EzSEO Newsletter # 62

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EzSEO Newsletter # 62

Andy Williams ez SEO

ez-search-engine-optimization.com

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This week:

1. Prune the dead wood or get lost in the trees!

2. A new links manager with great potential

3. SEO Detective – babyjogger.com question

4. “Help, I cant write articles!”

5. Another top ranking web page explained

6. Can low competition, low search phrases be profitable?

Hi again

I hope you had a good week.

I have had a lot of emails asking about my 3 month old daughter. Well, she had been doing fine on the new milk, but is again bringing up a fair amount after feeding. We are back to giving her medicine 30 minutes before her feed to help her keep it down.

Despite this, she has grown and put on a lot of weight in the last month, and the doctor is amazed at how freakishly strong she is. I sometimes think that the milk powder company has got their powder mixed up with some body-building powder. Look at the muscles on her.

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1. Prune the dead wood or get lost in the trees!
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Last week I suggested that you all take a long hard look at the newsletters you are now receiving. Many of you will have signed up for some of the “Christmas gifts” offered over the festive season, and now find yourself receiving lots of newsletters, sales pitches, and downright rubbish.

As I said last week, if you keep subscribing to all of them, you wont read any of them. Too much distraction leads to inaction.

Here is what I suggest you do. Go to the archives of each newsletter and read the last 3 or 4 issues. If that newsletter does not teach you anything, or the stuff covered is not of interest to you, unsubscribe. Each newsletter should have an unsubscribe link at the end of it – look at the end of this one and you will find it right at the end.

That goes for this newsletter too. Have a look at the archives and see whether the stuff I write about is of interest to you. If not, then unsubscribe. Find one or two that you do like, and stick with them.

The other piece of advice I would give you is not to go buying everything and anything that is touted as the next best thing since sliced bread. Again, many newbies to internet marketing buy eBooks, read them and then never get round to using that information because another eBook has come out and Guru X is saying that this is the one to make you rich, so they buy that one too. And so it goes on. A constant search for the magic bullet.

This is again a case of too much distraction…

The truth is that there are very few books or tools that are essential. You just need to find the ones you need for the task in hand, and get to work.

Pruning the dead wood is necessary if you are going to make a success of your business this year. Find someone you trust, and stick with them. If your business does not take off, shoot your mentor an email asking why not. If they are worthy of your subscription, they will reply.

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2. A new links manager with great potential
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In the last few weeks I have been testing a number of products that can help create and automate a links directory. My own requirement were as follows:

The software must:

a) Create the links page for me based on my own template.
b) Allow me to add/remove links at the click of a button and have the links page rebuilt.
c) Allow webmasters to submit their site
d) Notify me when a webmaster has submitted their site and give me the option of accepting or rejecting their submission.
e) Automatically check whether link partners linked back to me.
f) Help to automate the process of finding new partners.
g) Be easy to install.

Now, their were a lot of candidates.

I have always used Arelis to help me with links pages because it is packed with features, but the licensing is a bit steep for those starting out. It is a great tool though, and one that I will still recommend on my site to those who afford it. Do a search on Google for Arelis review and you can see it comes highly recommended.

Another candidate was SEO Elite. While this tool does meet some of the requirements, it does not satisfy others. SEO Elite has a host of useful features, but in this case, I dismissed it as a links manager. It could just not compare with the dedicated links manager solutions I was testing.

An exciting candidate is one that does not cost anything. Duncan Carver’s Link Management Assistant allows you to create a huge links directory, and even import entries from DMoz to get your directory started. This software includes some great features including showing the PR of the sites in your directory.

It does not satisfy point (f), and the install does require some technical know-how, but this is a real winner. My only reservation about it, is that Duncan puts in advertising at the bottom of each page in your directory (to build links to his own sites, or those of his clients). This advertising can be removed by purchasing a license, but again, that works out very expensive if you want to create more than one directory. You can read more about Duncan’s software and see a demo directory on his site. Just do a search of Google for:

“Duncan Carver’s Link Management Assistant”

Now, just when I was about to finish my search and go with Duncan’s software, I got an email from Michael Ferrier who has developed a script that does not require an mySQL database, and is very easy to install.

I downloaded his 10 day trial, and setup a test directory within about 30 minutes (including creating the template and reading through enough info to be able to customise it).

It was very easy, and when I did have questions, Michael was quick to reply (even though my questions were answered in his online help). The first directory was only created to test the software, yet within 24 hours, two webmasters had contacted me asking to be included – they had already put up a link to my test directory.

Now this directory is not advertised anywhere, so how did they find it? Well, that is one of the features of this script – it finds webmasters using the script who have set up a complimentary directory and emails them (OK, you have to click on the send button, but I would not have it any other way).

You can see my first test directory.

Now I will be deleting this directory this week, but have started work on a bigger directory.

I set up a directory that will become useful in the next few weeks when my new infoproduct series is released (incidentally, it is ready, and I am getting a few people to check it before I give you a complimentary copy of the first in the series. SEO Website Builder users will be able to get it first on the members forum, and then subscribers to this newsletter shortly after).

You can see this new directory.

Feel free to submit any of your own sites to this directory. It may appear that there is only one category, but when you click on the Add Site link, you will be given a lot of other categories. If you think I need to add a category so your site fits, let me know and I will add it.

This directory is new so it has no PR yet, but it will have PR soon.

I love this software. It is easy to use, and cheap too of you decide to buy it (I recommend you try it first and see how easy it is). The cost of $69 allows you to use this on 3 sites, and each additional site costs $10. I think this script has huge potential.

My only criticism of this script is that the help is online, but I have tried to persuade Michael to create a downloadable help manual.

For more information and to get your trial, visit his site.

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3. SEO Detective – babyjogger.com question
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Last week we looked at reasons why I think babyjogger.com is so successful and has such good rankings in the major engines. You can read that newsletter (#61) on my blog if you missed it.

During the week, I received an email from one subscriber. Here it is:

“Andy,
great article about the baby jogger site.
Somehow, I think I missed something.
I searched for the 60 links of that site, and clicked on each site that links.
All of them have the anchor text “baby jogger”.
Is there something that I am not understanding?
Thank you,
Serge”

Well, what Serge saw was that nearly all links contained the word baby and the word jogger, so why did Optilink tell me that only 67% of those incoming links have the word “baby” in them, and 62% have the word “jogger” in them?

The mystery is soon solved when you look at the actual linking text. What Serge saw was that most links had either

baby jogger

or

babyjogger

in them. He assumed that all links therefore had baby and jogger in them. However, Google sees “baby jogger” and “babyjogger” as different terms, therefore they must be counted separately.

If you don’t believe me, do a search on Google for both term and you will see a vast difference in the number of results returned. Optilink is quite right not to include “babyjogger” links in its count of links containing baby or jogger.

Incidentally, if you carry out the same analysis using SEO Elite, you will find that it does not agree with Optilink. I have talked with Brad about this and he says a fix for his SEO Elite customers will be ready very soon (possibly by the time you read this). If you own SEO Elite, just start it, and if the update is ready, it will tell you there and then and offer to download it for you.

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4. “Help, I cant write articles!”
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I am a big fan of writing articles to improve rankings, get more traffic and make bigger profits. In the Article Writing Report available on the subscriber bonus page, I explain why.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks has always been that many think they can’t write articles. This is a real shame, because once you see the power of articles at work, you will know that the effort is well worth it. See the last section (6) of this newsletter for a case study of mine.

A year ago or more, Gary Antosh released a book that received rave reviews (including from me). His book was call “How to Create Web Content Fast” and was all about how he hires authors to do the work for him for as little as $5 per article. It is a hugely effective way to create content if you have the extra money. If that is how you want to create content, it is well worth checking out.

In the last year, this technique has become so popular that you now hear other “gurus” discussing it as if it has always been a part of their own SEO arsenal. Gary really started something here, but, not everyone has the funds to hire authors.

What do you do if you want to write content, but don’t think you can? Gary Antosh has come to the rescue again. In his second eBook called “Web Content Made Easy“, Gary shows how anyone can write articles, and takes you through the baby steps from gathering material, to publishing your work.

He shares some wonderful secrets and techniques that can get over any writers block or feelings of “can’t”.

This book is so new that you wont have heard about it yet from anyone else (except maybe from Gary if you subscribe to his newsletter). I have recommended that he puts his introductory price of $47 up to $67, because that is what I feel this book is easily worth. However, that price increase wont go into effect just yet. He is giving my subscribers the chance of getting it at the discount price first.

If you want to write articles and add content to your site (and all successful sites in 2005 will have a lot of content), I can highly recommend this book.

I also recommend you get and read my f.re.e article report on the subscriber bonus page, since that gives you information on how I write articles and takes you through an example to show how easy it is.

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5. Another top ranking web page explained
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In this section I want to go through another example of why a site ranks well. This site was chosen after an email form a subscriber. Here it is:

“Hey,

I’m currently doing some researching on building a site about vacuums (in fact I think I’m going to build a few mini sites for different brands). Anyways, when I type in the main kw for each brand one site keeps coming up in all the results.
http://www.onlinevacshop.com, it has around 200 links in Google, and close to 6000 overall. After looking at their link directory they have pretty much no related links. Also all the titles look spammy. How is this ranking possible? Aren’t all links supposed to be relevant to that site? Should I even bother to compete with this site?

Another observation, type “kirby vacuum” into Google, the number 2 result doesn’t really have much to do with the vacuum. And of course #4 is that same site I mentioned above. Also look at the 7th and 8th results, I see allot of these (biz rate, eopinions, shopping.com type sites)

This also got me thinking, say I do build a site about vacuums, should I only link to vacuums site, or is it ok to link with sites about home appliances, or home cleaning, or allergies?

Thanks

Mark”

Let’s answer the last question first. Who should you link to? Should links only be to related sites, or are all sites equal in the eyes of the big G?

Well, links from any site will help you in theory, but the problem arises when a human from Google looks at your site (as they will if a competitor reports you for spam, or using questionable techniques) and sees all these incoming links from unrelated sites. You site would probably be banned for excessive and unrelated linking.

This is the reason why I feel related site links are better.

However, that is not to say that all links in to your site must be from vacuum cleaner sites. By related, I mean that it is better to only swap links with sites that you feel YOUR VISITORS will find useful. e.g. vacuums is the obvious one, but people looking for vacuums are interested in cleaning products, floor care information, carpets etc.

Doing a quick search at Wordtracker will give you some ideas of the types of sites you should link to. Go to Wordtracker and type in carpet, cleaning, floor care etc into the search box, and let Wordtracker tell you what types of sites you should look at linking with. By targeting non-vacuum , but cleaning related sites, you probably wont be losing your potential vacuum customers to a competitor.

OK, so onto the main part of this question. Why does this site do so well.

Again, running this site through either SEO Elite or Optilink should give you the answer.

The large number of backward links should be enough to explain the high rankings of this site, but lets do the density check that we did last week. Does this site use a similar formula as those successful sites we mentioned last week?

To find out I analyzed only the incoming links from other sites (not those links from within the site).

Vacuum is found in 38% of inbound links
Cleaner is found in 38% of inbound links

It seems this site is also keeping its primary phrase density low in its incoming links. I would expect with the shear volume of links and the low incoming density of the words vacuum cleaner that this site will rank well on Google for the term vacuum cleaner.

Doing a quick check, I see that it is 8th out of over 3 million competing sites.

On Yahoo it is 3rd out of 1.5 million.

On MSN it is 3rd out of 316,107.

Is there a mystery as to why this site ranks well? Not in my books. It is doing great off-site optimization.

Now, compare this to another site that one subscriber wrote to me about. They were asking whether they had been penalised, because despite a good PR and lots of incoming links, they were no-where to be found for their primary terms.

In Google, his primary term has about 3.5 million competing pages (similar to the vacuum site), yet has more incoming links.

I wont tell you which site this is to protect the owner.

Here is what Optilink told me:

The primary phrase for the site was made up of three words, let’s call them keyowrd1, keyowrd2, keyowrd3.

keyword1 appeared in 93% of backlinks
keyword2 appeared in 86% of backlinks
keyowrd3 appeared in 86% of backlinks

I believe that his inbound links are over-optimized, therefore he is being penalised.

The good thing about analyzing this site is that Google reports 388 backlinks, so it is a great one to test my theory on. Lots of backlinks, yet poor rankings. I will leave it up to you to draw your conclusions, but my advice to this webmaster was to reduce the frequency of these main phrase words in about half of his backlinks. Think of related phrases that don’t contain these words and use that instead when requesting reciprocal links. Once the density of his main phrase is reduced in the inbound links, I would fully expect his ranking to rise.

Optilink and SEO Elite can both do this analysis in minutes, and for professional SEOs, one or other of these tools is essential to success.

Both have demos, so if you are interested in finding out why sites rank so well, you really should download them and do some testing for yourself.

Get your demo of SEO Elite

Get your demo of Optilink

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6. Can low competition, low search phrases be profitable?
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If you have read both my Wordtracker Tutorial and My Creating Niche sites reports (which you received when you signed up for the ezSEO Newsletter), you will know that my own techniques involve writing articles that have low competition and low numbers of searches.

Some of the phrases I target in an article only have 2 or 3 searches a day at Google, so the question I get asked a lot is “Can low competition, low search phrases be profitable?”.

In a word, yes. Using the techniques outlined in those two reports, I have a new site (3-4 months old), with around 80 unique articles on it. That site has consistently attracted over 800 unique visitors per day in the last week.

By using the techniques of blogs and RSS feeds mentioned in previous newsletters, that site is now ranking well in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Every single one of the articles is indexed in all three engines. I have never had a site where this has happened before, and can only attribute this to content, blogs & RSS feeds.

If you are looking to build your first site, and start that road to financial independence where you can fire your boss, re-read those two reports, and start a site based on the technique within. You will be amazed how well it works.

That’s it for another issue.

Have a great week!

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