SEO News Tip of the Day!

SEO can seem like a long hard slog with little to no reward at times. Your mind often racing, constantly thinking about keyword phrases, H1 tags and links as you lay in bed trying to catch a few winks. Six months down the line your SEO efforts are nowhere to be seen, not even a trace, except in the redness of what used to be the whites of your eyes. But what if, it didn’t have to be this way. What if, there was a method of seeing results sooner rather than later.

I still remember when I first set out on my path of SEO enlightenment, vividly. If I knew some of things I know now, it would have been a completely different journey and a much shorter one to arrive at the place I’m at now (slightly further up a never ending path). The sleepless nights as my brain churned through the new chunks of information learnt that day. The eureka moments when you learn the most simplistic of things like anchor text and emphasising keywords with bold tags. Learning how to perform keyword research was one of the most enjoyable and undervalued aspects of SEO. And did I mention the sleepless nights.

Anyway enough reminiscing and back to topic of this article. The SEO snowball effect is a simple an analogy. Remember those cartoons where a character would role down a snow covered hill, gathering more snow and increasing in size until they crashed into something like a tree. Well that is the SEO snowball effect, minus the crash at the end (hopefully).

You see, if you drew a chart that measured the effort put into SEO and the traffic it produces, you get something very much similar to that snowball. At first the effort you put in yields very little traffic if any at all. But putting the same amount of effort in again results in slightly more traffic, until further along the chart, the same amount of effort yields a much greater output of traffic.

The problem with this is the time it can take to see the first initial traffic from your efforts. Many webmasters will give up because of this, while others carry on but only see little reward in the first year or so. However, there is a way of optimising the initial stages of this snowball and it all comes down to keyword selection.

In brief, many webmasters focus on keywords they believe are worth the effort in terms of traffic and rightly so. After all what’s the point of chasing keywords that no one uses or only have a very small number of impressions? So we go after the big boys, the keywords with lots and lots of traffic. But this contributes to the snowball effect because the effort required to obtain a top hundred ranking can be a lot on keywords with higher traffic levels. While the traffic gained from being listed in position 67 will be insignificant. So may be there is a reason to gun for those keywords with fewer impressions?

If you conduct you keyword research intelligently you should be able to find quite a few keyword phrases with small amounts of traffic but more importantly, phrases that contain your main keywords. By optimising these phrases you are contributing to the SEO of your main keywords, simply because the main keyword is part of phrase. These lesser phrases in terms of traffic are much easier to reach traffic generating results and therefore can be done much quicker. Once you’re happy with the rankings of that phrase, simply move onto the next until all small traffic phrases are optimised. In a lot of cases the combined traffic from sub-primary keyword phrases can be more than the primary keyword it self, not to mention more targeted.

When all sub-primary phrases are optimised, the chances are your site will rank well for the primary keyword with little to work left at all to get the top spot. The best thing is you have targeted the best keywords but received highly targeted traffic earlier in the campaign. Turning the snowball effect from an annoying symptom into a competitive advantage.



Article by James Anderson, an SEO Consultant at Podium Solutions, a web design and internet marketing company based Manchester, UK.

©2005 James Anderson. Author bio box, links and copyright notice must be included in all reproductions of this article.

Are You Hung-Up on Page Rank and Back Links?

It's unfortunate that many website owners are so hung-up on Page Rank, they'll rarely if ever, link to a site with a page rank lower than their own.

I'm frequently approached by other website owners who it's clear want to exchange links with one of my websites for no other reason than its Page Rank and so they can get more back links to their own website.

That's my experience with quite a few of my own websites. It's not until you get around a Page Rank 4 do back links come without you having to go and find them.

Back link requests tend to come more from sites with Low Page Rank wanting to improve search engine ranking by getting back links from higher ranking websites. They're also frequently from websites that offer no relevant content to your visitors and are from totally unrelated areas.

Many website owners have read a little about why and how to gain back links, then set about gaining as many as possible from any site that will give them one in return. They know it's important to gain back links, but what they forget or never knew, is it serves little purpose if they're of poor quality.

Poor Quality Back Links are from Unrelated Websites with Low Link Value.

I was reminded recently of the Google Page Rank obsession by one of my linking partners. I had advised them that because of some necessary changes to my website I had moved their back link to another page.

The website owner quickly emailed to tell me they had checked the page rank on the new page and finding it to be lower, advised me there was little point in them continuing to have a back link to my site.

Although we had been linking for over a year, it only served to prove they were not linking to my site because of its great content or because of its value to their visitors, but just for the Page Rank. When I advised them that their Page Rank check must have been in error because the page was the same PR as the previous one, they retained the back link to my site.

The obsession with Page Rank and how many back links a website has, led Google to put limits on this information.

For those of you obsessed with back linking by Page Rank you probably know that it only gets updated about every 3 months. Google also no longer reveals the true number of back links to a web site. Limiting information about back links is also something other search engines are starting to do.

An article of mine published on over 17,000 Websites Gained only 4 back links in any of the major search engines.

I recently proved the limits placed on information about back links and the discounting of back links, after one of my articles got taken up on over 17,000 websites. Since the article has a back link to my website, in theory that should mean 17,000 back links to my website.

A popular tool for checking back links among other things was a software tool called Optilink. Its popularity became such a problem for Google that they set about trying to detect its electronic signature and then blocking it when people used it.

It looks as if in the past months, that Google have been successful, because Optilink has been disabled by the developer from conducting queries on Google for back links. It's also no longer able to do queries on back links with MSN or Yahoo and the only one left now is the minor search engine Hotbot.

I'm only telling you all this, because it proves how obsessed many website owners have become about checking for back links to their websites and checking Google Page Rank of potential and existing link partners.

But are these web site owners right to be hung-up about Page Rank and Back Links and are you one of them?

What if I could prove to you that the value of back links from another website is not just about Page Rank. That in fact back links from Low PR sites could be of more value to you than back links from High PR sites. Would you believe me?

No, well if you want the proof you'll need to read another article called "How Low PR Web Sites Can Improve Search Engine Ranking" by Andy Theekson who advises on Search Engine Optimization.

The article shows how the value of back links from other websites is not just about Page Rank but also how many other outbound links there are from the same page.

It was possible to show how a back link from a PR 2 web page can be of equal or greater value than a back link from a web page with a PR 7, 8, 9 or even 10.

The article should be read by anyone who only looks for back links from High PR sites.

It's often said that people don't value what they get for free and only value what they have to pay for. This may also be true of back links since the website owners who value them the most will often buy links.

Many website owners who have the cash will buy links, or to be more correct with terminology, buy text links from websites with High PR pages. Some people would argue this is cheating and trying to buy links to improve search engine ranking.

The cost to buy text links varies widely from $5 to $30 per month for a PR 4 link up to $50/mnth for a PR 5 text link. They become progressively more expensive up to PR 8, when in some cases, you can expect to pay several $100's per month.

So why would people pay these prices to buy text links on high PR pages?

Is it for the traffic they expect to get by being on a high ranking and assumed high traffic page, or is it to gain from an improved search engine ranking for their own website?

If they want traffic there are cheaper ways, even if you include Pay Per Click where even at 50 cents per click your $1000 would give you 2,000 targeted visitors per month.

When you buy text links there are no guarantees you'll get traffic and you're paying for the text link not by the click but by the month, regardless of what traffic you get.

So I would suggest that someone who is going to buy text links obviously believes they're going to improve search engine ranking for their website.

But are people who buy text links getting value for money?

For the answer to that question you'll need to read the continuing part of this article "Can You Buy Text Links And Get Value for Money?"

Tony Simpson, advises on website design, promotion and optimization; in particular website automation for the one person operator. The continuing part of his article is at: Can You Buy Text Links And Get Value for Money?