EzSEO Newsletter # 132
August 6, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 132
Andy Williams
“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”
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This week:
1. Who came first, Google or Yahoo?
2. Keyword counting.
3. High PR, poor rankings?
4. Poor July Niche Blueprint Sales!
5. 5-a-day.
Hi again.
Lots to talk about this week, so let’s get straight to it. Apologies if there are grammatical errors today but my daughter is wreaking havoc, and I am a little rushed.
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1. Who came first, Google or Yahoo?
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Those of you who have been online as long as I have will know the answer to that one. Yahoo.
Do you remember what they looked like 5 years ago though?
There is a very useful website called the Way Back Machine.
You can “browse through 55 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago”.
Typing in google.com into the way back machine, shows that there are archived pages for Google stretching back to Dec 02, 1998 .
Click one of those links and see what Google looked like back then.
What about Yahoo and MSN? Well both of these were around before this archiving system began, but you can see what they looked like in October 1996.
Whenever you buy a new domain, you should check its history (there are ways to block the Way Back Machine from archiving, so this is not a fool-proof method, but it is all we have got).
Go to the Way Back Machine and type in the URL. Make sure that any previous websites on that domain were white hat (i.e. not using techniques that would get them banned). Make sure that the content was not adult orientated, or gambling orientated, since both of these niches tend to be run by less scrupulous webmasters (I know I am generalising, sorry!) and those sites are more likely to have incurred penalties in the past.
If the site is clean you have no problems.
What if the site has a shady past? Well, if the site closed down several years ago, penalties may have been removed by the search engines. If the site was closed down more recently, I would be careful about buying it. It is possible that search engines are much quicker to remove penalties to expired domains (and strip the old PR), but unless you have no other choice, I would be careful. If you do find out that you have a domain that was previously penalised and you are finding it difficult to rank well, contact Google and explain the situation and see if your domain still has a penalty.
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2. Keyword counting.
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While on-page optimization has less of a ranking impact than it use to, it is still wise to get your main phrases into the page. Google themselves state this in their webmaster guidelines:
“Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”
This is exactly why we work so hard to theme our pages (see “Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”). Make it clear to Google and the other search engines exactly what our pages are about.
When writing naturally, we tend to theme the pages well without even trying (and this is why the VEO strategy works so well – see last weeks newsletter for info on VEO).
The real problem is that we don’t always have the knowledge required to write about certain topics naturally. We rely on research and keyword lists to help mould our copy into an article.
The big problem is that working to a keyword list can make your article look unnatural, and even forced. Keywords seem to be stuffed into the article, just to make sure that all of our phrases have been covered.
Let’s look at an example. You can follow along with this if you have the demo version of Keyword Results Analyzer (KRA). Get the KRA Demo here.
If you own KRA, you should have the BBQ database pre-installed.
When running the Niche within a Niche feature (to help find sub-niches within our keyword research), one possible topic KRA found was “pit smokers”. Here is a report produced by KRA:
Main Keyword: pit smoker
Related Phrases:
===============
build bbq pit smoker
bbq pit smokers
bbq pit smoker plans
portable bbq pit smokers
Unique Keywords:
===============
bbq
build
pit
plans
portable
smoker
smokers
There are 4 phrases there that could be used to write an article on this topic.
My advice is usually to use the main keyword in the title, filename, an H1 header, and in the opening paragraph, and then concentrate more on getting the unique keywords into the article. That way you don’t have to try to force a main phrase plus four related phrases into an article.
However, let’s look at the related phrases.
All of them contain the main phrase – “pit smoker”.
That helps us a lot. If we want to get the main phrase into our article 4 times, we could just use each of the related phrases once each. That would ensure that all of our related phrases were included in the article.
I would look at which phrase was potentially the most profitable by looking at supply and demand (you can use KEI, but also use common sense):
Count 24 Hours Competing Keyword Phrase
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20 7 5 build bbq pit smoker
21 7 171 bbq pit smokers
5 2 1 bbq pit smoker plans
4 1 0 portable bbq pit smokers
From this list, the first phrase looks to be the best of the bunch. 7 searches a day, and only 5 competing pages (note this data is a couple of years old now, so competition data is out of date).
This is the phrase I would use in my filename, title, H1 header and opening paragraph. Obviously the choice of this word as the main phrase means the article subject has written itself – it has to be about building a pit smoker. You just need to write the article now ;o)
OK, so what do you do with the other related phrases? You still want theme the page about pit smokers, so include the related phrases once each if possible. If you cannot include them naturally, don’t. Instead, just make sure all of the “unique words” are included on the page at least once, twice if possible (and if it reads naturally).
The important thing in this example is that my original main phrase “pit smoker” is not one we try to get into the article. That phrase is included in all of the related phrases, so we don’t need to. Include all of the related phrases once each, and you have “pit smoker” included 4 times in your article already.
If you followed my suggestion of using “build bbq pit smoker” once in title, filename, H1 and opening paragraph, plus each of the other related phrases once each, you’ll have a themed page that includes “pit smoker”5 times on the web page, plus in title and filename.
I like to create articles around slightly larger groups of related phrases, but this example was chosen to simplify the point I am trying to get across. With your KRA/KRA demo, have a look at some of these sub-niches that KRA found, and see if you can work out a similar strategy outlined above for them.
“smokers”
“homemade”
“pork”
“charcoal grill” (with this one, filter only the phrases that have 4 or more daily searches *).
“recipe” (with this one, filter only the phrases that have 10 or more daily searches *).
“outdoor grill” (with this one, filter only the phrases that have 5 or more daily searches *).
* Extra filtering used to reduce the number of phrases you have to deal with, while still including all of the most important phrases in that topic.
I hope I have given you some ideas. There is no need to count keywords, just mark them off the list as you include them in your article, and you’ll have a well themed article.
Happy writing!
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3. High PR, poor rankings?
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It seems that a lot of webmasters are still obsessed with Page Rank (PR). Everyone wants more, but just how important is it?
This article may be confusing, so if you want to get to the bottom line, see scroll to the end of the article and read the last section.
I would argue that it is still very important (not so much the PR itself, but how the PR was achieved), but it is just one of the factors that affects your rankings. Another important, yet highly under-rated factor to get right is the quality of the content. You need to get all factors on your site right to make the most of your PR.
So, why is PR important?
If you have five PR4 pages on your site, you can link to another page on your site using text links on each of each of these PR4 pages, and the page you link to now has five PR4 links pointing to it.
This will help boost your rankings for the terms the page is optimized for, AS LONG AS the incoming link texts confirms the theme.
(Don’t forget though that the more links on each of these five PR4 pages, the less PR boost each destination page gets).
It is the phrases used in the incoming links that you need to pay most attention to.
Having a site with a high PR gives you the ability to “influence” the rankings of new pages you add to your site, by careful linking strategies. However, to do this, you need to have a good PR on your site first.
So how do you get PR to your site in the first place? Well, you get that by getting other sites to link to you.
PR is not just about the homepage, its about any web page on your site. Think of a website as a collection of web pages instead of a homepage plus main pages, plus articles etc.
The PR of any page will help it rank better, but only for the theme of the page, AND ONLY IF the text used in the incoming links that make up the PR confirm the theme.
Incoming link text is very, very important. Proof? Easy. Lots of web pages rank well for phrases that are not found on the page itself. These pages rank well for those terms because of what the incoming links tell the search engines what the page is about (however, give yourself as much of a head start as possible and theme the page too).
So, back to PR. The PR of any page is made up from the incoming links to that page. Those incoming links will be from pages with different PRs, various numbers of outgoing links, varying topic etc. For maximum impact, the incoming PR should be from a webpage that is topic-related to your own page, and also have few outgoing links on that page.
Think of Page Rank as being topic-related.
Some people will argue that it is not, but I think the reason a lot of sites have suffered recently is the lack of quality topic-related links to the site. In the past, a link was a link, and wherever it originated, it would increase your PR and help your rankings. Many webmasters started massive linking campaigns with any site regardless of topic (link spam). As the search engines have begun filtering out the poor quality links, rankings to these sites have dropped.
So, are you still with me? The above is a bit of a mess of various ideas in my head, and its not always easy to get it down in an easily digestible format (especially this early in the morning). To make things clearer, here are some general guidelines to getting and using PR effectively.
The bottom line
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If you want a webpage to rank well for a given term:
1. Try to make sure the page is themed around that term, or a topic highly related to that term.
2. Include the term on the page.
3. Get incoming links to the page by submitting articles, link exchanges, or any other method available to you. Use the term in the link text of your resource box.
4. Monitor rankings for that page. After a few weeks, if it is still not ranking well enough for that term, get more backlinks to the article using the term. If the page is ranking well for the term, choose another term you want the page to rank for and repeat the above process.
If you are getting links to a homepage, you should repeat the above procedure for all of the most important phrases for the site as a whole. This might be 2 phrases, it might be 200. It takes time, but it is worth it.
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4. Poor July Niche Blueprint Sales!
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Last week I told you about the release of the July Niche Blueprint. I was quite surprised to see that sales of this blueprint have been so slow, since this niche has the potential to be exceptionally profitable, both as an Adsense site, or as an affiliate site. I wonder, is it that the site topic is just not interesting enough? Online Education may not send shivers of excitement down your spine, but there is no doubting the caliber of the niche.
If you have no interest in this topic, there is a wealth of articles at various article directories that you could use to build a site. e.g. one of the “main page” suggestions in the Niche Blueprint returns 1280 articles at Ezine Articles for that search. Another “main page” suggestion return 1060 articles, and yet another 2440 articles.
Whether you used the articles as they are, or just used them for research to write your own, there is a wealth of information available in this niche.
With Adwords CPCs up to $20 for some phrases, and Commission Junction merchants with 3 month EPCs of nearly $100, this is a niche that you should consider.
How many other niches that are potentially this profitable would give you:
1194 phrases with 1000 or fewer competing page in Google, and 5 or more daily searches.
776 phrases that have 100 or fewer competing page in Google, and 5 or more daily searches.
321 phrases that have 10 or fewer competing page in Google, and 5 or more daily searches.
93 phrases have 1 or zero competing page in Google, and 5 or more daily searches
If you want to get this Niche Blueprint, visit the site, and click the link top right to July 2006 blueprint. As always, only 100 will be sold.
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5. 5-a-day.
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I read about this somewhere else, and since I started doing it myself, my business has grown. Its a simple 5-a-day rule, and it can fit into the busiest of timetables.
Do 5 things every day to help your business.
If you only have an hour, you could submit 5 articles to few directories, or submit 5 of your sites to a few more directories, or a mixture of both.
If you have more time, you could write 5 articles and post them on your sites.
You can mix it up too.
You could (1) create a main page for your site, (2) write an article for submission, (3) submit that article to some article directories, (4) submit your site to some directories, and (5) read the last issue of ezSEO Newsletter ;o)
5 of anything a day, as long as each of those 5 points help your business.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2006 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
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