Good search engine rankings (especially at Google) depend mainly on two things:

1. Having plenty of good text content that Google can index. Google doesn’t really index pictures well, or flash, or javascript, or videos. Google can’t pick the text out of an image or a Flash presentation or a video. They do a great job of indexing straight text, whether in the form of a .txt file (just text, no formatting!), html files, and PDFs.
2. Having lots of relevant links to your website from other relevant websites. Note the use of “relevant” in there. If a site or web page has nothing to do with what your site is about, it’s usually a waste of time to get a link from it to your site. But any relevant link is golden!

Link building is an ongoing activity. You can do projects to get links to your site (for example, registering at all the
top directories.) Once you’re done with that, the head-scratching begins; “Where do I get links to my site?”

Here are two excellent resources for those who are looking for ideas on how to build links to their sites:

Matt Cutts (Google spokesman) talks about organic link building on this video:

New slide show from Wordtracker with 25 ideas to help build links (warning, strong Scots accent!):

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Reader Zahra posted this question:

Can you tell me how can i register my site on search engines?

Answer:

For SEARCH ENGINE registration, go to these three sites:

http://www.google.com/local/add/analyticsSplashPage?gl=US&hl=en-US
and
http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
and
https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx

If you want to register at DIRECTORIES, go here:

http://www.wordsinarow.com/wheretogo.html — it will walk you through the
process at the top 30 big directories. It will cost you money to do that – about $1200 in “hard costs”, such as the $299 that Yahoo Directory charges to look at a normal site.

You can also submit to about 2500 smaller directories by getting this
software program for $25 (last time I checked) which is cheaper than paying for registration the big
directories:

Directory Submiter

About 900 of the smaller directories listed among the 2500 in that software program do not require payment or creating a reciprocal link (don’t do either of those, please!). It will take you a lot of time, but it can be worth it.

(Note – that’s an affiliate link to Directory Submitter – I liked their product enough to use it often and so signed up as an affiliate for them.)

Best,

Jere

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A few years back I helped John Eberhard get educated in the techniques of search engine optimization, when he was starting his Real Web Marketing company. He does good work in SEO and web marketing now and he sends out a regular newsletter that I always read when it arrives; it is usually packed with good info and he summarizes the state of things very well. He recently put out a list of tips for website link building that was fairly complete and worth reading and doing. Recommended reading if you do any link building or are trying to figure out how to get started down that road.

I have very few sites bookmarked to which I refer my clients for link-building ideas. Rachelle Money wrote an article a couple of years back after interviewing Eric Ward, who runs a master class for link building. The resulting advice on link building is also worth reading.

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We do a lot of internet marketing for our clients, including SEO of existing websites, PPC campaigns for them, link building, and so on. We manage tens of thousands of dollars of Google AdWords budget monthly for various clients.

One of our clients is the Front Sight Firearms Training Institute, out in the desert near Pahrump, Nevada. On a typical weekend they train about 500 people in firearms safety and help them gain “the competence of skill at arms” which helps someone become cause and stop having a victim mentality about firearms.

The founder of Front Sight is Dr. Ignatius Piazza, with whom we have been working for the last three years to help him continue his unparalleled expansion. We support wholeheartedly his efforts to “change the image of gun ownership in our lifetimes”. Anyone who hasn’t gotten the “Front Sight Legacy” DVD should pick it up to see what he’s doing to help keep secure our 2nd amendment rights.

A few years back Ignatius Piazza fired his existing marketing team because they couldn’t keep up with him. They kept telling him that “you can’t double your business every year.” I don’t happen to believe that, and neither did Dr. Piazza; hence the firing. We are happy to have been a big part of the team that has since facilitated Front Sight’s expansion over the last 3 years; Front Sight has continued doubling every year and is, by all indicators we can read, on track for doing the same thing into the foreseable future. There are no guarantees for such, especially in uncertain economic times with a liberal Supreme Court and an anti-gun sitting president and Congress; but then again that’s why Dr. Piazza’s work is so important.

The moral of this story is: when a client is pushing for expansion – don’t ever get in their road. Get ahead of them and lead the expansion, or get behind them and push.

Because in this world, a group either expands or it dies.

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Just received this fan letter from Lynda in the UK, about our Google AdWords Tutorial.
—–
“Blimey! That was a great read! There have been several “make money with adwords” ebooks/programs I have bought that have still left me blind, but this info, was practically everything I needed to know, so in depth, and best of all, it was free! Not many actually give their knowledge away, unless its for a hefty price in return. Thankyou! I have the confidence to get on with adwords now, knowing some tips and the advice you gave. I think I’ve got the hang of what to do! Cheers!”
—–
It is always nice to be appreciated. We do give away a lot of info on that page about how to optimize a Google AdWords campaign. We also offer Google AdWords campaign management to our clients at a reasonable rate; we manage tens of thousands of dollars of Google AdWords campaigns monthly for our clients. We’ve gotten one client up to a stunning 13% average conversion rate on his Google AdWords campaign traffic, of which we are quite proud. Not as proud as having gotten that same client #1 placement in the Google natural search results for just about all of his keyword phrases, but still we are happy about that high 13% conversion rate.

Best,

Jere
www.wordsinarow.com

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My friend and colleague Carri Bugbee of Big Deal PR in Portland has just won an award at the first annual Twitter awards, winning a “Shorty” award for her many tweets as fictional character @peggyolson (a character from the TV show MadMen). She’s got about 12,000 followers on Twitter, who have followed her many thousands of tweets about what she (the fictional character) is doing.

This is indeed a “Big Deal” for Carri, who just returned to Portland from a week in New York where she came out as the Twitterer who has been tweeting as Peggy Olsen. Prior to that her identity had been cloaked — no one knew who was making these tweets; that itself created some mystery and interest in the character, who posted tweets that were in character and funny, too. A sample tweet:

“It’s a relief to have an entire week without Pete Campbell in the office. It can be hard to get work done with him lurking around my desk”

See article in Business Week

and in the Wall Street Journal.

Carri does a good job twittering on behalf of one of my clients, PetHabitats, who make a flushable dog poo bag (biobag) in an effort to make a difference in preserving and protecting our environment. (Which I am all in favor of, without subscribing to the Green religion itself.)

Carri has set up her own company and website to handle these kinds of Web 2.0 social networking activities for her clients, called “Supporting Characters”

Kudos and congratulations, Carri!

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Jimmy asked:

1. Would you say its better to have your domain name relevant to the sites content or actual highly searched for keyword that will be optimized on the site?
2. Content — Do you recommend hiring someone to write content if we cant do on our own? how exactly does this work?
3. I’ve been told that a high CPC value is important on those highly searched for keywords that your optimizing. What exactly does that mean? How does it work as far as making money?

Dumbed down answers please! Thanks Jimmy

My reply:

Hi, Jimmy -

1. Example: If your website is only about chickens, then having the domain name of chickens.com (or .net or .org) would be best. If your domain is about barnyard animals, then having a page on it optimized for chickens ( www. barnyard-animals.com /chickens.html ) would be best. I would think more searches would be made every day for “chickens” than “barnyard animals”.

2. It’s not hard to write content for a website. But if you can’t do it yourself, then by all means have someone else write content for you. Contact a writer (you can get bids on what you want by posting a notice on www.elance.com ). Give the writer a list of the pages you want, the keywords to be covered on each page, and have them put at least 250 words of text on the page. If the writer is any good, he will interview you and get the info needed to write the pages by picking your brains, or the brains of whoever has the info you need to go on the web pages.

3. I don’t understand your question.

The cost of CPC has nothing to do with optimizing a website for good natural rankings in the search engines. There is probably *some* correlation between the cost of an expensive CPC term, and how many people search for that keyword. But: one of the most popular searches recently was “Brittney Spears” — yet last time I checked, there’s only one person bidding on that keyword at Google Adwords, so the cost of the CPC for that term is minimal. “Brittney Spears” just doesn’t seem worth much as a paid CPC term because there’s so much free stuff out there about her.

Then again, “life insurance” is both an expensive CPC term, and a very popular search term.

The external Google keywords tool here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal will give you actual counts of how many people are searching for which terms every month at Google.

If you want to know what people are paying for certain CPC terms, use the free tool at www.spyfu.com.

Hope this info helps.

Best,

Jere Matlock
SEO Specialist
www.wordsinarow.com

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Visitor J.A. says:

I’m interested in some SEO consulting from you.

My dream words are ‘email lists’

I’m on page 4 now, what will it take — backlinking?

Hi, J.A. -

There are only 37 mentions of your site that Google knows about. That’s a pretty small number.

If you run this search for backlinks on my site www.wordsinarow.com, it will find about 1010 such links. It’s one reason my optin email lists page does so well in a search at Google, where it is has been #1 for about 3 years now in a search for “optin email lists”. Insert your own domain and you’ll find the actual number of backlinks Google knows about. Don’t use the “link:” command, as it has been broken for years now and does not actually report all the links Google knows about.

There are several ways to get really good relevant links to your site that will help your Google rankings:

1. We can do a directory submission process through the top 30 directories online. This costs $500 (our fee) and about $800-to-$1700 in “hard costs”. The hard costs are listed here: http://www.wordsinarow.com/hardcosts.html. You can pick and choose which ones you want us to submit, but to do it right, pay the $1700 (minus anything you’ve already paid, such as possibly the $299 for Yahoo Directory which many people have already paid. Here’s our current list of directories where we register the site: How to Register a Site with the Directories.

2. We farm out a service of registering a site with about 900 little “free” directories. Although we register with 900 of them, only about 500-600 will actually list the site, and many of them are slow to do so. This builds a lot of little links from directories.

The good thing about both 1 and 2 is that your site is usually hand-entered into the directories, so it is “human-reviewed” and thus Google pays attention to the categories in which your site is listed. This creates relevant links.

Completely aside from directories, there are two good ways to get links:

3. Go to this site: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

enter in “email lists” including the quotes.

See what comes up. (You may have to download a Java applet to do this — go ahead, I believe it’s safe — I downloaded it with no ill effect).

You’ll see there various groupings of sites. Bigger circles are the sites that are doing well at Google because they have links from the smaller sites. The trick is to use the list of links on the left of the page and contact the website owners directly (by phone works best) asking for a link specifically from those pages. Try to get links from the exact same pages of the smaller sites that are linking to the larger sites. You can usually get contact info (phone number) from the website. If not, go to the whois info:

http://whois.domaintools.com/wordsinarow.com – for example – you’ll find our phone number there.

4. I can run a report that gives a list of what Google considers to be the “authority” sites for any keyword phrase. (Using software for which I paid a bundle.) “Authority sites” are sites that link to two or more of the top 10 sites at Google for any particular keyword phrase. Once you know who those are (and many of them will be the same sites as in step 3 above) you can contact them asking for links from the same pages. This is best done by phone — emails requesting links are generally ignored in the flood of spam that people are receiving. (Personally I get over 2000 emails a day, 98% of which are spam. I delete most link requests without even looking at them and I’m sure the majority of site owners do the same.) I charge $100 for the report.

So those are ALL good methods of getting relevant links to your site.

Not as good but still sometimes effective:

5. Text link ads can be bought from Text Link Ads and others. Google is filtering these out wherever possible, but while Google is omnipresent, they are not yet omniscient and they will count many of these paid text links toward your ranking. The problem is that not all such links are relevant, so are somewhat wasted. Still, this system works for many companies.

An excellent source of high-quality links is article marketing (although these are short-lived and require constant campaigns to be effective):

6. Article publishing — this is a service offered by several companies — both Expansion Plus (Doug Hay and Sally Falkow) and Studio 98 Design(Rafferty Pendery) offer this service. Feel free to contact them directly.

Best regards,

Jeré Matlock
SEO Consultant
Website Design & Marketing / SEO

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I received this question from a friend today about directory registrations and their worth or lack of it:

QuestionHi Jere

… I just wonder whether you can give me any advice on this. I am looking at a quick way to get some of my sites listed in on-line directories to increase incoming links and I wonder whether you use any tools for doing this…

Basically I have looked at a few tools but in the end there still seems to be a substantial amount of manual inputting involved – so I’m not sure if there is any great benefit from using these types of tools.

I’d totally understand, if you don’t feel you can give away any of your ‘trade secrets’ but if you can offer any pointers or thoughts then that would be very helpful.

Cheers – M

——–

Answer: It’s my experience that there is still great benefit to be had from registering with the top directories. The jury is still out on whether doing lots of registrations in the smaller directories is going to keep working, but it’s fairly close to absolute truth that a link from the Yahoo Directory and ODP are good for your site’s rankings at Google. You can use the page we put up here: ( Directory Registration Page ) to register your website with the top 30 directories. Some of these require payment, and the total hard costs of this project will come to about $1200 if you register where we recommend. Here’s the list of hard costs.

However, if you’re on a tight budget, you can buy a program here: ( Directory Submitter ), which will assist you in registering your site in about 2500 directories. Some of those require payment, and some require setting up a reciprocal link. I recommend you do not do either of those things. That will leave about 900 completely “free” directories where you can register your site, without requiring any payment or reciprocal link.

If you register with them, you can expect that for the next three or four months you will get a steady stream of links coming to your site from these little directories, because all of them are over-booked at the moment with backlogs for submissions. It will take a while for them to process it, which is good because you don’t want to get 900 links overnight, it will result in a penalty at Google for “gaming” their system.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Jeré Matlock

http://www.wordsinarow.com

Website Design & Marketing / SEO

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Question: Jere – I have the stable datum that keyword density should be around 3-4% of the page content for best optimization. More is bad apparently for Google and less isn’t as effective. Any thoughts?

Answer: Good question. That’s not a bad stable datum, but in practice I’ve seen keyword density on a high-ranking page at Google range from 0.01% to 10%.

This page on my site about optin email listsusually ranks at #1 for “optin email lists” at Google.

I have no idea what the keyword density is on that page (I’ve never checked), but I can tell you it’s probably pretty high, despite having many thousands of words of text on that page. I use “optin email lists” and
variants of that phrase everywhere I can on the page, wherever they make sense. However, it doesn’t read as “spammy” and it isn’t “keyword stuffed”.

Basically, I never put any attention on keyword density. I just make sure that the keyword phrase on which I want to focus any given page is listed in these places:

1. Title tag of the page
2. Meta keywords tag of the page (99.99999% useless but I do it anyway)
3. Meta description tag on the page (not quite as useless but heading that way)
4. H2 heading tag on the page (still useful)
5. At least twice in the text on the page, once as an underlined link to another page, which links back to this page using the same underlined text (for double listings at Google). And make sure you have at least 250 words of text, other than menus, sitewide footers, headers, etc.
6. As the underlined link text from the human sitemap to this page.
7. In the title attribute of the links that point to this page.
8. In the alt text of any image that acts as a link to this page.
9. As underlined link text from other websites pointing to this page.

That’s fairly sure to get enough attention from Google concerning what this page is about to get a good ranking, without getting hosed for spamming, spamdexing, keyword stuffing, etc.

Good luck!

Jeré Matlock

http://www.wordsinarow.com

Website Design & Marketing / SEO

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