Many website owners make the mistake of thinking that the more traffíc they get to their website the better, and they work towards this end. It is better to focus efforts on bringing in targeted traffíc that will convert to sales or enquiries. To understand more correctly how well a website is performing, and who is visiting the website, a good website statistics package is required, as well as an understanding of the data these website reports produce.

With many website hostíng packages free, website statistics are available. However, the information is not always easy to understand or doesn’t always give you the information in a way that is easy to understand.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great application that Google provides absolutely free. It tracks all activity on your website, not just visits through Google. All you need is a Google Account, and FTP access to your website to insert a small amount of code in your website, and away you go. If you don’t already have a Google account, I encourage you to set one up as soon as possible! You can do so at: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount . Not only will you have access to Google Analytics, but having a Google account gives you a whole host of other tools.

Visitors

As a start, it is a good idea to find out how many visitors are coming to your website. Visitors are broken down into new and returning visitors. While it is great to attract new visitors to your site, you should aim to see a decent percentage of returning visitors as well, as this gives a good indication that people find your site interesting enough to come back to.

Depth of Visit

How many pages are viewed during a visit to your website?

Length of Visit

How much time do visitors spend on your website? If they are spending very little time on your site when you have an information-rich site, then you need to start looking at the navigational report to find out where you are losing them.

Keywords

The Keywords that people are finding your website through, are a good indication of what keywords are performing well for you in the search engines. Are the keywords that are displaying for you truly reflective of what you offer? If not, then it is time to revamp the content on your website.

Referrals

Which referrals drive the highest quality traffíc? This report lists activity coming via referrals from other websites. This is useful for tracking links that you cannot control. You can gauge the overall effectiveness and importance of PR activities, partnerships, etc. The referrals are compared to the number of visits, page views per visit, conversion rates and average value per visit.

Navigation

Which navigation paths resulted in conversions during the visit? For each navigation path, this report shows conversion rates and the value per visit.

Exit Pages

From which pages do visitors commonly exit your site? This report shows the number of exits from pages on your site. If you notice a high number of exits for specific pages, it is time to seriously analyze these pages and try to improve them, because it is very likely that people are not getting the information they expect or want.

Conversion data

Arguably this is one of the most important pieces of information. Conversion data gives you a true understanding of how successful your site really is.

Conversional goals can be set up through your Analytics settings. Take time to think about what goals you want to track. These may be sales or web enquiries you are receiving, or specific pages in your website that you want to focus on. Keep in mind that if your visitor contacts you by telephone or fax, this will not be reflected in the goal conversions. However, you can set your contact page as being a goal to get a feel for how many people are looking for your contact details.

By monitoring the changes in conversion rates for your primary goals, you can monitor the overall effectiveness of website changes, marketing roll-outs and other events.

Organic vs Pay-Per-Clíck comparison

How does paid search compare with organic search in driving high quality traffíc to my site? This report compares paid and organic referrals with respect to number of visits, page views per visit, conversion rates and average visit value.

Date Range

Throughout the report it gives you the ability to track your website statistics between various date ranges. At this time it only allows you to see a maximum of a month’s data at a time. The reports also allow you to compare data, so you can find out how your site is tracking against a previous date period.

Beta Version

The current Beta which is just in the process of being released, provides a lot more flexibility, and one of the most exciting things about the new version is that it allows you to schedule reports, daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. This is great news as it makes the process of accessing your website reports even easier.

Google Analytics Features

There are many other features that Google Analytics offers, and it is worth spending the time having a good look at them and trying to understand what they have to offer you. Alternatively, speak to your webmaster or SEO” href=”http://www.search-commando.com/goto/SEO/332/3″>SEO specialist and get them to help you understand how Google Analytics can help improve your website performance. By having a better understanding of it, you can potentially íncrease your profíts significantly.

Final Note

When you analyze the data from your website statistics with the intention of improving your site, or getting a good indication of how your site is performing, it is important that you have a decent snapshot of the data to work from, i.e. make sure that you are not making assumptions based on the data of a single day, as trends vary over time, and even from day-to-day. IMPORTANT- never become complacent! Make sure you review your website reports at least weekly or monthly–if not daily–to make sure that your website is performing to your expectations.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

So I tripped on over to the the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and started reading the document United States Patent Application: 0050071741 which seems to be Google applying for a patent on their search algorithm. There seems to be no reference to PageRank here, but it seems to be PageRank redefined with a few variations to limit link spamming and reduce stale results, along with multiple innovative elements not previously considered.

They discuss link spamming limitations extensively, which would be a welcome relief as Linking Psychosis is rampant and I’d like to see an end to it. Much of historical data related to pages seems to be a bit onerous because it would appear to limit the perceived value of a page unless it becomes wildly popular over time. Bïgger is better seems to be an enduring theme of this algorithm as described generically in the text of their application.

An odd addition to the historical ranking discussion is amazingly – the “Advertising Traffïc” for a particular document! They will rank a site based on the advertiser choosing to advertise on a particular site. If Amazon wants to advertise on your site, then Google will rank you higher!

That’s good, I guess, if you have a site that attracts highly rated advertising, and don’t rely on cross promotion of your separate products or those of suppliers to appear in your site advertising. Example: If I have a discussion forum on coffee, don’t I want to advertise my coffee products? Why would I serve ads from highly rated advertiser Starbucks to rank higher at Google? What if I sell thousands of products and simply cross promote and upsell my own products sitewide? Odd stuff, ranking based on advertisers.

How does affïliate advertising factor into that advertising element of the algorithm? Do they know you are advertising a book from Amazon as part of affïliate program through your direct Amazon affïliate program links and do they recognize tracking links through affïliate management companies differently than the tracking URL’s of ad serving monsters like DoubleClick and confer higher ranking upon the big boys of advertising above affïliate tracking firms?

Also seems to call into question their own Adsense ads and how that factors into this algorithm! Do the Adsense ads along my blog border gain more ranking score because it is from a monster advertising company – Google – or is it downgraded because I’m not a “Premium” advertiser serving over 20 million content page views? Again, seems that reward for being large outweighs relevance in this formula. Or does it? How do they value Overture advertising in the formula? Adbrite? Smaller ad networks versus large advertising aggregators?

They extensively discuss historical data related to rankings over time, looking at seasonality, popularity during spikes in traffïc due to news coverage of particular topics and changes in ranking related to those items. The historical data related to ranking over time are interesting since they refer to link spamming, relevance, and topicality when they say:

“As a further measure to differentiate a document related to a topical phenomenon from a sp@m document, search engine may consider mentions of the document in news articles, discussion groups, etc. on the theory that sp@m documents will not be mentioned, for example, in the news. Any or a combination of these techniques may be used to curtail spamming attempts.”

They’ve added another interesting element in the algorithm of determining value of pages based on “user maintained/generated data” (patent item 113) read that “bookmarks” and “favorites lists” built into your browser. Is this one of the reasons that Google recently hired Ben Goodger, the lead developer of Firefox?

Snooping into my favorites and cookies on my machine seems like a bit more than I want Google doing on MY machine. It strains the limits of privacy as well. We can stop sites from serving us cookies, but can’t stop who reads them? Ouch!

Further, they reference user’s browser cache files as a method of determining value of a site. “For example, the “temp” or cache files associated with users could be monitored by search engine to identify whether there is an increase or decrease in a document being added over time. Similarly, cookies associated with a particular document might be monitored by search engine to determine whether there is an upward or downward trend in interest in the document.” Apparently they can see this info, but I’d like them to stay out of my cache and cookies too!

It appears to apply further penalties to new sites by keeping them poorly ranked for even longer periods and applies an apparently new item to algorithms not seen or (at least discussed publicly) of long term purchase of domain names and historical data related to IP address and hostïng company! Here’s the snip about that longevity of domain registration to ranking:

“[0099] Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitïmate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitïmate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.”

I’ll be extending the term of my domain registrations ASAP! What a boon to registrars if that element of ranking becomes as valued as linking has been! Everyone will get 10 year registrations if they want to rank well. The domain name aftermarket will also be changed dramatically if this becomes as important as this element makes it appear to ranking. People will buy and sell domains when disposing of them rather than simply letting them expire at the end of the registration period, as most do today.

It appears they will be penalizing domains “associated” with “illegitimate” domains. Hopefully they have a method of determining that it isn’t a competitor linking to your domain from their “illegitimate” domain! That suggests they will be able to eliminate “Domain Scrapers” that have been known to scrape search engine results of high ranking domains and post those on “illegitimate domains” which in effect drags down the ranking of those previously highly ranked domains. How odd the search world is sometimes!

Altogether, it seems that older content will suffer overall because it hasn’t changed, because nobody new is linking to it and because it will lose links over time. What if you are posting a historical document that you can’t change or an authored piece that is copyrighted? Does it decrease the value of the information? Hmmmm. I guess links would continue to increase if the information remains valuable, so there is some protection in that. But older site content may be unchanged because it is popular, not because it is stale – that’s an odd Catch-22.

The anchor text issue discussed in this patent application suggests that “[0118] Unique Words, Bigrams, Phrases in Anchor Text ” are significant in determining rank, because if natural links develop, they would vary when webmasters link to a document differently, some would use the URL and embed the link in that, others would use requested text from the webmaster if it were a link request that successfully garnered a link and still others might simply use Google’s own Blogger “Blog This” link which simply takes the page title. (I routinely change link text generated by “Blog This” in my blog posts to emphasize the topic discussed and eliminate business/publication names usually added ahead of the topic of the page.)

The US Patent office has a link to images including illustrations and figures that are linked to the filing but they are absurdly large and don’t fit in the viewable framed window. This is silliness. Do they mean to hide it by making it unviewable?

I’ll attempt to post a smaller version of images on my blog.

The final notable item seems to me to be the clickthrough data that Google sees to sites from their own search results. They will rank sites higher that get significant clickthrough rates from the Google SERP’s.

“Google may monitor the number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results and/or the amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document. Search engine may then score the document based, at least in part, on this information.”

How will they know how long I spend accessing the document unless they can monitor my actions AFTER I’ve left the Google SERP’s to visit the linked site? Wonder what’s at work in that? Do they have some way of tracking our actions after we leave their site? I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google acquisition of Urchin traffïc statistics company last week. Well, it’s back to work for now, but it will be interesting to see where this patent application is discussed in forums and SEo” href=”http://www.search-commando.com/goto/SEO/328/3″>SEO blogs over the coming week.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

Google came up with a brilliant plan for determining the best web pages to show in their search engine results. And then without telling us the intimate details of their plan, they told us about part of their algorithm by explaining the importance of inbound links — the Google PageRank (PR) system — in their calculations.

Google itself planted the seeds of its own future headaches. Nobody did it to them; they did it themselves.

I am sure the fault really lies in Google’s marketing department. They wanted to tell the world what made their search engine algorithms more powerful than the competition. It probably was an innocent mistake on their part. But once the genie is out of the bottle, it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

So, now the whole world knows that if you want to get good search rankings in Google, you must have links pointing to your website from other websites on the internet. Everyone also knows that if you want better search rankings in Google, then you should strive to create even more links with the appropriate keywords in the anchor text of those links.

Building Links

There is always more than one way to skin a cat. There are many methods that people can employ to build links to their websites.

1. Register frëe websites so that you can create inbound links back to your own site.

2. Register new domains where you can place other links back to your website.

3. Leave comments on blogs.

4. Link Exchanges.

5. Getting your own listing in any of the directories that are available (dmoz.org, yahoo.com, etc.).

6. Signature File – getting involved in discussion forums and actually adding value to the discussions.

7. Submit product and service testimonials to those product distributors and service providers.

8. Social Networking – bookmark web pages through social bookmarking sites.

9. Link Baiting – creating a resource that people will want to link to for the benefit of their website visitors.

10. Article Marketing – writing an article and giving webmasters the opportuníty to use your content on their website, IF they agree to post your link on the page with the article that they are using.

11. Press Releases – writing and distributing press releases online.

12. Buy advertising on a website.

13. Buy Link Placements on a website.

Good Links Versus Bad Links

I have always focused my attention on practicing White Hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, instead of Black Hat SEO techniques.

Most of you know what I am talking about, but I have been surprised a number of times when people did not understand what was meant by “white hat” and “black hat.” So, for those of you who do not know what I am talking about, here is a brief description. “White hat” and “black hat” are references to the old serial cowboy westerns. The good guys always wore “white hats,” and the bad guys always wore “black hats.”

By far, the link building techniques I employ most often are article marketing, press releases, and link baiting. I still frequently participate in forums and buy advertisements on other websites, but I do those for public exposure and not for search marketing.

A Black-and-White Issue

I have always been extremely concerned with White Hat techniques for building links to my websites and from my websites.

“Providing good quality content as the foundation for my linking activities” has always been my golden rule. And, it still is that main driving force behind everything that I do.

I like a black-and-white world where everything makes sense, and I had no reservations about my thoughts on this topic.

The Morality of Paid Links

A couple weeks ago, I was reading Matt Cutt’s thoughts about paid links on his blog. Most folks in internet marketing” href=”http://www.search-commando.com/goto/internet_marketing/326/1″>internet marketing know who Matt Cutt’s is, but if you don’t, he is a software engineer that works behind the scenes with Google in their quality department.

Generally, if Matt Cutts says anything at all about improving your rankings in Google, you can take his words to the bank.

Now, Matt has made it more than clear that we do not want to buy “paid links” to our websites as part of our link building campaigns. Paid links are a big no-no according to Matt. That is his advice, and I have always trusted it at face value.

That is why I have focused my entire link building activities towards “content-driven linking.”

I was reading a discussion of paid links in Matt Cutts’ blog and after I read Matt’s thoughts, I continued reading the comments on the page. Many good points were made and responded to by Matt. It was an interesting read.

And then, my black-and-white world was turned upside-down when I read the comments presented by Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs.

Here is what Dan said:

Search engines are frëe to develop their algorithms as they see fit. They’re frëe to decide which links they want to trust. Maybe I’m the heretic here, but I don’t see anything wrong with Google identifying sites that are selling text links, and dealing with that however they like.

I just hope Matt and his co-workers aren’t expecting this to solve their problem. He’s already seen that people are looking for better ways to game the system. I hope Matt and his co-workers don’t seriously expect the entire web to start labeling paid links for them.

The Google ideal may be that “the best links are earned and given by choice,” but what does that mean?

If I add text links to my favorite florist, favorite online casino, favorite unlicensed pharmacy, favorite travel site, etc. will Google decide that my site isn’t worthy to participate in developing their “democratic” search results? If I “vote” for George Bush or Michael Moore as a miserable failure, am I no longer qualified to vote?

What’s the algorithm for determining intent, Matt?

Intent Is Abstract and Important At The Same Time

There is the rub. How can Google know the heart of the webmaster? They can’t, unless the webmaster pointedly describes their intent.

If the webmaster calls those links “paid links” or “sponsored links,” then Google can know that webmaster accepted monëy to provide those links.

If I buy advertising on a website, to attract potential buyers to my website, how does Google know my intent? Did I do it to get traffíc from that website, or did I do it to game the Google results? They cannot know my heart.

Even if the webmaster does not call the shown links “paid links” or “sponsored links,” does the suspicion of the pay-for-placement model label the webmaster as a “bad egg?” How does Google really know if Dan is linking to a site because he wants to, or whether he has accepted payment for that link? They cannot know.

And the final example on this topic comes from a poster named Shelley who participated in the discussion at: http://weblog.philringnalda.com/2005/08/19/.

Shelley stated that she allowed two “paid links” on her well-respected blog, because she had a car payment to make. She traded on her brand name to get enough cäsh to make the car payment in tight times. Will she be penalized for selling “link space” to advertisers on her website?

In Conclusion…

Based on the comments that I have read from Matt, Shelley should not be worried about her acceptance of “paid links” on her website. If I have interpreted his comments correctly, her site will not be hurt by her outbound links.

However, we are meant to believe that if you and I were to buy links on her page, then we should be concerned about our future in connection to the Google search results.

So these questíons remain for the search companies to figure out…

Webmaster’s Intent:

1. Which links are paid links, and which links are freely given links?

2. Who is selling links to pass on their PageRank value, and who is providing a useful or valuable link for their visitors?

Link Buyer’s Intent:

1. Who is trying to game the Google results, and who is trying to attract buyers to their website?

2. Who should be treated as a spammer, and who should be treated as an honest performer?

This last question is the tricky one. We all know a spammer’s website when we see a spammer’s website. But, how can the search engines deal with the spammers, without damaging the innocent in their quest for search results perfection?

Yes, that is their problem, not mine. But, if Google’s paid links policy hurts my own placement in the search engines, then the paid links equation becomes my problem too.

More Questíons Than Answers…

Yes, it is true. I have posed more questíons than I have presented answers. But sometimes, the questíons are more important than the answers. This is one such case.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

There are two kinds of links that you can pay to have made for you: rented or paid links, and permanent links.

Introduction To Paid Links, Or More Accurately Rented Links

With Rented links, you can generally make your purchase decision based on the PageRank of a page.

The downside with rented links is that Google has stated that they do not like links that are sold on the basis of PageRank, and they are trying to create systems to identify links rented for PageRank, for the purpose of discounting those links. While they may eventually be able to target and negate links developed by systems like Text-Link-Ads.com or TextLinkBrokers.com, they will never be able to completely identify and discount all links that are sold for the purposes of PageRank.

In the end, I suppose Google is not going to penalize the Source or Target websites for those links, but they will nullify the value of the individual links in the Google algorithms. Cutts suggested and implemented the “rel=nofollow” a while back as a tool webmasters could use for the purpose of identifying links for which the webmaster did not want to pass PageRank. The only thing that Google’s algorithm will actually do to links identified as rented or paid links is that it will treat those links as “rel=nofollow’s”. If Google succeeds in their quest, the webmaster buying the links will be throwing away his or her monëy, if they are buying placement on a webpage solely for the purpose of influencing PageRank.

The Story Of Permanent Links

The second kind of link is the permanent link. Permanent links come in many formats, and in most cases should generally be viewed as non-rental links. With rental links, you pay a fee for placement once a month, quarter or year.

Of course, the Yahoo directory is not viewed as a paid link by the Google engineers, because although you “pay” to get the link, Yahoo does not guarantëe placement of your link in their directory. Instead, Yahoo says that we are paying them to “review our link.” This is why Google is not discounting links from the Yahoo directory. Those Yahoo links are nice to have, but they still do require a yearly review for commercial websites, which must be paid for on a yearly basis.

Permanent in all cases is in the eye of the beholder. Permanent as a rule in the Internet world means that you will not have to pay another fee later to keep that link on the page, where it will reside. In the context of links on the Internet, permanent actually means that the link will live at that location, until the webmaster who owns the website changes his or her website’s direction OR goes out of business.

In my experience, perhaps 10% of the websites where we get links placed will go under within one year. Towards the end of the second year, webmasters will look at their Profit/Loss and make a determination whether their income level will justify shooting for a third year of operation. Another 20% will close their website at the end of the second year run. So, 30% will drop out of business, within their first two years. Of the remaining 70%, many of those websites will survive to the fifth year and beyond. I don’t know how long one will be able to count on a permanent link just yet, but links that I built for myself in 1999 continue to produce traffíc for my websites today, and those links have sent me continuous traffíc for years.

Permanent, One-Way Links

Many permanent one-way links can be acquired on pages that currently have PageRank on them. In those cases, it may simply be a matter of your link being added to a líst of links already on someone’s web page.

However, any link created through a content development method, such as pay-per-post or article marketing, will be posted on a new page on the Internet. All new pages on the Internet begin life at PageRank Zero. It is like the birth of a baby. The baby begins small, but grows into a child, then a teen, and finally an adult. All article pages begin their lives at PageRank Zero, and most of those new pages will íncrease in PageRank as they age. Some web pages will nevër mature beyond PR1, but others can grow into pages that are as high as PR6 (at least that is the highest I have seen an article page to date).

If you trust Matt Cutts of Google, he has indicated that all new pages begin life at PageRank Zero and in the Supplemental Results. He also said that Supplementals are not the end of the road. Cutts stated that the only thing required to bring a web page out of the Supplemental Results is to have that web page gain PageRank. (For those curious why a page went from the Primary Results to Supplemental Results, the answer is that either Google began counting links differently OR the links that gave a web page PageRank no longer exist.)

Three Reasons Why Article Marketing Helps Link Building

My conclusion from this information, and I might be biased, is that the use of article marketing for link building is a positive in the Google algorithms.

? I conclude this because links developed through article marketing begin on pages that have a PR Zero. So, we are obviously not getting links placed on websites for the sole purpose of acquiring PageRank, not directly anyway. We are placing links for the sake of having links, but with good luck, many of those links will gain PageRank over the long haul.

? By the very nature of article marketing, we can ensure that the links we develop for our websites reside on web pages that are tightly focused and targeted to the content of our websites.

? Most websites that post articles do so through a process of moderation, meaning that all article placements have been human reviewed. That human review process at the other end of the transaction puts most article websites on par with Yahoo’s human-reviewed directory.

When we can get our keywords embedded into the link pointing to our websites, then that is always a much better deal. But, that outcome will be affected by the webmaster at the other end of the process. Each webmaster has his or her own rules for article placement, and some of those folks simply do not permit embedded keywords in our links, either in the body of the article or in the about the author information. A plain text link is better than no link at all, although we always strive to get embedded keywords in our links.

Final Thoughts

When you write a great article people will link to it, no matter where it may reside. So in time, the pages that house your article will gain PageRank.

As the article’s author, you are in total control of the relevance of the web page linking to your website.

Just as you are in control of relevance, you are also in control of whether people will choose to reprint your article. Write a good article, and people will use it.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

While the creation and subsequent presence of effective links within your website is a crucial factor in ensuring that your website is well optimized for search engines, it is still only one factor and you should take the time to explore other means by which you can achieve a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

This article will be focusing primarily on Link development but you would do well to be aware of the other factors of successful SEO Tips and Advice” href=”http://www.search-commando.com/goto/SEO/325/2″>SEO such as the Text component, which involves the use of various words and phrases that your target audience will most likely type into search queries and the Popularity component which has to do with the number and quality of links pointing to a Web site.

One of the most important things to keep in mind and one that eludes most first-time web developers is that high-quality link development takes a considerable amount of time. There is simply no way to get around this fact and many web developers who resort to the use of spidering software as opposed to actual human efforts are bound to experience less than satisfactory results.

Link farms have as of recent times already garnered an unsavory reputation but for those who are new at this it bears repeating that you should avoid these at all costs. In almost all cases, a text link that you purchase from a link farm will have absolutely no value and therefore have no use for you. Be wary of sites that feature several links that obviously have nothing to do with each other and are irrelevant to that particular site’s theme and general content. This is not a hard and fast rule however, as there are many reputable sites that host a large number of links. Take your time to determine which ones can actually be of value to you.

Relevance is of course of primary importance and to this end you should make sure that any links that you host on your site are relevant to your content and general theme. You can help ensure this by targeting most of your link purchases to sites that have the same subject matter as yours. This will result in a better link profile that will eventually translate into more publicity for your site and higher visibility in search engine results.

One of the easiest considerations to miss when you are in the midst of a link buying frenzy is whether the domain name that you are buying the link from is actually still operational. Many domains that are in fact expired still show up in Google so you may unwittingly fall for one of them. Check the status of the domains in question yourself and if they are expired it may be best to avoid them and save yourself the monëy; they probably will not be of any use to you.

Probably? Yes, because in some cases, even if the domain has expired it could still be of some use to you if it has good backlinks. Whether a site is good or not is largely dependent on the quality as well as quantity of its backlinks. Both active and expired domains can have a favorable backlink profile so do not automatically discount a domain just because it has expired.

You should of course always chëck your links for page ranking and make sure it is the current page ranking and not a fake one. DigPagerank.com is a good site to check your current page ranking.

One of the most important factors that can affect the quality of a backlink is the number of outbound links. Generally speaking, a good quality backlink will have as few outbound links as possible. The total number of outbound links on a page will also have an impact on the value of a particular page.

You should also consider the possibility of buying links as a means of increasing traffíc to your site as opposed to buying links for the purpose of increasing page ranking. This could potentially provide more direct benefits and even profits for you.

Some other things to keep in mind: contextual links are supposedly seen by Google as being more natural and therefore will prioritize these over other links. .gov or .edu links are not treated as special in any way by Google so consider carefully the benefits of hostíng such links. Look for a site that has similar keywords to yours for a better ranking in Google search engine results page. Finally, it would be best to avoid purchasing a site wide text link if all the other outbound links on that site have nothing to do with the site in question.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

The web as they call it is a mesh of links. The wired world is now being counted for what it is. A Network. The more your pages are wired or integrated into the overall web linking architecture, the better it is from search engine ranking point of view. Google specially thrives on crawling on links. Its pagerank is a measure of this.

In this article we will measure the importance of good internal linking architecture on Google’s PageRank.

When setting up the linking architecture of your site keep in mind that links are of two kinds:

1. Internal links
2. External links

Internal links are the constituent elements of the way your web site is organized. They are the bridges by which one page of your site connects to the other & more importantly outlines, which page of your site will connect to which other page/s.

External links on the other hand are the community tools by which the online community votes for you by linking to you. The more popular you get is a function of more incoming links into your website. This in turn is interpreted by search engines as a measure of your online value creation.

In essence, if your pages are orphaned (no one links to them) or lying isolated within your web site thats not good news from a pagerank point of view. To enjoy a good pagerank for the pages it is imperative to have proper linking amongst various pages within the website as well as having good quality external links coming into the page.

A factor to keep in mind while linking is that one should focus on quality links & not always quantity. Consider that, there is a huge difference from a link, to your page from another page with a good pagerank than a page from a low pagerank.

Internal Linking: A Primer
Proper internal linking ensures that the web pages are accessible to search engines & that they are indexed properly.(This is not to discount the navigational ease of the end user) A good internal linking structure should be intuitive as well as functionality driven. That will benefit everyone.

Internal linking on the other level decides the pagerank flow within the website. The pages that are linking to that page get a pagerank benefit from that page. Then it stands to reason that if the maximum number of pages linking are internal pages they will retain the maximum pagerank emanating from that page. This will boost their ratings as well.

Hence one rule of thumb says that have as many incoming links to your web page as possible(this will boost the PR of that page) from outside resources or may be good PR pages of your site. Try & pass on the benefit of that page to the other pages of your site by proper interlinking. Inward looking as it might sound, this makes lot of good online marketing sense.

External linking:
External linking on the other hand is more difficult to control & hence more valued by search engines. This is what really builds up the PR of the webpage. Good quality (High PR) incoming links are craved by the online promotion experts all over.

Linking Attribute:
It is always preferable to have a text link rather then a Graphic/Image link, because in a text link you can use Keywords as the text on which hyperlink is given(anchor text). In effect you can make your anchor tag keyword rich. Anchor tags? text is a very important criterion in search engine ranking matrix.

Search engines look at not only how many people are linking to you, how important they themselves are but also what they are saying while linking to you. In fact search engines like google have gone a step ahead. They not only look at the anchor tag but also the text surrounding it. Essentially they are trying to establish the relevance of that link to your pages content.

If anchor tag is so important & more often that not, one cannot control what the world says while linking to you then it is very useful to have internal links speak the language of keywords. This means that it is a good practice to use keywords as the internal linking text.

However if you are using Graphics/Image linking then you should not do it using image map because many of the search engine does not follow image map. To overcome this problem make use of the ALT attribute. ALT attribute give the information about the image and where it is going to provide the link.

Another important aspect of the internal linking of your site is the sitemap. A sitemap is a page that contains links to every page on the site. There should be a link to the sitemap on every page, or at least on the homepage. A sitemap helps you to have an overview of your site linking architecture as well as it helps SE crawl the entire web site.

Internal linking architecture:

There are three forms that can be assumed while planning the sites internal linking pattern.

Hierarchal
In this kind of Internal linking all the pages of the website are connected to the home page and home page is individually connected to all the pages of the website, but there is no linking between the pages of the website.

Looping
In this kind of Internal linking the home page is connected to the primary page and the primary page is connected to the secondary page and this process goes on till the last page and the last page is connected to the home page in this way a loop is formed.

Extensive inter linking
In this kind of Internal linking each page is connected to each other in the website.

What kind of internal linking is preferable in a certain case, is dependent on the objectives you are trying to achieve in terms of Pagerank optimisation, user navigation ease & site theme.One tip to bear in mind is that internal linking should reinforce the theme. One should not crosslink between the pages on the site which are unrelated by themes. This will dilute the theme intensity & affect the page rankings on SERPs.

Redundant Internal links:
Two category of internal links that should be guarded against are: broken links & dead links.

Broken links
Broken links are the links that are in the website and when they are clicked they don?t open a webpage rather they show some error.

Dead links
Dead links are the links that are in the website and when they are clicked they don?t open a webpage and they don?t even show some error.

To summarize pagerank of a site apart from other factors, can be guided by the way information is organised within a site & the way it is presented. Careful planning with setting up the information flow will go a long way in helping optimise the pagerank of the site.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

Conversely, there is no maximum number of words you can put on any one page so long as you are adding quality content. You’ll notice that some BruceClay.com pages are over 5000 words. However, before you go after a strategy of building lengthy pages, remember that you want to build depth of content in your site. It’s not about saying everything you have to say on one page. While it is possible to rank for a one page site, it is very difficult. It is much easier to establish a site wide theme, supported by depth of content and good internal linking.

Pages should be structured to address customer questíons or product information as they become relevant. This can seem to be a daunting task for many people, but it’s actually quite manageable as long as you start your copywriting project off in the right direction.

Search engines want to be treated like any other visitor to your site, but while they are coming closer to the ability to mimic human judgment, they’re not there yet. Search engines can still have trouble trying to accurately define what a page is about if the content is written in anything but a clear and well-defined style.

To understand what you should be writing, you first need to understand a little bit about the history of the search engines. The first search engines were set up for the people who were using the Internet at the time. Because the population of the early Web was largely researchers, scientists and educators, the focus of search engines was to bring back pages that fit the thesis model. This model persists today in the way Web pages are written: a title, description and some keywords that help define what the focus of the paper or page is.

In order to write effective pages to support your search engine optimization goals there are a few guidelines you should keep in mind. Assuming that you have generated a solid keyword líst (See Lisa Barone’s article, Five Steps to SEO Keyword Research” href=”http://www.search-commando.com/goto/Effective_SEO_Keyword_Research/319/1″>Effective SEO Keyword Research, and have assigned the words to pages, your next step should be to brainstorm the best way to represent the keywords in an informative way.

Brainstorming works best if you throw out all your filters. Don’t critique any of your ideas, just write them down. The idea is to get out everything–great ideas and garbage alike. At this stage, no idea is too stupid. You can narrow it down later.

If you are writing content for your own Web site, your first response might be to feel frustrated. What on earth are you going to write about? Everyone knows everything that you could possibly tell them and you’re not a writer anyway. But that’s just the thing, they don’t and you are.

Let’s pretend that your business is selling cowboy boots.

Brainstorm everything you can think of that relates to cowboy boots, even if it’s only somewhat related. Once you have all your ideas down, pick a few of the best. For example, you’ll want to focus a section of your site on the keyword “buy cowboy boots”. Everyone, you think, knows about how to buy boots. It’s just a matter of finding the right fit and style. You don’t need to explain it to your site’s visitors. But it’s one of your keywords so you sit down and simply write all the obvious information.

You are an expert in your area. Of course you know how to chëck the fit of your boots and which styles will work best for which people. It’s obvious to you that your jeans should be tucked inside your boots if you’re working outside and that you should take certain steps to care for your boots. But for most people, that’s not the case.

That’s why they’re coming to your site in the first place. Your expertise is a valuable resource for the development of content. Explaining something that is obvious to you is probably the best way to introduce new customers to your products.

When I write my first draft, I like to keep the keywords that I want to incorporate on the page in mind. I’ll tape them to my monitor or put them at the very top of the document. However, I don’t worry about densities or forcing them in. If it doesn’t sound natural to use the keyword, I don’t use it. The first draft is just to get the information out. Use your keywords as a guide for the content.

Once you have a first draft, take a look at the tone of your piece. Are you writing to the right audience? Is your content engaging and informative? Does your content solve a problem or help the customer make a decision? If you’re in a highly technical area where your customer isn’t likely to know enough to ask intelligent questíons, have you educated them enough to feel comfortable?

Revise your draft with these ideas in mind. Knowing your audience means putting in the kinds of words that they will be looking for, the same kinds of words that will help them understand what the best choice of products will be for them.

After your next draft, the best thing to do is ask someone else to read it over for you. The best person for this task is someone who fits the profile of a site visitor. Have them read it to see if it answers their questíons in an easy to understand way. If not, revise the content to meet their understanding.

Once you have a final draft, incorporate your final product into the destination page and use the SEOToolSet’s KDA or any other page rating tool to determine the strength of the document. Tweak it if necessary. Keep in mind what your linking strategies will be and how the content will support the Web site theme as a whole.

The final thing to remember about writing for search engines is that there is no magical formula for writing the perfect copy. It takes work and attention to detail to meet the needs of both the search engines and your human visitors. The best thing to do is start writing and go from there.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

While the creation and subsequent presence of effective links within your website is a crucial factor in ensuring that your website is well optimized for search engines, it is still only one factor and you should take the time to explore other means by which you can achieve a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

This article will be focusing primarily on Link development but you would do well to be aware of the other factors of successful SEO such as the Text component, which involves the use of various words and phrases that your target audience will most likely type into search queries and the Popularity component which has to do with the number and quality of links pointing to a Web site.

One of the most important things to keep in mind and one that eludes most first-time web developers is that high-quality link development takes a considerable amount of time. There is simply no way to get around this fact and many web developers who resort to the use of spidering software as opposed to actual human efforts are bound to experience less than satisfactory results.

Link farms have as of recent times already garnered an unsavory reputation but for those who are new at this it bears repeating that you should avoid these at all costs. In almost all cases, a text link that you purchase from a link farm will have absolutely no value and therefore have no use for you. Be wary of sites that feature several links that obviously have nothing to do with each other and are irrelevant to that particular site’s theme and general content. This is not a hard and fast rule however, as there are many reputable sites that host a large number of links. Take your time to determine which ones can actually be of value to you.

Relevance is of course of primary importance and to this end you should make sure that any links that you host on your site are relevant to your content and general theme. You can help ensure this by targeting most of your link purchases to sites that have the same subject matter as yours. This will result in a better link profile that will eventually translate into more publicity for your site and higher visibility in search engine results.

One of the easiest considerations to miss when you are in the midst of a link buying frenzy is whether the domain name that you are buying the link from is actually still operational. Many domains that are in fact expired still show up in Google so you may unwittingly fall for one of them. Chëck the status of the domains in question yourself and if they are expired it may be best to avoid them and save yourself the monëy; they probably will not be of any use to you.

Probably? Yes, because in some cases, even if the domain has expired it could still be of some use to you if it has good backlinks. Whether a site is good or not is largely dependent on the quality as well as quantity of its backlinks. Both active and expired domains can have a favorable backlink profile so do not automatically discount a domain just because it has expired.

You should of course always chëck your links for page ranking and make sure it is the current page ranking and not a fake one. DigPagerank.com is a good site to chëck your current page ranking.

One of the most important factors that can affect the quality of a backlink is the number of outbound links. Generally speaking, a good quality backlink will have as few outbound links as possible. The total number of outbound links on a page will also have an impact on the value of a particular page.

You should also consider the possibility of buying links as a means of increasing traffíc to your site as opposed to buying links for the purpose of increasing page ranking. This could potentially provide more direct benefits and even profits for you.

Some other things to keep in mind: contextual links are supposedly seen by Google as being more natural and therefore will prioritize these over other links. .gov or .edu links are not treated as special in any way by Google so consider carefully the benefits of hostíng such links. Look for a site that has similar keywords to yours for a better ranking in Google search engine results page. Finally, it would be best to avoid purchasing a site wide text link if all the other outbound links on that site have nothing to do with the site in question.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization

In almost every case, a campaign created by a reputable search engine optimization company will eventually garner lower per-clíck costs than pay per clíck marketing for any industry. Yet using cost per clíck to compare the effectiveness of these two separate disciplines is comparing apples to, well, anything other than apples. The crucial difference between these two approaches is that pay per clíck marketing is more of an advertising ínvestment, while search engine optimization is more appropriately likened to an ínvestment in infrastructure. While both have their merits in terms of increasing a company’s online exposure, it is important to understand the differences in the respective investments and to determine why cost per clíck is not a fair indicator of the perförmance of a search engine optimization company.

Pay Per Clíck Marketing

Advertising investments of all kinds, from billboards to print ads to television spots to pay per clíck marketing, all share a common trait. They exist in the public eye for as long as a company is willing to pay for them. Stop paying, and they disappear. True, a print ad may continue to exist for a while after it runs (until the newspaper or magazine gets recycled, at least), and a television spot may get attention if it wins any awards (or winds up on YouTube). But a pay per clíck marketing campaign will simply vanish as soon as the budget is cut. This means that when a company reduces its advertising spend in this arena, it loses all of its exposure immediately.

What does this really mean? Well, for one, it means that figuring out the average per-clíck costs of a pay per clíck marketing campaign makes sense because everything happens in real time. A pay per clíck campaign will begin nearly instantly after a company signs up and pays, and it will vanish just as quickly when the company ceases payment. In other words, there is a clear delineation of when a campaign begins and when it ends.

This delineation is important, because it excludes many other potential factors that muddy the waters when you try to apply this same ROI analysis to a campaign created by a search engine optimization company.

Search Engine Optimization

As said previously, utilizing a search engine optimization company can be likened to making an ínvestment in the infrastructure of a business rather than an ínvestment in advertising. This is because with search engine optimization, there is no clear delineation of where the benefit from the campaign ends. If a business stops paying its search engine optimization company at any point after the campaign has been launched (presuming they have hired a decent search engine optimization company), there will continue to be results from that campaign for an extended period of time – usually many months or even years.

Of course, it is not recommended that any business actually quit an ongoing seo campaign because a good search engine optimization company will always be expanding and honing that campaign over time to make it more successful over the long term. However, budgets get revisited and revised. Decision makers can change. And if the budget for SEO does get cut, a business will continue to see results for long after. How, then, can you determine value on a per-clíck basis? The simple answer is that you can’t.

It should be noted that while maintaining ongoing results after payments have ceased is a big upside to search engine optimization, the inverse downside is that an effective campaign put in place by a search engine optimization company can take some time to implement, and the results may not appear for weeks or months. A search engine optimization campaign takes patience, effort, and, most of all, time. If a business needs its marketing campaign to be up and running immediately, pay per clíck marketing is going to be a better short-term choice.

Conclusion

It is important to recognize the innate differences in pay per clíck campaigns and search engine optimization when trying to quantify results. A pay per clíck marketing campaign can have a definitive beginning and end, which makes cost per clíck a good way of determining ROI. Yet the results gained from hiring a search engine optimization company, although an seo campaign can take much longer to implement, will outlast the results from a pay per clíck campaign if a business ever needs to cut spending. And this is where the notion of analyzing the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign on a cost per clíck basis breaks down.

Technorati Tags: pay per click marketing, search engine optimization