Monthly Archives: January 2012

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In this article I’m going to lay out a method so devastatingly effective for getting top search rankings really fast that its simplicity might surprise you.

Now, to be fair, I have talked about pieces of this in my last article.  In fact, I’ve been harping on two aspects of this: the use of Google+ (which I’m going to shorten to just G+ from here on out) and becoming an authority in your market.

The problem with the whole “authority” thing is that it can take time. What I want to do with this article is help you get some good rankings quickly.

Actually, what I want to do with this article is help you to absolutely crush it on Google.

The thing is, the new Panda update, followed by the Search+ changes, have made it so that anyone doing any kind of business without a G+ page is foolish.

Understand that before the Panda update I was a little G+ agnostic. There just wasn’t enough going on, and some of the “sharing” features (such as the +1) didn’t seem to be getting enough usage. However, with the growth of G+ has come more sharing. Not only that, but the Search+ additions have made it worthwhile to actually offer an incentive for +1s. 

On my own G+ page I’m doing this as well, by giving people who +1 and add me to their circles a special report containing information that I’ll never give anywhere else.

All of that is a long way of saying that G+ is now important for businesses of any kind. As with Facebook, it allows an impressive level of engagement with your customers.

For the purposes of this article, however, G+ can receive preferential search treatment. The emphasis here is on the word “can,” as it’s important to make sure that you do things correctly.

Not only that, but G+ being so completely spidered by the search engine means that posts you create on G+ that are important, and get heavily shared, will be “findable” years down the road. In fact, great posts on G+ can easily “take on a life of their own” and be spread and shared around in ways that simply are not possible with Facebook.

Not only that, but the “circles” concept allows you to segment people in ways that are frankly awesome, besides being incredibly intuitive. Imagine having one circle that is prospects or leads, and another that is customers. You can now vary what each sees through their G+ streams based on their relationship to you. In other words, you can give different information to a prospect than to a long time customer.

With the background information out of the way, let’s talk about how you can absolutely crush your competition on Google. 

Next: Optimize Your Profile
 

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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/The-EXACT-Method-for-Crushing-It-On-Google/

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What do a great cook and a great blogger have in common? A lot more than you might think. So grab a quick snack and keep reading for an explanation you can really sink your teeth into.

Inspiration strikes in strange ways; in this case, I reached the end of Neil Patel’s excellent article covering 13 questions you should ask yourself while writing a blog post. In his discussion of the last question, he compared a blog post to a restaurant meal. Will your reader complain about your blog post because you’ve served them skimpy fare? “Are you feeding people content so they are full when they leave your site…or are they hungry, looking for more?” Patel asked. “If they are still hungry, your readers probably won’t come back.”

So if your readers are devouring your blog content, that makes you a cook. And if a blog post is a complete meal, then writing a blog post is like cooking that meal. As with a meal, your visitors enjoy the finished product, but you know how much work went into it. Creating a good blog post, like cooking a good meal, involves a process that begins even before you turn on your computer or open your cookbook to track down some recipes.

It starts with what you enjoy. No, actually, it starts with what really makes you salivate. Can’t get enough spicy Indian food? Then you probably shouldn’t be cooking potato pancakes – unless you want to give them a very different twist. The best chefs, like the best bloggers, are passionate about what they’re doing. So write about your passion. Or at least find something in what you’re writing that makes you feel passionate.

Now if you’re preparing a meal for a group, you need to take their tastes into consideration. Is someone allergic to garlic? You’ll need to exclude that spice and find ways to make your meal just as flavorful. That’s eminently doable. I’ve talked about many aspects of my life in the literally hundreds of articles I’ve written for SEO Chat, but there are certain things I won’t discuss – because they’re private, or because some of my readers might find them offensive. So cater to your readers’ tastes. You can certainly spice things up a bit, but let’s face it, you wouldn’t serve steak tartare to a table full of vegetarians, right?

Okay, once you get a general idea of what you’re going to serve, you need to look up some recipes. What this means in the context of a blog entry is, you need to do some research. And unlike many cooks, you won’t want to copy a recipe exactly. “Before you sit down and write an article, it’s important to search the web for articles like your idea,” Patel notes. “One of the things that I do is take the headline that I’m thinking about using and drop it into the Google search box. Then I look at what comes up.”

In the context of a blog entry, that might mean that you find some provocative research, an analyst’s opinion relevant to the research, and form your own point of view about it all. There are plenty of ways you can combine different ideas, but you need to add something original to make a blog entry – or a dish – truly yours.

Next: Assemble Your Ingredients
 

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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Feed-Your-Blogs-Readers-Well/

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Streamlining and simplifying seem like such good things on paper. Strangely, though, when Google is the one doing the simplifying, and the subject of the process is its privacy policy, most observers get hot under the collar. Why is it so bad when Google does it?

Just in case you didn’t check Google yesterday, the search giant started posting a note under its search box explaining that it will be updating both its privacy policy and its terms of service, with the new terms going into effect on the first of March. If you can’t be bothered to read the entire policy previews to which I’ve linked, no problem; Google also provides a policy overview to help you understand why the company is making these changes and how they’ll affect users of the search giant’s various services.

So why exactly is Google doing this? Well, if you had more than 70 different privacy policies that applied to your tremendous array of products and services, as the search company explains in its blog post, you’d probably feel as if you had too much legalese to deal with, too. And if Google finds all of these different policies complicated – and that’s AFTER they trimmed back on their policies in 2010, by the way – surely their users find the situation a little bewildering as well.

Google retained separate privacy policies for Google Chrome Browser and Chrome OS, Google Books, and Google Wallet, but more than 60 will be covered by just one policy. The company says that this will assist it in its “efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google.” Google notes that this approach “is now fairly standard across the web,” and in line with regulatory calls for shorter, simpler privacy policies.

Basically, the new policy will allow all of the information that Google collects about you to be shared between its services. It’s important to note that Google won’t be collecting any MORE information about its users than it already does; it just won’t be kept in separate silos any longer. Combining information in this way could allow Google to make more intelligent guesses when you use their services.

For instance, if Google notices from your YouTube viewing or sharing that you’re more interested in jaguars (the animal) than Jaguars (the car), when you put the word “jaguar” into its search engine, it will return results relevant to the animal and not the auto. Or if you use Gmail, Google may remember the way your friends spell their names, and make corrections accordingly. As an example of what might eventually be possible in an environment where information gets shared between services, Google notes in its blog entry that “We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day.”

Next: Activists Outraged by Changes
 

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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Simplifies-Its-Privacy-Policies/

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I’ve only just started writing here at SEO Chat and already I think I’ve created a bit of a problem. I’ve discussed several techniques, but provided no real way of turning those into a single cohesive strategy. Consider this piece the first part of my correcting this issue.

Now let me be clear about something. This article isn’t meant to provide some all-encompassing strategy for traffic generation or search engine rankings. It is instead meant to take the information I’ve already given and roll that information into a strategy. As I do more articles, I’ll continue to expand on this. Right now, however, what I’d like to do is start putting some of the pieces together that I’ve given to you into a single picture.

In the article “Real Link Wheel Secrets To Top Google Rankings” I talked about link wheels and how to build them using white hat techniques to improve your search rankings. Most importantly (to me at least), I talked about how to use them to expand your authority presence and gain traffic from many different sources.

Then, in “10 Steps To Being #1 On Google” I gave several techniques that can improve your chances of obtaining links and getting your content shared. Again, the idea with this article was to give you methods to expand your authority presence in your market and gain more traffic from more sources.

Then recently I wrote “The Google Optimization Truth You Aren’t Being Told,” in which I talked about how search results can vary tremendously from one person to another. I hammered home yet again how important it is to get traffic from as many sources as possible. I talked about (yet again) making sure that your market sees you as an expert in the space.

You’ll notice that’s a recurring theme with me. Once the marketplace sees you as an expert and bona fide authority, you are no longer limited by whatever the search engines deign to send your way. You’re getting a ton of traffic from a lot of sources.

The problem, however, is that it can take quite a long time to build the perception in the marketplace that you’re an authority, unless there is some way to shortcut that process.

Fortunately, the changes at Google actually can help that to happen. In other words, it is now easier than ever to rank well. Done correctly, you can very quickly build the impression that you’re the overwhelming leader of your market.

You can quickly create this huge domination of the search space, then use that to build market authority much faster and easier than waiting around for years for it to happen on its own.

So the question becomes … how do you do that?

Next: It Starts With Google Plus
 

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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Laying-Out-An-SEO-and-Traffic-Generation-Strategy/

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Every marketer knows that anything “above the fold” will attract the most attention. That’s why many advertising-supported websites put lots of ads near the top of the page. Now these ads are attracting some possibly unwanted attention from Google.

You know that the search giant focuses on getting users to the sites that best answer their queries. If you’ve been trying to rank for a while, you probably also know that Google cares about the user’s experience once they arrive at the site. This fact drives most of their algorithm changes. It’s why Panda devastated content farms; the thin content these sites often provided helped relatively few searchers, and cluttered the search results with low quality pages.

Google’s newest algorithm change also stems from searcher concerns. You can read their blog post covering the issue. But you almost don’t need to read it to understand why they’d do it. Think like a searcher. You’re looking for meaty content. How do you feel when you click a promising link from a search result, hoping to find the answer to your query – only to find what appears to be a page full of ads? Sure, there’s real content on the page, but you can only see about an inch or two of it visible, and you must scroll down to make out the rest.

You can curse Internet-shortened attention spans and laziness all you want, but the fact of the matter is, that’s a frustrating experience. And Google has chosen to do something about it. The search company changed its algorithm to look “at the layout of the webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on the result,” it explained in the blog post. Google has heard complaints from users who click on a result and can’t find the content: “Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see the content right away. So sites that don’t have much content ‘above-the-fold’ can be affected by this change…Such sites may not rank as high going forward.”

It’s important to note that Google is singling out sites that place excessive above-the-fold ads; they’re not trying to penalize advertising-supported publishers who use a normal amount of this kind of advertising to help monetize their content. The search giant stated that this change “noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally.” If you believe your site has been affected, you can try out Google’s Browser Size tool to check the appearance of your site under various different screen resolutions.

Maybe you figure that this change won’t affect you; it’s less than one in a hundred sites, right? As Alan Bleiweiss explains on Search Engine Journal, “that’s a big mistake…With billions upon billions of searches taking place, that’s an awful lot of searches impacted.” Which brings up the following questions: how do you know if your site got dinged by this algorithm change? And what can you do about it?

Next: Finding Out and Taking Action
 

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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-to-Penalize-For-Excessive-AbovetheFold-Ads/

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Personalized search makes it much tougher to know your site’s exact standings in the SERPs. But you can use some of the recent changes to Google’s features to help your pages turn up high in the results, and attract the traffic you’re looking for.

In articles here on SEO Chat and on my blog, I talk much more about getting traffic than I do about actually getting top search rankings. In fact, in my “State of Marketing Address” I discuss at some length how the focus in 2012 is going to have to change.

There is a simple reason for that: search results are now extremely variable from one person to another, especially on Google, and this has been the case for quite some time. The new “Search Plus Your World” results on Google make this situation far worse.

In fact, I can make almost anyone’s website show up on page 1 for a given search result on their computer — at same time that on mine, their site might be buried on page 10, if it shows up anywhere in the results at all.

However, now that I’ve just said that, let me also say that you can dramatically improve your chances for ranking well no matter who does a search for a relevant phrase (or where they do it). Yes, while it is true that, with the highly variable nature of Google search results, you have no idea where you will show up, you can certainly “stack the odds in your favor” that you’ll show up quite high in the search results.

What’s interesting with all of this is that the new “search plus your world” feature, at least for the moment, makes getting your site ranking well for everyone easier than ever. Google is showing that lots of “+1s” will rank well, and those are fairly easy to get. Take a look around the articles here on SEO Chat, and you’ll quickly see that Google seems to be giving preferential treatment to Google Plus pages (especially if they are named the same as a search phrase).

In fact, it is rapidly looking like those have more weight with Google than even links. This means that businesses are likely to start working hard to get them. Furthermore, local businesses will be well served by doing everything they can to make sure they are added to as many circles as possible.

These connections look as if they will heavily drive the results listings for ALL users. The more +1s and the more connections a given business, page, etc. has, the better its rankings are likely to be. 

What’s interesting is that if you go to fiverr.com, it’s pretty easy to find people that will get you hundreds of +1s. Now you need to be smart about this. Getting hundreds of +1s to a page that doesn’t even have that much traffic is going to raise red flags and probably won’t help much.

That said, imagine for a moment combining the idea of getting a bunch of +1s with a Google page. This is proving to be a rather rapid mechanism for getting on the first page (or even on the ever important first three results) in a startlingly short period of time.

The best part is that these rankings appear to hold even for people without Google Plus accounts, which is a testament to how strongly social factors are being weighted in the newest Google search algorithm.

Next: The Best Kind of Links
 

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The title says that there are 10 steps to being number one on Google. The truth is that there is only method — and it is an absolute Google domination machine.

I will go so far as to say that there is NO other method for getting to the top of Google that is better.It’s a method so intensely powerful that not only will you obtain top Google rankings, but people will soon begin seeking you out specifically, without considering anyone else.

I can also say that this method can get you an insane amount of traffic from a wide and ever growing variety of sources.

What magic method am I talking about? The method can be summed up in two simple words:

Be Worthy

Now before I continue, let me say that this isn’t a cop out, because there’s a little more to it than that.What I’m saying is that your site needs to be worthy of your visitors time to visit.

Let me put it to you another way.I don’t care what you do, I don’t care what you sell, or what your site is about, you are in the information business.Your job is to educate and inform your visitors as to why they should do business with you.

Done properly, it means more than just saying, “we’re the low price leader!”It means giving your visitors real knowledge and information, real value, whether they buy anything or not.

It means putting stuff onto your site that is so good people WANT to read it AND to SHARE IT. It means putting information on your site that is so good, people want to TALK ABOUT YOU.

When people talk about you, they link to you; when they link to you, that helps your Google ranking. Not only that, but it also means that other sites from all over the web are also sending traffic to you.

In fact, for MOST of my own online businesses, I get FAR more traffic from other sites than I do from Google itself, even though my sites completely dominate in the searches.

So how exactly do you become worthy? How exactly do you get people to want to talk about you?

It starts by wanting to know enough about your market that you can be a thought leader.

Next: The Ten Steps
 

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