We’ve all seen the local search results pop up in Google or Yahoo at one time or another. They tend to display whenever you enter a keyword with a city or location as your search phrase. They look like this:
You can see the first 3 results are paid listings and then Google shows the Local results. Local results are the new #1 position! The original #1 organic listing is below the fold and was pushed down there by 10 new businesses that sit next to a map image, which we know draws the eye to the listings.
If you’ve ever tried getting a domain name that is topically relevant to your site and still contains your primary keywords, you know this can be an aggravating process! You can easily spend hours trying to find that perfect domain name with a .com extension.
Here’s the basic steps to this exercise in futility.
1. You type in your primary keyword phrase, but its taken.
2. Then you add some hyphens to separate your words, but that’s taken.
3. Then you try some plural and singular variations - No luck.
4. You might try adding extra words like "site", "depot", "online", "blog", or even using numbers like "4" to mean "for".
5. And when all that doesn’t work you find yourself contemplating how bad it would be to use the .biz or .info version with your primary keywords. Enough!
Complete article on A Trick to Finding a Keyword Rich Domain Name
Whether you’re a professional SEO managing 40 or 50 websites, or you’re a one-man operation with a couple of your own sites, you still need to track your search engine positioning. Are you moving up or down on the SERPS? How many keywords do you hold a page 1 placement for? Does MSN love your site, but Google hates it?
And, if you’re doing any kind of link building campaign (which you definitely should be), how do you know what’s working and what’s not? Sure, if you only have a couple of sites of your own you might be tempted to let the Google Gods do what they will with your site. But, if you’re trying to run a business, you need to treat your website like a business - and that means tracking your rankings!
How to Track Results
You can do it manually with a trusty Excel spreadsheet, a few hundred hours (ok, so I exagerated), and sheer will and determination. But why?
Just to give you an idea of one of my old manual ranking reports, here’s a screenshot of the whole grueling mess:
Complete article on How Do You Keep Track of Search Engine Positioning?
We all know, as SEO’s, how important getting links are and how they play a major role in influencing your rankings in search engine’s. The main issue some search engines are trying to sort out is, how many of those links are actually “natural” and how many of those are manipulated by link builders or webmasters? If you have a good quality site with quality material, other sites in your niche should link to you regardless right?
Complete article on Is Link Building Really Necessary?
For those who are new to the concept of “Google Juice“, let me take a moment to explain. Google Juice is the sweet nectar that is passed from one site to another through linking. Sites with high rankings have lots of Google Juice, and can therefore pass it around through dofollow links. The more high quality links you get to your site, the more Google Juice is passed, and the higher your rankings climb.
Internal Google Juice
You can even pass Google juice on to other pages in your site. Since most of your incoming links probably point to your homepage, let’s start there.
Let’s say your “Running Shoes” website homepage has a Google Pagerank of 5. And, being a good search engine optimizer, you’ve done your keyword research to find that “Nike running shoes” and “New Balance running shoes” are highly searched keyphrases in your niche. So you setup your two pages targeted for each keyphrase.
Complete article on Is Your Site Leaking Google Juice?
As any good SEO knows, backlinks can make or break your site. If your incoming links are from low value directory sites, or link farms, your rankings can drop like a stone overnight. And, now with Google’s restrictions on paid links, your site can get banned completely just for a harmless paid review.
So it’s getting more and more difficult to create quality backlinks to your site that play by the rules. Until Hubpages came along. Hubpages is a content sharing site that allows anyone to create an account for free and post articles (AKA “hubs”) to it for everyone to read.
Benefits to Hubpages
Hubpages followed in the footsteps of its predecessor, Squidoo, but in my opinion, has made some improvements over Squidoo. Here’s how…
Complete article on Using HubPages to Create Quality Backlinks
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) can be a little confusing and seem overwhelming to those of us who want a hard and fast rule for reaching the perfect keyword density in our web pages. I’m going to break down the concepts behind LSI, and give you a couple tips to make it simple to find out what Google really wants.
LSI has been around as an SEO hot topic for several years, but gained in popularity when Google mentioned using LSI as one way to determine the relevancy of a page, in their patent application.
Complete article on LSI Made Simple
