Category Archives: Backlinking

Everything you need to know about SEO but were afraid to ask

One of my favourite sites, Search Engine Journal has put together a brilliant list of the blogs and sites you should pay attention to if you want to really understand SEO.

One of the weirder ones is Bill Slawski’s SEO By The Sea, where he covers what the search engines try to protect by way of patents. If you are in any way techy, grab yourself a large latte and get stuck in.

There is also Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, something that every respectful SEOer should be reading and taking notice of, as well as the die-hards like SEO Moz and Search Engine Land.

There’s also mention of a few forums worth checking out such as Webmaster World.

And just to show there’s no bias, SEO Black Hat is also included.

Anyway, sign up to the newsletters and keep abreast of the changes going on every day in SEO Land.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/free-seo-resources/15336/

Internet Marketers Toolkit Keeps Growing

Internet Marketers Toolkit Collection

Site speed checker (and brilliant analyser)
Keyword finder, LSI keyword finder and more
Real backlink generator (this one is incredible and… real – no spammy links here please!)
SEO infographics you should print and stick up above your desk
Google Analytics insights
Mobile phone emulator – what does your site look like on a smartphone?
Royalty free images – pep up your posts
WordPress tutorials and plugin lists
Ever wondered how to format your eBook? – I’ve got you covered
Don’t forget Kindle KDP
Want to see if any sites are similar to yours – ooh you are nosey!
Need a proxy? if you don’t got one, get one
Press release sites – spread your news free and get even more backlinks and traffic
I could go no… but I wont

Here’s the link again: http://quentinpain.com/tools-and-resources-for-internet-marketers/

Right it’s back to the grindstone for me. Enjoy and if you find any good ones please let me know. Do we have a deal?

How much traffic is a website getting?

2 Replies

The first thing to understand is that all traffic to a website is not equal.

I realise you may already know that, but how many people pick a high traffic keyword, get it ranked and find none of it converts?

So before we start, here is the fastest route to picking a keyword that will do you some good:

Use Google’s keyword tool and enter in a few keywords you think may do you some good
Now enter those into Google search
How many ads show up?

If no ads show up, there isn’t a market. That’s the number one rule. Of course if you are just providing a free information service, then brilliant, but we are here to do business.

Look at the screenshots below. I am going to share with you some important data and proof of numbers very rarely shared by any online marketers.

traffic estimation of a website

At the time of writing (July 2012), one of the keywords this site is successful with is: “How many backlinks do I have?”. In fact we are number #1 for this keyword on Google.

Look at the figures. Google estimates that there are 320 monthly global searches for it.

And it is 100% accurate as the screenshot shows. Google brought up the relevant page on my site precisely 320 times.

Now here’s the best bit that you can take away and have some confidence about. Of the 320 times it was shown, 150 people clicked on the link. That’s a CTR for a #1 position of 46.88%

I have just checked another keyword, that is at #2 and it has a CTR of 22.73%

So you can now see the sort of traffic you can get based on your position in the search engines and the amount of traffic the search engines are sending for that keyword.

Let’s take a look at some numbers here:

If the monthly traffic was 100,000 and you were at #1 on Google, you could expect to get 46,880 clicks. Not bad eh!
If you were at #2 then it would be around 22,730. Still great.
I just checked another keyword that is at #4 and it gets 10% of the traffic. So that would return 10,000 clicks.
One more check here was for a kw at #7. It got 2.5% of the market. That’s 2,500 clicks.

Now, getting to #1 for a keyword with 100,000 impressions is a very tall order indeed (unless you are lucky enough to find that magic keyword that no one else has thought of).

The reality for 99.9% of us is that we manage to rank for a keyword with, say, 1,000 impressions. That means you can expect around 468 clicks for the month, or around 15 a day (and that’s if you get to #1).

And if we now return to the beginning, about the value of traffic, you can see that unless the keyword you are ranking for has buying intent, then all you are is an information service.

So always check if other people are willing to pay for adverts in the search engines if you want to convert not only the impressions into clicks, but also the clicks into sales.

The Truth About Backlinking After Penguin

Ranking Theory

It’s important you ‘get’ this next bit.

Google (and any decent search engine) wants to return results that solve a problem. I know you understand that already, but think about why it is important.

After Alta-Vista and earlier search engines, the only reason we all changed to Google was because firstly the results were far more relevant, and secondly they were returned far quicker than anything previously.

On a dial-up modem this was really important. Nowadays with broadband you would think it hardly matters, but the number of indexed URL’s was already past a trillion 4 years ago (according to Google’s Jesse Alpert), so speed matters still.

Ranking on Page 1?

Now here’s the thing. If you look for any long tail keyword (that is, a keyword with very low traffic) and build a page for it, it is the easiest thing in the world to get it ranking very high.

Where it ranks and for how long, post Panda, depends on just two factors:

Relevancy
Bounce rate

Yes, I know many have said this before, but it holds true even more so after the algorithm updates. And it makes sense too.

If a search engine matches your page with a search query it does the following things:

It ranks it (on what page and what position to show it) depending on…
It checks its relevancy compared to all the other pages and…
It checks what the visitor does should the page get clicked

That means if you have a title that closely matches (or answers) what somebody is searching for (myth explosion coming in a second…) the visitor is more likely to click on the link (it has very little if anything to do with whether Google sees the Title as being relevant – to look at it that way misses the point entirely).

The same goes for the meta description. You can keyword stuff it and do what you like, but to do so again misses the point (another myth busted here – it’s all about the visitor NOT the search engine).

It is a well known fact that search engines like Google don’t rely on the meta description. This was talked about back in 2002 on Sitepoint.

All we have to do is look at what the visitor does. If the information on the page is what the user wants, or solves the problem, they will stay and read it all. The bounce rate shoots down. Google sees that it has delivered something useful. That fact is recorded against the URL for that page.

If the user clicks away, that of course is recorded too.

Either result will determine where it gets displayed next time for the same keyword.

And remember we are talking about long tail here, not hard to rank for keywords.

CTR (click through rate) is also vital. If a page appears at position #8, is shown 1,000 times and is clicked on 10 times, we have another vital metric. It has nothing to do with what Google ‘thinks’ about the title. It has everything to do with what the searcher thinks about it.

If the page at #7 was shown 1,100 times and is clicked on 10 times, then there is a chance that it will be pushed to #8 and your page pushed up to #7 shortly.

And that depends on what the searchers do when landing on the page. If they stay there longer for your page than the page above you, then again there is a good reason to move your page higher up the rankings.

So how do I rank post Panda and Penguin?

Relevant content. Make sure the page title promises to solve the problem. Make sure the content solves the problem. Make sure the visitor stays on the page long enough to chalk it up as relevant – simply by staying there longer than the page that is ranking one position higher.

That’s really all you need to know. But understanding the logic as explained above means that you really will ‘get’ it and also see why this is actually a very good thing for the web.

The playing field is being levelled again. You have just as much chance as anyone else provided you stick to ranking long tail keywords.

If you want to learn simple logic about internet marketing and get your business ranking, just fill in the form (top right) and join my inner circle. I welcome you.

Quentin Pain
Cambridgeshire, UK

Negative SEO

Negative SEO Industry

Well, that appears to be exactly what has just happened. And as a result, an industry that was always very much on the fringe is starting to become big business – yes: the Negative SEO industry.

Imagine what you could do to a competitor if Google decided that some of the links to that site were considered spammy and actually reduced or penalised the value of that site? How much would it cost to outsource some cheap black-hat SEO company to totally trash your competitors? You can buy thousands of instant links from many sources online right now (just search for ‘cheap backlinks’).

The feedback is getting louder and louder on this one. Take a look at SEOBook‘s excellent post to see some real examples of this.

They will open your eyes to something you may find you have no control over whatsoever. It is of course not proven (and can never be so long as search algorithms are kept secret) but the evidence is pretty convincing.

http://www.seobook.com/negative-seo-outing

How Many Backlinks Do I have?

4 Replies

Want to know how many backlinks you have, and how that compares with your competition? I show you exactly what you need to know…

Backlinking is probably one of the great myths of Internet Marketing. There are tens of thousands (literally) of products, books and articles on the subject.

The advice ranges from ‘no backlinks necessary’ to ‘get as many as you can as quickly as possible’. So what is the best advice?

Before we go down that route, here’s a new online tool where you can check your own site(s) and your competitors (it is in beta at the time of writing so may disappear or cost money sometime in the future):

http://www.backlinkfinder.com/backlink-checker.html

Most people used Yahoo site explorer to research backlinks in the past, but it was rumoured it would be turned off in 2011, so there was a need to find alternative tools.

However, Microsoft came to the rescue with their Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. As I write this, the original Site Explorer site is still up as they are busy incorporating it into Microsoft Webmaster Tools (the MS version of Google Webmaster Tools).

One site I like is this: http://website.informer.com

Enter any URL and depending on how popular it is, you will get a ton of information. It uses a mashup to bring together information from Yahoo, Compete, Alexa, Site Advisor, Mywot and others depending on the site. It will also tell you about the owner of the site, and even shows other popular sites from the same owner. Very revealing.

SEO Moz is another well known and respected tool and has been used by many as a good alternative, but it is quite costly (it is aimed at webmasters rather than business owners).

So, back to backlinking. First up. The truth! No one knows how the search engine algorithms are tweaked. You can look up Google’s patents or see what Google spokespeople like Matt Cutts has to say on the subject, but we are talking here about many hundreds of different metrics that make up a search engine’s idea of page relevancy.

And those metrics are constantly changing. In other words it’s pretty much anyone’s guess as to what works today and what will work tomorrow.

Google are fairly transparent about this, which is a good thing in my view. The massive changes made in 2011 (Panda etc) and the new social metrics introduced in 2012 (Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’) have changed things even further.

What the search engines are after of course is completely natural backlinks. They absolutely do depend on them in order to test relevancy. The basics of this relevancy is called PageRank (PR). Each page is given PR and if that page links to another page, some of that PR is passed along to it (the original page doesn’t lose any PR, it is just accumulated along the path).

So if you have a page with a PR of 2 that has lots of outgoing links, each link will have a very diluted portion of 2. Or to put it another way, the more outgoing links there are on a page, the less important the PR from that page is (note that the page itself is obviously still relevant as it has a PR of 2).

So, imagine you have a page you want to rank for the keyword ‘best sausages’. It makes sense that if other pages have a link to it, and those other pages have something to do with sausages, then your pages PR will increase. Right?

Well, not necessarily. Those other pages may have links pointing to them that are not about sausages (i.e. not relevant). They may also have pages that a search engine may consider spammy (negative PR anyone?).

Links to your page may also not be relevant, or they may be spammy. So would you lose PR because of this? Well, again, no necessarily. If that were the case, then as has been stated before, you could kill off a competitor site.

So, the SE’s algorithms have to be extremely robust. And they do this in many ways, including tracking activity over time. This is one reason why it is possible to get a brand new site on to page 1 of an SE within 24 hours (it is very easy to do BTW).

But unless you have a very strategic plan, there is a good chance your new site will just as suddenly disappear.

Here’s a simple blueprint to follow to give you a rough idea of what to do:

Pick the keyword you want to target
Type it into an SE
Research the top 10 sites that show up (for backlinks and other metrics such as keyword in title etc,)
Research the PR of the pages linking to those top sites
Make a decision on whether it is now worth chasing
Build your plan to ‘naturally’ out do the competition

I will go into far more detail with this in the future with examples. Make sure you join my Inner Circle by filling in the form on the right so you get the latest information on internet marketing tactics that work.

Meanwhile you may like to check out some interesting things about the Google Penguin update and how you should think about linking and ranking: read it here…

Also, Matt Cutts of Google announced in a tweet in October 2012 that another tweak of the search engine algorithm had been implemented (actually, this is along with well over 60 updates in September) to stop thin sites that use exact match domains (EMD) ranking so highly.

See my post on the Google Freshness Project.