One interesting company I have encountered even calls you  by telephone to persuade you to take their Instant Google plan for a fixed monthly fee, which sounds amazing.  I had the displeasure of talking to one of their very pushy agents with a UK accent, who tried to strong arm me into taking their ‘plan’ (which sounded really dodgy), I decided to play along to find out how they operate….

Firstly they get the owner or manager on the phone and tell them their website is nowhere to be found on Google. When I was told this by the agent I was really puzzled as I get loads of traffic from Google and asked what exactly they searched for when attempting to find my site, but this information was  ‘not on hand at this time’, but they are 100% sure my site is not reaching its full potential in Google and I should consider ‘Instant Google‘.

‘OK’ I said, ‘tell me EXACTLY what you are offering’…Now I obviously know a bit about SEO and Google Adsense, so I was appalled at all the inaccuracies and blatant lies in the sales pitch, but basically this is the offer…

they will place my site INSTANTLY onto page one of Google.com (ok, within 48 hours), I just need to supply them with 5 phrases that I would like my site to appear for. Now this sounds exactly like Google Adwords right….but ‘No its NOT Adwords’, and I was assured many times over that ‘this is NOT pay per click  as the cost is set at R1300 + VAT’ (£25 in the UK), and it was rather ‘Sponsored Ads for a fixed monthly fee’ (subject to a R265 + VAT setup fee of course)

Wow, sponsored adverts on page one of Google for a fixed monthly fee!!! Imagine the possibilities….here I have clients spending tens of thousands monthly on Adwords, when they could be paying a fixed montly fee! (This was really starting to smell bad now!)

‘How can you charge a fixed monthly fee for PPC advertising’ I asked, ‘well’ the agent said (and you are gonna love this!) ‘Google subsidises the adverts for you, because of the world wide recession’!!, OMG, can you believe that! NO! LOL that is a blatant lie! but anyway there’s more…

Features of the Instant Google package are:

• Guaranteed 1st Page Listing
• Live within 48 hours
• Month by month arrangement
• 5 area targeted phrases for your business
• Tailor made adverts
• Price Freeze Guarantee
• No additional click charges!!
• Email Technical Support
• Keyphrase translation (additional charges apply)

Now this all sounds amazing for a fixed monthly fee right, I wish it were so easy and cost effective to advertise like this, it all sounds far too good to be true, because it absolutely is.

The BIG problem with this plan is that at no time are you told HOW MANY CLICKS you will receive for your set monthly fee. The fact is that depending on the bids of your competition, the Quality Score of your adverts, and your Click Through Rate for said adverts, and the amount of money the company actually allocates to your clicks, you may only get a few clicks for monthly fee before the budget allocated is depleted and your advert is removed. The company obviously needs to make a profit, so not all of your monthly fee is added to the campaign budget for your advert…how much is added is anyone’s guess.

So in reality your fixed monthly fee might only get you 5 clicks before the advert is removed, who knows, it all depends on the competition and the cost per click of the keywords you are targeting.

What is also dodgy, is that according to the agent, you don’t get access to your adwords account as ‘its their account and the adverts with it that is ’subsidised’ and they are the ones with the special ‘arrangement with Google‘, but I think its probably because they don’t want you to know how much of your monthly fee is actually going to your advertising budget…not much I would guess.

You have to also ask youself, how much of your budget is going to your own adverts, is there a possibility with such a setup and the pool of funds added to that account that your budget could be used for another companies adverts…yes it could, not saying that it is, but without transparency and access to your adwords account budget, clicks and stats, you are completely in the dark.

Interestingly, after NOT signing up with this particular company for obvious reasons, I actually landed a new client who was already using their services about a month later. My client happily showed me how their advert was displaying on Google, and as a test, they clicked their own advert, after which time (to the disgust of my client) it no longer displayed on Google for their chosen phrases. LOL, luckily for me the budget allocated to the clicks for that client had been exhausted right in front of us, and I was happy to jump in, and setup a REAL Adwords account for the client. My new client  then cancelled their monthly agreement with the company offering the Instant Google service, in favour of their own account, that they have full control over, managed by us on their behalf.

Now my client has full access to all their stats, can create as many adverts and choose as many key phrases as they want for their campaign, there are no limits! The client is also able to get far more mileage out of their monthly budget because they know ALL of what they put into the campaign is used exclusively for their adverts.

So strictly speaking, companies offering the Instant Google service might not be breaking any rules, but in my opinion, what they are doing is misleading people who have no idea what Adwords is and how it works.

The client I got honestly believed their site was simply bumped to the top of ORGANIC search results, and had no idea what Adwords was all about. The client thought that their site would feature at the top of page one 24hours a day, 7 days a week, as long as they paid their fixed monthly fee, regardless of clicks, this is simply NOT true.

According to Google (View here):

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.

For another account of the same type of practice, check out SEO Scotland who had a similar bad experience.

If you want your website to rank well on Google, get a professional company to show you ALL the options available to you, and do some research before signing anything. I can recommend Gotaclick because I am associated with them, check out SEO Cape Town

You can get an invite directly from Google (https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/) or you can be invited by an existing member, which is why there are so many people simply asking and begging existing members for a spare invitation. Twitter is riddled with people blatantly asking for invitations, and I have heard of people actually selling them to others! If you want to see the chatter, follow the hashtag #googlewaveinvite on twitter.

I am lucky enough to still have some invites available, and have allocated 15 out of my stash to give away to desperate people in need on an invite.

I will be randomly choosing 15 names from the people who tweet or comment on this post, and inviting them to Google Wave. I will choose 5 random names from people who tweet, 5 from people who comment using a disqus profile, and 5 from people who comment using a non-disqus profile.

If for some reason very few people comment or tweet this post, then everyone will get an invite.

Having your anchor text in the backlink set as your target key phrase, should make your site rank better for that key phrase, basically increasing its relevancy for that phrase. There is a theory that even a blank page can rank high on search engines if there is enough backlinks with the same anchor text linking to it.

An extreme version of this technique has been called a ‘Google Bomb’, ‘Link Bomb’, or ‘Google Washing’, which is basically when thousands of websites all link to one site, all using the same anchor text, so as to manipulate the search engine results. These days Google has changed a few things so that extreme versions are not as easy to create as they were back in the day. Google needs to deliver Relevant results to its customers, and if the results are incorrect, due to a Google bomb, it would have unhappy users, hence the change. For some information on famous Google Bombs, visit Wikipedia

Another important part of your link building efforts is getting websites with a high Google Pagerank to link to your website. Many of the link exchange pages on websites specify that they only exchange links with websites that have a high PR, or a Pagerank of at least 3 or 4, with the purpose of getting good quality inbound links to the website.

At the end of the day, if you are trying to get good rankings for your website, you will be wanting to get loads of backlinks, especially those with a high pagerank.

Now for the cool stuff!

When you are trying to get your website ranked above your competitors in the search engine results, its a great idea to see where their backlinks are coming from, what anchor text was used, and the pagerank of the site the backink is on.

I like to use a tool called Link Diagnosis, which allows you to put in a url, and get a list of all the backlinks pointing to that domain.

Creating a report showing the links to a website shows the Pagerank of the inbound links, the anchor text used, if each link is No-follow, how many outbound links are on that page, and the strength of that link! Awesome!

With this information you will be able to visit all the same high PR and quality sites linking to a competitor website, and see if its possible to add your own link there too, or even better, if you can get your link listed instead of the competitor website.

Using this method is a really easy way to find a great list of websites that you could possibly exchange links with, or event better, to build a one-way link to your site with.

I suggest you start with the websites that have a PR over 2 for best results. What I like about Link Diagnosis, is that you can arrange all the links displayed in order of Pagerank and link strength, as well as the fact that you can register as a member, and save your reports online, not to mention export them to a spreadsheet.

Another great website that I like to use is called Check Backlink (http://www.check-backlink.com), which offers a similar service. I like both these websites and use them both quite often. I find that although Check Backlink is not as comprehensive as Link Diagnosis, it is a fast way to do a quick check when doing research, while Link Diagnosis is a tad slow sometimes.

Need to build quality one-way backlinks FAST?

If you are looking to build quality backlinks fast, I can suggest http://www.textlinks.com, if you sign up for free, you can place 25 permanent links. Obviously it would be better to pay the $99 a month and be able to place 100 links per month, but I like the fact that you can sign up and test the system before buying. Even if you don’t purchase, your 25 links are permanent and will remain.

Users are able to search accounts and follow each other, as well as re-post other users content. You have the option to post text, images, video and audio for each post which is pretty awesome. I am not sure on the character limit for text posts, but its pretty big, not like twitter’s at all.

Photos can be uploaded from the local computer system or by pasting a link into the upload form directly.
Videos are currently only accepted from Youtube and Vimeo and music can be pasted as a link that needs to point to an mp3 file on the Internet.

At the moment, Yahoo Meme is in testing mode, so you can only get access if you are invited by someone else who already has an account. A new user is getting 15 invites to pass out right now.

So…..who wants an invitation? There are loads of good user names still available, so now is your chance to sneak the cool ones before everyone else!

Link pirates are guys who try to trick you into linking to their website. The way it works, is that you will receive an email requesting a 3 way link exchange with one of your sites. 3 Way links are better than straight link exchanges, so many people jump at the chance of setting these up. The person emailing you will try to make the email look as legit as possible with a request for you to link to their site, and might even include the html for you, to make your life easier.

The scam comes when they link back to your site from another site (the third site in the 3 way link setup). This part is actually pretty clever, but just plain wrong. They will include the details of the page where they are linking back to your site, where you can check your link. The ingenious part, is that the site linking back to yours, has absolutely nothing to do with them! You assume that they have placed the link back to your site, when in reality, they are showing you a page where your link already exists. This is easy to pickup if you dont have many links, but when you have websites with hundreds of inbound links, and you are NOT using any link management software, its easy to forget a site that linked to you a year or more back.

Over the last few months I have even had a few cases where the link that was provided, showing how they have already linked back to me, was actually one of my own other sites!

The sad thing is that loads of people actually fall for it, and give these guys a link back to their website. This sort of underhanded link building is not cool, and really pisses me off.

I think what these pirates do, is visit your links page, and pick any one of the sites you are already linking to, OR, simply do a search on google for your domain name, and an unassuming site linking to yours. They then ask for a 3 way link exchange, and tell you they have already linked to you, and provide that link as proof.

What steps to take?

I have noticed that most of these guys use free email accounts, so immediately question requests from these guys.

Check how far down the list of links on the page your link is positioned. If your link is genuinely new, its more likely to be right at the top or bottom, not lost among loads of others on the page.

See if you can check when the page where you link has be ‘placed’ was last updated.

If all else fails, ask that the person changes the title of your link to something else, if they can do that, then you will link back. This is a sure fire way to check that the person really does have control of that links page.

On a final note, I have seen at least person using the same technique to build links, who actually has a real domain registered, so they dont use a free email address. The emails in question (I have received several dubious emails from them on different sites I manage) have come from a domain seohunts.com. I checked up on the domain and it is registered to an indian company. If you get any requests from people using the domain seohunts.com, BEWARE!!! Every email I have had from them, has been a pirate one. They have a lame ass website which is obviously designed just to give them more credibility if and when you check up on them.

The solution would probably be to be VERY careful who you link to (which seems to be good practice anyway), or maybe to use some software to manage your link exchanges.

I would be interested to see what link exchange software some of you use to manage your links….post a comment and let me know.

Cheers for now

You only get to choose your username once, and it cant be changed or transferred, so you MUST choose wisely.

On the Facebook blog:

Username selection is now live at http://www.facebook.com/username/. Remember, choosing a username is optional and will give you a distinct Web address for your profile. It will not change the name that appears on your profile, in search or elsewhere on the site.

Facebook go on to say:

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google

This is pretty interesting, as FB is a really powerful domain name, it could be great to have a keyword or phrase as your username for one of your Facebook pages, or even your own username. Surely it will display a URL from Facebook in the search results for that term somewhere, and any little bit helps right. Even if the username pages are not any help for google searches, time will tell if it will help with internal searches on Facebook, and hey, if you give out your profile to clients, wouldnt it be cool if they could see your product/services etc in the name, more professional I think.

Usernames allow public entities to easily promote your presence on Facebook with a short URL (http://www.facebook.com/companyname). This username can be used in your marketing communications, company website and business cards.

I was able to get: facebook.com/searchengine.optimization.expert for myself, so I can now give that out for my personal profile. I also have loads of Facebook pages, and tried securing names for them, but was not able to for all. At the moment, FB knows there are going to be loads of people trying to secure names for their pages, so they have set limits.

The limits are temporary, and are to allow pages with more than 1000 fans, that were created before 31 May 2009, to get first dibs.

Check out the rules here: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900

If you are new to Facebook, you will only be able to choose a username for yourself on or after June the 9th, 2009.

So….get cracking! Go out and secure your names, using the keywords that you want to be found with….let me know what you choose.

I use websites like Twitter all the time, and see loads of shortened URL’s being used, and every time I see one I dont recognize, I go check out the website, to see what they have to offer. Some of the websites simply create a shortened URL, that redirects to your website link, these ones sometimes expire after a certain amount of time, so beware!

I absolutely hate tinyurl.com, and think the only reason it has been so popular, is because it was one of the first, and because it was super simple to instantly shorten a url, no login or account required.

That being said, one that I have come to really like is called Trim (http://tr.im), and is one of those ‘no hassle’ websites we all like. Its possible to sign up for free, and be using their services in no time whatsoever.

What I like about their service, is that you have a record of all your shortened URL’s, and can see stats on them at any time.  Another great feature, is the option to automatically tweet your links as you make them, which is pretty sweet. For me though, the icing on the cake is the ability to custom make your url! Yep, you heard me, you can customize your URL, eg http://tr.im/FrancoisHarris will take you through to this blog!

Another really good one is http://bit.ly, which seems to have the same functionality as http://tr.im, also allowing you to also create a custom URL, and track the click through stats, as well as giving you the option to tweet your shortened URL. It also seems that bit.ly and twitter are good friends too, as twitter is using them for url shortening now.

One downfall Trim and Bitly both seem to have, is that I am not able to edit the destination URL AFTER it has been created.

I would like to be able to use affiliate links for instance, so that they are shortened and I can track the clicks, but what happens if I want to change the destination URL to a different provider, but keep the custom URL I have created? It would be far better to edit the destination URL, than to go through all my old websites, changing all the shortened URL’s. ClickAudit was able to do this, and it was one of their great features.

I do realize that these services are designed primarily for shortening the length of a URL, and NOT for tracking affiliate clicks, but why cant they be used for both?

I would love to hear what services you are all using, and what makes them so special, please feel free to post a comment.

Cheers for now

We began by cleaning up the coding on the website. A couple of years of subtle changes, tweaks, script changes etc had taken its toll, and due to laziness or bad workmanship, the code was splattered with snippets of left over code.

We cleaned up the code, removed all unnecessary coding, made sure the site validated as valid xhtml and css on W3C and streamlined the site. We wanted to also reduce the number of http requests to the server, so we combined images and used hotspots on the images to link to pages. The load time difference after changing the images was not noticable, and the file sizes were similar, but the http requests was cut in half.

We created a favicon image for the site, our reasoning was that we didnt want any errors when loading the site, and Google has the option of showing search results witht the icons of the sites displayed.

We combined all the javascripts in the site into one external javascript file, and moved the script to the base of the html.

We optimized all the remaining images on the website, making them faster to load, and streamlined the text, optimizing it for the target key phrase.

The good news is that in a two week period, the site jumped from page 3 position 6 on Google, to Page 1 position 10. Obviously the ranking is changing all the time, as Google re-crawls each page in the top pages and re-shuffles the sites, but hopefully the site will carry on up the charts.

The main changes to the site allowed it to load in half the original time, with fewer requests, and more valid and streamlined code. Score!

According to the Google help page:
(https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6100&hl=en_US)

What are keyword matching options?

There are four different keyword matching options, each specifying a different way for a keyword to interact with search queries. With some options, you’ll enjoy more ad impressions, clicks, and conversions; with others, you’ll get fewer impressions and more narrow targeting. By applying the appropriate matching options to your keywords, you can best meet your ROI goals.

Your options are:

Broad Match – This is the default option. If your ad group contained the keyword tennis shoes, your ad would be eligible to appear when a user’s search query contained tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads could also show for singular/plural forms, synonyms, and other relevant variations. For example, you ad might show on tennis shoe or tennis sneakers. Run a Search Query Performance Report to see what keyword variations trigger your ad. Check out this blog post to learn how broad match can help you reach more customers (English only).

Phrase Match – If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in “tennis shoes,” your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches on the phrase tennis shoes, in this order, and possibly with other terms before or after the phrase. For example, your ad could appear for the query red tennis shoes but not for shoes for tennis, tennis shoe, or tennis sneakers. Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, but more flexible than exact match.

Exact Match – If you surround your keywords in brackets — such as [tennis shoes] — your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches for the specific phrase tennis shoes, in this order, and without any other terms in the query. For example, your ad wouldn’t show for the query red tennis shoes or tennis shoe. You likely won’t receive as many impressions, clicks, or conversions with exact match as you would with broad match. However, if you’ve carefully constructed a comprehensive keyword list, the traffic you do receive may be more targeted to your product or service.

Negative Keyword – If your keyword is tennis shoes and you add the negative keyword -red, your ad will not appear when a user searches on red tennis shoes. Negative keywords are especially useful if your account contains lots of broad-matched keywords. It’s a good idea to add any irrelevant keyword variations you see in a Search Query Performance Report or the Keyword Tool as a negative keyword. Learn more.

Remember, no matter which matching options you use, it’s important to only use keywords that accurately describe your product or service.

What I like about this whole system is that if you use these options together, you can creat an embedded match, which is able to help you run an incredibly effective campaign.

Setting up an Embedded Match

To start a basic embedded match campaign, setup three different adverts for the same website, these adverts are going to be shown at the same time, but to different users, depending what they search for. As such, each advert should be targeted for that specific user/visitor profile.

Advert 1 = Exact match advert

Make sure all the key phrases in this advert are in [square brackets]

Advert 2 = Phrase Match

Make sure all the phrases in this advert are in “quotation marks”. Once you have these setup, also add negative -[exact match] key phrases, use the same ones as in your first advert. What you are doing here, is targeting the phrase, but NOT showing the advert at all for the exact matches on advert one. So advert 1 and advert 2 will always be shown seperately.

eg: “key phrase 1″, “key phrase 2″, -[key phrase]

Advert 3 = Broad Match

In this advert, simply type the target key phrases without the square brackets or quotation marks. Once you have all your key words, also add negative “key phrases”, so that your advert is not shown when a user searches using your exact phrase. eg: key phrase 1, key phrase 2, -”key phrase”

By doing all of this, you have segmented your target audience, and can create adverts specifically for each demographic. If you think of a dart board or target, your bulls eye is the traffic from advert 1, the second ring is the traffic from advert 2, and the third ring, is the traffic from advert 3.

That is how you setup an Embedded Match. Hope you find this useful, it works like a charm for me

Cheers for now

Google describes PageRank as:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

For more information on PageRank, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Apparently the actual update was on the 30th of December, so many people will start to see changes on the search engines over the new year and the beginning of 2009. If anyone is interested, SEO Company has a page showing updates, I dont know how accurate it is, or how up to date, but it has some interesting info anyway.

Sadly, not everyone is going to benefit from the changes, there are many sites that will drop in PageRank, but I suppose not everyone can be a winner, there has to be a loser too

The sites I noticed the biggest change on, were the ones that I have been working hard on with on-page SEO, as well as making them faster loading, valid xhtml and css, cross browser compliant.

Lets hope that 2009 is a good year for all our websites, good luck to all!