Earn By a Click Blog

By Matthew Rotterman

I recently found out that a friend of mine has an online business that I was not aware of. She said that she sells beads and jewelry accessories. She sent me the link to her site and I gave it a cursory glance. I asked her how business was and she told me that business is ok, but that she would like to have more customers. I then asked her about her marketing and what all it consists of. She told me that she does not bother with it because her business is part of a franchise. I recommended to her that she use some keyword rich articles to improve her search engine results and she told me that she does not want to spend the money on it and that “business will pick up soon”. She had no strategic plan of how her business would “pick up” though.

This is an all too common conversation I have with people when talking to them about search engine optimization through the use of keyword articles. Many of the people I talk to do not really know what search engine optimization is, much less what keyword articles are. Too often I see people who turn to the Internet as a way to make money but do not understand how to go from making a little money to having a booming business. Internet businesses are often times rather easy to operate and generate a good return on investment, but what if those returns on investment could double? Triple? More?

Consider this, when I did a search for “jewelry accessories” on Google there are 23,500,000 results listed at the time of this article writing. After looking at about three pages I stopped looking to see if her website was listed. This is typical for people who do searches for keywords like jewelry accessories. If they do not find what they are looking for in the first two or three pages they will generally stop looking and try other keyword combinations. Most people are not going to sift through 235 sites, much less 23,500,000 listings. The more you sift through the sites the less likely they are to be good matches to what you were looking for anyway.

Keyword articles could improve her search engine results a great deal. Keyword articles most often come up when someone types in “jewelry accessories” and other relevant keyword combinations. Creating articles that provide information, as well as adhere to a keyword density formula, is a major component as to how your website will get ranked higher in the search engine results.

Most often, it does take some time for Google and Yahoo to crawl the keyword articles on your website. You will not see an instant ranking increase the day you post these articles on your website. The major search engine companies prefer to find a website by way of a “natural” search. This is why inbound links to your site are also important. You can set the Revisit meta tag on your sitemap page to better represent the frequency by which you add new content to your site. Try to be accurate with this setting — if you try to cheat the system, the search engine robots will eventually stop coming.

Sites that are discovered by the search engine robots through a natural search — links from another website — will be crawled far sooner than the site whose webmaster uses the Add URL link at the search engine’s main website.

My friend did not realize the potential increase keyword-rich articles could have on her business and did not want to invest the money into developing this content. She was more concerned with the “now” and not the future returns that she could get from investing now in strategic marketing activities. It does cost some money to have keyword densities developed as well as having the articles written. It is also important to know what keywords to use. Keyword combinations can easily be researched on the Internet by using sites such as http://www.wordtracker.com. Once all of this is determined, the articles can be written and then posted to the website. There are many companies, such as http://www.keywordtext.com, that offer these types of services for a reasonable price.

Is the cost of doing this type of marketing worthwhile? Well that is up to the website owner to decide. If the website owner wants to see strong gains in the amount of hits his or her website is getting, then yes. The more people who visit your website, the more likely you are to sell your product or service. You may have a wonderful website and sell a great product or service, but if no one can find it, you are not meeting your potential.

How do you find products or services that you need? Do you look on the Internet? The phone book? Newspapers? Whatever method you choose to do your own shopping, you know that advertising and marketing produces results. You do not purchase goods and services from companies you cannot find. Do yourself and your business a favor and get some keyword articles written, so that you can watch your website traffic and sales soar.

About the author:
Matthew Rotterman is a writer and editor at: KeywordText.com
“Keyword Text” managed to bring together several writers and editors to provide a few low-cost writing services for those who are working hard to become more profitable. They offer Content Creation Services which include: Exclusive WebPage Content and Reprint Articles. Keyword Text also offers very attractive Volume discounts. Compare us to our competition, you will be surprised. http://keywordtext.com/dir.pl/ktc/index.html

By Darren Yates

How many years did you register your domain name for?
If it was only one then Google could hold that against you.

Why?

Because the majority of Spam websites only register a domain name for one year. A domain name registered for a longer period implies that the owner is more likely to be legitimate and serious about their web site.

This is just one of the unusual factors possibly considered by Google when indexing and ranking a website. Factors you could never even have guessed at in some cases.

How do I know this?

Google have recently made public, March 31 2005, the contents of their filing of United States Patent Application 20050071741.

In which many of the search giants secret ranking criteria is revealed and it makes very interesting reading. You must read this if you are serious about ranking well in Google. The days of Spaming Google are drawing to a close. With this patent they reveal just how hard they’re coming down on Spam sites. You Do Not want to get caught out.

Listed below you will find the hard facts, I recommend you bookmark this page now. You will need to reference it each time you optimize a new site.

• Links.

It’s common knowledge that Google relies heavily on inbound relevant links to rank a site. Now they explain exactly how it works.

As well as the number, quality and anchor text factors of a link. Google seems to also consider historical factors. Apparently the Google ’sandbox’ or aging delay begins count down the minute links to a new site are discovered.

Google record the discovery of a link, link changes over time, the speed at which a site gains links and the link life span.

With this in mind fast link acquisition may be a strong indicator of potential search engine Spam.

Gone are the days of pages and pages full of links. You must grow your links slowly to stay below the radar and be careful who you exchange links with. That means no more buying hundreds of links at once or other underhand tactics.

PR is now very valuable.

Your link anchor text should vary but remain consistent with your site content. No more using your main keywords on every link exchange you gain. That’s ‘anchor Spam’. Instead vary them around your top five to ten keywords.

Link exchanges are still very important but you must work and utilize them ethically. If you don’t and you get caught the recovery from a ban can be months in coming and your host and IP may also be recorded.

Softly softly seems to be the message. The fact is fewer but better quality links will benefit you more anyway and they will be much more likely to long-term which is good to.

• Site click through rates (CTR)

CTR may now be monitored through cache, temporary files, bookmarks and favorites via the Google toolbar or desktop tools. Many have suspected for some time that sites are reward for good CTR with a raise in ranking. Similar to how Adwords works.

CTR is monitored to see if fresh or stale content is preferred for a search result.

CTR is also analyzed for increases or decreases relating to trends or seasons.

• Web page rankings are recorded and monitored for changes.

• The traffic to a web page is recorded and monitored over time.

• Sites can be ranked seasonally. A ski site may rank higher in the winter than in the summer. Google can monitor and rank pages by recording CTR changes by season.

• Bookmarks and favorites could be monitored for changes, deletions or additions.

• User behavior in general could be monitored.

As Google is capable of tracking traffic to your site you should closely monitor the small amount of copy returned in search results. Ideally you want to integrate a call to action in there to increase your listings CTR.

Clicks away from your site back to the search results are also monitored. Make your site as sticky as possible to keep visitors there longer. As mentioned above it may also help if you could get your visitors to bookmark you.

• The frequency and amount of page updates is monitored and recorded as is the number of pages.

Mass updates of hundreds of files will see you pop up on the radar.

On the other hand few or small updates to your site could see your rankings slide. Unless your CTR is good. A stale page that receives good traffic may hold it’s own and not require an update. So don’t update for the sake of it.

Depending on your market fresh content may not be a requirement. If the information your pages contain does not go out of date then updating may not be necessary. If your market is more news based for example then changes regularly are a must. In general changes don’t necessarily have to mean fresh content. They could involve simple edits to current content.

A further indicator that Google is really cracking down on Spam is made clear in the following extract from the Patent. Mention is made of changing the focus of multiple pages at once.

Here’s the quote -
“A significant change over time in the set of topics associated with a document may indicate that the document has changed owners and previous document indicators, such as score, anchor text, etc., are no longer reliable.

Similarly, a spike in the number of topics could indicate Spam. For example, if a particular document is associated with a set of one or more topics over what may be considered a ’stable’ period of time and then a (sudden) spike occurs in the number of topics associated with the document, this may be an indication that the document has been taken over as a ‘doorway’ document.

Another indication may include the sudden disappearance of the original topics associated with the document. If one or more of these situations are detected, then [Google] may reduce the relative score of such documents and/or the links, anchor text, or other data associated the document.”

There’s still more to look out for:-

• Changes in on page keyword density is monitored and recorded as are changes to anchor text.

• The domain name owner address is considered, most likely to help in a local search result.

• The technical and admin contact details are checked for consistency. These are often falsified for Spam domains.

• Your hosts IP address. If you are on a shared server it’s possible somebody else on that server is using dirty tactics or Spaming. If so your site will suffer since you share the same IP.

The impression I get here is that Google have learned from the Spam ‘attack’ they suffered in early 2004 and they are determined to eradicate it from their listing results.

So what do you do?

There’s a lot to take onboard here and consider. But you can’t go far wrong with your SEO if you try to grow your site as organically as possible.

If you know what you are doing you can take short cuts. Carry on with link exchanges but consider each site carefully and slow down in your gathering of them. Vary your anchor text. Add small amounts of good quality content to your site regularly. Check your search engine listings and edit your site to include a call to action in them if possible. Make your site more ’sticky’ to encourage visitors to stay a while. Encourage visitors to Bookmark your site. Oh and register new domain names for at least two years.

Before you do anything remember to reference the above info first. It may just save you months of misery as your site gets banned and ‘Sand boxed’.

Overall keep it ethical and you can’t go far wrong.
Do not be tempted to Spam. Stick to the guidelines above and you are much more likely to outlast and out rank your competition.

About the author:
About the Author

Darren Yates is owner of How-to-make-money-online.info a site focused on Making Money Online and Internet Marketing, listing the many and varied ways of making money online. Featuring, resources, thousands of Internet Marketing articles and useful links.