7 Secrets to High Google Rankings: By Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Secret #1: How to Gauge the Missed Opportunity Costs Calculate the missed opportunity cost of not ranking well for products and services that you offer? # of people searching for your keywords engine share (Google = 60%) expected click-through rate average conversion rate average transaction amount x x x x Or being outranked by affiliates of your own company name - like Bissell.com is for "Bissell cleaners” and LernerCatalog.com is for "Lerner catalog"? E.g.10,000/day x 60% x 10% x 5% x $100 = $3,000/day

How Frequently Are People Searching For My Keywords? Tools to check popularity of keyword searches Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com) WordTracker.com Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com Google’s Keyword Tool Google Trends Google Suggest

Overture Keyword Selector Tool Pros Free! Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (including all searches on Yahoo!) Cons Variations of keywords are aggregated (e.g. verb tenses, plural & singular, misspellings) Rife with bogus data from automated searches Only a month’s data. No historical archives.

Keyword Popularity – According to Yahoo!

WordTracker.com Pros Cons Based on last 60 days worth of searches Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel, synonyms, … Cons Requires subscription fee ($260/year) Data is from a small sample of Internet searches (from the minor search engines Dogpile and MetaCrawler) Contains bogus data from automated searches No historical archives

Keyword Popularity – According to WordTracker

KeywordDiscovery.com Pros Cons Full year of historical archives Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (9 billion searches compiled from 37 engines) Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out Can segment by country Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel, synonyms, … Cons Access to the historical data requires subscription fee (~$30/month) Contains bogus data from automated searches

Keyword Popularity – According to KeywordDiscovery

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Pros Free! (Must have an AdWords account though) Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (from Google) Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out Can segment by country Synonyms Cons No hard numbers Augment this tool with other free Google tools: Google Suggest (labs.google.com/suggest) Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)

Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Keyword Popularity – According to Google Trends

Keyword Popularity – According to Google Suggest

How To Factor in Competitiveness When Looking at Keywords? Competition for that keyword should also be considered Calculate KEI Score (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator) = ratio of searches over number of pages in search results The higher the KEI Score, the more attractive the keyword is to target (assuming it’s relevant to your business)

Secret #2: How to Make Your Pages “Sing” Each web page should have a unique keyword focus (i.e. every page has a “song”) The higher up in the HTML on the page, the more weight the keyword is given Have at least 200-250 words per page Title tag is most important element on the page Home page is the most important page

Secret #2: How to Make Your Pages “Sing” Heading tags (H1, H2) Contextual links Text links much better than graphic links Alt tags may be mildly helpful, for images that are links Meta tags don’t improve rankings Meta description can influence what’s displayed in the search results

Secret #2: How to Make Your Pages “Sing” Remember, you’re writing for humans & search engines equally You still have to be compelling, interesting (voice/personality), succinct, relevant (WII-FM) and reader focused (“you” vs. “we”) Anything you’d be embarrassed to show your customers or a Google rep should not be fed to the search engines!

Pretty good title

Not so good title – where’s the phrase “credit card”?

Good link text and body copy

Good link text and body copy

No link text or body copy

No link text or body copy

Take a peek under the hood

The “meta tags”

Unnecessarily bloated HTML

Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank Inbound links play a key role in determining rankings It’s not just about quantity (“link popularity”); it’s about quality (importance of the page, topically relevant/authoritative) PageRank™ – Google’s algorithm for measuring a page’s importance; Yahoo & MSN have similar measures Each web page (not site) has its own PageRank score PageRank scores from 0 to 10; logarithmic scale

Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank Check your link popularity at www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck Check your PageRank with the Google Toolbar (download it from toolbar.google.com) And/or check your home page’s PageRank using the Google Directory (directory.google.com) Listings are ranked in order of PageRank

Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter

Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank

Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank Find link targets Review links of competitive sites, sites in your keyword market Again, use the Link Checker tool at www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck Yahoo’s linkdomain: query operator & Yahoo Site Explorer tool Run a link: query on www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/ Check sites with high rankings for relevant keywords The fewer the number of links on their page, the better Offer link-worthy content. Keep it fresh. Consider providing an RSS feed

Conduct any Google query and get results organized by PageRank

Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank Try to get good keywords in the hyperlink text Types of links that are likely to get discounted: Reciprocal links Affiliated sites (on the same IP range or hostname) Footer links (at the bottom of the page) Site-wide links Don’t participate in “link farms” or FFA (“Free For All”) sites Hallmarks of a link farm = more urls per page & less organization Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods”

Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank Sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper by Googlebot “Google Bombing” Inbound contextual links alone can drive a site to the top of Google (e.g. “miserable failure”) Also works on Yahoo, Live Search, etc.

Secret #4: How to Rejig Your Internal Linking Structure It’s not just about inbound links; internal links matter too Your home page’s PageRank gets distributed to your deep pages by virtue of your hierarchical internal linking structure Links are the currency of the Web as far as search engines are concerned; spend it wisely w/in your site Site hierarchy (tree structure) Breadcrumb navigation Site map

Dynamic Sites Can Kill Your Internal PageRank “Flow” The issue lies with “spider traps” Avoid stop characters (?, &, =), complex URLs Session IDs are death to search visibility Options Recode your site to not pass “query strings” URL rewriting (using a server module/plug-in) Remote-hosted “proxy serving” (e.g. GravityStream) catalogagemag.com/mag/marketing_right_page_web/

Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs

Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”

Duplicate pages

Avoid PageRank Dilution Careful about having multiple URLs serving up the same content Multiple homes for your content Multiple domains registered and resolving to your site abccompany.com vs. www.abccompany.com https:// version of your site Session IDs or User IDs in the URL 301 redirect them all to the definitive version of the page Removed pages 301 redirect rather than 404

Avoid PageRank Dilution Example of multiple homes for the same content: Laura Ries’ blog

Optimize PageRank Flow Link gain dissipates due to Dynamic URLs Session IDs or User IDs in the URL Superfluous flags in the URL Link gain is typically blocked by Links based in JavaScript, Java, or Flash Overly complex URLs (e.g. 7 parameters in the query string) Forms (including pulldown lists) Temporary (302) redirects

Optimize PageRank Flow Manage the flow using “nofollow” on unimportant links <a href=“/privacy-policy.htm” rel=“nofollow”> Does it flow? Tools to check Poodle Predictor (www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go) Server Header Checker SEOChat’s PageRank Lookup Do a “site:” search on SEOChat’s PageRank Search

Server Header Checker

Secret #5: How to Influence the Click Decision Zipf’s Law applies - you need to be at the top of page 1 of the search results. It’s an implied endorsement. Synergistic effect of being at the top of the natural results & paid results Entice the user with a compelling call-to-action and value proposition in your descriptions Your title tag is critical Snippet gets built automatically, but you CAN influence what’s displayed here

Where do searchers look? (Enquiro, Did-it, Eyetools Study)

Search listings – 1 good, 1 lousy

Secret #5: How to Influence the Click Decision You may be #1 for some but not others… Search results are tailored to the user Google Search History, geolocation, etc. Vertical search results offers multiple paths to visibility Google Base, Google Co-Op, Google Blog Search, Google Maps (Local),… This also has translated into visibility in the “onebox” Google’s new “Universal Search” results

Google’s “Onebox”

Secret #6: How to Check Your “Pulse” and Benchmark Number of pages indexed (netconcepts.com/urlcheck) Google PageRank Link popularity Alexa ranking (alexa.com) Positions in the search results for important keywords What keywords are they targeting? (check their metatags)

Secret #6: How to Check Your “Pulse” and Benchmark Measure what’s important to your bottom line Not “hits” or even unique visitors Number of orders delivered by search engines Sales volume delivered by search engines Profit delivered by search engines Conversion rate Cost per conversion, Cost per lead ROI

ROI – Sales by keyword

ROI – Sales by referrer

Secret #6: How to Check Your “Pulse” and Benchmark Advanced metrics that most analytics packages don’t measure: Page yield Keyword yield (keywords per page) Spidering behavior More metrics at multichannelmerchant.com/webchannel/seo/beneath_surface_search_012007

Secret #7: How to Avoid SEO “Worst Practices” Target relevant keywords Don’t stuff keywords or replicate pages Create deep, useful content Don't conceal, manipulate, or over-optimize content Links should be relevant (no scheming!) Observe copyright/trademark law & Google’s guidelines

Spamming in Its Many Forms… Hidden or small text Keyword stuffing Targeted to obviously irrelevant keywords Automated submitting, resubmitting, deep submitting Competitor names in meta tags Duplicate pages with minimal or no changes Spamglish Machine generated content

Spamming in Its Many Forms… Pagejacking Doorway pages Cloaking Submitting to FFA (“Free For All”) sites & link farms Buying up expired domains with high PageRanks Scraping Splogging (spam blogging)

BMW.de hosted many “doorway pages” like this one

“Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to this page

Doorway page spam

Doorway page spam

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing in the “meta tags” too

Not Spam, But Bad for Rankings Splash pages, content-less home page, Flash intros Title tags the same across the site Error pages in the search results (eg “Session expired”) "Click here" links Superfluous text like “Welcome to” at beginning of titles Spreading site across multiple domains (usually for load balancing) Content too many levels deep

Case Study: Homestead.com What worked Comprehensive SEO & usability audit Intensive on-site training sessions with their IT and marketing teams 6 months of support What didn’t work No significant changes to the look of the home page were allowed for political reasons, significantly reducing the options available

Case Study: Homestead.com Results Within 8 weeks of launch of some preliminary optimization work, on page 1 for “website hosting” in Google With our audit as a blueprint, later that year launched an internally built site redesign which landed them the #1 Google position for “website hosting” Consistently held #1 position for 2 years! Still on page 1

SEO Tools For keyword research WordTracker KeywordDiscovery Overture Keyword Selector Google Suggest Google Trends Google AdWords Keyword Tool Googspy SEOSleuth

SEO Tools For link analysis and PageRank TouchGraph Live PageRank WebmasterEyes Google Toolbar Google Directory SEO for Firefox SEOpen Page Strength Tool Netconcepts Link Checker PageRank Lookup PageRank Search Neat-o SEO-Links Google Webmaster Central Thumbshots Ranking

SEO Tools Miscellaneous User Agent Switcher SwitchProxy Scrutinizer Copyscape Poodle Predictor Xenu Link Sleuth Robot Replay CrazyEgg What’s That Site Running Wayback Machine

SEO Tools For indexation checking Other reporting Yahoo Site Explorer Netconcepts URL Checker Netconcepts Product Page Checker Other reporting Alexa DigitalPoint Keyword Rankings Urltrends Hitwise ($$) List and links at www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/368/SEO-Toolkit/ & www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/176/SEO:-Tools-for-Link-Building/

Further Reading google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 www.google.com/webmasters/ www.mattcutts.com/blog googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com blog.outer-court.com www.searchenginewatch.com www.seroundtable.com www.naturalsearchblog.com

Q&A! For an ebook on Google power searching, SEO checklists & worksheets, and audio recording, executive summary & transcript of an SEO thought leaders teleconference, and this Powerpoint, give me your business card Any questions come to you later, contact me: stephan@netconcepts.com