EzSEO Newsletter # 88
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EzSEO Newsletter # 88
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. Gurus holding back the good stuff?
2. How not to send email.
3. Quotes or no quotes
4. Other Stuff
Hi again.
If you have ever moved house, you will know what a stressful and tiring time it can be. Added to that, temperatures in the mid 30s centigrade (90F +) and more humidity than a camel’s armpit, and you might just have an inkling of how tired I am feeling right now.
We have now moved all of our stuff into the new house and are in the process of unpacking boxes and trying to find places to put everything. Hopefully things should get back to normal soon. At least we got the telephone and ADSL installed the same day we moved in (we had to wait 3 months for a telephone last time we moved).
Let’s get on with the newsletter.
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1. Gurus holding back the good stuff?
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Someone mentioned on the SEO Website Builder User forum that they thought the “Gurus” must be holding back information just for themselves. If they didn’t, then surely everyone would be using the “secret” information, making lots of money, and invalidating the techniques through over-use.
Now, I fully expect most marketers would keep certain information to themselves. This would include the niche or the product(s) they promote (why create extra competition for themselves). A notable exception to this was James Martell. He did expose many of his sites to the scrutiny of the public and I bet he wished he hadn’t.
However, I don’t think that many of the so-called gurus hold back as much information as you might think. Certainly not when they describe “how to” build a profitable online business.
The reason why I think a lot of people don’t make a success of online marketing is not that they are following an incomplete plan, it is more in the execution of that plan.
The process of building a successful site is quite complicated, with lots of different tasks that need to be performed. e.g. keyword research, affiliate program research, writing preselling content, building pages, linking pages into a well optimized site, getting links from related sites, etc, etc.
Think of each of these tasks as a cog in a Swiss Cuckoo Clock. Each cog has to be built with the utmost precision if it is going to work with the other cogs to drive the hands around. Take a shortcut in the engineering of one cog, and the rest fail to turn.
Thinking about this analogy, I hope you can see why some people fail. They just don’t take enough care when building each cog. Short-cuts and sloppy workmanship lets them down.
In the next few newsletters, I will be writing a new mini-series (we have not had one of those for a while). This mini-series will cover each cog, and show you how to build those cogs with precision, so that your clock ticks and the cuckoo, well, has a chance to cuckoo ;o)
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2. How not to send email
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FACT: Spam filters aggressively seek out email that they believe are spam, and delete them.
This is something you should consider when sending email to people.
The number of times I get emails with no subject line, from people who are genuinely seeking help is unbelievable. And do you know what happens? My own spam filtering system tries to remove the email because there is no subject line. I use to check all of these just in case, but now don’t have the time to do so. Any email sent to me without a subject line is automatically deleted before I get to see it.
Another fine example of what not to do is use a subject line like “Important, please open”. You may think that no one would send legitimate email with such a subject line, but I can tell you that they do, and often. Even inserting my name into the subject (like “Hey Andy, this is important. Please open immediately”) is not enough to get me to open an email like this. They get deleted straight away.
This is actually a bigger problem than most people realise. Before you are quick to accuse someone of ignoring your emails, look at your own emails first and make sure they are spam filter proof.
SOLUTION: If you want your emails to get through, put in a subject line, and make sure it is a subject line that the recipient will recognise as being legitimate (and spam filters wont diagnose as spam).
e.g. if you are asking someone for support for some software you bought (let’s call it XYZ), put in subject line like “Problem with XYZ”.
A final piece of advise. Don’t use any keywords in your subject that might trigger spam filters e.g. free.
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3. Quotes or no quotes
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When I am trying to find out how much competition a phrase has, I search at Google by putting the phrase in quotes.
e.g “blue widgets”
Now this seems to confuse a few people, because I regularly get asked the following:
QUESTION: “Why do you search for competition figures using quotes when most people don’t use quotes in their searches?”.
I also get this:
QUESTION: “Wordtracker says that the phrase “blue widgets” gets searched for 50 times a day at Google, and even though I am #1 on Google when I search for “blue widgets” (in quotes), I get no traffic. Why?”
Both of these questions are related. You need to understand when to search using quotes, when not to, and why.
Here is what I do:
1. Search with the phrase in quotes when looking to see how much competition a phrase has.
2. Search WITHOUT quotes when looking to see where a page ranks for a phrase.
OK, let’s look at why I do that.
When you conduct a search at Google, Google tries to match up the words in your search request with pages in its database.
RULE #1 - If you surround a phrase in quotes, Google will try to find the exact phrase in the web pages in its database.
e.g. If you type in:
“big bad blue widgets”
at Google, Google will look for pages that contain the exact phrase “big bad blue widgets”.
Try it. You will see there are no reults found for this phrase.
RULE #2 - If you do not use quotes around a phrase, Google will try to find pages that contain the words in your search request.
e.g. If you type in:
big bad blue widgets
at Google, Google will look for pages that contain the following words:
big
bad
blue
widgets
but not necessarily in that order.
Try it. As you can see, there are 171,000 pages in Google that contain those words.
So what have we learnt from that example?
Well, we know that there is not one webpage in Google’s database that contains the exact phrase “big bad blue widgets”.
So how much competition does that phrase have?
I would say it does not have any competition, because not one webpage contains that phrase.
If you were to create a page with that phrase in it, your page will be the only page in Google with the exact phrase, so surely Google would see your page as more relevant than the 171,000 others that just contain the words that make up the phrase.
This is the reason I search for competition using quotes around my phrases. It gives me an idea of how many web pages are actually targeting the phrase. We all now how important inbound link text is to the ranking of a page, but it the phrase is not on the page, there is a good chance it is not being targeted in inbound link text either.
NOTE: In some competitive niches, you may still not rank at #1 for the phrase even if you are the only one, but you do at least have a good headstart in your optimizing strategy.
When searching for where your page ranks in Google, you obviously want to know the position your page will appear when the majority of people search for the phrase.
Very few people search for stuff using quotes, so neither should you when you are checking your rankings.
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4. Other Stuff
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During the last few weeks, I have been moving house. This has given me very little time to complete other projects (like the August Niche Blueprints (niche-blueprints.com), and Content Publisher’s (content-publisher.com) official release and affiliate program). With the move now completed, and just the unpacking to do, I will be devoting more of my time to work on these projects from now on.
Hopefully, I can finish at least one August Blueprint this week, and the second shortly afterwards.
Don’t forget, next week we are starting a new “mini-series” that should build up into one of the most comprehensive how-to guides ever written on the subject of affiliate marketing. That is something you don’t want to miss if you are struggling to put the pieces of this big jigsaw together.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old internet marketing archives.
Have a great week!
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