Search engine optimization is designed to get your website ranked on the first page of a search engines results page. This ranking is based on the search term entered by the user. The key to getting on the front page is to determine what search terms will be used.

Organic traffic, also known as free traffic, is the traffic you receive from a search engine. To receive this traffic you need to be listed in at least the top 10 results on the various search engines using the search term (keywords) entered by the user. Search engine optimization is all about optimizing your pages to get that top ten position.

The various search engines use their own formulas to determine which sites deserve to be in those top results. The difference between being on the front page (the ideal placement) and being on page two could be very marginal. In fact you may be on page one today and back to page two tomorrow. It all depends on what you and your competition have been doing.

The problem with most search engines is that their algorithms (their formulas to determine rankings) maybe using data today that you optimized last week. It can be difficult to know when a change in your search engine optimization tactics is going to effect your placement.

Most website owners want traffic; free traffic at that. To receive this free, organic traffic, you need to be up there with the best when it comes to search engine rankings. Search engine optimization is designed to get you to that front page. Just remember, there are thousands of others trying to get there too.

I found this paragraph buried deep in the middle of a half-way good article on Search Engine Optimization:

The world of search engines boil down to the stereotypical high school hierarchy. Search engines pay more attention to those that are popular. In high school, teens usually become popular by having popular people associate with them. The online world is no different. But how do search engines know that popular sites are associating with you? That is an easy one - they link to your website.

What many beginning webmasters don’t understand is that Search Engine Optimization is a popularity contest. You can have a well-designed website with keyword-rich pages, but that won’t guarantee your success. The more competitive your industry, the more you’ll have to do to compete for rankings. There are many factors that go into ranking for certain keywords. Some of the ones that don’t get a lot of attention are:

• How much traffic your site gets
• The velocity at which you attract relevant links
• Synonymous keywords

How Much Traffic Should You Have?
Most people don’t think about the volume of traffic, but that does come into play in search engine rankings. The author of the above-mentioned article gives a great example with eBay. Why is eBay ranked highly for almost any query involving the word “buy”? Part of it is because it uses the word in conjunction with thousands of other products, but it’s also a well-trafficked website with the age factor going in its favor. Being a popular site is a good thing in Google’s eyes because it means a lot of people trust eBay. If a lot of people trusts a website then Google believes it deserves to be ranked well for its important keywords.

Another example is Wikipedia. Why is Wikipedia on Page 1 for almost any query? Because it is popular. That’s the primary reason. A lot of people use it, therefore Google gives it additional rank juice.

So how do you become popular? There are two ways to achieve popularity on the Web. You have to work on your search engine saturation - the number of pages you have ranked - and link popularity - the number of quality inbound links you have to your site. The way you build search engine saturation is with number of pages. You just build pages. Pick a keyword and build a well-optimized web page around your central topic using a long tail keyword that will rank your site highly in the SERPs. Then you start building inbound links. Do those two things well on a steady basis (Google likes slow growth) and you’ll see your traffic rise steadily.

The Importance Of Link Velocity
Nice segue into the next topic. If you build your links too fast it could hurt you. You might find your website in the Google Supplemental Listings until a human can examine your links to see if they are spam or real solid links. A better way to build links is to do it slowly over time. There are several methods for doing that.

• Article Marketing
• Gradual Directory Submissions
• Forum Participation
• Comments On Blogs In Related Niches
• Link Exchanges With Related Websites And Blogs

The idea is to build steady, solid links by promoting your website with a steady marketing plan. Not a one-time surge, but a steady marketing plan over the lifetime of your website.

Use Synonymous Keywords
Instead of trying to optimize your website around one keyword on every page, try optimizing each page around two or three keywords that are related. For instance, if your website is about teaching florists how to make beautiful flower arrangements then you might built a website that is focused on arranging geraniums, tulips, and lion’s tails in one vase arrangement. Your keywords are pretty obvious, aren’t they?

• geraniums
• tulips
• lion’s tails

But you’ll also want to use “arrange” or “arrangement”, “flower arrangement”, “set”, or some other similar phrase in conjunction with your three primary keywords. The way I would do this is to make “flower arrangement” the primary keyword and each of the names of the flower types secondary phrases that support each other and the main phrase. If there is a name for this type of arrangement then that could be your primary keyword. If there isn’t a recognized name for that arrangement and you want to create a name for it, you probably shouldn’t use that name as a keyword because no one is going to know it but you. You can use it on the page, but don’t make it too prominent or it will compete with your real keywords.

Synonymous keywords get to the heart of semantic Search Engine Optimization. So many people are discussing semantic search as if it were some future development. It isn’t. It’s here now. Google uses synonymous keywords to help it identify a page’s real subject. Synonymous keywords are useful to helping each web page you build rank well for the right terms as part of your Search Engine Optimization.

DMOZ has taken a lot of flack in recent years. Critics say it is slow, unnecessary, and full of prima donnas. Of course, it could be fun to be a prima donna. Couldn’t it?

If this blog post at DMOZ is any clue, I’d think being a DMOZ editor is kind of fun. But can it benefit your web business at all? Does it do anything for your Search Engine Optimization.

First, there is the obvious ethical question: Are you playing favorites with your own websites? DMOZ exists to list websites in categories. It is free and human edited. If editors use their position, as some have in the past, to make their own websites take priority over others’ then that would clearly be an ethical problem. I don’t think most DMOZ editors are that unscrupulous. I’m sure it is a temptation that editors must be on the lookout for.

That said, being a DMOZ editor can benefit your business, albeit not in a search engine positioning and search engine optimization kind of way. At least, you won’t get any additional search juice by being an editor. Being listed in DMOZ will help your business a great deal as you’ll have a valuable incoming link for your website from a high PR site - and that’s always a value. Being an editor, of course, you’ll be able to ensure that your own website is listed. But I think most people would have a problem with it if you applied for an editor’s position at DMOZ and used your position to get your site listed ahead of everyone else’s.

I’d recommend that, if you want to be a DMOZ editor, you submit your own site for inclusion in the directory before you ever apply to be an editor. If your site hasn’t been approved when you are approved for the editor’s position, don’t approve it right away. Check to see where it is in the lineup for approval and work your way through the list until you get to it - then approve it. The link will benefit you, but your job as editor is to be impartial with regard to the sites that are listed in your category. You should not play favorites. Just play the game fairly and you’ll be a benefit to us all.

I like Matt Cutts. Sometimes.

Recently, he addressed an issue regarding Google Images and took the opportunity to explain, once again, how search engines work. I have a few thoughts of my own.

Recently I was on an email thread and the images team wanted to address a misconception. Google Images doesn’t have a dedicated blog right now, so I offered some space on my blog if someone wanted to do a guest post.

Perhaps Google Images needs its own blog now.

Every now and then a story surfaces that Google has ‘censored’ images or web pages and removed them from our site without saying a word to anyone.

I just want to say that I don’t work for Google and Google doesn’t give me money for supporting their cause. But this just doesn’t make sense in and of itself. Google has nothing to gain from censoring images. Ever. Why would they do this? You can Google porn and see all kinds of smut that is likely illegal where you live within seconds and probably see stuff you’ve never imagined possible. You can Google gruesome war photos. You can Google videos of Osama bin Laden making demands to the U.S. and other western countries. There is hardly anything at all that you can’t Google, yet somehow this person thinks that Google censors. Actually, it does - in China where, by law, it has to or risk being blocked by the Chinese government. If Google is so open about its censorship in China, why would it ever deny doing so anywhere else? The allegations just makes no sense.

Well it turns out this image was difficult to find on images.google.com for the first few days after the match, and the story that’s gathered steam is that Google removed it. Some outlets said that this was under pressure from the Israeli government.

First of all let’s put the story straight: we definitely didn’t do this. In fact from the very beginning you could find the image quite easily on YouTube and also on Google News.

It is particularly uncanny that people accuse Google of censorship when you can find the images they claim are being censored elsewhere on the Web. If Google were to censor an image, don’t you think it would censor the image for every result and not just one or two? If the image is on Google News and YouTube then you can Google it and find it. If you can Google it and find it then Google hasn’t censored it. If the image search doesn’t show your website as a result then the problem isn’t Google, it’s your website. Matt Cutts, however, has another simple reason why an image may not appear in Google search results for a few days:

The reason for the delay in the image showing up on Google Images was that it can take a few days between when an image appears and when its crawled by the Googlebot, as explained here.

I’m so tired of hearing the “Google is broke” sob stories. There is nothing wrong with Google. In some ways, the search engine is actually better than it used to be, as Matt clearly points out in his blog post:

When I joined Google in early 2000, we measured the time to update our index in months. Personally, I think it’s great that people now start to wonder why we don’t have a particular web page or image within just a few days. Over time, Google is getting fresher and fresher in my experience, but making a search engine work really well is a difficult task.

Did you read that? Months! It took Google months to index a document in 2000. Most of the time today you can have a document indexed in a few days or even a few hours. But the time factor for indexing new documents has a lot to do with the document and the source of it that is being crawled. If you own several websites and you know how to build incoming links to a website quickly so that you get the search engines to it to crawl the site then you can see quicker results. If you don’t then you may not see results for months. It all boils down to how savvy you are at search engine optimization. I’ve had blog posts on this blog indexed and hit No. 1 at Google within 4 hours. That’s because this blog is a trusted source for Google. We do things right.

That said, Google doesn’t crawl images. All the search engines are trying to figure out better ways to index images. Until they do, we’re stuck with alt tags, page authority, surrounding text, inbound links, anchor text, and other such clues. If the images on your website aren’t getting crawled, don’t blame Google. You probably need to improve your website’s crawlability.

WebProNews suggests 10 ways to increase your search engine saturation. Actually, they called it Number of Pages Indexed. Whatever you call it, there is hope.

Here’s the list:

• PageRank
• Links
• Sitemap
• Speed
• Google’s Crawl Caching Proxy
• Verify
• Content, Content, Content
• Staggard Launch
• Size Matters
• Know How Your Site Is Found, And Tell Google

PageRank

From WebProNews:

It depends a lot on PageRank. The higher your PageRank the more pages that will be indexed. PageRank isn’t a blanket number for all your pages. Each page has its own PageRank. A high PageRank gives the Googlebot more of a reason to return. Matt Cutts confirms, too, that a higher PageRank means a deeper crawl.

I concur. This is proof that persistence pays off. New webmasters often wonder how to increase their PageRank. Well, it doesn’t happen overnight. You’ve got to keep building pages. Don’t worry about stats in the first 30 pages of your website. Just build. Eventually, your PageRank will rise. I’ve seen websites start off at a PageRank of 3 before they even have one page of content on them. That happens because of the website owner’s Whois data, I’m sure. If you have several sites with PageRank then your reputation will help you. If you are on your first website then you have to build your reputation. Be patient and be persistent.

Links

Links and PageRank go hand in hand. The more quality, relevant inbound links you build to your site then the more likely you are build your PageRank. If you have a good internal link structure then that will help your PageRank as well. One of the best strategies I’ve seen for websites is to start an external blog - a standalone blog with its own domain name on the same topic as your website - and build links from the blog to the website every day. Consistency in this will help you establish quality inbound links from a relevant source.

Speed

I can’t tell you how important this is. Too many beginning webmasters start off wanting to build massive sites with huge files that take a long time to load. Start small. Learn the ropes before you go Web 2.0. Huge files with low bandwidth will load slowly and that will hurt your indexing mojo. Again, from WebProNews:

This could involve simplifying the structures and/or navigation of the site. The spiders have difficulty with Flash and Ajax. A text version should be added in those instances.

Bingo! If you’re a newbie, stay away from Flash and Ajax. They are speed killers and you’ll struggle with indexing and PageRank.

Content, Content, Content

There is no substitute for quality, original content. Frequent updating of your websites will keep them fresh. Take static pages of your website that have not been updated in a while and change them up a little bit. It doesn’t have to be much; just a small change will let the search engines know that you’ve changed the page. Then re-upload it and you’ll get crawled again. Work on building inbound links to those pages as well.

Staggered Launch

Here’s another big one. New and inexperienced webmasters want to build Rome in a day. Don’t build your entire website off line then try to upload it all at once. Do it in stages. Plan your website so that it is usable while you work on your long range goals. Staggered launch will build your PageRank and indexability a lot more quickly and reputably.

Size Matters

Bigger, better, faster, and more (thanks to 4 Non Blondes) should be your motto. The bigger your love handles - uhm, I mean website - then the more pages you’ll have indexed. Kind of a no-brainer, huh?

Know How Your Site Is Found, And Tell Google

Track your stats and understand what is going on with your website. Work with the search engines, not against them. One last time from WebProNews:

Find the top queries that lead to your site and remember that anchor text helps in links. Use Google’s tools to see which of your pages are indexed, and if there are violations of some kind. Specify your preferred domain so Google knows what to index.

All of this matters. Anchor text, verification, and Webmaster Tools. Use them. That’s what they’re there for. You can have a world class website with a little work and persistence. Did I mention persistence?

It happens to the best of us sooner or later. You’ll fall in search engine rankings for no apparent reason. You’ve been to the top of the SERPs then all of a sudden you drop, and you don’t know why. There could be any number of reasons why. The first thing you should do is make a list of the things that have been done to your site in the last month. By making such a list you can easily identify any problem areas. Here are some recommendations on some of the most common webmaster problems that have causes search rankings to fall - and what you can do about it if it happens to you:

• If you’ve recently changed hosting providers then you might have had too much down time between providers. If that is the case then don’t worry. Your rankings will come back. Just remember, don’t dally between hosting providers. Get it done quickly.
• One common problem people experience is broken links or permalinks. If you have changed your site infrastructure or moved pages around, but didn’t perform a 301 redirect for the old pages then you could have some broken links. That will hurt you in the search engines. Plus, inbound links will not be effective either. You’ll just lose whatever link juice you have and that will hurt your rankings. Be sure you include 301 redirects in your site structure changes; this is a very common mistake.
• If your hosting company has experienced undue down time then that could be affecting your rankings. Just a one time period of being off line isn’t going to damage you, but if there has been a lot of time off line, multiple instances of it in a short period of time, then that could affect it. Call your hosting provider and ask if they’ve experienced a loss of server recently. If they say that your server has been off line extensively then that could be the problem. No reason for alarm. You’ll get your rankings back when the problem is fixed. If your host can’t fix the problem in a reasonable time then find a new host.
• Is your content spammy? If so, that could be the problem. It’s strange, but sometimes search engines don’t find spam right away. You’ll constantly find top 10 sites that are nothing but spam. But eventually they will catch it. If you have just one page of spam on your website then it could hurt you so check your content.
• Non-optimized web pages. This is the opposite of spam. If your web pages aren’t optimized well enough then the search engines may not know how to rank your pages correctly. Did you rewrite any pages? Double check them. You may have uploaded the wrong pages, previous pages, or just wrote bad content.

These are not the only reasons you might fall in rankings, but these are some of the most common reasons web pages, and websites, fall in search rankings. If you need to, call a professional SEO to help you fix your problem.

This graph showing the Google search and Alexa traffic rankings of this year’s political candidates says a lot. What it doesn’t say is how this information will affect the outcome of the campaigns. Based on the outcome of the Iowa Caucuses, one could conclude that Huckabee didn’t benefit at all from Internet marketing or organic SEO efforts while Obama may have. But the best we can say about the Democratic front runner is that SEO may have helped.

The fact that Ron Paul was the most effective Internet marketer (mostly social marketing) of all the Republican candidates and still did as poorly as he did only shows that the Internet is not a major force in political turnouts. But I believe it will be.

Most people turn to the Internet now as their first source for information. According to the latest figures, about 57%. But what will that look like two years from now? Four years from now? At some point, that number is going to reach 80%. When that happens, political candidates who cannot rank well in the search engines for important key terms aside from their own names will not do well in elections. When that will be exactly, I’m not sure, but I’m banking that it will be before the 2012 presidential election.

If that’s the case, and I believe it is, then how much more important will it be for businesses to do well in search engines if they expect to reach their target markets? It will be extremely important. It is now, but it will be even more important as the competition gets stiffer. And SEO will still be king of content - even in elections.

Giovanna Wall, wife of the famed Aaron, started posting to Aaron’s blog on November 20. That was the day of her first post. Aaron asked everyone to give her a warm welcome, so here’s mine.

I’d first like to say what a great topic she chose for her post. Wikipedia. And then the proverbially rhetorical question as a post title, “When Will Wikipedia Rank For Everything?” Funny. I thought they already had.

The part that I liked the most was the chart she borrowed from RankPulse that showed Wikipedia ranking in the top 10 for 989 out of 1,000 keywords. Then she said that she added high traffic classifiers to those phrases and found that Wikipedia’s results dropped considerably. No doubt. They probably did simply because Wikipedia is not concerned with the long tail.

But I found Giovanna’s conclusion to be enlightening as well:

My explanations for the results are:

1. Although Wikipedia ranks well for competitive phrases, they don’t belong to the associated topical communities. They rank primarily on site authority.
2. While they have enough content to rank for said terms, they don’t have pages targeting those terms. In many cases the relevant content for the phrase is compressed as part of a broader related page.
3. Their title tags target core keywords and lacks modifiers needed to rank well for popular terms that Wikipedia did not dedicate unique pages to.

By fixing the above issues, they may very well rank for the remaining 11 keywords.

My response: Yes, Wikipedia is all about site authority. No long tail. Just a good and trust source of information. Regarding Bullet Point No. 2 - that’s an important SEO principle. You don’t necessarily have to build pages that target specific keywords to rank for those keywords. If you get enough inbound links using a particular phrase as anchor text then you can rank for that key phrase. Match it up with a web page that is relevant in a broad sense and you can steal the thunder of top notch websites in your industry. Finally, if Wikipedia did fix those three issues above then they might actually rank for more than the remaining 11 keywords. But will they?

(Source) 44% of traffic to consumer packaged-goods sites comes from search, according to new joint research from comScore, Procter & Gamble, Yahoo and SEMPO. And these buyers spent 20 percent more in the month following their search activity, reveals the study.

Now that’s a study worth quoting. If you are in the consumer package goods industry and you own a website then you sure want to optimize it for the searches that people are making. And you’ll want to make it easy for people to purchase goods from your website or to arrange for those purposes conveniently. The key to understand e-commerce in this industry is to know what motivates people. According to the study,

* 30% were looking specifically for the company Web site

* 73% were researching products

* 64% were seeking help with an actual purchase decision

* Almost 50% were looking for product promotions

Note that 73% of searchers were looking for product information and 64% were looking for assistance with making a purchase. Is your company website making it easy for people to do these two things?

If you want to meet the growing demand for consumers who go online to find product information and to make a purchase there are some tools that you need to become familiar with. Here is my list of tools that you need to focus on to increase your search engine performance and positioning:

• Search engine optimization
• Company blog
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Press Release Distribution
• Email Marketing
• Link Building
• Social and Viral Marketing

These are all tools that you can use to increase your search engine positioning to meet the demands of consumers in the consumer package goods industry. For more information on these services, contact Brick Marketing today.