Archive for the 'Optimizing for Google' Category
I was trying to think of a creative place to hide my extra house key but apparently Google searchers are querying for something else.
It really is simple if you want to understand why guaranteed results SEO is always a scam.
If someone really had the super SEO skills or the inside scoop on the secret algorithms of search engines and they could guarantee ranking, then why would they do it for $50, $500, $5,000 or even $50,000? The top spot for a competitive keyword (top 500 revenue generating) can be worth six figures easy, so why not do it for themselves and retire? Why do it for you on the cheap?
Besides this obvious reasoning you might wonder why anyone would be so desperate for business that they would take a chance of working for free? Most often they are either using paid search to place you on the first page and ripping you off, or they are ranking you for non-competitive keywords and ripping you off.
Sometimes your website or various web pages within your site don’t rank well or rankings go down without any obvious reason. Sometimes you need to dig deep and be creative. There was a post over at Google support forums that received an interesting answer.
John Mu, checked out a posters site and made an observation about the length of the alternative text (alt tags) used in the images source code. John said that the images are using “a full copy of the – sometimes long – title as the alt-text for all of the product images on the page.” He recommended the webmaster stay away from throwing so much content in the alt tags of the images.
it could be confusing to see the exact same text over and over again. Search engines generally aren’t impressed by seeing the same text that many times, so I’d simplify that a bit by perhaps using the full text for the main product image, but not reusing it for all of the smaller detail-images.
Great little piece of information to file away!
My answer is NO! There are probably a trillion pages of spam remaining in the index.
I just got a random email from a link seller with a list of 560 websites most with page rank 3 and 4 with computer generated content that reads like a completely different language.
Seriously, what can Google do to get rid of these websites? And the kicker is that most of them have Google Adsense on them!
OK, so who can answer this question…what search engine shows 11 sponsored results and only 4 organic results on the first page??
?
?
The answer is GOOGLE!!! These keywords are very expensive, so less organic results equals more clicks and more money in Google’s pockets.
I do realize this could just be some testing but if it is a sign of things to come, my feeling is it will translate into a very poor user experience…
Typically most SEO’s will begin with a new website by optimizing the home page because that is usually your best starting page in terms of current search engine visibility but many beginners neglect the power of inner page conversions. Inner pages can be so valuable because often the traffic that you send there is laser targeted and will therefore convert at a very high rate. I have found it common to see inner pages with bounce rate and/or conversion rates that are 5-10 times higher better than home pages.
Here are a few results I pulled from a client that has been with us for the past two years and it can give you a good idea on the growth potential of inner pages.
The moral of this post is that you should always make sure the search professional that is working for you has a holistic approach to your search engine success. Focusing solely on the home page will leave a lot of visitors and money on the table.
Sometimes I come across the most interesting pages. Things were so different a decade ago when I was first getting into online marketing. Something like this was a common sight *http://www.mvdn.com/exit.htm* (sorry, but please cut and paste, I don’t have the willpower to make this link live) and it actually worked!! I notice the page rank bar on this page has a 3, I wonder if after a certain amount of time Google still allows juice to flow from a page like this? Maybe the logic is that if it has lasted online for this long it is somewhat legitimate?
Let’s just hope it really doesn’t pass on any authority, but even if it does I guess it is watered down between the 200 or so outgoing links on the page. Oh to be an SEO in another decade, would be so easy!
It seems like Google is no longer happy with just pushing the organic listings down further on the page, they seem to have gotten rid of them all together. Many local searches are showing 7 Google Places listings and that is it!
Actually many of my test searches have been getting an interesting page like below:
Now that is a what I call stealth results! But seriously, how are they going to decide who is in the 7 Google Places spots? With those being the only listings on the first page, how long till they are selling these for $1000′s a month. When is a new search engine going to step up and show organic results again? I understand the concept of a ‘level playing field’ but dropping a nuclear bomb on the land to level it, is not really fair in my opinion.
Does the text color of your link matter? According to a Google patent granted a little while back it just might! You can view the document yourself here.
But let’s spend a little time with claim 18,
The one or more server devices of claim 16, where the data associated with the features of the one of the links includes at least two of: the font size of anchor text associated with the link, the position of the link within a source document, the position of the link in a list, the font color associated with the link, the attributes of the link, the number of words in the anchor text associated with the link, the actual words in the anchor text associated with the link, the determination of commerciality of the anchor text associated with the link, the type of the link, the context of words before or after the link, the topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated, whether the link leads to a target document on a same host or domain, or whether an address associated with the link embeds another address.
This claim gives us a lot of good information on how text links might be valued but by color? It might have something to do with detecting hidden text (for instance if the color of text matches the background color a flag is raised or the link is discounted), but I would bet some serious money it is just a matter of time till we see some quack SEO’s offering Bill and Jimmy’s Rainbow Color Link Building Service, claiming that they will garner you hundreds of blue, green and yellow links for $xxx a month. Guaranteed to get you to the number one spot or your choice of a full refund or a case of multi-colored lollipops!
Chitika advertising network published some analysis it did of click through percentages based on 8,253,240 impressions.
“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.
The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”
