photo credit: Tony Webster

Most of them are pretty worthless: They either nave no PageRank, no traffic or allow no dofollow links (unless you upgrade and pay between $1 and $50). But there are some press release distribution sites that have PageRank, good traffic and allow links that are dofollow.

If a press release service is not syndicated by Google News, it’s plain worthless. I’ve submitted to them just to have some more meat for the story. If I would have only used services that submit to Google, you might have take that fact for granted.

By the way, there is one secret weapon in regards to press release services. It brings you the PR News Wire distribution (at least the online part) for only $350 as opposed to $650 directly. Just give me a call to find out more

photo credit: stefanopa

A few days to 1 Month
Google discovers your site and starts to index a handful pages. If your page can not be found in Google after a month, you must have committed some serious blunders.

2 to 3 Months
In the first few months Google starts to index your web site. Not all pages are indexed yet. Google determines a crawl schedule. It is very important that you add fresh, unique content at least on a weekly basis and add backlinks from relevant pages. Depending on your niche and on your efforts, the PageRank should be between 0 and 4 by now. Yes, it is true, PR4 is possible after 3 months.

6 Months
By the end of the 6th months, all your pages should be indexed completely and Google digests your backlinks to determine your ranking. Some of your keywords start to nip from the first page. You should continue to add relevant backlinks and unique content on a regular basis. The Pagerank can improve slightly.

12 – 24 Months
Now you should see a marked increase in traffic, as well as a much improved PageRank and some stable ranks for your keywords. A PageRank of 5 to 6 is possible now. If you are doing at least some things right, Google should trust your site now. But careful: don’t stop the engines now or your site will crash badly.

Another thing: Don’t expect to get a page one listing for any meaningful keyword by “investing” a couple hundred dollars. That will not happen! For any industry you will find some guys with very deep pockets. That means you are competing against real SEO budgets.

However, the power of the Internet makes sure the competition is healthy. This means that a store that’s only a few miles from your store and is nearer to a major city doesn’t mean that it will be ranking higher than you. The only way this has any of affect at all is when your store is at a large distance, over 20 miles. Then in that case, the distance becomes a factor.

You might be surprised and at the same time happy to know that it doesn’t take anything different to boost your ranking in Local Google search, it’s pretty much the same. For example, the crucial aspects such as on page and off page SEO will still play a major role in the ranking of your website. If your locally targeted website contains content that’s SEO optimized with the right keyword density, then it will definitely be ranking higher than the others.

As with any regular search engine optimization, when you use the right keywords on your site, your rankings will dramatically improve in Google’s local searches. Just make sure your address appears at various places on your website, so that it can be crawled. Also have your city name inserted in important places such as the headings and of course, the title tags. When you do this, the chances of your site coming up when someone searches using your local keywords get strong.

If you’ve tried Google SEO for a while now, you know how much value Google gives to anchor text, so it’s important to have your related local keywords in your anchor text when linking to any external site that’s relevant (Example: SEO Services Tampa). Keep in mind that Google gives high emphasis to the position of the text appearing on the page. If all your targeted keywords are brought together and aren’t spaced out, it may affect your local ranking.

Finally, you also have to keep in mind what kind of rating your business has in the offline/real world. For instance, if you own a 5 star hotel, it will automatically be ranked higher than a 3 star hotel. That’s how Google works. All those sites that have a good reputation and a well known business are going to get a higher rank in Google local searches. Apart from this, manually adding your business to Google’s local search by going to their site is a good idea. This can give you a faster ranking. Remember, the longer your business stays on their listing, the higher it will be ranked. Businesses that aren’t long term and don’t stay around for long don’t get to rank well.

Photo Credit: CMJ Stock

How long does it take until you see results? It is very difficult to give a general answer on this. Once I start on a project, you’ll usually see some kind of movement within the first 3 to 4 weeks. But that does not mean much. You will see a handful of visitors and your ranking for your targeted keywords will go from maybe nowhere to number 30 or 40.

A few weeks later,  about 6 to 8 weeks you should see some further climbing up the ranks. Your main keyword or keywords will by now probably be sitting on the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Depending on your market, that can already mean some kind of traffic, but usually it’s just a trickle.

“Since there are only 10 places and many millions of websites you can’t just expect to be lucky enough to appear on the first page for your target keyword and phrases. It takes planning, hard work and a certain amount of expertise. That’s where SEO comes in. Optimizing your website involves work both on and off of the pages. It is important that your site is built to a high standard, all the links must work and the content has to be both keyword rich and relevant.” Via google-pageone.co.uk

After 3 to 6 month, with ongoing search engine optimization work, you should see your main keyword appear on the first page of the results. And another 6 to 8 month later should be rewarded with some solid top rankings. This could mean Google #1, or at least on page 1 and within the  3 to 5.

But all this depends on so many factors, that it is very difficult to give an answer that is true for the majority of the cases. Or to state it different: I have seem sites going from nowhere (just registered) to solid top rankings with several weeks and on other sites it too almost 2 years of solid work to achieve similar results.

So, what do we learn from that? Doing the right things, doing just enough of it and your site will be at or near the top. If you want to get an idea what it takes to achieve excellent results, I suggest to read Google Ranking Factors – SEO Checklist. If you calculate several months and don’t freak out if the phone does not ring off the hook after a week or two, I can work with or for you. If you need miracles over night, go fishing elsewhere (and hope to not get caught with your pants down…).

A leading online competitive intelligence service, Experian Hitwise accounced yesterday that Google accounted for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Nov. 28, 2009. Yahoo! Search received 15.39 percent, Microsoft’s Bing 9.34 percent and Ask.com received 2.65 percent. The remaining 52 search engines that were not explicitly named in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.07 percent of U.S. searches.

If you are interested in up-to-date analysis of online trends, you can visit the Hitwise Research Blog .

This table is not completely correct. The data is obviously a little slanted towards Google. It counts ALL traffic to Google, while it only counts a small portion to Yahoo. But even if that would be compensated, my guess is that Google still get over 50% of the US search traffic.

This picture is by the way completely different for other markets. In Japan for example the word Google is almost unknown. The market leader there is Yahoo, by far. So, if you want to reach somebody in Japan, you would focus your search engine optimization efforts on Yahoo.

There are also markets where basically only Google exists as far as search engines is concerned. One example of this would be France, where Google enjoys a whopping 91% market share.

Google’s market share in France was 91.23% for February 2009. The major search engines that trailed Google were Yahoo (2.43%) and Live Search (2.29%). Source: Google Blog.

For the US market you are, at least for the time being, save if you optimize for Google. The good thing: If you have optimized your web site for Google, you are already very close to a home run on Bing and Yahoo. The differences are not that big anymore.

SEO for Bing differs not that much from Google SEO or Yahoo SEO. Reducing SERP bounces is the most important on page factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as this factor monitors how good your content is. Or better how good your content matches the “ad”. The search engine listing is nothing more than an ad. If that ad matches what you deliver, you will have happy visitors that turn into customers.

photo credit: Christopher Jeschke Stock Photo Blog

Google Top Ranking - Soar Above Your Competition

First you start with you own web site. You create a page on your site and make sure that the keyword in in the name of that page. If you ant to rank for “blue widgets”, your site should already be about “widgets” and the domain would ideally contain the term “widgets”. The full URL of your page would then be something like widgets.com/buy-blue-widgets.html.

On the page itself you would make sure that the title tag would be something like “buy blue widgets” and that the Meta description tag would contain a nice and concise description, also containing the words “buy blue widgets”.

Then you would write a nice article on “buy blue widgets” that would contain the phrase “buy blue widgets” and natural variation thereof sprinkled nicely into the text (naturally, no stuffing please). The title of your article would have “buy blue widgets” in h1 or h2 tags.

In the navigation you would link to other documents on your site about widgets and you would also link to industry or history resources on “buy blue widgets” on other sites.

Then you would build links from other pages on your site pointing to the “buy blue widgets” page, using the anchor text “buy blue widgets” and natural variations thereof. You would also build a nice video on how to use blue widgets and put it on your “blue widgets” page.

This are the main on page SEO factors and should be sufficient in most cases ( I assume that you make sure the page loads fast and the html code is readable by ‘dem’ stupid browsers).

Now you go into the off page SEO. First you check your competition. You can do that directly on Google or you can use something like nichewatch.com for example (It’s a free tool that shows you the competion for any given keyword).

Then you get a link from every (or as close to every) page that ranks well for “buy blue widgets”. With some pages it will be easy, as they might be articles on a public article directory, or on dmoz.org or other directories. If you can’t get a direct link from a particular page, you can either out-create the link or knock the page out of its place.

By out-create the link I mean that you create more links from other pages that also rank for that keyword or get links from pages that at least rank well in that niche or industry.

You might be wondering how to knock out a page from its Google listing. In short: you duplicate their link profile and then add a few more. Stay tuned for a detailed article on how to de-throne a Google listing.

Once you are par with your competition, you can throw in some additional dofollow links with your anchor text and you’re all set. If you need to find dofollow blogs, I can recommend the DoFollow Blog Directory & Compendium.