“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.

An Example-Driven, Beginner's Guide to Building Interactive Maps with Bing, Yahoo!, and Google Maps is finally here!

Map Scripting 101: An Example-Driven Guide to Building Interactive Maps with Bing, Yahoo!, and Google Maps (No Starch Press, Aug 2010, 376 pp, $34.95, ISBN 9781593272715) is an example-based beginner's guide to map scripting. Author Adam DuVander delivers a cookbook of 73 immediately useful mapping scripts like a local concert tracker, a Twitter friend-finder, and a real-time weather map. And because the book is based on the cross-platform Mapstraction JavaScript library, readers can use virtually any mapping service, including OpenStreetMap, MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo!, and Bing.

In this book, you’ll learn to:

Create, embed, and manipulate basic maps by setting zoom levels and map boundaries

Show, hide, and filter location markers and info-bubbles

Customize maps for visitors based on their location

Use common data formats like Google Earth's KML, GeoRSS, and GPS XML (GPX)

Create graphical overlays on maps to better analyze data and trends

Use freely available geodata from websites like Yelp and Upcoming—and public domain geodata from the US government

We do a lot of work with Bing Maps and this book is already getting worn from use. The step by step guide and the library reference is incredibly helpful and drastically cuts our development time. If you work with Google Maps or Bing Maps then this script reference is something that should be open and on your desk!

Are you trying to find your way through Starcraft 2 and hitting a few hurdles? Or are you new to the game and looking for some quick examples of what to do and when to do it? Then our FREE Starcraft II guide will get you going. Check out our quick start Tips and Tricks guide to Starcraft II absolutely FREE! We’ve been playing Starcraft 2 since the day it was released,  so we decided to jot down and research a few things that helped get us started. In this FREE guide you will learn:

Basic strategy tips

 Basic economy strategies

 Single player tips and cheats

 Multiplayer secrets

 Do’s and Don'ts

 Players checklist

 PLUS – links to the Internet’s best selling Starcraft 2 Strategy Guide with even MORE tips and tricks.

To get your FREE Starcraft 2 tips and tricks guide, simply Click HERE!

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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!

A custom program is fully customized software based on the specific requirements of your business. For example, if you need custom programming that meets various business demands such as a seamless shopping cart integration into your Web site or a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system to help you manage interactions with your customers, then eSource Development's custom programming software services may be the answer for you.

The key to successful custom programming is project definition. The project software definition defines such things as your customer base and demographics, operational business needs, computer hardware, image requirements and revenue-generating opportunities. It's a consultative process, which combines your business knowledge with our custom programming expertise to provide you with a proper business solution.

eSource Development provides web development, custom software programming and database design solution services. Our consultants work within a discipline that starts with defining your needs in detail. We prepare a firm time-line and setup a reporting process so you know where your project stands every step of the way. From the start-up companies to multinational firms, eSource has a proven record of success. Our staff has worked for companies from small businesses to Fortune 500's.

The services we provide have many different titles - application development, custom programming, web development, IT consulting, b2b development, software design, database design, html programming, web programming, c programming... the list goes on and on. Most of our clients don't know exactly what they want when they call us but they do know of a problem that needs to be solved or an opportunity that needs to be leveraged. We take the client's needs and provide an elegant business solution, turning our client's ideas into digital business reality.

We will work with your business to help you determine exactly what you need, then come up with a plan to achieve it within your time and budget requirements. Custom software programming services and development is a complex process, but we are experts at getting these types of projects completed and implemented quickly. You control the process and can count on us to get your development done in a timely and cost effective manner.

eSource Development turns your ideas into digital business reality. We work with key people within your organization to learn their unique business approach and apply our experience and technical programming expertise to provide the optimum custom technical software solution for your business needs. We build custom programming solutions tailored to your unique business model and geared to optimize the success of your organization for a fixed price.

Our custom software solutions are often cheaper than buying a packaged program. After all, your organization is successful due to its unique value proposition to your industry. Why should the system that runs your business be the same as your competition’s?

We provide support for our applications and monthly reports concerning the performance and state of your system at a fixed monthly cost. With an eSource Development support contract, your application will be periodically upgraded as new, proven programming technologies become available that can improve it.

System Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning

At eSource Development, we leverage the combined experience of our custom development staff, our partnerships, an extensive set of proven tools, and an analytical systematic approach to problem solving that will identify and resolve your computer application problems in a quick and concise manor. We are experts at solving problems with ASP, .NET, C#, C++, VBScript, J Script, Visual Basic, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft IIS, Bing Maps, and much more!

Contact eSource Development if you have a custom programming assignment, question, or bid request. We look forward to hearing from you!

In addition to our new training area, we are also expanding our reach by offering free Podcasts of our SEO training and tips. We plan on offering a weekly Podcast that will summarize valuable SEO and Internet Marketing tips, tricks, and techniques to our subscribers.

In anticipation of this, we had to do some research to learn how to actually get our Podcasts published and distributed. The process is easier than you might think. Below is our step by step ‘tutorial’ on how to create and list your Podcast on iTunes.

Step 1: Write out your dialog and record your first episode. Make sure it's in one of these formats that iTunes supports: .m4a, .mp3, .mov, .mp4, .m4v, and .pdf.

Step 2: Your Podcast material must be placed on a publicly accessible URL. You will then need to create an RSS feed file and place the URL of your RSS feed onto your server.

Step 3: Open up iTunes and the iTunes Store, and click on Podcasts. In the middle of the screen, amongst the numerous podcasts, there will be a button called "Submit a Podcast." This will take you to a screen where it will request the URL for the podcast RSS feed that you would like to consider adding into the iTunes Store.

Step 4: After entering your RSS feed URL, you will see a summary page. Depending on whether you have added tags already, a second screen might come up, asking you for more information--such as language, category, and whether the podcast requires explicit tags.

Your going to have to wait a while after that last step. The iTunes staff will have to approve your Podcast before it is accessible via search or browse. Give it a half a day and then search for your Podcast. You should see it no later than 24 hours after submission. After which you can create ‘episodes’ on a regular basis and continue building your following.

Notes:

Before you submit it, you should test that your RSS feed works. You can do that by either dragging the URL into the Podcast playlist or going to the Advanced menu in your Toolbar, clicking on Subscribe to Podcast, and typing it in.

If you are asked to add summary information after you submit your URL (because your RSS feed didn't have tags), you can always go back and change them by including tags on your feed. The information on the RSS feed is what is going to be the definitive source of information for your podcast.

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!

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.