EzSEO Newsletter # 9

Andy Williams ez SEO

ezseonews.com

Hello again & welcome to the new subscribers to the ezSEO Newsletter. We are coming towards the end of a series of articles that will build up into a comprehensive SEO course. This is the 9th installment. If you have missed any, you can read all of the archived versions online at:

Internet Marketing Ezine Archives

Todays topic as promised will be about Page Rank and Link Reputation. How these two properties relate to one another and how you can use that information to leapfrog the competition at the search engines.

Before that however, I would like to update you on the changes I made yesterday with our SEO experiment page.

I sent out a mid week announcement about our little SEO experiment from a previous article. If you missed the announcement, here it is re-printed:

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Remember where I created a page optimized for
"how to optimize a web page"
This page had an apparent 1.3 million + competing web
sites at Google. Well that page is indexed and sitting at #5 in Google if you search without quotes, and #1 if you search with quotes. If you don't remember this experiment, why I did it, or the point I was making, go back and read the earlier newsletters. This page took 5 minutes to create and is ranking well. I would expect its position to climb as other factors are taken into account.
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OK, I have modified this page slightly and added inbound links, to see if I can boost its position. Firstly I have linked to it from my left hand menu bar (ezseonews.com) which can be found on nearly every page of my site. Guess what linking text I used?

BTW, before you think I am mad, and that it must have taken hours to add this link to about 200+ pages, it didn't. It took 30 seconds (including uploading the changes!) using a server side include (SSI). SSI is an extremely valuable tool for webmasters, that can actually be used to boost rankings (as shown above), and get pages indexed quicker. We will have a look at them at a later date if you like.

Why did I do this? Well if it isn't obvious to you by now, you really should go read the archives. Think about it. 200+ links all with the link text "How to optimize a web page" pointing at this page. This page is going to get a reputation ;)

Since I have a sitemap for my site, Google should pick up the changes in these 200+ pages next time it visits. For more information on the value of a sitemap, read my free report at:

http://ezseonews.com/downloads/Sitemaps-missing-link.zip

OK, the second modification is that I have moved my optimized text further up the page. If you go to Google and search for "how to optimize a web page", click on the link to get to my page. Once there, view the source code of this page using the View > Source menu item in Explorer. OK, don't close that text editor. Go back to Google (and this will only work until Google next updates my page in its index), and search again for the phrase. OK, now, instead of clicking the link to my site, do you see the small link underneath my listing labelled "Cached"? Click on it and you will see the web page that Google had indexed that gave the page its current ranking (i.e. my first attempt at this page). View the source of that one.

Compare the two sets of source code. Do you see how the new page (the first one you clicked on) has the optimized text further up the HTML document? The problem with the cached version is the menu bar on the left was pushing my optimized text down the page. That as you know is a big no-no. To get the optimized text up higher, I used a little trick that I explained in a previous newsletter. I modified the table so that the middle cell (containing my optimized text) appears above the left hand cell holding my left hand menu. Go back and read the previous newsletters for that Super Tip!

OK, now its a waiting game. It may take up to 4 weeks the way Google is behaving at the moment before the change are picked up. We will then see how these two small changes affect the web page ranking.

Phewww! Sorry about the long intro, but I want to keep you up to date on this experiment.

Now we can get on with this weeks topic, so sit up and pay attention. What you are about to learn is perhaps the most important of all SEO knowledge. With this knowledge, you will undoubtedly conquer the search engines and win the battle for the top 10. So let's begin.....

PAGERANK & LINK REPUTATION - PARTNERS IN CRIME

Sorry, this issue on Page Rank (PR) and link reputation has been removed. It has been expanded and now makes up one of the chapters in my SEO book:

Battle For the Top 10

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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 [REMOVED - USE CONTACT US LINK]. 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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Dr. Andrew Williams
EZ SEO
ezseonews.com

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