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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this
issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V2I2_042007.htm
and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it. Table of Contents for this issue..... 2.
Q & A, Suggestions
and Comments 3.
Let Google's Algorithm
Show You The Traffíc 4.
SEOMOZ.org I
am working on upgrading the Retirement Jobs Online site to expand its
appeal. It is getting about
100 visitors per day, but I feel that it should have a lot more. Right
now the site is number seven on the Google search engine results page
for the keyword “retirement jobs”.
This is below the fold. I
am working to improve the content to try to move up in the results so
that Retirement Jobs Online is above the fold.
This should substantially increase the visitors to the site. I
am expanding it to include help for retirees who do not want a totally
online job. Instead, they
want to use the Internet to promote and assist their offline jobs. I
found an interesting survey by Merrill Lynch that showed the jobs that
Boomers desired after they retired.
The top pick was consultant at 27%.
Teacher / Professor / Teaching Assistant was in second place at
20%. The
website transition is not complete, but if you want to check out the
survey you can see it at http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/#Begin
Track Two. We
are still working on the transition from Boomer eZine to Entrepreneur
eZine, but corollary three of Murphy’s Law (Everything takes longer
than you expect) is what we are experiencing. We
will make the transition, but we are not in a hurry and the old Boomer
eZine is doing fine right now. Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments Nothing to report this week. If you have anything for this
section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article,
please go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm
and give us your input. With
your input, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine. I
have written several articles about how to write web pages to make them
rank high on the search engine results pages.
I admit that I learned most of these techniques from Site Build
It (SBI). SBI
has a program called “Analyze It” that reviews each of your web
pages before you publish them. It
tells you what to change to make the page an ideal search engine web
page. You make the suggested
changes and resubmit the page until “Analyze It’ tells you he page
is ready to publish. “Analyze It” is a major reason
why SBI websites as a whole rank at the top of the Alexa ranking. ======================== Author’s
Note: For those of you who
are not familiar with Alexa.com, it is a website owned by Amazon.com
that tracks website popularity. The
lower the ranking number of your site on Alexa, the more popular the
website. You want your site
as close to #1 as you can get. ======================== A
few years ago, SBI commissioned Netcraft.com,
a leading Net demographic firm, to perform a study of the overall Alexa ranking of a randomly
selected group of SBI sites. The
results of the study follow: There are
56.1 million active sites on the Web. (At the time of the study). Thirty-five
percent (35%) of the SBI sites were in the top one percentile of all web
sites. Sixty-two (62%) were
in the top three percentile. Anyway, all
that aside, I
read the following article that reinforced what I learned from Site
Build It. I thought that you
might like to read this information from another author’s perspective. We included an article by Titus in Volume
1 Issue 46 of Boomer eZine. Let Google's Algorithm Show You The Traffíc Recently
Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org brought together 37 of the world's Top SEO
experts to tackle Google's Algorithm, the complex formula and methods Google uses to rank web pages. This
ranking formula is extremely important to webmasters because finding
which factors Google uses to rank their index is often considered the
Holy Grail of site optimization. Google's ranking factors affect how and where you are listed in their search engine results or SERPs. Since obtaining top positions for your targeted keywords often spells success for your site, knowing Google's ranking factors can be very beneficial. Every
experienced webmaster will know Google is the main supplier of search
engine traffíc on the web, getting listed on the first page or anywhere
in the top 10 positions for popular keywords will result in plenty of
free quality targeted traffíc. Briefly listed below are some of the main ranking
factors you should be optimizing your web pages for in your marketing.
The majority of these ranking factors will be very familiar to most
webmasters who take full advantage of any and every SEO tactic which
will give their site an edge over their competition. Here are some of the main ranking factors to
consider: 1.
Keywords In Your Title And On Your Page Place
your keyword or keyword phrase in the title of your page and also in
your copy. Many webmasters use variations of their keywords on this page
and also include it in the H1 headline. 2.
Keywords In Your URL Keep
your page on topic and place your keyword in the URL. Use your keyword
in the H2, H3... headlines. Place it in the description and meta tags,
place it in bold/strong tags, but keep your content readable and useful.
Be aware of the text surrounding your keywords, search engines will
become more semantic in the coming years so context is important. 3.
Create High Quality Relevant Content Have
high quality relevant content on your pages. Your content should be
related to the topic of your site and updated regularly depending on the
nature of your site. 4.
Internal Onsite Linking Internal linking is important to your overall
ranking.
Make sure your linking structure is easy for the spiders to crawl. Most
suggest a simple hierarchy with links no more than three clicks away
from your home/index page. Creating
traffíc modes or clusters of related links within a section on your
site has proven very effective for many webmasters, including this one.
For example, creating a simple online guide on a subject related to your
site's topic can prove very beneficial. Keep all the links connected and
closely related in subject matter and don't forget to have occasional
external 'anchor keyworded' links coming to these internal links on your
site instead of to your homepage. Deep build your links. 5.
Only Linking To High Quality Related Sites Unless
your site has been around for years and is well established and trusted
by Google, this factor will have an adverse effect on your site's
overall ranking. Linking only to high quality content sites will give
your site an edge over your competition. 6.
Global Linking Popularity One of
the major ranking factors is the Global Linking Popularity of your site.
You should try to build plenty of
inbound links from quality sites. One simple and effective way to do
this is through writing articles and submitting them to the online
article directories. Only related sites will pick up and display
your articles with your anchor text links back to your site. These are
often ONE-WAY-LINKS. But
don't just write articles to get links, write quality content that will
help the reader first and the links will come naturally. Also remember
an article is an extremely good way of pre-selling your products and
gaining trust with your potential customers. 7.
Anchor Text Is Very Important Anchor
text is an important factor you must not forget to use. Perhaps more
importantly these inbound links should be related or relevant to your
site's topic, which will play an important role in your rankings. Keep in
mind, as search engines become more semantic, the whole text of your
article will probably be considered your anchor text, thus making
articles even more important to your rankings. 8.
Number And Quality Of Your Inbound Links Your
inbound links should also come from related high Global Link Popular
sites. The more links your have from these popular related sites the
higher rankings you will get. Many SEO experts suggest you should have a
steady stream of new sites (inbound links) added each month to keep your
rankings growing. These links will age and íncrease your rankings after
4 or 5 months. Both quality and quantity are important. 9.
Reliable Server And Service Like any
business, Google is only serving up a product (SERPs) to its customers,
this service must be continuous and available at all times. Make sure
you have a good reliable server because any extended downtime when your
site is inaccessible to the Bots may be detrimental to your rankings. If
it is down for over 48 hours, you could be dropped from the index. Ouch!
10.
Duplicate Content Is A NO NO! Make certain you don't place duplicate content on
your site. This may affect your rankings and get your pages thrown into the
supplemental index. Be careful not to use duplicate title or mega tags
on your pages as this will lower and disburse your internal page
rankings, resulting in poor optimization. Your
overall SEO strategy should be to provide valuable relevant content and
links for your visitors and the search engines. Furthermore, as
mentioned earlier, be extremely careful to whom you link out to from
your site. Avoid sp@m sites, link farms or selling links. Although it is
a bit outdated, using the Google Toolbar will still give you a general
overview of a site's PR or Page Rank. These
are some of the most common and important ranking factors Google uses to
rank and display their search engine results. Optimizing your site or
keywords for these factors can prove very beneficial and rewarding. There are many more factors so you
should use the link in the resource box below to get all the gory
details. For any novice or experienced webmaster it makes for a
fascinating read and is extremely helpful in tackling Google's complex
ranking system or algorithm. Conquer it and an endless supply of free
organic traffíc is yours for the taking.
Notice that the
“About the Author” in the previous article referenced the website,
SEOMOZ.org, where you can read all the ranking factors.
Let’s take a closer look at it. This site has
some really useful free tools that will help you analyze key word for
competition. I used the
tools in the past and they are helpful and informative. If you use the
Page Strength Tool and study the results for your site or any site, you
will also see what SEOMOZ considers the important factors for page
ranking. I have been
working for some time now to build another SBI site, the-best-web-host.com.
I used the SEOMOZ Keyword Difficulty tool to determine a niche
area in a very competitive market. The Keyword Difficulty tool produced
a very detailed seven page report on each keyword that showed how
difficult it would be to compete for a specific key word. The keywords that
I researched were webhosting - 62%, web hosting - 81%, best web host -
39% so I targeted “best web host” with the intent of creating pages
for the more competitive keywords after the website is established with
the search engines under “the best web host”. Unfortunately, in
the process of writing this article, when I went back to SEMOZ.com, that
tool is only available to SEMOZ Premium Members at $39 per month.
Good things don’t seem to last. If you are doing
some really serious research and you are not using Site Build It
Brainstorm It, you might consider a one month subscription to SEOMOZ for
your research. This is one
of the best tools I have found after SBI Brainstorm It. SEMOZ is a good
source of SEO information and it still has some free tools that are
helpful. Some of you might
have picked up on the fact that I started out on the new website project
using the SEOMOZ Keyword Difficulty tool and not the SBI Brainstorm It
tool. This is because I
originally was going to build this website on another server other than
SBI. However, as I got into
the project, I realized that to compete in this very competitive keyword
area, I needed the full assistance of SBI. I transferred the
domain to SBI and I am using it to build the site.
You will get a “Not Found” for this domain name if you try to
find it. I am not ready to
turn it on live yet. I read a new term
this week, “Link Rot”. I
share this with you since it is very descriptive for a broken link.
I have found that as we have written the eZine, some of the
external links are now broken since the sites that we referenced are
shut down or the pages were dropped. Maintaining links
is a continuous job on your site. If
you have broken links, it counts against you in your search engine
ranking. Make it a habit to
check and maintain your links. If a link is no
longer valid, take it out and clean up the text around it.
You might have to add a note explaining that the link was
removed. Google has an
entire webmaster help section at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters. This is a heads
up for you since we will focus on this topic as the theme for next
week’s eZine. That wraps up our
issue for this week. Until
next week, stay tuned. John and http://www.entrepreneur-ezine.com (http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Amazon_Page.htm)
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Copyright 2010 John Howe, Inc.
Please visit the other Boomer sites
| www.frugal-senior.com | www.retirement-jobs-online.com |
| www.best-retirement-calculators.com | www.the-best-GPS.com |
| www.the-best-web-host.com | www.the-best-HDTV.com |
