EzSEO Newsletter # 61

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EzSEO Newsletter # 61

Andy Williams ez SEO

ez-search-engine-optimization.com

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Hi

Hope you had a great Christmas & New Year.

The New Year celebration is all about a new year and a new start. Its a time of making resolutions which will undoubtedly be broken, and setting goals for the New Year which you want to achieve.

The last point – setting goals which you want to achieve is something everyone MUST do if they want to make advances in their personal of professional life.

What goals have you set for the New Year?

A lot of new subscribers to this newsletter may have come via the Christmas promotions in which marketers gave away products – I gave away my Wordtracker Tutorial and Creating Niche Site reports. Now, if you obtained a lot of material during these promotions, you will find yourself on a lot of newsletter lists. That means that you are going to be bombarded with information (and sales pitches trying to sell you every new product that comes out).

From experience I know that too much information causes inaction. That is the very last thing I want to happen to you this year.

So, my first bit of advice for 2005 – have a newsletter clear out. After you receive one or two newsletters from each source, evaluate the newsletter and the authors motivation. If that newsletter is mostly sales pitch, dump it. If that newsletter does not give you valuable unique information, dump it. Get rid of 99% of all these new subscriptions, and find one or two that you like.

By doing this, you are far more likely to actually read the newsletters that do have value. You are far more likely to do something about your online business this year (either starting one, or building on your existing one). It is far better to follow the methods of one successful marketer, than trying to combine the techniques of several.

OK, This week:

1. Your complimentary copy of my new infoproduct

2. FeedReader – A blog reader that wont cost you anything.

3. Google Suggest

4. An update on my wife’s site traffic.

5. Ezinearticles.com

6. eBay Hot linking – a real problem for webmasters!

7. The SEO Detective – www.babyjogger.com explained

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1. Your complimentary copy of my new infoproduct
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I am bringing out a new series of Infoproducts this year which will likely be released once a month. The first one is going to be my g.i.f.t. to you. It was due on New Years Eve, but as I told you, time just ran out as this thing got bigger and better.

So when is it going to be ready?

I am going to be putting this at the top of my agenda this week. The product is nearly finished – I just need to set up a few more things. Once complete and uploaded to my server, I will send you a notification via this mailing list and tell you where you can download your copy. This offer will only be lasting for 48 hours, so those who don’t get it during that time will have missed this one (I wont be selling the first one either).

Keep an eye out this week for that notification.

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2. FeedReader – An RSS blog reader that wont cost you anything.
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I started publishing this newsletter on my blog at:

http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/blog/index.php

This was because of increasing spam filters at ISPs filtering out my newsletter. My own ISP even labelled my newsletter as potential Spam. I decided the easiest thing to do was post each newsletter on my blog, and then if you don’t receive it in your inbox, you can read it online at my blog.

Now, you could just bookmark that page and go back to check every so often, but there is a better way.

Feedreader is a piece of software that can check for new blog entries automatically. You setup Feedreader to check any number of blog sites, and once setup, Feedreader will go and check for new stuff every time you load it.

To help those who want to set this up to retrieve my blog, I thought I would give you instructions since it is not as easy as I first imagined.

Download Feedreader here:

Install it.

Run Feedreader.

Press F2 to tell it about a new feed you want to track.

Paste in this into the box:

ez-search-engine-optimization.com/blog/wp-rss2.php

Click Next, enter a name for my blog and finish.

Now you see my blog listed in the left hand panel. Click on it and you will see that Feedreader has retrieved the header info for entries in my blog.

Click on any of these entries, and the bottom panel will show a short description. Click on Actions : Read On to open a particular entry.

That’s it. Have fun.

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3. Google Suggest
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Google is coming out with a new toy. It is still in Beta, but is well worth checking out.

Type in a keyword.

Google comes up with suggestions (hence its name) of what you might be looking for, including how many search results are found for each suggestion.

I will leave you to find out some of the creative uses for this tool.

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4. An update on my wife’s site traffic.
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In previous newsletters I told you how adding RSS feeds and a blog to my wife’s site had not only increased traffic, but also increased the pages “stickiness” in the main search engines.

Google has continued to index the content on the site, and now has almost all the main pages indexed. As you might expect, this has increased traffic to new highs. On the 29th December, that site had 634 unique visitors (1365 page views), and it is now consistently getting over 500 uniques per day. Not bad for a site that we had trouble getting indexed before adding RSS. Looking back to November before adding the feeds, the site was averaging less than 50 uniques per day, and Google would only include around 10 of it 250+ pages!

Now, don’t think RSS is a magic bullet for traffic. It can get your site indexed more frequently, but you must have keyword focused content on your site if you are going to get good rankings and more visitors.

If you are unsure how to create a site that attracts visitors, I highly recommend you re-read the Wordtracker Tutorial, and the Creating Niche sites report. These details a system that works!

In addition, there are several other reports available to my subscribers that you can get from the subscriber bonus page mentioned in the resource box at the end of this newsletter.

As a side note, if you want to learn how to add RSS feeds to your site, you can learn easily and quickly with Adrian Ling – he taught me how in his fabulous eBook RSS Made Easy.

Very little technical knowledge is required, and for a little extra expense, he will install it for you!

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5. Ezinearticles.com
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Those of you who have read my newsletter for some time know that I am a great fan of adding content to a website to draw in visitors. In addition, my favourite way of getting incoming links to my site is not to ask for reciprocal links, but to write articles and submit them to article submission sites. When other webmasters take up those articles and post them on their sites, I get an incoming link to mine. It works!

Now, I mentioned EzineArticles.com recently where you can find content for your site, as well as submit your own articles.

You can see five of the articles I submitted to this site here:

So far, those 5 articles have been emailed to webmasters 10 times. That is a possible 10 incoming links to my site (not to mention the incoming links from EzineArticles.com itself).

I am planning to submit another 25 in the next month.

Think about this as a plan for 2005:

1. Carry out some keyword research.
2. Write a keyword rich article.
3. Include a link to your site in the resource box at the end of the article.
4. Submit to EzineArticles.com
5. When it gets indexed in Google, there is a good chance it will rank highly.
6. You article will get a lot of visitors.
7. Some may publish your article on their site.
8. Others may visit your site by following the link at the end of your article.
9. You get seen as an authority on the subject – branding you as an expert.
10. You get more traffic, more incoming links, more sales.

Try it, and I think you will be surprised by the results.

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6. eBay Hot linking – a real problem for webmasters!
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A friend of mine wrote last week asking for help. Someone selling on eBay was hot linking to the images on his site.

If you don’t know what that means, you need to find out because this can cost you money. When someone hotlinks to an image on your site, every time their page is displayed (in this case, every time the auction item was loaded into a browser of someone looking at the auction), the image is downloaded from YOUR SERVER. It uses YOUR Bandwidth.

Bearing in mind that these auction pages can be loaded thousands of times, that means your server is sending that image thousands of times, using your resources. Not only can this slow down your server, but you also pay for your bandwidth. If you exceed your allowed bandwidth, you will either have to pay extra, or your site may even be taken down for the month by your service provider.

This had been happening several times over the previous months to this person, so he asked my advice.

I must admit I did not have any answers, but searching on Google I found the problem was widespread.

Here is a thread on the Webmaster World forums that gives some advice to combat these bandwidth thieves.

I highly suggest you keep a look out in your logs for any references to eBay. You may have been hot linked.

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7. The SEO Detective – www.babyjogger.com explained
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In the previous newsletters I mentioned a site that one subscriber brought to my attention.

Here is his email again:

“Hi Andy,
If you are going to do more case studies I have a really
good candidate: www.babyjogger.com

Doing some search on Yahoo and Google this site comes
up #1 or top 10 for a lot of keywords /baby jogger strollers, jogger strollers etc./ And has a PR4.

That is not a problem but as you can see
the source code there is no content – not even a word on this page! and hardly can find any on the next level pages either. Only the “Accessories” page has content.
If you think it is interesting and worth a case study you might want to have a look.
Thanks again and take care,
Attila”

In my SEO Detective slot, I asked you to see if you could find out why this site does so well, with so little content.

Many of you wrote to me with your thoughts and ideas, and many of you had a lot of the answers, but with one big omission.

Let’s look at this site a little more closely to see why a “contentless” site, does so well.

The homepage has no content, and no keyword rich text other than the title tag:

Oh, and the domain name is also babyjogger.com so does contain the key phrase.

Do a search of Google for baby jogger.

This site comes up #1 for this term. Have a look at that entry in the results.

Notice the description for that site?

“Probably the funnest piece of baby equipment you’ll own, The Baby Jogger all terrain stroller is…”

Where did that come from? That text is not found on the page. Noone who emailed me with their answers seemed to notice this.

My initial reaction is that this is a form of cloaking. Serving up one page to the search engines, and another to the visitors. Could this be the technique that this site uses? Google certainly frowns upon cloaking of this nature and would ban the site it that was happening.

Go to DMoz.org and search for baby jogger. This site comes up #5 for the term and has the description:

“# The Baby Jogger Company – Probably the funnest piece of baby equipment you’ll own, The Baby Jogger all terrain stroller is now an international favourite among active parents”

Google has used the Open Directory for sometime now as a source of quality sites to include in its index. It seems to have used the description of this site from the Open Directory in its free search listing.

Do the same search on Yahoo. This site comes up #1 for that term too, but this time the description is different:

“all terrain stroller for all sorts of outdoor recreation including running, walking, and hiking.
Category: Shopping > Baby Strollers”

Now where did that come from?

The description in Yahoo is different to that in Google, so where did that come from?

Do you see the bit at the bottom of the Yahoo description:
“Category: Shopping > Baby Strollers”

That certainly looks like a directory entry to me.

If you search for this category in the Yahoo directory, you will see this site listed as:

Baby Jogger Company – all terrain stroller for all sorts of outdoor recreation including running, walking, and hiking.

Ahh, now that is where the description came from.

There is no doubt that the entries in the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory have had a huge influence on the rankings of this site. The site, which at first glance appears to be using cloaking, is not.

You can do a quick check for cloaking by looking at the cached page from the search engine results. If the page in the cache matches what you are seeing, then the chances are it is not cloaked.

Now. Entries in these two directories will not be enough by themselves to make this site rank well.

Let’s do a little more detective work.

My tool of choice for this is Leslie Rohde’s Optilink:

although the new version of Brad Callen’s SEO Elite can now do pretty much the same thing (and a lot of other tasks that webmasters need to carry out on a weekly basis):

For those of you who want to be able to reverse engineer top ranking pages, I highly recommend you make a little budget this year to buy one of these tools.

Many of you, when sending me your thoughts on this high ranking page pointed out a PR of 5 and 60 incoming links as a reason for its #1 position (incidentally this site now has a PR of 6, meaning that the webmaster has been getting even more links to it). Google does not show all links to a site, so the figure is going to be much more than 60.

One thing I would like to point out, is that incoming links by themselves do not make a site rank highly. Those links must be keyword rich for the target phrase.

Running this site through Optilink shows me that most of those 60 reported incoming links come from pages with different IP addresses (different sites possibly not owned by the same person), but probably more important than that, 67% of those incoming links have the word “baby” in them, and 62% have the word “jogger” in them.

From my own testing, this 60 – 70% range is a good one to aim for if you are targetting a competitive area. You might think that if 100% of the links had “baby” and “jogger” in them, that this site would be even better, and a lot more difficult to beat. This is a big mistake made by many webmasters. Google would probably penalise you for such linking structure. It would be seen as blatant link reputation manipulation (what I call the Over-Optimization penalty).

Remember in issue #60 I told you about a high ranking “alsatian dog” page? You can read that issue on the blog if you missed it.

Well let’s do a similar check:

Alsatian appears in 53% of incoming links, and dog in 57% of incoming links.

Let’s compare that to the page I mentioned that should have done well but was not in the top 1000 at Google. Admittedly this page only has 2 backward links, so we cant expect to draw too many conclusions from it, but here are the results:

Alsatian was in 100% of incoming links
Dog in just 50%.

As I said, we cannot draw too many conclusions from this one since the sample size of two links is insufficient.

Let’s do one final check on this theory.

If you search Google for generic viagra, the second result (I am ignoring the first since it is a directory result) is,
www.trustpharma.com. Let’s run this through Optilink:

This site has a PageRank of 5 and 87 incoming links.

The words generic and viagra are the two most common words found in the link text of these incoming links, but look at the percentages:

Generic is contained in 48% of incoming links.
Viagra is contained in 33% of incoming links.

Maybe we are onto something!

If you own Optilink or SEO Elite, do some searches yourself for some top ranking pages in competitive areas. Try to find patterns for yourself. This is the way search engine “experts” find out what works, and what doesn’t. Are you using varied link text to your site, and what proportion of incoming links contain your primary keyword for a page?

Well, I hope that you enjoyed today’s issue and that it made you think a little more about your own linking strategies.

Next week, we will continue to look at a few more pages.

Have a great week!

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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.

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