Very new ideas for the old internet

Reasons To Ignore Toolbar Pagerank Updates

There seems to be this hysteria around Google and its Toolbar updates.  Maybe it relates to webmasters and web designers thinking that once Google make this fabled toolbar update that their website will magically jump up in the SERP’s.  Well I cannot say this clearly enough but if this is what you believe then you will be sadly disappointed.  Google just don’t work this way.

I see many, many articles, posts and blog comments by interested onlookers and self-declared SEO experts about the upcoming, and according to some people, well overdue, toolbar pagerank update.  I have one quote I would like to share with you, from Matt Cutts who is one of the head Google Search Engineers, “Toolbar Pagerank updates are a non-event at Google”.  The main reason Matt says this is because pagerank is updated constantly and the toolbar pagerank is only a snapshot of the real pagerank.  So this being the case once the snapshot of the real page rank is taken and assigned to the toolbar database it will have no affect on how Google actually view or rank the website in the SERP’s.  Fretting and stressing about where the toolbar pagerank update has gone is pointless because your web page already has a pagerank assigned to it, you just can’t see a little green bar.  It’s just so teasing by Google isn’t it!!

So, what should we do now that we have decided that checking your toolbar pagerank and those terribly inaccurate pagerank predictors is a waste of our time?

Well, find some good articles on SEO.  Read them.  Find more.  Read them.  Absorb as much information as you can about SEO and online marketing.  Read about the website language your website is coded in.  A common language nowadays is PHP.  Research keywords and how to find good keyword phrases.  Take a proactive approach and make some modifications to your site that you now know are correct SEO techniques.

If you have already got web pages in the SERP’s then look for where you have 2 pages with 1 indented and maybe make some small modifications to the page that is the indented result and experiment with it a little.  Keep a diary of your changes so that if you need to trace back to what changes you made you can.  If they get a positive result then you can apply the exact same changes across other pages or if they are negative in the SERP’s then you can start again from where you were before.

Give at least a week or two in-between making changes so that you can know exactly what affect your change had in the SERP’s.  Make only one change per page so that you can monitor that particular change vs. SERP’s rankings.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Melbourne, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimization, SEM, seo, Web Marketing, website marketing

Affiliate Programs And SEO

While good SEO skills will get your page noticed by search engines by themselves there other tricks to help increase their effectiveness. Affiliate programs can be a good way to increase your website’s own SEO attributes. There are different types of affiliate programs. An older one would be the old banner concept which predates pay-per-click. Google’s Adwords is a modern incarnation of this where by people can profit from Google’s pay-per-click business. Let’s look at some of these.

Not all affiliate programs have to be for profit. There are many people who are just looking to get traffic to their sites by cooperating with other sites. Just as a strong page on your website can help increase the rankings of your other pages rankings on affiliates’ sites can do the same. Don’t confuse affiliates with guest books or link pages. An affiliate is working with some kind of service or business to make a profit so it is a function of commerce. This will help with the search engines’ rankings. Search engines look for link pages and don’t give them a very high ranking so they wouldn’t help you very much. However since affiliate pages are used for commerce they are going to have a much stronger ranking. Affiliates can act as a team just like the pages on your site.

Another point to consider is that pages that are involved with affiliate programs are going to be set up well in order to profit from them. So this is analogous to strong members of a team making a colossal team effort. Enough strong pages driving traffic to your site is lie diverting a river to a drought stricken town.

Fortunately affiliate programs are easy to find so just keep in mind what kind you would be willing to do for your site. Don’t give yourself more work than you need to.

Tags: Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, seo

Black Hat SEO – What Never To Do Or Get Banned

While there are many legitimate skills in SEO there are also those that can work but if you get caught using them the results can be disastrous. When search engine optimization became an issue many techniques were employed because at that point the search engines used a much simpler algorithm. As these tricks were used to exploit the simpler algorithms they were also served to make them more advanced. Let’s look at a few tricks.

Cloaking and redirects are methods whereby you show one page to the search engine but a different one to the visitor. A redirect merely brings visitors to one page and then sends them to another page by refreshing the page with one on their site. Cloaking involves fooling a search engine’s indexer into thinking that it is something else and getting the indexer to send false information back to its boss.

Other techniques involve overloading metatags with keywords or even hiding keywords in plain site on the webpage. A variation on this technique is to shrink the keywords so that are too small to be seen by the naked eye.

Using unrelated keywords is another trick especially when combined with the above mentioned tricks. By using unrelated keywords in this manner you can drive traffic to your site from multiple sources.

Using an overly optimized landing page can also work. This is not the same thing as a legitimate landing page. In this case you use any and all methods to overly optimize a single and use that to lead people to your site. This would involve using all of the above methods for this one page.

The ultimate penalty for using the unscrupulous methods is banishment from the search engines themselves. Be careful when you employ these dark methods for fear of this punishment. Being penalized is one thing but to not even be on a search engine in the first place is your worst case scenario.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimization, seo