EzSEO Newsletter # 72
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EzSEO Newsletter # 72
Andy Williams ez SEO
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This week:
1. ISP filtering of your email
2. Finding a profitable Niche
3. SEO and the art of Common Sense
4. Other News
Hi again,
Hope you are enjoying your Easter holidays. In many parts of the world you probably have chocolate egg on your face ;o).
This morning in Tenerife I can hear the banging of drums further up the valley as people celebrate the resurrection (and can once again eat meet). I originally thought it was Teide erupting and I would have to cancel the newsletter ;o), until my wife reminded my what day it was.
Whichever way you celebrate this holiday, enjoy it, and enjoy your family.
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1. ISP Filtering of your Email
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Aweber, who send out this newsletter for me, sent me a list of about 10 ISP who filter out Aweber email including my newsletter. This is making it increasingly difficult to get this newsletter to those who want it.
You may have noticed that I have been sending out notifications that the newsletter is online. The number of clickthroughs to the newsletter from these notifications indicate that up to 25% of you don’t get the newsletter when it is sent on a Sunday morning.
If for any reason you don’t get it on a Sunday, you can skip straight to my blog, where newsletters are published straight after I send them out. If you use a feed reader, why not configure it to get the newsletter directly to your desktop.
If you find that you consistently don’t get the newsletter, you might try contacting your ISP and asking whether they are blocking emails with the @aweber.com ending. Since Aweber only allows double opt-in, it is impossible for someone to receive mail that they did not sign up for (unless someone has access to your email details). They should not be blocking this mail.
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2. Finding a profitable Niche
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In last weeks “How much is enough” article, I tried to answer a question about how many web pages was enough to make a living online.
As I pointed out, it is impossible to say.
It depends on how targeted those pages are to keywords people actually search for, how likely someone is to buy from your page if they do find it, and how well you rank in the search engines for your chosen terms.
You also have to take into account the niche. Do Adsense ads pay well in that Niche? Do your merchants offer high commissions? Are your merchants protecting you and making sure you get the commission on all customers that you sent?
Obviously there are so many variables, that it really is impossible to say how many pages you need to make a living. However, it is relatively easy to find out which niches will be profitable.
A great way to find out how profitable a niche will be is to look at how much money others are prepared to spend on PPC search engines for related terms.
Spend an hour or so looking at PPC bids for your Niche.
You could do this by opening a Google Adwords account and see how much money you would need to bid for the keywords in your niche if you wanted to advertise on Google Adwords.
If you don’t want to go to that trouble, you could look at Overture and see how much people are paying there for their clicks. Again, the more the better from your point of view.
If something has a high bid on Overture, it is likely to have a high bid on Adwords too.
Here is a tool that can show you how much advertisers pay on Overture:
e.g. Using this tool, I typed in various phrases:
viagra - Top bid at Overture was just $1.57
generic viagra - Top bid at Overture was just $0.99
car loan - Top bid at Overture was just $3.76
home loan - Top bid at Overture was just $8.01
morgage - Top bid at Overture was just $11.03
Let’s look some related phrases that might appear on different pages of a site:
binoculars - Top bid at Overture was just $1.29
bushnell binoculars - Top bid at Overture was just $0.99
nikon binoculars - Top bid at Overture was just $0.77
digital camera binoculars - Top bid was just $0.53
So, is your niche attracting high bids at the PPC?
The niches that attract the highest PPC bids, are the hot niches. Not only will you make more money from Adsense, but you are likely to make more affiliate revenue because the PPCers will have already tested this, and are prepared to pay so much to get visitors to their sites. They have to be profitable!
Finding the right niche is the first step in creating a profitable site. Obviously once you have found that niche, you need to find keywords that you can compete for, and that is where Wordtracker comes in.
If you have not already read it, I highly recommend reading (or re-reading) my Wordtracker tutorial you downloaded when you signed up for this newsletter.
If you lost your copy, you can read it online. Do a search at Google for “Wordtracker tutorial” and it should be there at #1.
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3. SEO and the Art of Common Sense
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Not a day goes by without someone asking me the secret of SEO. And not a day goes by when someone is disappointed when I tell them “there is no secret”.
More and more, common sense is playing its part in SEO. You need to think like a search engine - perhaps THAT is the secret.
If you were the owner of Google, what would be your goal?
The answer to that one is simple - the most relevant, quality web pages showing up at the top of the results pages for every search phrase entered, by every visitor.
Only by achieving this, can you make your search engine the best there is, and get people coming back.
OK, now we have answered that question, what is preventing this from happening?
My answer would be “SPAM”.
There may be a lot of definitions for this word, but where search engines are concerned, I would call spam:
“Any web page that does not provide relevant, quality content”.
Obviously the search engines have a long way to go, because most searches at Google will turn up pages that do not provide “relevant, quality content”.
So, if a page is not providing this relevant, quality content, why is it appearing at the top of the search engine?
My guess is, that either
(a) there are no relevant pages in the Google index for that search phrase (so the spam has no competitor and appears at the top by default), or
(b) that the spam page has been manipulated in such a way to trick the search engines into thinking it is relevant.
It spam is at the top because there is no competition, then the chances are, there are very few searches being made on those phrases, so I would leave that problem until the bigger problems are sorted out.
If I were the boss of Google, I would be looking at ways in which I could reduce the effectiveness of techniques that made poor pages rank well for terms that were more competitive. This would be my biggest goal, as I see this as the biggest problem.
Using your common sense, can you think of ways in which this might be achieved?
Well, we all know that Page Rank (PR), Link Popularity, and Link Reputation are important in the ranking algorithm at the moment.
I would hazzard a guess that these three factors are the main reason why so much spam is still ranking well in highly competitive niches.
Why?
Simply because, as we have stated many times before, webmasters know how to manipulate these factors. With profits coming from high rankings, webmasters work over-time ensuring they get lots of links, with keyword rich link text, to ensure a high PR.
So, let me rephrase my initial question. What would you do if you were Mr. Google, to make it harder for webmasters to manipulate the results in this way?
Here are some ideas worth considering.
1, Reduce the effectiveness of reciprocal links (since this technique is used for manipulating PR, link popularity, and link reputation).
2. Give more weighting to links from related sites.
3. Don’t count links from sites on the same IP address (as this would imply that two inter-linked sites might be owned by the same webmaster).
4. Penalise sites that have links pointing to them from several known “pay-per-link” sites (these are sites where you can purchase high PR links to your site).
5. Penalise sites that link to penalised sites.
Here are some points I would consider when considering the overall quality of a web page:
1. Give more weighting to the on-page content (using Latent Semantic Indexing which we talked about in the last couple of newsletters, this is becoming easier).
2. Penalise pages/sites that had a high percentage of identical incoming link text (as this indicates unnatural linking by way of link exchanges and other link building techniques designed to raise PR and link reputation).
3. Give more weighting to sites that were found in a human-edited directory like dmoz.org (since these sites are likely to be higher quality if a human editor accepted them).
4. Penalise pages that have a high density of the same keyword, or keywords stuffed into every conceivable HTML tag..
5. Penalise pages that had a high ratio of links:content. This would indicate links pages or pages built with spamming tools that grab search engine results and display them as “content” (you all know which ones I am referring to here).
6. Penalise sites that had a large proportion of duplicate content on the site (which would catch pages built by those search and replace tools that use the same content to build thousands of pages, each page only differing by which keyword was inserted at strategic places on the page).
I could go on and on with this list. To me, it is common sense that these types of pages should be penalised and removed from Google’s index.
Which of the techniques above are you using?
Does it make you nervous?
When building pages, common sense is the best form of SEO, because sooner or later, Google will get it right, and those relevant, quality pages will rise to the top, as the spam is gradually removed.
A new dawn will break in the search engine world.
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4. Other News
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A few of you wrote to me last week asking about Content Publisher, since I had not mentioned it last week. Well, it is nearly ready, but is still being tested, and a few new features are being added. I think it will be worth the wait.
More news: The Niche Blueprints for March were due on the 20th, and obviously have been delayed. This delay is mainly due to the Easter holidays. The Blueprints are ready and sitting on my hard disk, and they will be released this week. They will be available to owners of the last blueprint first, and then 24 hours later, I will release them to the Niche Blueprint Notification.
Other news: After weeks of preparation, Andrea Thomson of Golden Pine Cone is about to release some templates created for SEO Website Builder. Many of you will know Andrea as the web designer one who designed James Martell’s templates.
SEO Website Builders will now have the opportunity of compiling their sites using her beautiful templates.
To quote Andrea “These CSS templates (zero html tables!) are super fast & clean - perfect for SEO. They’re also W3.org compliant for html & css.”
For more details of these, SEO Website Builder users can login to the forum and look at the “Template” forum.
For none SEO WSB users, Andrea offers a wide range of Frontpage templates, and an increasing number of Dreamweaver/Other editor templates (though the latter are for more advanced users). You can view her templates here.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the older ezSEO Internet Marketing Newsletter archives.
Have a great week!
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