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

Does your Online Reputation look foggy?

The bad results have usually some “juice” behind them. And very often the bad results reside on trusted web sites, like government pages or web sites from Newspapers etc. If you want to push these negative results off their places, you need much more than just creating a few social media profile pages.

The profile pages that you have created in order to outrank the negative results need to be charged with some serious link juice. After they are charged up with link juice, they can start to outrank your bad stuff. How much link juice you will need, depends a lot on what kind of PageRank you target has. The higher the PageRank, the more effort in necessary in order to outrank them.

Google, Bing and Yahoo gives a lot of trust to government web sites. The same is true for web sites from newpapers and other media. If they have published some negative items about you or your company, you basically have to outrank them with your good results.

It took years for these web sites to build up to the size that they have now. So, you can not expect to easily outrank them with some cheap social media profile pages without any further work.

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: davedehetre

Keyword Stuffing

This is undoubtedly one of the biggest and the most expensive mistakes one can make. You can also call the act of keyword stuffing “over optimizing”. A lot of people and web designers feel that when they add a desired keyword into the content of a page and its template, they will increase the chances of getting ranked higher. However, one must keep in mind that the search engines are intelligent. They look for a natural flow of keywords within the content body of the site. If you try to stuff your page with keywords, then it will be detected by them very easily. It’s usually fairly easy to satisfy the search engines: Just write naturally. The keyword density will most likely be fine. If your site offers good, fresh, quality content and the keywords are relevant to the theme of your site, then the search engines will reward you with a good ranking.

Build It, and It Will Rank

It’s hard to believe but there are still people out there who have this assumption that all they need to do is get their site indexed, search engines will rank it automatically in good positions over time. But they forget the fact that by injecting even the basic SEO practices into their website, they can rank better than the others. If a site is badly optimized, the chances are high that it will never be able to get a good ranking. Getting top search engine positions is not difficult, you have to do your homework first and implement the optimization process as much as you can, in a natural way.

Just Depending on Social Media

As we all know, social networking sites have gained a lot of popularity in the recent few months and there’s a big buzz around these, especially Twitter and Facebook. The reason is that they have spread by word of mouth and have made their way into people’s lives, becoming a need to them. But are they any good when it comes to link building? The right answer is they are worthless for SEO purposes. Facebook and Twitter might spit out quality traffic from time to time, but the backlinks you get from them are “No Follow”. This simply means that you won’t be getting any leverage from the links on these social sites. If you have been dependent on such sites to give you link juice, then you better start looking elsewhere.

Building Links Unethically

This is a serious issue that is growing day by day due to heavy competition. Many websites nowadays are trying to improve their rankings by unethical link building. There are unethical SEO companies out there who promise to give websites a large amount of links fast and easy. Even though they do deliver results and the links are indeed generated, the manner in which it is done is totally unethical and this could ultimately have your website banned from the search engines for indulging into unethical practices. If you’re outsourcing your work to a SEO company, make sure you know how the links are being generated, so that you avoid to get into trouble.

SEO or How to Get 'em boats out of da 'arbor                         Photo © CMJ Stock

When you are surfing the web, you may have noticed many websites with huge content on board yet with a few visitors. (You can get an idea how much traffic a web site has by checking it out at alexa.com.) Have you ever though why this is the case, I mean the little traffic? The only thing that they are lacking (assuming that they have sufficient and proper content) is search engine optimization. If that content and the website is correctly optimized for the search engines, it can drive a huge amount of traffic.

The search engine optimization aims at preparing the website to attain a better rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that the search engine optimization will involve refreshing every aspect of the website. Beginning from the URL and content, you will slowly be building links and will be working on submitting articles to article directories (Best bet here is www.ezinearticles.com) containing links to your website. All this is part of search engine optimization (SEO) and it is extremely important for the success of any online business. You will not get sales if you have not enough targeted visitors coming to your website.

Remember that believing that the visitors will come naturally to the website is a false concept. All you need to do to reject this belief is to make a search related to your keywords. How many pages do you see? A million or a thousand? Whatever the figure is, it is still huge. You will have to do things and you will need to put in effort in order to stand apart from others. Any natural or organic traffic will not come to your website if you are not located on the very first page of the search engine results.

If you have optimized your website, you might like to say that it cannot do anymore than what it is already doing. This again is not true. You can always improve anything and your websites is no exception. You can hire a search engine optimization professional and you will see the difference. Remember that hiring a professional is a job in itself and you must make sure that you are hiring the right person. Never believe in hiring the very first person who comes your way. Always perform tests and conduct interviews. Make sure that you are getting the best for your search engine optimization campaign.

Make sure that you are always adding excellent content on a regular basis to your website. All your search engine optimization efforts will dead end if you are not paying special attention to the content. Also make sure that the content is unique and is not copied from anywhere else (If in doubt, run it through copyscape.com).

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…).

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. (A quote from Google Webmaster Guidelines.)

Often it is very obvious which link is good and which link is not good. If the links points to some bad site or a site that is doing something fishy, you are doomed if you link there. Also sites that use questionable techniques are not recommenced as online friends.

But sometimes the badness of a link can be nicely hidden. Here is an example:

The other day I found a comment on this post High PR Web 2.0 Properties for Link Building in SEO :

Looked to me like a relevant comment. I checked the URL and it looked fine too, so I went ahead and approved the comment.

Fast forward to today. I found this little tool on www.davidairey, to check good and bad link neighborhoods:
Text Link Checker Tool. I keyed in my domain and wham -  it spit out all my links and gives some data on it. To my surprise I learned that I was linking to a bad neighborhood:

I thought “that is strange”, I am not aware that I ever linked to that domain. “Was my blog hacked? Did I use an infected plugin?” Well, nothing that serious. I scrolled up and found this:

As the comments on this blog are nofollow anyhow and this particular page (fwisp.com) is only a bookmarking page, that can be used by anyone, there is no real danger in it. But I added bad neighborhood link checking to my routines for all my sites and all my customers sites.

If you hire an SEO company, remember to ask them to also check your links according to this.

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.

In Real Life You Fix Your Reputation with a Rose - Online Reputation Management is Different

Photo credit: Small Rose by Christopher Jeschke CMJ Photography

That’s not good! But it can be handled. Here is how it is done: First you isolate the listing or listings that you want to attack. Then you decide how to go about it. Usually it is best to start a campaign to outrank the bad stuff immediately. Sometimes it is also possible to yank the negative listing out of place. This can by done by direct communication, indirect communication (legal means).

The best approach to fix your online reputation is in most cases to just plainly outrank the bad stuff with your good content. There is an excellent article on marketingpilgrim.com where Andy Beal describes in detail on Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results.

You can use Social Media Sites to get your online reputation back under control. If you want to know how to do it, you can see what David Wallace suggests in an article titled Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation.

But if you only address the search results, you are only treating the result, not the cause. In each case it is necessary to also address the root of the problem. Listen to the person that spreads the bad news if you want to improve your online reputation. Sometimes the things are justified or at least have some truth to it.  If you are willing to listen, it is very often possible to get the bad news removed and turn that disgruntled person into a firm believer.

It is also important for your reputation management to monitor what is being said about you online. You can use Google alerts, Yahoo alerts, RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse and  Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com as suggested in Basics of Online Reputation Management.

If you don’t want to do the reputation management yourself, you can always hire me and I’ll get that stuff handled.