Now That Google Dominates...

Now That Google Dominates...

TechTransform, November 18, 2002: Now that Yahoo has renewed with Google, "the potential exists for about 70-80% of all web searches coming from a direct or indirect result of a Google listing."

That's the message from search engine veteran Dave Kelly, published in Jim Daniels' article of 8 November, posted at http://www.bizweb2000.com/gazette/. He goes on to say:

Need I stress any further how important it is to get a great listing in Google? I cannot emphasize enough that how important it is to do well in Google.

OK, so here is what I recommend to you to help your Google rankings.

For starters, I would ask if you have to free Google toolbar installed into Internet Explorer browser? If not you can download it free at http://toolbar.google.com/ - it shows you your current page rank (PR).

Jim, your site has a PR of 6 and 240 links pointing to the site. A PR of six is very good but the only way you are going to get a higher page rank is to get other PR 6 and above sites linking to you. At this point with your current high page rank you want to be very careful whom you link to. You do not want to add any outgoing links on your site to sites of lesser quality than yours. In my opinion, Google tends to penalize for this.

The key right now in my opinion is not to go out and secure as many links as possible, Google is far more concerned with the quality of links that point to your site... and what the linkable text in those links say.

For example, if I had a link on my site to your main page which is geared towards internet marketing, the way to ask the other site to display the link would be by using the words internet marketing in the linkable text. This is one thing Google looks for. And they make a direct correlation to the info on your page, especially the title tag...

The problem most folks have is obtaining those great links. There are lots of ways to do it, you just have to use your imagination. One technique you might consider is checking customers' URLs when they order. If any customers have high page rank you could offer them some type of discount on your products if they agree to put a link to your site. There are a lot of high PR sites and some of the site owners don't even know. Links from a few good sites would likely offset any lost income many times over.

In closing... be sure to tell your subscribers that if they are looking to gain search engine traffic, get into Google! And before they pay a SE specialist big bucks for better ranking in any search engine, try the simple and effective strategies I share at my Search Engine GoldMine site.

Great advice from Dave, brought to you (again) by Jim Daniels.

Read the full article here.

Posted 18 November 2002

Excerpted from an article by Jim Daniels of JDD Publishing. Visit Jim at http://www.bizweb2000.com and http://www.make-a-living-online.com.

COUNTERPOINT

Scott Anderson of Shadow Marketing responds to this article:

Dave is right, but there are some insights that he should have included that would have made this a more useful article. Yes, Google is on record as saying that inbound link quality has become one of the (if not the) primary relevancy criteria. And yes, as goes Google, so goes the rest of searchenginedom.

But he could have also said that Google places high link quality ratings to listings on the OTHER human directory - the Open Directory Project. Everyone keeps thinking Yahoo, Yahoo, but the ODP is a sleeping giant...now made much more important by the very points he raised in his article. And they don't charge inclusion fees (of course, their editors may take 3-4 months to review your submission, but so did Yahoo's).

He should have also said that it's not just any links, but SOLELY TEXT LINKS. Graphical links are (for some incredibly stupid reason) invisible to the search engine spiders. Sooner or later the SEs will wake up to this...why they haven't is beyond me.

Then he should have said that it's not just where the text links are pointing from, but what what the text links use. So a link that says www.techtransform.com has WAY less relevancy value than a link that says "high tech turnaround artist" or "technology company transformation" or whatever it is you're up to these days. (In addition, the more links are on the page pointing to yours, the less relevancy each of those links has, so just getting onto someone's Links page is good, but not as good as you'd think.)

Also, many people lose sight of what exactly is getting indexed by Google and all the others. The key is to "optimize" individual pages. Sites don't get ranked, pages do. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) people get this, but many do-it-yourselfers forget about it. So unless your entire site is focused on a single idea (say, leaf blowers) it's critical to construct optimized search phrase landing pages...screw the homepage.

And not to get too long-winded (oops, too late), but it's interesting to note that the Web has ALWAYS been about links. The last few years everyone seemed to get "search engine myopia". All the attention was on "defeating" the SE's ranking algorithms. Wrong wrong wrong.

Thanks to the big brains at Google, the focus is finally coming back to keel: good inbound links from good sites drive good traffic and high relevancy rankings. That's not an SEO statement, it's a web statement. Build links for their own sake and the search engines will reward you for it.

There are some fabulous new tools to help do this incredibly tedious work, too. But my fingers are too tired to elucidate....

Posted 18 November 2002

We pestered Scott about the tools:

Oh, that tools thing: the link analysis gem is called OptiLink. It's a cheesy site but a remarkable piece of software. And I love it when the developer PHONES ME UP when I have a pesky upgrade issue.

Posted 8 June 2003