows that as well. So there is a massive industry out there now creating autoblogs, link wheels and automated backlinking software. There are even companies out there offering 50,000 backlinks for $50. It is all very tempting. There are a couple of things to be aware of – many of these are get rich quick schemes for the people who have made the software not you. So many of them have 1 page that you need to scroll for 25 minutes to get to the bottom of after reading 100 spun referrals from “ John Smith”. It is all very frustrating.

You might actually stumble upon one system that seems to work. Then before long the word is out and everyone is using the same method – then by magic it doesn't seem to work anymore. So the crowd moves onto the next one.

The warning here is that if you stumble upon something that works – keep it to yourself. If it seems to work too well then you might end up in the Google Sandbox – a speeding ticket!

So if you find the secret sauce then becareful… Is the proof of secret sauce being in a Google Sandbox. Is that the next marketing technique…” you wont find this product in the SERPS because it works so well we are all Sandboxed”

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Sand leaking out of Google Sandbox?

Holidays have been upon us and as a result the blogging died off a bit. One of the good things with the holidays is I don't get a chance to run the analytic tools we use every 5 mins. My holiday is always in a location where computers are rare and the internet simply does not exist.

So it is great to come back from holidays and get a screenshot from one of our clients showing that they are coming back out of the Google sandbox from the MayDay update. So they track 20 odd words where they WERE in the top 20 for most of them back in May - but all were in the top 100. Since the May update they had to change the settings to cover the top 1000 where there was nothing. However some of the slightly longer tail words are back on the screen at 60 and 250. These 2 words came back in the last 2 days. What an exciting screenshot that was to have in my mailbox when I got back.

Just for the record the reason we think that the site was sandboxed was mainly because of duplicate content. ½ the content was duplicate before they joined us and heard about what duplicate content is. Since that time back in December 2009 all new content has been unique. Also since May there has only been a very small amount of link building done to target other keywords (in case that was the reason) it made no difference. Also back in May the sites homepage was changed around a bit to see if it was an internal linking issues.

Finally no new content has been added and no old content has been changed since May. This site lost 90% of its traffic overnight and then was not worth the effort of rewriting.

So is this the start of a recovery? Has the rain washed some of the sand out of the Google sandbox?

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Google ranking plummet

One of our clients got hit by the Google May-Day ratings plummet. You can read all over the web about the May-Day algorithm improvement. The aim was to improve the quality of the results (no shit Sherlock!) and this was done by attacking duplicate content issues and the long tail.

Those 2 are pretty easy to understand BUT our client also got hit on the short tail – even the 2 words he was targeting. Lets make up an example to protect the innocent – his words were “fast cars” where he ranked number 2. Now he is not in the top 1000… so why the drop? If he was good enough to get to number 2 then he should still be good enough to get into the top 1000?

Is there another penalty in play? Duplicate content? Malware? Something else?

Well it might take a while but we will follow his road to recovery because his site is absolutely not an ecommerce site nor is it a spam site nor is it filled with adsense or bad material.

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Paid directories for Dofollow links

Google makes it quite clear that you are not allowed to pay for links. We all know that. You are allowed however to pay for directory submissions where there is editorial control and the directories are not full of all the undesirable websites. Business.com was one of these that everyone knows. There are also about 20-30 that we typically register all our SEO clients for but not all at once. You don't want a speeding fine from Google. I will not list them all here because some of them are not picked up by other SEOs.

I will however say that this is one of the ones we use - V7N Directory - that is not on everyone’s radar but it gets enough attention to be in the top 20 but not the top 5. So there you have it I gave away one of the less obvious paid directories.

On top of the 20-30 general ones there are about the same again niche specific directories.

One of the ways of telling if the directory is “good” is to check its Page Rank. You can generally forget about anything below a PR4. Often if Google gives a penalty to a directory it drops its Page Rank from say 6 to 3. So we ignore all the PR3 and below. For niche directories this does not apply as it is often hard to get the high Page Rank when you are so specialized. There are also sites out there that have lists of directories and their Page Rank. So if you are not sure then search because a directory can go bad if it is sold. By looking at old lists you can see what its Page Rank was previously.

Only pay if……

Regardless of what directory it is the purpose of this post is to make sure you don't hand over money to be put in a category that is not indexed! You are not going to get any direct traffic from this directory anyway – you are only doing it for the dofollow link. So why would you do it if that category has never been crawled by Google? If they have never been there then you are not going to get the credit. Do you follow?

If your category is not indexed then don't pay regardless of which directory it is!

Ontop of that we don't submit to directories where the category we are going get listed in has not been cached by Google in the last month. If Google only visits your category every few months then put your money elsewhere!

If your category has a cached date in Google of older than a month then put your money elsewhere.

For some directories you cannot be 100% sure where you will end up… so there is a bit of a gamble in. Have fun with paid directories but don't throw your money away.

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Other Do Follow Blogs

Well there are a few other blogs out there that allow the dofollow. But like ours they are not for spammers. It is quite simple add value with you comments and you will get rewarded. There are no easy links of any value. Put some effort into your blog comments and you will be rewarded.
Here is a list that we liked of do follow blogs so maybe you can follow our advice and get rewarded by the search engines and the blog owners.

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Free SEO advice!

There are so many SEO blogs out there and if you read them all, threw away the rubbish and picked up the best of everything out there you then might have a clue about what works in SEO land. But really we could fill this blog with all the standard stuff like get links, optimize your page, descriptions etc but we (and everyone else) are not going to put out our hot tips of what works today on an open blog. Even if you hire an SEO you are not necessarily going to learn all the tricks because you could then just do it yourself. Some places like SEO Book where you pay to be a member you will get 90% of the information you need, but let’s be honest if we knew that by getting a link with xyz text from xyz site was the secret ingredient, then everyone would go and get links from there and then 5 minutes later all the “bad areas” of the internet would have polluted the source and destroyed the value.

Why would we or anyone else give out that information on an open blog?

There are a lot of tips out there the building blocks and if you don't have those right then the secret sauce won’t help. That's where all those free guides do come in handy but they are all just a copy and paste of each. Maybe we should do it as well?

If you want to get to the top then you need to pay or work really really hard and have the ability to filter out the noise. You will also need to read the 100,000 SEO blogs and hope that by reading between the lines you can learn a secret or 2. Most blogs are writing to sell something and to stand out you need to say a bit more than your neighbor but you can’t give away the secrets – not that there are any anyway. Most blogs are still pushing ideas that don't work anymore. At least that's what we see from the comment spam we get!

Move on it is 2010.

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Rereplacer Plugin for Nofollow in Joomla

Google is a funny beast when you want to have your webpage listed at the top of the search results. There are so many things to do to get to the top but you can also help yourself out by doing some of the following listed below. This is regardless of what Matt Cutts might say today or has said in the past.

Is there any reason to have your “Lost Password” button indexed by Google? Are you really expecting someone to search in Google for that? What about Privacy policies? Terms and Conditions? Maybe FAQs and Contact Us are good things to have in Google.

If Google and the others index those pages then there is a chance they are not indexing pages you want. Ontop of that if Google and the others can get to that page are you losing your Page Rank power to useless pages via useless links? Matt Cutts says you are not – well he did say it once but they change their minds and everything is secret in Google. So our advice is to stop Google and the others getting to these pointless pages. Humans can still get there by clicking on the links but there is no need for all the search bots to get there. This way you can be nearly 100% sure you are not losing your Page Rank power to useless pages. Thus giving your page rank power to the real links on your page that you want this juice to flow.

For one of our clients who was using Joomla we used the usual robots.txt to stop some pages but others are really hard to stop. Things like password links can be blocked in the robots.txt but then it gets too big and complicated. You might accidently block pages you want indexed as in our clients case.

Another choice is to hack the Joomla code and force the rel=”nofollow” link within the code – but what happens with upgrades?

So we have been using another solution Rereplacer Plugin from here http://www.nonumber.nl/extensions/rereplacer it is free. What it does is allows you to replace whatever you want on your entire site. It is extremely powerful but does not affect the code nor does it change your database. All it does is change the page code as it is rendered. So if you deactivate the plugin all changes are gone.

Here is how we have used it for one of our clients:

In the search field we wrote this:

faqs.html,Lost-user-name.html,Lost-password.html,Create-an-account.html,Policies/terms.html,Policies/security.html,Policies/privacy.html,Policies/contact.html

In the replace field we wrote this:

faqs.html" rel="nofollow,Lost-user-name.html" rel="nofollow,Lost-password.html" rel="nofollow,Create-an-account.html" rel="nofollow,Policies/terms.html" rel="nofollow,Policies/security.html" rel="nofollow,Policies/privacy.html" rel="nofollow,Policies/contact.html" rel="nofollow

And it has added nofollows to the links we wanted to keep Google and the others away from.

The team at Web Hosting Plans
http://www.webhostingplan.com.au/blog

Adwords & Adsense Payout ratio = 70%

We had had a funny thing happen to one our webpages the other day with regards to adwords and adsense. As you have read in an earlier blog we use adwords extensively for testing the actual search results for certain keywords. As part of that process we added content providers for one particular case. And in that case our advertisement was posted on one of our own websites…and clicked on… So as we owned both the data on the Adsense side and on the Adwords side we were able to see how much we got paid and how much it cost. Want to know the numbers? I thought you might as that's why I am writing it here.

Adsense = $0.62 was the income.

Adwords = $0.43 was the expense.

Which means that the Payout ratio was 43/62 = 69%!

Now the numbers are low so if it was say 42.9cents but Google rounded it up (I doubt it) then the %'s change a small amount.

So we could almost say with rounding it was exactly 70%.

Not bad.

The team at Web Hosting Plans
http://www.webhostingplan.com.au/blog

Using Adwords to generate Accurate statistics.

We use Googles Adwords for many tasks. One of the most useful task is to actually measure traffic. Sure there are tools around including from Google that provide estimates of traffic but these are just estimates. When you are about to buy an exact match domain, it would be nice to know whether or not “London bird watching” provides the same search results as “bird watching London”. If you are about to pay a few thousand dollars or even a few hundred you need to get this right. The benefit of an exact match domain is well worth the effort of getting it right. So we use Adwords to actually target those keywords.

The exact match function [London bird watching] and [bird watching London] are then added to Adwords.

We then do 2 things

Make sure that we pay enough so that our ad will always be shown. Thus providing real search volumes for those days it is showing rather than the very generic calculation from Google which is often out by a significant factor.
If we have enough cash left over we run the ad at the top of the list for Adwords by paying what is needed to see the traffic sent and see how “clickable” the topic is. It might be that people search for that combination but actually meant to search for something totally different.

If you have to pay a lot to do what I have just written then the chances are that the exact match domain will cost a lot as well. If you think about the cost of developing websites this is not much to pay for real statistics, but you need to think about when to run the ads. No point in testing “skiing ads” at the start of summer etc. If you were thinking of developing a website you would have thought about this already.

The team at Web Hosting Plans
http://www.webhostingplan.com.au/blog

a bit about SEO and the plan for the blog

Our blog title is “all about the web”. We plan to talk about whatever is on our minds and at the same time to do some projects of interest. This will all be about the web and whats happening on the web and how you can make the most of it in which ever way you want.. knowledge… money etc.

We will be talking about SEO and what that means and how to make your web page stand out above the rest but only at a basic level. We will only be giving you the information which will help you to get to a Page 3 Ranking in 6 months or so. Everyone here has done it and everyone who will be writing about it has done it. A Page Rank of 3 is achievable within 6 months if you are happy to do the work! We have 2 sites that are actually 5’s but that's not easy. It is almost like the Richter scale in terms of going from a 3-4-5 and beyond. We will help you get to a Page Rank 3 for free – give you the information to get yourself to a 4 but not tell you any of the tricks. They cost and we are not here to sell those and at last count this site was not there yet. Not surprising since it is only 1 month old. We are here to just help your webpage go in the right direction. Don't forget that Page Rank really does not mean anything. It is just funny how obsessed we were with it at the start of our career with Page Rank. It is like a score but after you get to a 3 you will stop following it. Your logs and statistics will be more important. Your conversions rates as well.

We are not just going to be talking about SEO because at last count there were 2,000,000,000,000,000 blogs (almost) on the topic with everyone claiming they know the secrets. Let’s be honest go to Google.com or you local Google and type in SEO or Search Engine Optimization and you will get the people who REALLY KNOW. If you can get into the top 10 for that search in Google then you know what it is about the 1,999,999,xxx,xxx other people might know what it is about but are not the best at it!

The team at Web Hosting Plans
http://www.webhostingplan.com.au/blog

Web Hosting Plans – blog Its all about the web

the future of SEO

Related Reading:

Forum promotion

Related Reading:

Is an autoblog a good idea?

Related Reading:

Adding Value to blog posts

Related Reading:

focussed link bulding

Related Reading:

Google Speeding Fine

Related Reading:

Sand leaking out of Google Sandbox?

Related Reading:

Google ranking plummet

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Paid directories for Dofollow links

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Other Do Follow Blogs

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Free SEO advice!

Related Reading:

Rereplacer Plugin for Nofollow in Joomla

Related Reading:

Using Adwords to generate Accurate statistics.

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a bit about SEO and the plan for the blog

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