New Orleans Internet Marketing

I was just browsing through some of Bing’s search results for “dedicated server” because I have a site in that niche these days, and I came upon something pretty interesting:

If you notice, the last search result for LiquidWeb’s homepage is indexed with an affiliate tag! I wonder how much commission “sdawkins” is getting off of Bing for this? How many search phrases is it showing up for? Must be nice!

If you look at the backlinks for the URL, it’s nothing but link directories and such. Lucky guy. Bing needs to work on their canonical URL issues here. It wouldn’t hurt for LiquidWeb to have a good SEO on staff either. I can almost guarantee you won’t see this in Google.

In the past I’ve done a few posts about PageRank that may help newcomers understand the difference between “actual” PageRank and “Toolbar” PageRank, along with some of the anomalies you will see if you look at the Google Toolbar for a long time (no, not visions of Mary either, just the little green bar).

One of the things I discussed in my post “Anomalies with Google’s ‘Toolbar PageRank,’” was the fact the sometimes search results will look strange when there is a site with low “toolbar PageRank” ranking high for competitive keywords. This is sometimes due to the possibility that Google has penalized the website’s “toolbar” PR for selling links.

This appears to be what happened to Blog Catalog today. Blog Catalog used to have a PR 6 or 7 homepage, and many interior category pages that were PR5, but if you check today, you will see that they’ve been bumped down to a PR4. Is Blog Catalog really selling links? You be the judge – have a look at the top right of the “Health” section page (click here).

Will this affect BlogCatalog’s search engine rankings? Probably not.

Although it has been argued both ways, I am of the opinion that it WILL affect the “link juice” that gets passed down to all of the blogs listed in their directory.

I’m posting this because I Googled it to death this past weekend trying to find the code for it, and it was nowhere to be found. I’m positive I’ve used it before in the past too, but the code was not in any of my old projects either. After hours of googling for what I knew was a simple mod rewrite for .htaccess, I submitted to defeat and asked (more like begged) an expert on the subject. Here was the problem:

301 Redirect every URL from www.domain1.com to the coresponding URL (keeping the trailing file path intact) on www.domain2.com, when both domains are being pulled from the same directory on the same server, and respecting URL canonicalization issues (www vs. non-www).

This should be a readily available mod rewrite written about on SEO blogs worldwide right? Wrong.

I offered to pay my expert for the consult, but he refused, probably laughing at the trivial request I submitted. So here it is – hopefully good ole Google will pick up this post so the next guy coming along will find this, no problem:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain2\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain2.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Cut, paste into .htaccess file, use notepad, must have Apache server with mod rewrite enabled, works like a charm :) It worked the first time in fact, not like when I do a mod_rewrite and have to test it out 20 times to get it right!

I wrote this because I was explaining PageRank to someone today, and I realized that my first post on PageRank didn’t do a good enough job of explaining some of the strange things you will see from time-to-time. I also added it into that post.

Anomalies with “Toolbar PageRank”
Another important aspect aspect to consider is that there are a few anomalies associated with the PageRank scale as it’s shown on the Google Toolbar. One is the fact that it’s only updated every quarter, and sometimes less often than that. Because of that, sites that are new, may take a while to get “Toolbar PageRank.” I’ve also seen a lot of cases where the initial toolbar PageRank was higher than what they ended up having in subsequent updates.

Another anomaly is the fact that the scale seems to change over time. If you think about it, it makes sense because the internet is constantly growing while the scale remains a number 1 – 10. That being said, it should follow that websites who were at one point a PR5, that don’t build links over time, will see a decrease in their PageRank as it’s displayed by the toolbar over time. This is something I’ve seen on older websites I own. I used to be able to get a PR5 from the toolbar with just a few hundred average links, whereas these days it takes significantly more link building effort to achieve the same toolbar PageRank. The “kicker” is that these “toolbar PageRank” changes may not be associated with loss in rankings at all.

It’s because of the concept of internet growth mentioned above, and penalties that I will discuss next, that I’ve often seen a website’s search rankings go up, even though their toolbar PageRank went down!

The last anomaly I should address about the toolbar is that occasionally you will find websites whose toolbar PageRank has been penalized. It’s something that is most often noticed when you’re looking at competitive search results, and you find it strange that the top results are all well-optimized web pages, yet one on top has a significantly lower PageRank than those beneath. While this can usually be attributed to on-page SEO factors, sometimes it’s because Google actually penalized the toolbar PageRank of the site because it was selling links at one point in time. The strange thing about these types of toolbar PageRank penalties is that they seem to only affect the toolbar and not the website’s actual search engine rankings. This would indicate that “actual PageRank” has not been affected. Sometimes these penalized websites can get their “toolbar PageRank” back through appeal, but that’s not always the case.

As you can see based on these anomalies, there are quite a few reasons that the toolbar may not be indicative of how a website ranks in the search engines.

Paid blogging services can make it obvious that your buying links if you’re new to using them, or they can make it look like your site is generating buzz and natural links in the blogosphere. The second of which, is the desired outcome when optimizing your site for Google. While many paid blogging services don’t give much control to the media buyer, PayPerPost has many options that can make your posts look more natural to the search engines. Here are some tips for using PayperPost. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of ways to get links for most SEO campaigns, but one thing I almost always do is hire some outsourced personnel who contact related websites asking them to link to the site we’re promoting from their “Resource” pages. This can be very time consuming work, that’s why most of the people I’ve met who do this are from India. The value you get for your dollar is very good in India. We pay these link builders anywhere from $5 – $50 for a link, and we get a one-time fee, permanent link from another website. Outsourcing companies, like OutsourcedLinkBuilding.com are getting more and more popular due to the cheap price of labor overseas. Outsourced Link Building dot com in particular, has secured tons of valuable links for me in the past. Granted, there are times when I wind up paying for a few I wish I hadn’t, but the overall service is incredible for the price you pay.

The value you get from one-time fee, permanent links is so great, because when you specify a decent part of your budget for that, the links really build up over time. So does your PageRank, and so do your rankings. I’ve found so many ways to get permanent links these days, that it’s rare that I rent links. To me, renting links (paying a monthly fee) is little different from pay-per-click advertising in that you’re renting your space at the top. Don’t rent! Own!

First let me say, that Google does not recommend changing domain names, and neither do I. My next disclaimer is that I can’t control what Google does (the classic SEO disclaimer that every long-term SEO has had to resort to at some point in time). So if you try this at home and it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault.

The internet marketing firm I work for recently ran into a problem that is likely to happen to anyone who names their firm after the partners – one partner left, and we had to change the name. So “Foreman & Pike Consulting” became “Reciprocal Consulting,” but that was the easy part. We had top search engine rankings in Google for “Internet Marketing Firm” and “Internet Marketing Firms,” which had been two productive keyword phrases. How were we going to change our domain name and retain our search rankings?

I’ve been doing SEO since 1998, so I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done (301 redirects) without looking anything up, but this was a big deal, and the other guys in the firm were depending on me! I’m the only SEO guy, and I needed to get it right!

What helped things out, was that I had done some research for a consulting job on this very thing not long ago, and I tried to find out what Google’s “official” recommendation was on the matter. Here are a few good snippets that I found: Read the rest of this entry »

Title tags are one of the most important aspects of on-page search engine optimization. While there are a lot of aspects of a web page that help it to rank well for keywords, the title tag is undoubtedly one of the most important.

The title tag is the html code that looks like this: <title>Title Goes Here</title>

It is contained within the <head></head> section of the html document and shows up at the top of the web browser. It is also the link that shows up at the top of your site’s listing in the search results. Here are some important considerations that will make your use of title tags more effective.

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I do a lot of pay-per-click management for the firm I work for, and I think I’m pretty good at it. I can build out good ad groups and ads, lower click costs, improve clickthrough rates, build good content match campaigns etc., etc., etc., but every now and then I do a consult for a client that’s thinking about using us for SEO. Here’s where I shine. SEO is my one of my favorite topics, and I have been doing it with success for many years now. These are the top 5 reasons I think SEO is one of the best investments you can make in your website:

1. Improvements to the way you organize your site and it’s content, will help the Search Engines to find and index your site better for the rest of its life. Best of all, it should help visitors as well.
   


2. The suggestions that your SEO gives you will be “best practice” standards that you and your designers can use for any future work you do.
   


3. New, original content that you add will be yours forever, and you can bring in search traffic from it for as long as it’s there.
   


4. Many links that you get will be permanent links, that will continue to exist, drive traffic, and help your search results for as long as the linking site remains online.
   


5. Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.

SEO is a great long term investment in your website. I like to look at a website as a piece of property, and SEO is not only home-improvement, but it also puts you in a better neighborhood.

For those of you that don’t know who PayPerPost is, they are probably the biggest paid blog posting service on the web. They have a network of (according to them) around 80,000 bloggers, and anyone can sign up to create an “offer” for paid posts from the bloggers. Advertisers can request links from the blog posts, and specify PageRank requirements from the bloggers as well.

This has put PayPerPost in a position to get a LOT of business from SEO’s looking for relevant links. At the same time, it’s put a target on the backs of all of their paid blogging network that Google is aiming at sharply. Last month, Google dropped the axe on many PayPerPost bloggers, reducing their PageRank considerably. If you didn’t see it coming, you don’t know much about SEO. Read the rest of this entry »

How much per month do you spend on SEO, not including on-page stuff like content and changes to your site? Is it enough? How much would you need to spend to be comfortable with the SEO effort?

I do SEO for a bunch of sites, some for other people, some for myself. I think I spend around $700 / mo. on link building for my own sites. Although I’m really not happy with that. I would like to spend $1000. If I spent $1k / mo. on link building I think I could totally dominate the keyword phrases I want. But I do have top rankings for like 7 out of 10 kw phrases I want (see the correlation there?) :)

Without going into details that would help my competition devour me (I think they probably spend twice as much for not nearly as great results), my budget breaks down to about an even split of several different forms of link building. Including the occasional email from yours truly to the more exceptional websites I want links from.

For my clients, I find I can hit moderately competitive keyword phrases for around $600 / mo., given about 6 months time if they were no where on the charts before I start. By “moderately competitive,” I mean the top results have some well optimized PR4 sites, maybe a PR5 or two. It seems like a PR5 is more difficult to attain these days than it was a year ago.

What do you guys spend on link building, and how competitive is your market?

This morning I ordered a new battery for my digital camera through a company called MemorySuppliers.com, they have a really good online store where you can buy all kinds of memory, batteries, etc. I got an email an hour later stating that my order had already been shipped! Great service!

Then I get this email from them, and it says:

We have a special money saving offer for you today: If you would like to receive a $15.00 credit back on your credit card for this order, simply post a link to MemorySuppliers.com on your website, blog, personal profile page (i.e. myspace) with a short one or two line description of our website and products. When finished, email us the web address where the link is posted and we will give you a $15.00 credit back on to your credit card.

This is a great idea, that I have actually tried in the past. The only problem was that I tried it on my marriage counseling directory, for new therapists who signed up to advertise. That population is not very tech savvy, and I got so many questions about how and what to do in the first few weeks, that I abandoned the campaign completely. It wasn’t worth the time it took.

Still, a great idea if you’re in an industry that deals with tech-savvy people. Try it out!

Here are a few popular article publishing websites. The first one, Squidoo, is a little more than just an article publishing site. On Squidoo, you create a page, or “lens,” where you can add different types of content like graphics, rss feeds, affiliate links and more. Articles submitted to many others typically rank well themselves in search results.

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.e-topic.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com
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There are many article directories on the web these days, and many websites that accept free article submissions as well. But how do articles help your website rank for keywords?

Ok, here’s an example: I have a website about cats, and I know that building quality relevant links to my website will help it in the search results. But most of the time, that’s eaiser said than done. Writing articles about your topic is one way that you can accomplish this. Here are some ideas for keyword rich articles for my “cats” website-

• Caring for Your Cat
• Feeding Cats: What’s the Healthiest Cat Food?
• Grooming Your Cat

I have a list of general article directories I will publish in my next post, but most are free, and they all accept articles that are allowed to have an outbound link near the bottom (the Author Bio). It will be even better for my “cat” articles if I can find niche websites about cats that accept article submissions. If you’re considering a website for submitting an article, make sure they allow a link to your site, and make sure that the link doesn’t contain the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute. That attribute tells Google not to pass PR down to the site that is linked to.

Some people will submit the same article or slight variations to hundreds of article directories… I don’t think that helps much. Search engines today are very aware of “duplicate content,” and work hard to weed it out. They try to determine the original source of the content, and then copies get penalized in the search results. So I say, submit your articles once to the most appropriate website. Quite often, the articles themselves will achieve decent search engine rankings, and can bring in natural traffic to your site that way as well.

There was a front page thread on WebmasterWorld about this recently, and it’s something that’s frequently asked. Probably because it’s so infrequent that someone gives a good answer. I posted on the thread, but I’ll go into more detail here.

So what’s the good answer? “Maybe,” is the best answer.

This is what I consider when I’m thinking of listing a site in Yahoo!

1. How deep is the category where the site will be listed?
   
   

   Is it a deep category like this?
   
   Regional > U.S. States > Louisiana > Cities > New Orleans > Business and Shopping > Business to Business > Communications and Networking > Internet and World Wide Web > Web Site Designers
   
   If so, it will have much less value than the upper level categories that get more traffic and have higher PageRank.
   
   

2. Is the category relative to the keywords you want to show up for?
   
   

   In most cases, the category will be relative to the keywords you’re targeting. If it’s not, you should consider changing or adding content to your site that represents those topics.
   
   

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Link building has long been a source of success and frustration when doing SEO. When it first became known that links form other sites affected search engine rankings, immediately FFA (Free For All) sites appeared that allowed users to add their links for free. There was no editorial discretion in the placement of these links and commonly, they were all thrown together on one page with no relevance between them.

This is when the search engines became charged with the task of determining link quality. I’ve long said that “a link to your site is like a vote for your site, but all links are not created equal.” Obviously, Google and other search engines found a way to devalue FFA links over time. So much so, that FFA sites are virtually non-existent today. Then came link exchanges, which are also not nearly as effective these days.

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What is PageRank?

If you’re completely new to search engine optimization, then you may not even know what PageRank is. Start by downloading the Google Toolbar. You may have to enable the PageRank display in the settings. Below are some examples of what PageRank indicators look like on a page form the Google Directory, viewed through a web browser with the Google Toolbar.



PageRank is displayed on the toolbar as a scale from 0 – 10, with “10″ being the “most important” pages on the web, and “0″ being the “least important” pages on the web. On the toolbar, PageRank is only displayed as an integer; however, in reality, PageRank is an infinite scale from 0 – 10. It is important to differentiate between “Toolbar” pagerank, and “actual” pagerank.

Actual PageRank is the factor that is computed by Google’s algorithm to determine the “importance” of a web page. While the toolbar PageRank is only updated about once every 4 – 5 months, actual PageRank is dynamically updated as changes occur in Google’s index.

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Not all Web Directories are Created Equal.
These are a few I know about, as well as some links to other lists. Getting your site listed in web directories is a small way to help your site’s relevance and link popularity in the search engines.

Most Important:

Yahoo! Directory

ODP – Open Directory Project

Best of the Web Directory

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People ask me how to get their web site to show up in search engines once a week. Then there’s the question about the spam email they got that guarantees to submit their site to over 1000 search engines! Or, “I keep submitting the site to Google, once every day, and I’m still not listed.”

Let the truth be known….submitting your site to Google is a waste of time. If that’s all you’re going to do in order to get your site listed, then I guess it’s better than nothing. And if your site is about some really obscure topic that no one else talks about on the internet, you might show up eventually. And that’s if your on-page factors are well optimized for the search engines.

With that being said, there are some very basic ways to get our websites to rank well in the search results. They’re not as easy as typing in the URL and clicking “Submit,” but if you’re going through the trouble of designing a site, you can certainly pay attention to these details along the way.

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