EzSEO Newsletter # 71
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EzSEO Newsletter # 71
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. The Ebb and Flow of Search Engine Rankings
2. Will Google do a U-Turn?
3. How much is enough?
4. Other Stuff
Hi again,
The weather here in Tenerife is getting better. This morning, as I write the newsletter, I am sitting in my garden in shorts (and a sweatshirt) - not quite warm enough, yet not cold. Looking to the right, there are magnificent views down the coast, and to my left, a snow capped Mount Teide. I realise just how lucky I am to work from home, and how lucky I am to be able to live anywhere in the world I want, as long as it has high speed internet ;o)
This is a dream many people have, yet few accomplish. It’s not that it is too difficult, its just that many don’t have the drive and determination to succeed, or just go about it the wrong way, and then give up.
In the third section of this newsletter, I’ll discuss some of my thoughts on just what it takes to make a decent income from a website.
Let’s get on…
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1. The Ebb and Flow of Search Engine Rankings
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An email this week got me thinking. In it, the writer explained that he did not want to get into the affiliate marketing business because of all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) he needed to learn, and then the constant tweaking of pages to ensure they maintained good rankings.
Also, how do you know how to tweak a page for better optimization? What exactly do you do to a page that has just dropped 5 positions in Google?
No. It’s far too complicated!
Thinking back to when I first started, I certainly did check rankings religiously and try to improve the rankings of my pages. However, as the number of pages grew, this became more and more difficult, until a point came where I just stopped tweaking.
What happened next was a lesson I’ll never forget. As Google updated on a monthly basis, I continued to monitor the positions of my pages. There was a cycle, an ebb and flow, where pages would go up, and pages would go down. One month a page would rise 10 positions, the next it would drop 15. The month after it would rise 5, then rise another 7 the next month.
And remember, I did not touch these pages. This ebb and flow was nothing more than the result of tweaks and changes in Google’s algorithm.
And the lesson I learnt?
I learned that tweaking pages is a waste of time. There is no way of knowing whether changes you made to your pages are responsible for the improved rankings, or whether it was a Google algorithm change that was responsible.
I can give you a documented example of this ebb and flow stretching back 16 months or so.
In November 2003 I released SEO Website Builder. On the sales page I showed a website that I created using the tool, and the positions those pages held on 21st November 2003.
Since those results were published, I have not changed the content on that site. The only change that was made was to remove a link pointing to that site, so the sites PR went from a 4 down to a 2.
I targeted 18 phrases in the web site.
On 21st November 2003, these were the positions:
6 pages were #1 in Google
10 pages were in the top 5 at Google
13 pages in the top 10
2 were not in the top 30
A year later in December 2004
5 pages were at #1 in Google
9 pages in the top 5 at Google
12 in the top 10
Just 4 pages not in the top 30.
Rankings had slipped a little over the year, but not by much.
Two weeks ago I ran the same check:
Out of 18 phrases targeted, 9 were not in the top 30.
3 were #1
4 were in the top 5
8 were in the top 10
Wow, that is a big drop, but that is the ebb and flow for you. Sometimes there is a full moon :o)
Yesterday I ran the same analysis:
Out of 18 phrases targeted, 4 were not in the top 30
5 were #1
11 were top 5
12 were top 10
As you can see, the rankings were back again.
Remember, this site content has not been touched since November 2003. The only change was removing an incoming link so I could test the effect of PR on my site.
The moral? Don’t worry about the ebb and flow of the search engines algorithms. Get on with creating more content. By the time you have finished tweaking pages, the algorithm will have changed and you wont know whether your pages have improved or gone belly up because of your changes or the search engine algo change.
Stay focused, try not to dwell on SE positions, and just add more quality links and content.
I know a lot of people will be tempted to email me about their site that got dropped from Google but never returned.
Where is the ebb and flow in that?
Well, my advice is to look at what could have gone wrong.
What techniques you used, who you linked to, and just importantly what quality of pages linked to you. The above test site of mine has not been overly complicated by the usual “must have” SEO techniques of building PR and getting links. It is a plain site, used mainly for monitoring on-page factors.
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2. Will Google do a U-Turn?
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The phrase “Content is King” should be familiar to you. A couple of years ago, I first heard it from Ken Evoy (of Site Build It!).
Ken’s philosophy was (and still is) to build quality content sites that search engines would love because they provided their searchers with what they were looking for - relevant information.
A couple of years ago, a well written page about “blue widgets” would appear at the top of Google, mostly because the on-page content was more relevant to “blue widgets” than the other blue widgety pages in the index.
**** SIDE NOTE ****
In many ways, Yahoo’s index still does this today. I had a web page indexed by Yahoo last week that is on a new site of mine. Despite only having one link pointing to it, that page is ranked #7 in Yahoo for a phrase that has over 11,000 competing pages (searched with quotes). Whether this is Yahoo playing catch up to Google’s algorithm (of two years ago), or a return to an emphasis of on-page factors in its ranking algorithm, I don’t know. Only time will tell.
** END SIDE NOTE **
In the last couple of years, webmasters trying to get top positions in Google found ways to manipulate their content so that they could rank above their competitors. Techniques like keyword stuffing and hidden text became more common. Google began to fill up with junk. They needed to find a way to rank pages that did not rely solely on the keywords found on the page itself.
As Google’s algorithm became more sophisticated, it incorporated incoming links into the ranking equation. The idea behind this was that a page that had lots of links pointing to it was more important than a page with few links pointing to it. And so the world was introduced to Page Rank (PR) - simply put, a measure of a page’s importance.
Webmasters the world over began finding ways to manipulate PR. The most common technique is called reciprocal linking and is still widely used today. You link to me, and I will link to you. Other techniques included buying text links from other sites, and more recently, spamming blogs with links back to your site (see the article on the nofollow tag last week).
Webmasters could manipulate the Page Rank of their pages, and therefore influence the search results.
So where does this leave Google?
Page Rank seems seriously flawed.
Using links to gauge the importance of a page is no longer viable.
My own thoughts here are that Google must go back to its roots, and give more emphasis to the on-page content to determine relevancy. This would mean less emphasis on PR and back links and more emphasis on the words on a web page.
If this does happen, Google will need to solve a big problem. They need to find a way to accurately rank pages that are written on the same topic. What makes one page better than the other? They certainly know that it is not a simple matter of how many times a keyword appears on a page.
As mentioned in last weeks newsletter, Latent Semantic Indexing is a technology embraced by Google for finding relevant Adwords and Adsense ads to display on a page. This technology may hold the answer to Google’s dilemma. With LSI, it is possible to detect themes in pages, and therefore eventually I would expect LSI to become more and more important in the ranking algorithm at Google.
Thinking ahead, how will webmasters try to beat the LSI system to get their pages to the top of Google? My thoughts are, that they will start creating quality, theme-based content :o)
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3. How much is enough?
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On the SEO WSB forum, one user asked how many web pages are required to replace your regular income with affiliate income.
A piece of string comes to mind ;o)
This question arose after one internet marketer suggested that 1000 pages of content could generate a nice monthly income.
From my experience, it is actually impossible to give a number here to answer the question “How much is enough?”.
There are so many variables involved.
The most important variable is your choice of keywords for your content.
1. Do people search for your keywords?
2. Can you drive traffic to those pages (i.e. get those pages to the top of the search engines)?
2. Can you get your visitors to buy the products promoted on your pages?
A well thought out website (or several websites) with 1000 pages of content in total, can certainly make you money, but how much depends entirely on how successful you are in meeting the answers to those three questions above.
Let’s look at some maths.
If each of your 1000 pages made 50 cents a month, you would make $5000 a month.
If each of your 1000 pages made $1 a month, you would make $1000 a month.
If each of your 1000 pages made $5 a month, you would make $5000 a month.
If each of your 1000 pages made $10 a month, you would make $10,000 a month.
Each of these figures are realistic, depending on how you build and link your content.
A lot of the content I see on the internet is poorly written, badly themed, and often put up primarily for search engine spiders. With Adsense being such an easy way to make money from content sites, many webmasters think that more is better, and put up 10 pages a day of junk.
These webmasters have a thought process that goes like this:
10 pages a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks of the year. Wow, that’s 2500 pages of content put up in a year. At $10 a month per page, I’ll make $25,000 a month
The mistake here, is that their sub-standard content is unlikely to even make 10 cents a month on average. Badly written pages, don’t rank well, therefore don’t get found.
It is much better to have 500 quality pages online, than 10,000 pages of rubbish.
Do your keyword research properly, build your pages around themes, and take your time. The more work you put in, the higher the rewards.
A while ago I recommended a couple of books by Gary Antosh. I think it is time to recommend them again.
In “How to Create Web Content Fast“, Gary explains how to hire authors to write your content for you. If you don’t have time to write your own content, why not pay someone to write it for you?
Not everyone can afford to hire authors to create their content. However, if you do find good authors, it really does pay for itself very quickly.
My own expectations from articles on my sites is that an article should bring in between $3 and $5 a month each.
If I pay an author $5 per article to write, it pays for itself after one month.
Going back to the calculations involving 1000 articles, if I pay an author $5000 for 1000 articles, I expect those articles to make $3000-$5000 a month, for the foreseeable future.
At the more conservative figure, that is $36,000 a year, from an initial investment of $5000. Not a bad return.
If you don’t have the money to hire authors, then learning how to create content for yourself is the subject of Gary’s second book “Web Content Made Easy“. Gary is the most knowledgeable person I know on how to build a theme for your content, and this book is a masterpiece of ideas and knowledge.
If you are not publishing quality content on your sites, it is about time you started. If you are making some money from your sites, I highly recommend investing some of that income back into your sites, by hiring authors to build your content.
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4. Other stuff
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The release of the March Niche Blueprints has suffered a minor delay. I do expect them to be out this week, so if you are signed up for notifications of their release, keep an eye on your inbox.
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 old archives at:
Have a great week!
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