It seems that Michael Campbell has started a new series of free videos on SEO advice. In the first one he talks about the importance of the title tag for SEO ranking and clickthrough rates. As you’d expect from Michael, it’s top quality advice…
Dr Andy Williams, the SEO expert working out of Tenerife, just published a report based on scientifically analysing the pages Google ranks for several different keywords.
You may be thinking, “how the heck can someone analyse the results for different keywords when there are usually millions of results“?
Ahh, well, here’s the thing… if you drill down through the Google results for “contact lens”, you’ll see that they stop at position 861. That’s how many useful pages Google thinks there are… the so-called, “Authority Set“. The other 29 million pages are buried in what we used to call the “supplemental index”… they’re pages with duplicate content, too few links or not enough relevance to break into the authority set.
So, Andy simply analysed pages from within that dataset of 861 and noticed something intriguing… the pages at the top almost always contained the phrase being searched for AND most of the other keywords relevant to the main phrase. Andy calls this broad coverage of the niche, “themeing” (also spelled theming).
Andy then analysed many pages for many different niches, and it became clear that better “themed” pages were more likely to be at the top of the search results. Now, intuitively, this makes sense, because experts on their topics will write well-contructed articles that naturally include all the theme words related to their topic. Logic tells us that those “best articles” will get cited by other websites and gain many natural links, which Google loves to see.
So where does this leave us? Is it the themeing which gets top rankings, or the links that expertly-written articles gain because they’re well themed?
The answer is, simply, both. You need a well themed article, and links.
BUT, here’s the kicker… if you get ghostwritten, low-quality articles for a few bucks which only repeat the main keyword a few times and don’t include many theme words, you can kiss goodbye to getting top-10 listings!
SO, check out the Google Authority Set PDF report, verify Andy’s findings and use Web Content Studio to work out the theme-keywords for your niche BEFORE writing an article. Better yet, give the list of theme-keywords to your ghostwriters and have them construct quality articles using as many of the theme-keywords as possible. Then you’re guaranteed to tick the “themed well” box, and give yourself a good chance at top-10 rankings!
Just a quick tip.. Dr Andy Williams has written another excellent EZSEO Newsletter. I really liked the section on how Google indexed new pages at two different sites in totally different ways… read the newsletter to find out why… and subscribe if you don’t already. 
BTW, I wonder if putting “excellent” in the anchor text helps boost the authority of the receiving site at Google? If so, Andy, you owe me a pint.
Jim Morris of Nichebot fame, has highlighted an interesting SEO Case study from Webmaster’s World.
In the case study, one new site was “SEO’d” and another site was left to grow “organically”.
The SEO’d site took off like a rocket. The organically-growing site grew very slowly.
I wonder what would’ve happened if they’d ran the experiment for three to five years? Would the organically-growing site eventually beat the SEO’d site for traffic?
Stompernet (using Leslie Rhode of “Dynamic Linking” fame) are making a big hoopla about whether or not Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing to determine search engine ranking positions in its search engine listings.
Interestingly, it seems that the waters are muddied by the fact that Leslie takes a “true” definition of LSI and applies it to Google. He says, “nope, Google don’t use LSI to determine rankings”. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But, most webmasters don’t use the “true” definition of LSI when they think about LSI. Instead, most webmasters consider LSI to be simply a case of using lots of synonyms and related phrases on the same page… what Dr Andy Williams calls “theming”. And, it most definitely is the case that Google likes to see lots of related words on your pages when you cover any given topic. For instance, it’s only by looking at the other words on your page, and links into it, that Google can determine that your page with the word “apple” is about the fruit, not the iPod company.
So, technically, Leslie is right. And, technically, Dr Andy is right.
To quote Dr Andy quoting an (unattributed) blog comment…
“Does Google use LSI according to Leslie’s definition? Nope, not a bit. Do they use LSI according to a webmaster definition? Yep, without a doubt. The only problem is, the webmaster definition is not true LSI”.
Top tip: one of the best ways to rank for long-tail searches without having to create individual pages and links, is to create one long, well-written article that covers all the long-tail phrases you want to rank for. One such page, with lots of inbound links, is much better than multiple pages with hardly any inbound links, each targetting individual phrases.
New BOTW discount coupon code for May 2010 posted here.
I just got this email…
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Attention Valued BOTW Members,
This Halloween, Best of the Web is offering a special treat that you don’t need to put on a costume to receive. As a show of appreciation for our loyal customer base during these tough economic times, we are offering all BOTW members a special 20% discount on all New Directory Submissions, BOTW Local Listings and Sponsorship Advertising for the entire month of October. Now that’s something to scream about!
Promo Code: ZOMBIE
Get Started today and Save 20% on:
You may use the promo code multiple times for multiple products and services throughout the month of October. Remember to act now, this amazing deal ends October 31st, 2008 so be sure to take full advantage!
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BOTW is one of the oldest directories online, and seems to be “trusted” by Google. Also, whether or not a site has a BOTW listing is reported by the “SEO for Firefox” plugin, along with DMOZ and Yahoo.
Some of my SEO friends suggested getting my sites listed in BOTW for additional search engine ranking power, but I didn’t submit any in September because I was hoping for a new coupon… and now one’s arrived.
One of the best SEO tactics of all time is article marketing. Distributing articles for links “the old way” was a 100% winner… until now.
My friends, Marc and Daniel at PLRpro are releasing a new system called “Article Marketing Automation” and, I can tell you from my tests… it rocks!
Their system lets you build…
On-topic backlinks within your articles using anchor text you choose drip-fed to your site over time… from a massive blog network.
This is the next step in article marketing. It’s huge.
Anyone who continues to do “old style” article marketing will get left behind.
If you can already see the power of this system, head over to the AMA site and sign up…
Here’s more detail for you…
1: Google knows the Article Directory sites. In November last year, their PageRank got slapped and so did all the sites who got links mainly from Article Directories… OUCH!
Solution: Use a big, distributed network of blogs for your articles. Marc and Daniel’s system has 2,000 blogs signed up, and it’s just emerging from beta. Daniel told me they’ll have 60,000 by the end of 2008.
2: Article directories don’t usually let you put links to your sites in the body of the articles, but only in the “author box”, which doesn’t look like a natural link.
Solution: Distribute your articles using a system that allows you to put links within the articles. The links look like “natural links of love” and there’s no “author box” at the bottom to let Google know these are distributed articles. This is what Marc and Daniel’s system does… the articles don’t look like “articles”, they look like natural blog posts.
3: Article directories send your articles out in one “blast”, which isn’t a natural way to get links.
Solution: Drip-feed your articles over time. Some article directories are moving to this system, but with Marc and Daniel’s system, it’s built-in.
4: If your article is distributed to many sites, Google will most likely not bother counting most of the backlinks. When you search Google for a phrase from your article and it shows 3 results and “click here to see more very similar results”, my guess is that Google doesn’t count links from those “very similar” pages, or rates them poorly.
Solution: Carefully craft your article with sentence replacement so that each version distributed is different, but still readable and of high quality. Again, some article directories are starting to do this, but Marc and Daniel’s system has this feature built-in… if you want to use it.
Article marketing has changed, forever. It’s no longer good enough to write an article, slap an “author box” at the bottom, blast it out and get backlinks.
Just as visiting each article directory was replaced by desktop software that allowed you to visit each directory and submit your article, and that was replaced by article distribution services, this is the future.
Now you can include your backlinks within your articles, lose the “author box” and distribute slowly, over-time to multiple on-topic blogs. If you like, you can even use the sentence-replacement feature to make the articles different from each other.
Just ask yourself… whose sites will get the traffic?
Will it be the people using the old system, or the new?
If you agree with me, Marc and Daniel, you need to start using the power of Article Marketing Automation.
PS, when Allan Gardyne says, “This is awesome!” and, “Daniel calls this a “ranking machine, I call it brilliant“, you know the Earth has just moved. I’ve never seen Allan so impressed by a new system, but I do know why.
BTW, I’ve spent many hours chatting with Marc and Daniel about this system via instant messenger and Skype. These guys are smart. I suggest you sign up for this new system right now, and start building genuine, quality links into your websites.
The Stompernet guys are playing it cool about their new product launch. They’re not exactly saying that you’ll be able to get the product for free tomorrow when it launches, but the heavy hints they’ve been dropping felt like those cartoon 10-ton weights landing on my toes.
So, if they’re going to give the product away, what does that mean? Well, let’s think. Frank Kern just did a giveaway and hoped to have people sign up for his monthly program. Frank was involved in the first Stompernet launch. Is it possible that the Stompernet guys could be “ethically bribing” you with the new product if you join their monthly program? Could it be… “our spanking-new monthly print Journal called “The Net Effect”…? Hmmm.
I think it’s possible, but for the full details, click this link after the product goes live. Hopefully, unlike Frank’s small test giveaway, they keep the doors open for a while. I think I read that they’ve produced thousands of DVD’s. I think they’ll need them.
(by the way, I’ve reviewed a digital version of Stomping 2.0 and it’s a good introduction to search engine optimization and getting traffic through SEO tactics.)
I’ve created a movie showing you that the “SEO guru’s” know nothing, and how my “thin affiliate site” avoided the Google Sandbox. Check it out here.
In fact, you’ll see the “sandbox” myth blown out of the water.
In the 9th minute of the movie imagine all the SEO guru’s scratching their heads!
I always liked that little “number of pages indexed” at the bottom of the Google homepage… back in the days when they were competing with Inktomi (now Yahoo) and Altavista (now, err, part of Overture, which is part of Yahoo) to have the largest index. I guess now the competition includes Microsoft. Back then, it didn’t!
I was wondering how big Google’s index is now. I found a page saying that the specific search query, *-”a yielded 17,960,000,000. The page is dated December 2006.
So I tried the same search query today and got 11,900,000,000 results.
Does that mean Google has kicked out six billion pages from its index? That’s almost exactly a third!
(Using the *.* search used to return 25 billion documents, but that search no longer works, so it can’t be used in a comparison.)
A shrinking index would account for the recent decreases in PageRank that people have been seeing… if the index has shrunk by 1/3rd, then there’s less PageRank to go around.
Google still claim to have an index, “more than three times larger than that of any other search engine“. Can that still be true if their index is shrinking?
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