“What formula does Google use to determine where your website gets listed?” Wow, if we knew the answer to that we’d be rich. The problem with that question is that there is no definitive answer. There is no one formula that can be exploited to ensure your Google ranking is always number one!

With that said, there are some simple, basic strategies that need to be adhered to when putting your website up for public view. These all factor into the Google (and Yahoo, MSN, Bing, Ask.com, etc.) formulas, but how each is weighted varies and in some cases changes daily to ensure the content remains fresh and unexploited.

So, here’s our list of some basic determining factors for SEO ranking:

Tracking and statistics: First and foremost, make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics. These tools are invaluable when tracking the performance of your pages and your website in general. If you don’t have it, get it. Yahoo and Bing have similar setups, but Google Analytics is still the best.

Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. Sadly, there is no way to speed up this factor. If you are a new website with a new domain name, it’s going to take time to get this factor to go up. The reason this is important is that domain longevity helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.

  Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? In this instance, outsourcing is a bad idea! The country in which your site is hosted plays a big role in how it gets scored. Always use a reputable hosting company. If you are a US based business, host in the US, if you are a UK based site, host it in the UK. When it comes to hosting, don’t go cheap. Also, make darn sure you have a dedicated (non rolling) IP. Some hosting sites that use clouds or virtual dedicated can change IP’s. This is a sign of website instability, so always make sure your hosted server is dedicated and demand a static IP for your server only. Never use the cheapest hosting. Let me be blunt… if you can’t afford decent hosting, then don’t expect to yield good SEO results.

  Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server or shared server, which even the big name hosting sites like Start Logic and Go Daddy use, chances are your site shares the same IP as dozens (possibly hundreds) of other websites. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not porn or classified as spam.

Content: Content isn’t just an important ranking factor, it is THE most important (IMHO). Make sure you have your keyword phrases on all your important pages, then make sure it is spread out evenly throughout the page (the beginning, several times in the middle, and at the end). And don’t just write mindless words for the sake of filling a page. The content must be relevant! I’m not saying that search engine algorithms are able to detect BS, but your readers are! The goal of SEO is to get people to visit your site or link. Once they do, you want them to come back. If they visit your site and see it contains a bunch of junk, they’re not coming back. And guess what the major search engines also consider in their rankings? You got it, time on page and returning visitors. Always write your content for humans and NEVER write content for the sole purpose of SEO formula injection.

  URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is a trap that a lot of resellers fall into. They register the short version of their long URL thinking that bit.ly/Djs8ds is simpler to read and also hides the fact the user is being redirected to a reseller link… And that is correct. But, search engine algorithms don’t understand gibberish at the end of a URL. The tradeoff is that you can fool users into clicking on an obvious reseller link, but you will not score at all in regards to SEO.

Keywords: This is an SEO lesson in and of itself, but some basic information includes making sure your website is optimized using your keyword phrases. This means placing that text in any alt tags for images, meta page information, and existing content (laid out according to our Content rule above).

Bounce Rate: Again, this is something that is hard for you to control, but sticking to some basic guidelines ensures that your bounce rate is kept to a minimum. Make frequent changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things like video tutorials, newsletter subscriptions, and comments will help improve your bounce rate over time.

Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should not have to hunt, peck, and wonder about how to navigate your site. Make menus and links clear, concise, and visible. Every so often, make sure there are no broken links in your navigation chain! Broken links are a punishment in SEO rankings. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Clean and easy to read is the way to go.

Trust: How do you gain trust? Well, if you don’t have the benefit of a well aged domain name, you need to provide people (and search engines) with a reason to think your legitimate and here to stay. If you have a physical business address, list it. Search engines like to see that you are not just a web based business, but also a physical business. Phone numbers are important, too. Even if you Skype or GoToMeeting most of your customer interaction, an actual phone number helps users and search engines feel that this is your only business and that all resources are exercised to ensure your availability. At a bare minimum, at least provide a customer service or support email address. The goal is to make it easy for people to do business with you.

Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. Don’t think for a second that a hundred links to unrelated sites is better than 10 links to genre matching content. Consider each and every link.

Want to learn more about SEO strategies and tactics? We’re only a couple of months away from releasing our training section, but until then we have a little SEO primer called “Backlink Generation in Minutes.” You can download it for free using this link.

There are many extensive and exclusive factors that all search engines use when determining where your website ranks amongst the others. The bottom line is is that to truly conquer SEO, your site must be relevant, informative, user friendly, and trusted.

In putting together our training curriculum, we added a section talking about how Google has so many tools and add-ons to make your SEO life a lot easier. One of them is a buried little gem called the “Wonder Wheel.”

At left is a screen shot of where to find the elusive '”Wonder Wheel.” After you enter your search term and Google displays the search results, click on the “More Search Terms” link on the left side menu bar.

This will expand the menu at left and display additional options for your search and SEO activities.

“Wonder Wheel” is useful for determining the associative keywords for the search term entered. For example, our test search term “email scraper” shows a “Wonder Wheel” of items such as “email extractor” and “email harvester.”

The image at right shows what Google displays when you enter our search term like “eMail Scraper.”

Google does limit the number of spokes displayed to only give you the best options for keyword determination.

The neat thing about this tool is that you can actually crawl through the spokes of the wheel and expand them to get more keyword ideas.

If we hit the link that is for “Craigslist email scraper,” we see that the image now rubber-bands out and we can now see where that spoke takes us.

Now we are presented with a new set of strong keyword phrases that are determined based of the linked text (Craigslist email scraper).

The links and lists can seem to go on forever. It’s best to stick with your power search phrase (“email scraper” in our example) and work with the keywords shown in the first spokes.

Once you have these keywords, be sure to use them within your posts and pages, H1 and H2 tags, your site description and your site content. This is just another example of the type of information you will receive in our training curriculum.

We hope to have initial publishing done this week and will always be adding more and more products and training materials. Be sure to also look for our upcoming PodCasts! Happy marketing!

That’s right. eSource has released the first tutorial in their Blue Hat Marketing Training Series Backlink Generation in Minutes! And best of all it’s FREE!

  Our newest eBook, Backlink Generation in Minutes, is yours FREE! Simply enter your email address below and a copy of this vital 15 page training manual will be sent directly to you (PDF format).

Backlink Generation in Minutes steps you through the process of creating intelligent backlinks that are designed to target your customers, rather than shotgun your marketing and hope for the best. In this report you’re going to get a simple, step-by-step plan for finding literally HUNDREDS of sources of quality, free in-bound links. We show you how to do the research, how to tie in with other articles, and even what to include in your post-backs and comments.

This report contains the secrets of:

The ultimate FREE tool that will determine your best chance of scoring a winning backlink.

Finding quality site links.

Quality links vs. junk links.

How to write a valuable link response.

And more!

You can download this FREE eBook by subscribing to our training section.

Simply enter your email and Backlink Generation in Minutes will be sent directly to you!

And more! Our signature software not only was approved for download from Windows7download.com, but we won some dubious distinctions!

5 stars Award on Windows 7 Download

Editor's pick on Windows 7 Download

Our latest version, 1.4, was released earlier in July and has addressed some small technical issues (nice way of saying ‘bugs’) as well as added enhancements. If you are using an earlier version of eMail Scraper, you can download the new version here. Your key will work and the install will update your existing version with the latest and greatest.

Download our FREE trial version!

In case you forgot, Internet marketing companies and professionals have been using this tool for years. Now, it has been re-engineered, updated, and released to the public. This 'insider only' software was a closely guarded industry secret until recently.

Because the tool is so specific in it's results, there is no danger of two people duplicating the exact list elements and entries. You use the tool for your specific needs and target audiences... And so does everyone else. Picking your markets and products and running them through the easy to use interface makes unique list generation possible for everyone.

Don't pay hundreds of dollars a month on some generic opt-in mailing list whose members haven’t been categorized by niche and have absolutely no interest in your blind email blast. Generic lists don’t contain people that specifically have anything to do with your product or service. You might as well throw darts at a phone book! Why not create specific and detailed emailing lists that cater directly to your niche market? eMail Scraper is the definitive automatic email address generator! Get detailed email lists covering any and all combinations. The only real limitation is your imagination. Give eMail Scraper a try to fully assess its capabilities and we’re sure you’ll agree eMail Scraper is everyone’s pick!

eSource Development has announced that they will be coming out with 2 brand new software titles this month. One is built on our popular eMail Scraper™, the other is a full featured website walker.

Craigslist Companion™ will feature some of the same email scraping capabilities of eMail Scraper, as well as a watcher program that runs in the background and searches for new listings based on your geographic selections and search criteria.'

Look for our BETA version out next week.

The second program is eSource WebWalker™. It is a full featured website crawler that allows you to specify a URL and have all of the codes, sitemaps, URL’s, and complete file breakdown within seconds. The results can then be exported to XML or HTML. eSource WebWalker™ will also feature an SEO tool that will let you see the top number of Google search results based on the keywords you enter. You can then see on the results page the exact location, count, and type of keywords used that makes them get top Google Rankings.

Look for BETA versions of both software to be available next week.

It seems the more tricks I learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the more surprised I am at just how much time it takes to implement some of these strategies. All that time spent just to crawl a few steps up the first page of Google. In the last couple of months, I started thinking about what is the 'cut-off' point where I would simply spend money or time in order to boost rankings. It's something any good SEO marketer considers when tackling a new genre or niche, sort of like PPC.

In this example, our company came out with a new product, Dr. Torgo's PC System Inventory. Actually, it's a program I wrote about 6 months ago that my cohort Steve took and finalized and has been bugging me to put it up for sale, which I eventually did. Anyway, when I put it up on the site I immediately went into SEO mode and started marketing the product as a direct link to our site. It took a couple of days until I finally noticed we were listed at around 7 or 8. I started wasting more and more time trying to up it a couple of notches. I then submitted it to a download site called SoftPedia. Within a couple of days, I was somewhat shocked to see that my new SoftPedia entry made it before my actual site page on page 1 of Google!

We tried the same thing with eMail Scraper. I got decent (page 3) listings direct to our site but could never crack the first page with "email scraper" as a keyword without a PPC campaign. But after submitting the download link to a couple of sites I found that they did the work for me:

So for next time, I'll simply post it to various software download libraries and get first ranking on certain keywords rather than bust my rear for hours trying to beat them. The download sometimes comes from their site, but I still handle all of the payments with no commission to them, so in this case... I couldn't beat 'em, so I'll join 'em!

A couple of notes:
1) A Google search on "email scraper" yields about 1.5 MILLION results, so to be listed on page 1 (or 2) is no small task.
2) Believe it or not, Torgo (and all it's variations a-la MST3K, IMDB, etc.) is still an incredibly popular search word. Every time I run Google, Yahoo, or Bing stats it ranks among the top 10 search words to my site every time. I used to have a posting about Torgo and the redirects to that page were consistently high. So, even though they're looking for the movie version of Torgo, they'll still hit my site!

We’ve had a chance over the last few years to try out a lot of different marketing schemes and tricks to get higher Google rankings, including auto submitters. One of the ways to get your site listed higher in the major search engines is to create a number of external links that point back to your landing page. In it’s day, mass article submitters worked great, but nowadays it seems they are just a waste.

The problem is that the major search engines have caught on to the trick of mindlessly submitting your article to hundreds of link and article submission sites. What they look for now is that each article be different. If not, the submission is not only discarded, but can count against your overall page ranking. Thus was born the companion piece to mass article submitters, the article spinner.

The concept behind this software is that it takes your base article and looks for synonyms to words that are in it’s database. That way every time the article is spun, it is worded differently than the original and will thus count as a positive back link to your landing page. The problem is that these ‘newly worded’ articles can make you sound like a dumb-ass. While you may be able to sneak your new article into a directory and have it count for Google, the result may be that the reader will be so turned off by your abysmal writing that they will look for a more ‘credible’ source. And once you lose your credibility, they won’t follow you again.

The other problem is stop words. Stop words are extremely common words that search engines ignore when indexing pages, calculating relevancy and when interpreting a search query prior to pulling pages from their indices. By simply switching stop words for example ‘this’ to ‘those’ will make no difference to the way a search engine views a page.

This is obviously a very simple example but when you consider that on average 40% of the words in any document are stop words it illustrates that Google will only consider approximately 60% of any document when calculating how unique it is is. Also consider that in order to create documents that are readable, even those created by article spinning, this percentage of stop words has to be maintained.

Article spinning cannot address this problem and in-fact may make things worse. Article spinning is a weak attempt to game search engine algorithms and as such should be used with care if used at all.

Part Four

SEO Basics

SEO is often thought about after a person has set up their blog or website. But, SEO best practices are bred into the site or blog as it is being developed, designed, and updated. We’re all about the SEO here. Our training class, SEO Launch Secrets, will be available May 11th, 2010. Remember that you can still get your early bird coupon by entering your email on the sales page.

What the heck is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are an excellent source of completely free traffic that continues to pour in for years to come but it usually takes a long time for a brand new site to begin getting traction in the search engines which is another reason why it makes sense to consider it from day 1. Here is an important point - ANY blog can build up a significant amount of search engine traffic over time even if that blog does not naturally lend itself to SEO. Why? Simply due to the sheer amount of content that gets posted to a blog.

If you create a few good articles every week (say 3), that really adds up over time. In a year you will have around 150 posts! Every single one of those posts can rank in the search engines and even though they may not all be individually optimized for specific keywords, they WILL bring in some traffic.

Backlinks… Learn it, know it, live it!

This lesson covers SEO basics and covers on-page optimization (making sure that your post is optimized towards your chosen keywords). However that is only one half of the SEO process and is arguably the least important half.

If Google has two pages that are equally optimized towards a keyword then how does it decide which one to rank higher? There are many factors but one very major factor is the backlinks to the page and these are simply links from another website.

 
Over time you will want to grow your backlinks as much as you can as this helps you rank higher and higher. With esourcedevelopment.com I must admit that I rarely pay much attention to on-page SEO as I tend to just write what comes to mind without really worrying about keywords. But over the last year or so we have attracted thousands of backlinks which means that whatever we do choose to write about will still bring us search traffic because this blog ranks well for terms in the posts.

You don't need to worry too much about building backlinks at the beginning, but you do want to know how to do the basic on-page SEO so that when you start to create your first few posts you can be sure that you are getting it right.
SEO is a massive subject and is an industry in itself. SEO consultants will often charge companies thousands of dollars to optimize their websites because of the power it has to draw so much traffic.

Optimizing Your Posts For On-Page SEO
The first step in optimizing your posts is knowing what keyword phrase you want to target. It is possible to target more than one but much more difficult. Now one thing that I would emphasize here is that as a blogger, particularly if you are starting out, if you have no idea about what keywords you want to target then just don't worry about it as its best to concentrate on writing good content rather than thinking about search engines. But if you're writing a blog about digital camera's for example and writing a post about a particular model then it makes sense to optimize that post to the model of the camera as that is something that would be searched on in Google.

This list is taken directly from SEO Launch Secrets. It covers where you need to place keywords in your article posts:
1) The title - at the very beginning if possible. This is the single most important element.
2) The post content - you need to make sure you are writing about what you want to target! Don't overdo it but make sure it appears a handful of times throughout the post. Ideally, your keyword phrase will appear at the beginning, middle, and end of the article. The more the better, but no more than once per paragraph.
3) Tags - WordPress and other blogging platforms allow you to add tags to posts and this is a great way to add keywords to any post.
4) The URL - if you are using WordPress then this is very easy to do because it has a feature to allow you to convert your post title into the URL and we have a video that demonstrates how to do that later in our SEO Launch Secrets course.

These are the most important places to put your keywords and this is all you really need to know when you're starting out. By the way if you don't know how to do this stuff don't worry because soon in the course I'm going to be getting onto the technical stuff and we have a bunch of free videos that show you how to do this technical stuff.

What if you already have an established blog?
If you already have a blog and this is the first time you have thought about SEO there are some things that you can do to tweak things. One thing that you should NOT do is change your post URL's because Google will still be indexing the old ones and if you change them you will have broken links.

However what you can do is change your titles and the copy text in your posts. One mistake that people often make is putting their keywords at the end of their title rather than at the beginning. For example, if you are targeting the phrase "make money blogging" which is best out of these two titles:

- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today!
- Make Money Blogging - 10 Killer Ideas!

The latter title is more SEO-friendly as it puts your keywords at the beginning so you can go back and tweak old posts in this way if you like. You can also check through the post itself making sure the keyword appears a few times and if your blogging software supports tags then make sure you tag it with your keyword.

Once you make changes it can take a while for Google to pick it up and act on it so don't expect results overnight!
Note that if your URL's are not optimized then it is possible to restructure them to better ones and do something called a 301 redirect to tell Google that the link has changed.

This is a quick post to highlight some of the things we’ve been teaching and telling people over the years regarding Internet marketing. When it comes to any search engine, you want your listing to be first, second… or TENTH! That’s right, the last spot on the first page.

It’s a hard spot to get since Google does not sell or market that spot in search results, but if you are lucky enough to be placed there, it could pay off!

A couple of weeks ago, our article on Google Maps vs Bing Maps was suddenly getting about 5 times the hits it normally gets. Not that it raised any bad flags, but it did make us curious as to why the sudden spike occurred. The reason was that the article in question was listed at the tenth (last) position on the page. It is our belief that more people click on that spot because it’s the last one they see as they pause for a moment before clicking to page 2. If your tenth spot description and link are good enough, people will notice it almost as much as if you were in the top 2.

A few days later we were elevated to the 9th spot, and as expected our hits to that page went down again, despite the higher ranking. So in the case of search engine placement, sometimes last can be best!

Part Three

The Naming Game
Our Internet Marketing blog is called "eSource Development" and the domain is at esourcedevelopment.com. We thought long and hard regarding a name - We were trying to think of something relating to making money
online but couldn't think of anything that didn't sound cheesy so we took our store name, eSource, and made it a development site since a majority of our business was web and software.

Topic Selection
When we first started our development / marketing blog we were already a successful web and software development company operating under the name eSource, and that's what we initially blogged about. However as the months passed we found ourselves learning and blogging about topics I didn't know about at the start, like niche marketing, social media, javascript, list building and so on.

Whether you are starting a blog from scratch or you have an existing one, use what you thought about in the previous lesson to think about what direction you are going to take your blog and sketch out some of the specific topics you can cover.

When it comes to writing your posts you will be able to organize them into categories which makes it much easier for new readers to find your posts and its easy for them to see at a glance what your blog is about. When you just post a mish-mash of posts on all sorts of topics that are not really related then it can be more difficult to turn a one-off visitor into a regular subscriber.

Posting Schedule
Many people advise you to blog every day when launching a new blog with the theory being that the more you post the more people will come to your blog, and the more often Google will index your site. However as a blog reader I find that blogs that post every day or even multiple times a day are simply too much - I can't keep up with them. We try to post about 2 times a week which seems to be the right balance for our type of site.

When we say "schedule", we don't really mean that literally. As long as you post at least twice a week, the exact day and time of the postings do not matter. Sometimes, we'll write 2 posts and schedule the second one to post the next day so there is a gap between postings. Most popular blog sites will have this feature.

I know your anxious, but starting out with an every day posting blog then settling in to a twice a week blog might look bad to some. It is much better to start out with a gentler blog schedule and see how it goes for a few months rather than over-commit yourself at the beginning and then burn out a few months down the line.

Posting Style
Some people suggest that you alter your blogging style to fit your target audience but in our experience we find that it never works to try to blog in a style that is not uniquely you. Your blog is a reflection of you - your thoughts, your findings, your interests and passions.

I used to teach at the University of Phoenix... Not so much by choice but by necessity. I had written a course for them on Data Communications and Protocols. I was then told there were no teachers for it, so I signed the contract to teach the 10 week course. I had never taught before so I read a couple of books real quick and tried to find a "style." Guess what? It was a complete waste of time! Do you know why? Because the best teaching style is your own style, not someone else's. As soon as I did that the teaching was easy. I was comfortable and coherent because I was talking and acting like me!

The moral of the story is simply to blog in your own style, whatever that means! Some people are very conservative, some people use very colorful language, others like to be controversial, others are very dry and matter-of-fact. Whatever you are, simply be who you are and write as yourself.

Similarly, I see people asking questions such as, how long should my posts be? This again is down to personal style. I find that when you are blogging about something you are passionate or knowledgeable about, the words just flow. Some of my posts here (and my other blogs) can get a little wordy, but hey, that's my style!

It really doesn't matter what your style is because the readers who like your style will stick around and subscribe and the ones who don't, wont! Simple as that really! There is no way that any single style is going to appeal to everybody so don't try! No matter what your posting style is, there will be people who like it and some who don't, but it never pays to try and be something that you are not.