EzSEO Newsletter # 65

#######################################################

EzSEO Newsletter # 65

Andy Williams ez SEO

ez-search-engine-optimization.com

#######################################################

This week:

1. A quick note about Nicheology

2. Backing up your business

3. Link Exchanges & the WayBack Machine

4. Creating PDFs - PDF Docuprinter

5. Help! My site is not getting any visitors.

6. LinkMachine Gets better

7. SEO Detective - Google v Yahoo

8. New keyword tool

Hi again
A big one today, so straight to it.

—————————————————
1. A quick note about Nicheology
—————————————————

Mid week I sent out an announcement about Nicheology opening their doors for more members.

It seems that they have been inundated with new customers all wanting to download the archives of products - so much so that they are experiencing bandwidth problems. For those of you who did join, make sure you read Phil Wiley’s last newsletter since he tells you an easy way to make money from the Nicheology products (a method I use). Phil does not seem to be keeping his newsletter archives up-to-date, but you can view it on his forum if you missed it. When you get there, just search for “My latest newsletter -321“:

One quick word of advise - use the information at Nicheology, or get out. Don’t stay subscribed if you are not going to do anything with the products. I believe Nicheology offers a fantastic opportunity for those prepared to put in the effort, but so many don’t. Carpe Diem my friends!

—————————————————
2. Backing up your business
—————————————————

I get a lot of emails from my customers saying something along the lines of “My laptop got stolen/dog ate it/lost it/hard disk crashed……can I have the download information again please”.

Backing up has never been more important than it is today with malicious code everywhere you turn. Firewalls and virus checkers will help keep you safe, but there are so many different ways in which your valuable data can be trashed that you are crazy not to back up regularly.

In the past, I copied all my important stuff onto CDs - maybe once a month if I remembered. When did you do your last backup?

When I have had problems, I was able to reformat my PC, reinstall everything, and get back to a point where I could start work again. However, it often took days of work.

A year ago or so I looked for a better option. I wanted some software that would compress an image of my hard disk, and back up everything, including the operating system, so that if my hard disk failed, or my laptop broke, I could get another one, and simple use the backup to restore 100% of my files, operating system, everything - and all in one go, without the hassles associated with reinstalling everything.

The tool I chose does all this and more. You can even mount the backups as extra hard disks so that you can access individual files if you need to.

R-Drive Image 2.0 from R-Tools Technology is fantastic. I bought myself an external hard disk (business expense), and now plug my laptop in once a week for a complete system and files backup. I feel so much better knowing that my data is secure. If you are looking for a system for backing up your work, this is one to consider. It is reliable, cheap, and easy to use.

Check details on their website.

—————————————————
3. Link Exchanges & the WayBack Machine
—————————————————

Following up from last week, I got this email from one subscriber:

“Hi Andy,
I enjoy most of your news letters, however, I must point out one piece of advice you have given in this one that I disagree with.

It is regard to accepting link exchange requests. You state that if their home page does not have a PR higher than 0 and their domain was registered a long time ago, do not link to them.

This particular domain of mine was first registered more than four years ago and my home page has a PR of 0, however, this site has only been up and running for a few weeks and once Google’s spider has visited I expect it to
have a decent PR..

My point is, I feel you cannot just disregard a site because the domain name was registered more than six months ago.
Thank you,
James.”

James makes a great point, and is right to feel disgruntled by my advise. A lot of webmasters think the way I do, and feel it is just not worth taking the risk linking to an “old” site with a PR0.

So, is there a way to check out their story that the site was not developed until recently which explains why an old site has no PR? Well, actually there is.

Using the WayBack Machine, you can see exactly what a site has looked like in its history (by the way, this is a great tool if you are buying used domains too, since it will allow you to check what that domain was used for in the past).

Typing in the URL of James’ site, I saw that for the last 4 years, his domain was nothing more than a page saying “Under Construction”. I know then that his site has not been penalised, and is PR 0 because it is a new site. I linked to his site.

One word of warning. If a site does not have any history at the Wayback machine, it may be due to the webmaster using a “no cache” tag in their web pages. I believe that this prevents the Wayback machine gathering archives of the site, so it wont help you much. However, the Wayback Machine is a great tool for checking up on sites, or just for fun. Go on, have a look at Google as it appeared back on November 11th 1998 when still in beta, and then again on 2 December 1998. How many of you remember that Google?

—————————————————
4. Creating PDFs
—————————————————

As an eBook & Report publisher, I always create PDF files (Adobe Acrobat format) so that my work can be viewed on both PC and Mac. The biggest problem with publishing PDFs is the tools to do so are either so expensive, or just don’t work.

This week I found a low cost tool that exceeded all expectations. They have a demo on the site which you can download and install. It creates the PDFs with a watermark, but it will allow you to test the software.

“PDF Docuprinter” works with Microsoft Word or any other PC software that can print. It correctly creates hyperlinks, bookmarks and a whole lot more. If you are a Nicheologist looking for a way to turn those Products in the Rough into quality eBooks, or you just want to get started with your own infoproducts, this might be the answer.

There is an LT version which is fine for most people, or a Pro version which includes some encryption technology. You can read more about these on the neevia.com website.

—————————————————
5. Help! My site is not getting any visitors.
—————————————————

How many times do I hear this?

I always end up writing back with the same information, so I may as well write it here, then I can point all those emails for newsletter #65.

1. Have you carried out keyword research to find out what people are looking for?
2. Have you chosen realistic phrases and optimized your pages for those terms? Note, that by realistic, I meant that your pages can compete with the top pages at Google in terms of backlinks and PR.
3. Have you optimized your site by making sure that links to your internal pages are keyword rich (using the main keywords from the page the link points at)?
4. Have you added keyword rich content (e.g. articles) targeting more keywords that people search for?
5. Have you got keyword rich links pointing to your site from other sites? (I suggest you vary the anchor text in the incoming links by using 2 or 3 completely different keyword phrases).

If you have carried out the above steps and still don’t have good rankings, repeat steps 4 and 5 until you do get good rankings.

Easy isn’t it?

—————————————————
6. LinkMachine Gets better
—————————————————

In this newsletter, I have been mentioning a new script (called LinkMachine) for managing link exchanges, and I love it. However, last week, in the link exchange section, I mentioned how important it was check up on link partners to make sure their sites were not penalised by Google. This was something that LinkMachine could not do for you, and required manual checks or use of a second tool like SEO Elite.

I have been sending in suggestions to Michael who wrote the LinkMachine script, and he has come up trumps. The script will now show you the PR (and Alexa ranking) of the sites that are requesting link exchanges.

If you only accept non-PR 0 links (as I suggested last week), then once a week, or once a month, you can now get Link Machine to show you any sites that are PR 0. By checking this periodically, you can be warned of any link partners slipping to a PR 0, and remove them from your links page.

I cannot tell you how important this is, and it is a welcome addition to the Link Machine script. If you are using it, it will update automatically to include new features as they are added. You will need to enable the new features though, so do check the options in your control panel.

I have sent Michael more suggestions to make this script even better, so this is only going to get better.

For those looking for an easy way to manage link exchanges, Link Machine is fast becoming my #1 tool of choice - even replacing my old favourite Arelis.

You can check out the pricing and try the demo on the LinkMachine site.

—————————————————
7. SEO Detective - Google v Yahoo
—————————————————

In issue #61, we talked about why a baby site ranked so well in Google. As a check on the theory we were building in that newsletter, I checked out a top site for the search term “generic viagra” to if it followed a similar pattern.

We looked at the percentage of external links that contained the words generic & viagra.

This is what we found:

Generic - 48%
Viagra - 33%

Our theory was shaping up. To rank well at Google, we needed to control the incoming link text and make sure that our main keywords did not appear in a large percentage of those incoming links. Or, to put it another way, make sure our main phrase did appear, but only in 40-60% of links.

Today, I checked generic viagra again, and another top site had the following profile:

Generic - 54%
Viagra - 35%

Very similar to a few weeks ago.

Now, here is where it gets interesting. I checked on the rankings of this site at Yahoo. It was not in the top 100 for generic viagra.

It begs the question
“Is it possible to optimize for both engines at the same time?”

Looking at Yahoo, one of the top sites for generic viagra had the following percentages in its incoming links:

generic - 100%
viagra - 100%

So where does this site rank on Google? It is not even in the top 100 on Google.

This example may not be statistically significant, but I do think it highlights a major difference in the optimization strategies required for Yahoo and Google.

Yahoo is much more like Google use to be. That is, to rank well on Yahoo, get your main keyword phrase in all incoming links. I believe that Google now consider this strategy spam (over-optimization penalty), so to rank well on Google, you need to have a smaller percentage of incoming links containing your main keyword.

If you are interested in carrying out your own research of this kind, you will need specialist software to analyze backlinks. The two tools available that can do this are Optilink & SEO Elite.

Optilink is aimed more at the professional SEO, while SEO Elite is more of a jack of all trades, including a lot of extra tools that make the life of an SEO easier.

—————————————————
8. New keyword tool
—————————————————

Phil Tanny has brought out a new keyword research tool that many of you may find useful. The upside is that it is fr.ee and easy to use. The downside (in my opinion) is that it uses Overture data for finding phrases & providing search numbers. I never use Overture myself, preferring to use the King of all keyword research tools - Wordtracker. However, if you are on a tight budget, Phil’s tool may be just what you are looking for. It is a kind of Wordtracker for Overture. Check it out 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 old archives.

Have a great week!

#######################################################
Visit the subscriber Bonus page for free reports and other subscriber-only offers:

REMOVED, SUBSCRIBERS ONLY
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at webmaster@ez-search-engine-optimization.com. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That’s extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.

#######################################################