Basics of SEO and Internet Marketing for beginners and those who might think they know SEO but really don’t.

When it comes to the internet speed is of the utmost importance, especially when downloading a web page. I mean let’s face it, we live in a microwave society where everybody wants everything yesterday. So why should the internet be any different.

It has been said that Google considers your websites page load speed when it comes to rankings. Well they have finally made it official.  Speed Does Matter! Personally I’ve always thought it was a factor but now they have officially come out and said it.

According to Search Engine News “Google reports that when they purposely slowed the search results by 100 to 400 milliseconds it impacted the number of searches per user by -.2% to -.6% and actually increased the longer they were exposed to the slower results. After Google changed the speeds back to normal, users continued to do .21% fewer searches on average for the next 5 weeks.”

Now even though a second or two doesn’t seem like much it has been shown that it can negatively affect your sites rankings and bounce rate.

You can check your sites page load speed in your webmaster tools under Labs and then Site Performance.  Click here to see if your sites up to speed and what you can do to improve.

Warning: Google has always considered relevance to be the most important factor when considering how a site ranks so please, please, please DO NOT sacrifice relevance for speed or you will lose your rankings anyway.

Getting indexed by the search engines the right way

Do you have a brand new website that you just put live for the world to see? Or, maybe you just updated your website with new content and a fresh new look and feel? Maybe you just added some new stuff and you want to get Google and the other search engines to come check it out. After-all, the faster your website is indexed the faster you can get found.

Now, before I share this with you I would hope that you have done your research, filled out your unique title tags and other meta data, and implemented your keywords into the pages the right way.  But, even if you haven’t you can still get the search engines to come visit your site, they just may not like what they see lol.

Getting indexed:

Write a blog post – one of the fastest ways to get indexed is to write a blog post about your website and link to your website you want to get indexed. One of the main things that makes a blog better than a website is it’s ability to ping (ping – a system that tells the search engines you’ve got new content and to go check it out).

If you have set your blog up correctly, especially if you use Word Press, you will have added the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer Plugin. This plug in will save you lots of headaches and prevent you from getting your website banned from ping services. If you don’t know what a ping service is click on the link above and read that post. Since your blog pings these sites in your ping list it tells the search engines to come see your new content and they usually come withing 24 hours. 

Get someone to write a post about you

For example, we just took one of our clients live the other day. This post is obviously our way of sending the search engines to his newly designed and optimized website. Here is what i wrote:

Bison Brewing company is an organic beer micro brewer with a cause. At Bison they not only make great craft beer but they care about the environment. Go to their website and see how you can get a free carbon offset in your name to help the environment and while your there check out their organic craft beer selection.

Ok, as you can see above I wrote just a few short lines about Bison Brewing. I included what they did and one of their unique selling points. Instead of just linking to the home page using the anchor text “Bison Brewing” I linked to their website using their main keywords. I went one step further and linked the appropriate keywords to the interior pages of the website.

So when I publish this post my blog will send a ping out to all the ping services i have listed in my ping optimizer plug in. Then the search engines will come check out this site and follow any of the links to the other sites I have linked to in this post. I used the keywords as the anchor text because this will increase their rankings for those keywords. I also set the target of the link to open in a new window so my visitors don’t have to leave my site to check out those links.

Wait for them to come to you:

I dont’ recommend this since they may not come for another week or so. You want them to index your new content right away and the best way for that to happen is to have them follow a link to your site.

Add URL:

Now this is a definate  NO NO so I have to mention it. Google and the other major search engines have an “Add URL” feature where you can go and enter your website and essentially tell them you have new content. People don’t realize it but even though that option is there it is frowned upon by the same search engines to use it. The reason is the major search engines what to find your site because you had truly genuine content that someone thought was important enough to link to you for. The don’t really want you to go tell them “Hear I Am!”. So i don’t recommend using this option.

So to sum it up, the fastest way to get your site indexed is through links from other websites. If you would like to know what ping list i use be sure and email me and I’ll be glad to send it to you.

Hope this info helps, feel free to leave any comments on this information.

Ever wonder what Google likes and doesn’t like about your site in order to rank it well or in the sandbox? The truth is there is no way to know all of the 200 or more ranking factors Google uses to determine whether your site merits the coveted first page listing (top 10 of the organic SERP’s).

The good thing is Google gives us a lot of free tools, education, advice and recommendations on how to make our websites better liked by the search engine mogul. Here’s one place that might help you get a better look at what Google likes to see when they visit your site. Google Webmaster Central check it out and see if your site is up to speed.

Universal Search May Fall Off

Google’s Universal Search feature has become very popular but what we have found is that it’s hurting the paid search results. So, is universal search going to go away? I don’t think so however, it will not be nearly as important as it once was. So what does that mean? Well, you may soon notice that video and image search results moving to a less prominent part of the search results pages.

Currently when you do a search you get back a mix of video, images and search results inner mixed with in the SERP’s page. Now you can expect to see those types of results at the bottom of the SERP’s page.

We all know that Google’s mission in life is to create a great user experience. The question is can that be achieved and still help the paid advertisers. If putting video and image results at the bottom of the page hurts the user experience then the advertisers may just have to deal with being pushed aside for a better user experience.

Only time will tell how Google is going to handle the shift in Universal Search and what that will mean for PPC advertisers.

Google Integrates Real Time Search Results

For some time now Google has been fascinated with Twitters real-time search results. And honestly i don’t blame them, Twitters search function is considered one of the hottest new search functions out there.  The best thing about it is it allows business owners, consumers and other searchers the ability to watch search trends happen as they occur in real-time.

Google considers this new development to be one of the more challenging aspects of it’s new Caffeinated search.  But, now keep your fingers crossed, if it succeeds we can all expect time sensitive search results to improve as search trends continue to increase in availability thus giving us real-time information.

Are you into Social Media? If not you should be. Googles Caffeine along with real-time search results will be a game-changer for businesses that are able to harness the power of social media optimization. By keeping tabs on events as they are happening, you may be able to provide topic and time sensitive content that will get immediately indexed and highly positioned in the search results. This can, in turn, provide invaluable branding and product placement opportunities that, before now, were impossible.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

Google's New Caffeine is about to change search as we know it

The latest top secret project by Google is about to be launched. What is it? Well it’s called Google Caffeine and it is considered to be a major search engine algorithm change. Actually it’s the biggest one since 2005. 

Caffeine’s purpose is to revitalize their algorithm giving the user a better search experience.

So what are you going to get with the new changes? 

You can expect to see faster indexing speeds, more web pages indexed and a more comprehensive search results page. There will also be an increase in competition for single, generic-type keywords, more fluctuation in rankings and you can expect the long tailed keywords to become even more relevant to sales and conversions.

How do you prepair for the big change? The first thing your going to want to do is to ensure that your current SEO both on-site and off-site is solid. I suggest you go back and check your on page SEO and clean it up. Check out my post on title tag optimization to make sure your doing it right. There is still time to beef up your SEO so your prepared for any nasty suprises.

Be sure to log out of your Google Accounts before you begin checking your search results so the personalization of search feature doesn’t skew your results.

Google released it’s new Services for Websites last spring making the process of buying a domain, creating a website and monetizing that site much easier regardless of experience leve. it’s an awesome service for new webmasters because it provides all most everything neded to get indexed in both the organic and paid search ads all in one place.

This new program in conjunction with their web hosting partners Go Daddy, FatCow, Aplus.net and others, has been such a great success that they decided to add more tools to the program. When the new program was initially released you had access to Webmaster Tools, AdSense, Custome Search and Site Search.

Here are some of the latest updates to Google Services for Websites:

Web Elements — This tools allows you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own Website.

Page Speed — evaluates the performance of your Web pages and gives suggestions on how to improve them.

Google Translate — offers instant access to automatic translations of your Web page to visitors.

Tips for Hosters — helps hosting companies offer valuable Google Services to their clients, so they can better serve their users.

If you’re hosting your sites with one of Google’s web hosting partnerships, you can use the hosting control panel to begin utilizing these great tools. Take a moment to review these tools and see how they can help you make your website the best it can be.

Google has now stripped away the page sculpting power of the “nofollow” tag. Up until now the “nofollow” tag has been used to block valuable link juice (Page Rank) from leaking to pages that didn’t need it. Some of those pages would be your contact us, about us, company info and any other page that didn’t need to be ranked by the search engines.

At the last SMX Advanced Conference, Google’s Matt Cutts let everyone know that Google changed the way the rel=nofollow tag works in their algorithm. Previously, the tag stopped the spread of page rank to unnecessary pages and passed that portion to the other links on the page that didn’t have the “nofollow” tag. Now it’s as if the tag is not there at all.

The crazy thing is that this didn’t just happen. It isn’t brand new. According to Cutts Google made the change sometime last year which means anyone who has been working hard on page sculpting has been waisting their time for a while. At least that was the initial reaction in the SEO community. And why wouldn’t it be; it’s been an excepted form of preventing page rank from leaking to pages that didn’t need it since 2005. That’s a long time in the Internet world.

Cutts went into further detail by explaining that even though the rel=nofollow attribute will now absorb page rank the way other normal links do it will not pass the page rank on to the target URL. Many people speculate that the tag works the same way it did and that Google just likes to mess with the SEO community every so often. I’m sure we will never know for sure.

Google changes it’s algorithms quite often so this is no surprise really. I honestly wouldn’t be a bit shocked if in 3 months it was back to normal. I’m still going to use the tag on the obvious pages. if it’s there it’s not going to hurt anything and if Google changes their mind and puts things back to normal I won’t have to go back and redo work that i’ve already done.

Hope this helps

Most people think that it’s almost impossible for someone to get found in a highly competitive market. I like to tell people that anyone can get found in the top 30 of Google no matter how competitive the market is. The thing is, you have to have pockets deep enough to make it there. In this post we are going to take a look at how to use your keywords effectively in a competitive market.

First Mortgage Modification Solutions is a company that does mortgage modificationfor people who are trying to avoid foreclosure and save their homes. As you can probably guess there are a bunch of these companies that have sprung up over the last few years since the recent decline of the housing market.

First Mortgage Mods doesn’t really have deep pockets yet, but our goal is to try to get them there though. What we did was we started them off with a 5 page optimization plan that included their most important pages. We picked 10 of the most important keywords that applied to those pages. Remember you’re only supposed to focus 1 to 2 keywords per page, so only 10 main keywords were needed. We didn’t stop there. We went on to collect supporting keywords for each of those 10.

The search engine spiders look at the keywords your targeting but they are also looking at the words that surround and support those main keywords. If you are in a competitive market you can’t afford to half ass your optimization. Every on page element has to be addressed. That means not only targeting your main keywords but making sure to implement those supporting keywords as well.

Here is an example of our main keyword and supporting keyword for the home page of this site. Mortgage Modification is the primary keyword for this page. We know this because of course we did our research. Our supporting keywords for this page are “need to refinance to stop foreclosure“, “foreclosure help“, “loan modification” and “avoid foreclosure“. Now, take a look at the home page and notice where we used our main keyword Mortgage Modification and our supporting keywords. This will help you get an idea of where an how to use your main and supporting keywords on your site.

Now, take a look at the process page and see if you can tell what the main keyword is and what the supporting keywords are. Take note of where they are on the page. Don’t be afraid to look at the source code either. Leave a comment and let me know what you found.