Effective basics

1) Google loves websites with many backlinks. Of course you can enter into the debate on whether Google loves quality or quantity when it comes to backlinks, but suffice it to say, backlinks are still a huge factor in Google. Most people recommend foregoing quantity in favor of “high-quality” links. This phrase is subject to interpretation, but to most people it means links from related pages. The older the domain holding the related page, the better. Quantity of links tends to be in the form of many unrelated links in footers and blog rolls. From what I’ve seen, both methods are still valid if followed with enthusiasm.

2) Careful on-page construction is a key to a high ranking. Most pros don’t overlook the careful construction of the on-page factors that lead to high rankings. On-page factors are something that webmasters have complete control over, so it’s definitely an area to consider. One nice thing about on-page optimization is that you can easily tweak the pages and experiment. There’s no good reason to ignore the obvious.

3) Google loves “authority.” In the last few years Google has become enthralled with the concept of “authority” and “trust” and has created a rather convoluted system to measure it. Once a website has been conferred authoritative and trusted, they seem to get a boost that helps lift even mediocre pages on their domain to a higher status. This is opposed to how it was several years back when Google would let each page fight it out on its own. The concept of authority and trust are well worth investigating if you’re looking to optimize your site for higher rankings.

4) Outgoing links. Not only are the links that point to you important, but so are the websites you point to. It’s easy to understand this concept as “the company you keep.” If you link to low quality resources and your website is linked to from low quality websites, Google could infer that your website is also low quality.

The progression of the years has seen Google’s algo get more sophisticated. But at its core the same essential principles that always applied still do apply. Your website is judged by a number of criteria that is not fully understood by anyone outside of Google. Based on continued observation, certain core principles have emerged. If you follow these principles, success will likely follow.

1) Do you still have pages indexed in Google? If not, you’re likely banned. If the site command shows nothing, you have probably been dropped from their index.
2) Do you rank for your own unique domain name? If you don’t, you likely have incurred a penalty. It’s not severe enough to keep you completely out of the index, and can probably be fixed on its own.

But if you still rank for your own domain name and you have plenty of indexed pages and incoming links, the problems gets a bit murkier. Add in the fact you may even have “sitelinks” to your website and the situation is downright cloudy.

“Domain trust”, “authority,” and “TrustRank” are all concepts that explain away the symptoms, but with no official word from Google, it’s all speculation.

In any event, I witnessed this phenomena again on 4/8/2009. Something “removed the filter” from one of my websites and a massive amount of long tail traffic returned to the logs. By the 12th it was gone again.

To me that looked like Google did some testing of user data signals and shit-canned the results for further study. Of course it could be something unrelated. Since I’m not privy to Google’s internal thinking, I can simply guess.

I have to admit that “All or nothing” form or ranking certainly does appear Draconian.

There’s no rule that says you have to follow everyone who follows you. Some do it because they think it looks like they’re interested in the law of reciprocity. But as the numbers of people following you go into the hundreds of thousands, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be personally communicating with everyone. So why fake it?

The larger your list of followers, the less likely personal communications remains the goal of your Twitter use

Once your list of followers becomes very large, the interpersonal aspects of Twitter start to lose appeal, and the marketing and broadcasting aspects of the new medium become more obvious. The potential for Twitter as a boon to marketing is not lost anyone who is trying to get the word out to the masses about a complimentary product or service.

Twitter is unique in that it limits messages to 140 characters, but since you can include a URL in your message, the limitation hardly matters. It’s a great way to point people to content or products on your website that might be of interest. In many ways, broadcasting to Twitter can replace many functions of email and email newsletters. Your followers are, in essence, a list of interested people who have “opted-in” to receive updates about you or your company.

Twitter can out-RSS RSS

Clearly there’s some overlap between this idea and what RSS if currently used for. But it’s not hard to imagine a world where Twitter is much more popular than RSS and people end up using Twitter in ways that RSS was originally intended for. As stated, a follower can get a list of interesting links from someone they’ve chosen to follow, but they can go one step further and actually respond to the link (assuming they’re being followed back). This provides instant feedback, and makes broadcasting through Twitter even more valuable than broadcasting your updates through RSS.

How many people in the real world interact with 300,000 people? Not many. But on Twitter, many accounts have reached these dizzying heights. Of course these accounts are maintained by people or organizations who generally have enormous “followings” offline.

Syndication is another no-brainer use of Twitter and many companies are already using the service in this manner. Again, Twitter is a one way communication tool when used in this way.

As Twitter continues to grow, more and more unintended uses for the service are bound to arise from the muck. With evolution, Twitter may even replace some of the current standards of online communication. Certainly using Twitter has a broadcast medium will be one of them.

The announcement has already kicked off a bit of a flurry of opposition. That’s not unusual when Google first unveils a new project. Personally I’m of the “wait and see” school on the subject. Google Adsense targeting has been particularly woeful of late, and that makes me want Google to innovate.

Why remain complacent when it looks like Adsense revenue is drying up? If ads can be exceptionally well targeted and they bring results to advertisers while not distracting visitors, I’m all for it. Google is nothing if they don’t continue to adapt, evolve, and innovate in the search market.

Global business trends are down right now, so the only way to keep going forward for G is to make decisions that improve the user experience for site visitors and also give advertisers a fair shake for their money.

Google interest-based ads will be phased in over the next month.

Advertisers have been cutting ad budgets around the world.

Advertisers are cutting their ad budgets, especially the companies who are losing money. This means less big money ad campaigns are running than were in the past. Certainly online ads offer some real advantages over their offline counterparts. They’re easy to track, and highly targetable. Even given these advantages, it’s reasonable to assume that low sales are forcing companies to cut back on spending, offline and on.

The presence of shady offers indicates that Advertiser quality is at a low point. Many current Google Ads don’t lead directly to an advertiser landing page, but instead to a third party. Make sure to read the terms carefully, because a large number of these ads will end up with you incurring recurring credit card charges. Not exactly the type of product most people want to be in a recession.

Of course Google isn’t alone in selling these types of ads. They’re running through multiple networks. A new rash of “$12,000 Obama Stimulus Check” ads can be seen across all of the web’s most prestigious websites.

Adsense targeting ain’t what it used to be

Either Adsense targeting has gone downhill, or the dearth of good ads is just becoming painfully obvious. Either way, you can expect to see some pretty off-kilter ads these days. In the past, Google seemed to value relevancy above all else. Now they appear happy to get whatever cash they can for ads.

The really scammy ads are perplexing, though, from a business standpoint. If people are continuously present ads that lead to scam landing pages, eventually they’ll come to associate all “Ads by Google” with being of low value. When this happens in earnest, banner blindness becomes the norm. Google would seemingly be better served running tight controls over the types of offers in their system, but editorial control doesn’t appear to be a strong suit.

Google has been one of the best performing companies in business since they went public, but like anyone else, they’ll need to continue to upgrade their business model and current practices in order to expand their ad program and make more money.

Hopefully the quality of advertisers will improve in the next few months. That way website owners and visitors will enjoy a better experience than the one they’re currently getting.

On-page optimization along with gaining TrustRank work well. Of course these terms are relatively meaningless for many, and YMMV, but obviously Google likes well structured web pages on domains they “trust” to rank. Take a gander at any of the millions of pages that rank in top spots for WikiPedia. These pages are text-dense, have a wide variety of incoming links, and reference external trusted web pages.

Your website won’t have anywhere the “trust” that WikiPedia has, at least not for broad terms. But you can work on gaining trust for subsets of important keywords. The way to do this is to stay topically focuses on a specific niche. If you devote your time to top-notch content creation, make sure your mechanical SEO is in place, you’ll likely acquire the bank link profile needed to rank well for a wide variety of keywords in a given category.

Search engine optimization is only one part of the internet marketing puzzle

It’s no secret that the fields of search engine marketing, public relations, and SEO interlap in many areas. To be ignorant of the capabilities of any of these disciplines is a way to short-change your online efforts. The people who use a synthesized approach to the task of online marketing don’t neglect one area in the favor of another. They attempt to balance their efforts across a multitude of mediums from social networks to offline publicity.

Google follows success and builds their algorithm around what they know historically represents “quality” in websites. That’s why you see so many of the same types of pages presented in their search engine results year after year. Their model for what constitutes authoritative pages doesn’t seem to be changing that quickly. Building your websites for long term success is the simplest way to build web pages with durable rankings.

The secondary online advertising market has been drying up a bit

Lately, second tier ad companies have been announcing troubles at a quickening rate. Blog networks are shutting their doors, and less ad money is going out to the throngs of bloggers who have started up in the last few years, intent on making money during the internet Gold Rush.

Less money going to online advertising might just mean increased revenues for SEO companies, who give customers a chance at lasting traffic, rather than just selling them disposable clicks. These near-permanent effects are enticing to advertisers who have to decide how to effectively spend their online budget. SEM, social media optimization, and SEO promise to have strong years because many of the leading companies have built ongoing relationships with clients who can clearly see the benefits of their online spends.

Google spends a lot of time these days weighing domains for their relative merits, and not just ranking the internet on a per page basis like they used to. A few years back it was relatively easy, okay, I mean really easy, to get pages to rank for long tail search based on good mechanical SEO techniques. Now it’s not quite so easy. Certainly part of the reason is your competitors are wise to the effects, and most popular content management systems are built on solid SEO fundamentals.

Now mechanical SEO is a given. It’s something you must do. But you won’t suddenly be number one just because you’ve taken the time to built your website in an SEO-friendly manner. That’s just the beginning.

Once you’ve handle the basics, the rest of your job is making your website attractive to visitors and other webmasters who might link to you. You do this my specializing in something, or by offering something other websites don’t have.

Failing that, you can make sure you execute at a high level and produce really outstanding content. It’s tougher than ever in a very crowded field these days, but with the right mindset and proper practices, you can create lasting content that stands out from the crowd.

If your website passes muster with the masses, you’ll end up getting the kinds of links you need that establish your reputation online. Once your trust is established, and your mechanical SEO is without peer, you’ll see the strong results that you once thought reserved for others.

Keep returning until the well runs dry

Once you notice people hitting your website based on a certain search phrase, use the knowledge to build ancillary support for the terms. Add more pages about what they’re looking for, and extend your archive in that direction. When you stop getting new results, then you’re free to quit. The well has run dry and you can move on.

Find additional keywords to mine

Once you’ve exhausted some of the obvious log file related words, move on to more keyword development. Google provides a handy keyword tool that can help you find more concepts easily.

Test the waters by going for a few long-tail phrases and see what the cat drags in. For bloggers, look at this task as a writing exercise. If you start to drive new traffic to your website, you can again expand on what people are searching for by adding more pages.

The circle continues again, until that well runs dry. When it does.

Find another well

Never be complacent because you’ve managed to get some traffic from Google. They handle 70% of the searches on the Internet, so you better believe they can always send you more people.

Another simple way to research keywords is to enter the beginnings of a phrase in the Google search form. They will “auto suggest” more variations that are presumably derived from actual terms people are entering.

Build on these terms by writing new compositions. Watch what variations people search for, and continue to build ancillary terms.

This approach isn’t for everyone, but for search engine marketers who enjoy writing, it’s an easy way to find new sources of traffic. For bloggers, this method should be fun and profitable.

Remember, the Internet is huge and there’s always new sources of traffic. Don’t be alarmed when one well dries up, with careful effort you can replace that one with much more valuable ones.

Now reality is settling in. For many of us, life in the Search Engine Marketing arena really isn’t doing that poorly. For others, the end seems to be coming soon. People who’ve built their online business around products shouldn’t be hurting nearly as bad as people who just “blogged.”

When all is said and done business always functions better when someone buys something from someone else. Sure, there are tons of variations on this basic premise, but e-commerce and online ad revenues function great when people are buying. For information-only content providers, this fact has long been realized.

The best visitor for Google Adsense is the same one who’s best for affiliate programs. It’s the customer who is researching a product, right before the purchase.

If the advertiser makes money on a visitor referred from your website, they’ll be happy to pay you handsomely. That’s just how the world works. If I’m making money, I have no problem paying you money. When the customers are “tire-kickers” advertisers start to feel like they’re losing bucks buying your traffic. They slow down their spends and lower their bids.

The next time someone out there complains about blogging revenue (or any online revenue) being down, be kind to them, but do a reality check on their website. If it’s clear they’re not really talking about products, or steering conversations towards products in some way, you may have found the culprit.

When somebody on your site buys something from someone else’s website, you make good cash. You make even more selling a product directly.

If you’re only blogging with the idea of sharing information, you’ll need massive amounts of traffic to earn your living.

This is happening on every page for every result.

Even the word “Help” turns up the same warning. HELP! It looks like I better be careful where I click, or I could end up in dire trouble.

What a scary place Google is today.