#1 Rank in Google

Impossible, right? Not really worth the time, right? Wrong on both accounts.

Many times while entering phrases into Google, I find a lot of somewhat related sites, but hardly ever anything exact. So why bother on getting these supposedly un-searched terms?

Because there is a perception that having your site in the #1 ranking in Google means that your site is an authority on that particular subject. As any experienced user knows, this is most often not the case, but perception is reality.

Granted, some of the phrases that you can get ranked on may not be very popular, but you never know what a user is going to enter into the search box, or do we ever know at what point of information gathering they are at.

One of the most common traits of searching is that when a user firsts begins a search, they use a broad term, but as they get further along into their search, the phrases become more precise as they themselves filter out the un-related sites.

This is the same concept of which a successful PPC campaign can be run. While it may be great to get tons of traffic for the keyword "shoes", if a user is really looking for "Nike running shoes", the site has wasted money on that search.

Another curious stat that web analytics reveal is that a consumer that comes to a site through PPC is not a life-time customer. They are usually interested in the quick fix, or easy solution. Compared to a user who arrives through organic search engine optimization, they are more likely to be lifetime consumers since they tend to trust a company that has "earned" it's way to the top of the rankings.

By the time a user has a four to five keyword phrase entered in for their search query, chances are that they have already eliminated the "noise" and are focused on the "signal" i.e. the product or service that your site is offering.

One final item to remember is that if you have an exact phrase that is not common to a search engine query, once it gets indexed, it will most like appear in the number one position since the search engines always try to find an exact match when other factors aren't available.

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com


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Useful SEO Tools

The Best SEO Tools

There are many Free SEO Tools on the internet as well as tools that you will have to pay for. There are tools which can submit your site to 100’s, even 1000’s of link and article directories at the same time, toolbars which will check page ranks and sites which will check page rank, backlinks and give an estimated value of your site all in one go.

Here are a few of the best SEO Tools:

Page Rank Checkers / Backlink Analyzer

dnScoop - dnScoop is a website which shows you a few statistics about the SEO state of your website. It shows you Google Page Rank, Inbound Links, Domain Name Age, Domain IP Report (See which other sites are hosted on the same server)

Page Rank Predictor - Want to find out what PR your site will have? Try here. I would not take this guesstimate as an accurate prediction though, more like a bit of fun.


Keyword Tools

Keyword Suggestion Tool - This tool will show you links to suggested keyword monthly search volumes and much more, so you can see what terms are searched for most on all of the search engines.

Hittail - Hittail tells you what keywords your visitors you are using to find your website from search engines. It also suggests what you should optimise your site for. It can be as easy as putting these terms in a


Link Submitters

digiXMAS Directory Submitter - Using Paid Mode it will add your site to hundreds of directorys automatically with you just having to choose categories and entering CAPTCHA confirmations. Paid Mode costs $15 per site but if you have many sites this price will go down. This is a valuable tool with helping gain back links and many of the top Link Submission companies use this.

Free Mode will allow you to still add your link to many directories it is just a bit more time consuming as it is not fully automatic. You will have to manually go through each directory and check the details and then press submit, whereas Paid Mode does everything for you.


RSS & Blog Submission

Submit Em Now - This will submit your blog & RSS feed to over 100 directories. Great for backlink building.


There are of course many more out there for you to try and use. Good luck with these any please post any additional useful links for other users.


Thanks Ashley
Acknowledged Web Solutions



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The great SEO con.

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

  • Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.

    Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

    "Dear google.com,
    I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

    Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

  • No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

    Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

  • Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.

    Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.

  • You should never have to link to an SEO.

    Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

  • Choose wisely.

    While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.

  • Be sure to understand where the money goes.

    While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

  • What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
  • One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

    Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

  • What are some other things to look out for?
  • There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

    • owns shadow domains
    • puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
    • offers to sell keywords in the address bar
    • doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
    • guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
    • operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
    • gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
    • has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
    • requests your FTP account information or root access to your server

    If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.



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How Google works

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits of each these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords servic

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking.

Google's Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it's because we've algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user's query.



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SEO and Google

Everybody wants a place sat proudly at the top of Google so much so that they try all kinds of methods to get there, however the only one that really works is Google SEO. Google search engine optimisation is basically implementing the webmaster guidelines and trying to make you site content as spider friendly as possible.

Over the past 5 years Google has become more and more focused on off page SEO factors, as far as their ranking system is concerned and this means they give less weight to your actual site content and more weight to how popular you are within the sites on their index. In this article I want to take the time to give you some basic Google SEO factors so that you can start to optimise your pages for the Google.bot.

Off page factors relates to getting links and the quality and quantity of those links is going to be a massive determining factor in how close you get to the top of the SERPs. So what makes a quality in bound link as far as Google SEO is concerned?

The first aspect of your link simply relates to relevance, how relevant is the page linking back to your site? Is the page URL, title, heading and body content relative to your webpage? If not Google will hardly notice it and you will not get an increase in PageRank. Make sure your links are as relevant as possible, this is one of the main aspects of Google SEO.

The second aspect is ensuring your link is coming from a site with as high a PageRank as possible. I have mixed feelings about this as I have seen pages rank for competitive keywords and have links coming from PageRank 0 sites only. All I will say is the more high PR links you have the less low PR links you'll need. Try and build up a mixture of both types.

The third aspect of Google SEO is making sure your links are anchored with your keyword text. Do not make the common webmaster mistake of linking back using your name or the classic "click here". Doing this is an absolute waste of a link. If you are selling cars link back using text like "used cars sale" or "car finance", this will give your site relevance and keyword authority and is the most important aspect of Google SEO. One word of warning when using this method though, do not use the same anchor text every time. You need to use variations otherwise it will look like keyword manipulation and your site could be penalised.

Google



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