Here’s a little tip for you, for when you’re doing market research of if someone is trying to tell you how fantastic they or their product is for search engine rankings.

Haven’t we all heard people say, my ABC SEO killer product is so great, “I’m the number one site in Google for the term blankety blank out of 1,630,000,000 possible results”?

Here’s how to debunk this one, preferably in the face of the braggart.

1. Make sure your Google results settings (go to advanced settings) are set to display 100 results per page.
2. Enter your term in the search box.
3. Press Enter
4. Google will display: “Results 1 – 100 of about 1,630,000,000 for internet business.”
5. Now scroll to the bottom of the page, and where the page counter is click on the number 10 link.
6. Google will now display: “Results 901 – 930 of about 1,630,000,000 for internet business.”

That’s it, not 1.6 billion, but actually Google only considers there to be 930 results for the term internet business. Scroll down to the bottom of the page again, and notice that there are no numbers or “next” after 10.

It doesn’t mean that it is easy to rank in the top 10 for internet business, but just to take a little air out the balloon of the SEO hype-sters.

Another way to use this information is in market research. You will get a much more accurate picture of the amount of effort required to compete in a market by looking at the “real” number of results rather than the giant inflated numbers.

Where do the BIG numbers come from?

In the earlier days of search, when Google and AltaVista were going head to head there was a “my penis is bigger than yours” type competition based on the number of pages each search engine was indexing. The numbers eventually became so silly that they were dropped from the home pages of the search engines, but I suspect these silly “…of 1,600,000,000 results” are a throw-back to that testosterone war.

Monday Morning SEO Tip – Google Exaggerates is a post from: Art of Money

SEO Professional – 76%

Are you an SEO Expert?

I came across this cool SEO Expert quiz at SEOmoz and decided to give it a spin. Just a warning this isn’t a lightweight fluff quiz to boost your ego, it’s pretty hard core. 75 questions that will take you about half an hour to complete.

It is a realistic assessment of your SEO knowledge. If everything you’ve learned is from forum rumors, you may find it a little bit tough on the ego.

Even if you don’t score highly on the quiz, by reviewing the answers to the questions, you will learn a lot of good SEO fundamentals.

Personally I have learned more about SEO, SEM and understanding Internet business in general in my last few months studying at University 20/20 and Theme Zoom. Even if you just join the Theme Zoom mailing list, you’ll have access to a lot of advanced SEO knowledge.

Another reason to visit the quiz is to take a look at a very slick and high quality piece of linkbait. Rand, who runs SEOmoz is practically a celebrity in the art of linkbaiting and getting his own and his client’s pages on to the front page of Digg and other top social networks. Take a look just to see what ultra high quality content looks like.

Can you beat my score of 76% ?

Thanks to Adnan from Blogtrepreneur for letting me know about the quiz.

Are You an SEO Expert? is a post from: Art of Money

I received an email from Text Link Ads a couple days ago telling me that I had to update my affiliate links to their new ones. Fair enough, but then I noticed that the new ones were being run through the “tinyurl.com” service.

Here’s my new beautiful affiliate link: http://tinyurl.com/2twhrb

Very weird, I thought….why would they completely give away their brand and have their entire system rely on a third party website (that’s a major business dependency and a huge risk point).

Then the answer became obvious…Text Link Ads is going underground in response to Matt Cutts and Google’s basically declaring war against paid links. Here’s more background than you’re ever going to read:

1. SES Paid Link Presentation
2. SEOmoz | The Paid Links Debate Rages On – SES San Jose 2007
3. Are Paid Links Evil: SES, San Jose 2007 » Unofficial SEO Blog
4. Bruceclay.com – Are Paid Links Evil?

At first I was ready to wave an angry flag about how Google was abusing their power and spreading fear and paranoia in an effort to make webmasters “be good” so their job as a search engine would be easier.

Then I read this excellent post from John Andrews called Understanding the Google and I actually began to see things a little bit differently. 

Matt Cutts communicated very clearly that Google wants to see more of the kind of content that drives adoption of the web. Google is a carrot and stick company, as we all know too well. The stick goes to paid links. The carrot goes to good content. For those who weren’t there, I’ll recap.

The session was about purchased back links, and why Google says they are bad. One of the complaining panelists asked why Google values links earned by a funny video but devalues links that are bought. Specifically, if a real estate guy posts a funny video on the politics of the search marketing industry, and earns a collection of backlinks, why do those back links count when they are off-topic and have nothing to do with real estate? That was a good question. And there was a good answer. Matt answered that the funny video was creative, was unique, and added something to the web, but the paid links did not. Did you hear that?

Google is talking. Are you listening?

I think that when you live in a dictatorial society, and that’s what life as a webmaster these days certainly is…with Google being the dictator, it is easy to assume the dictator is evil and has only his best interest in mind. After all that’s how we would all behave if we had almost absolute power but what if the dictator really is wise and benevolent…what then?

Just something to think about, I really liked John’s refreshing take on the story and I find that I enjoy believing in the goodness of playing in alignment with the dictator as opposed to fearing where the next shoe will drop.

- Jon Symons

PS. Want a blog SEO tip? …notice how John’s individual post pages do not have sidebars or even menus or categories. Each post has a link to the next and previous, a link to the home page, and his “about page” and a link to the feed at the bottom of the page. That’s it. From what I’m learning at Theme Zoom this is the correct why to setup a page for maximum SEO benefit. I’ve been craving to “go lean” with my theme and I think I’ll borrow a few ideas from John’s site.

TLA Goes Underground – Are Paid Links Evil? is a post from: Art of Money

I happened to visit Ask.com the other day while doing a bit of research and notice something very interesting there. I can’t even remember the previous time I actually used that search engine, if ever, but here I was so I thought I’d throw my test phrase “make money online” in and see what pages turned up…maybe I’d find a hidden gem.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprise by the results. Not so much, by the sites that were returned, they were probably a bit worse than Google, which is pretty much what you’d expect. But what was really cool and definitely useful was the panels on the right hand side of the page.

On the top was this list:

Narrow Your Search
Make Money Free Online
Make Money Fast
Ways to Make Money Online
Make Money at Home
Making Money on the Internet
Earn Money Online
Free Online Work
Opportunities to Make Money Online
Make Money Quick
Make Money with My Computer
Easy Money
Make Lots of Money Fast
Money Making Ideas
Free Cash
Envelope Stuffing Work from Home

And at the bottom was the even more useful:

Expand Your Search
Online Jobs
Surf Pay
Online Business
Paid Surveys
Affiliate Programs
Working Online
Home Employment
Home Based Jobs
Rich Quick
Free Online Store

Now why would I be so excited by these auxiliary search suggestions?

Two big reasons.

1. These keywords are like a look behind the scenes of how a search engine “thinks.”If a search engine considers these terms (both the narrow and the broad) directly related to your primary keyword, then there will definitely be a benefit to using them on your site.These keyword synonym branches are the foundation of advanced SEO theories like latent semantic indexing (LSI) which play a major role in search engine ranking algorithms these days.

   The bottom line is if you want to own this keyword write stories about all the Narrow Your Search terms and use the “Expand Your Search” terms as possible categories for your site (and then write stories about all of them too.)

2. Increased market understanding.
   
   Often times we have a very limited understanding of our target audience. I might think that the people I want to come and visit my site are searching for “make money online” but in reality my site might be a better match for people who are looking for “rich quick.”With most keyword tools, you don’t get this kind of lateral diversification. In short these related broad terms are gold. Now you can use them to find many more ways to connect with your market and to drill down in to them and do some market research and find many more products to promote and a greater understanding of your audience.

A free and instant SEO blueprint and a some incredible new doorways into your target market; two great reasons to try out Ask search engine – maybe we should nickname it the SEO’s search engine.

Note: You can get a similar result, although I’ve never seen it to be anywhere near as useful as Ask’s, in Google by putting the “~” tilde character in front of your searches. This is supposed to highlight and return all the related terms.

SEO & Keyword Research Über Tip is a post from: Art of Money

Today’s tip is a nifty one that I learned by watching some clever people employ it around my sites.

We all know about the 2-fold power of an incoming link to your site as:

1. A direct source of traffic
2. A “vote” in the search engines for your site

Let’s imagine that you’re just like most stats addicted webmasters and you see a new incoming link show up in your stats or WordPress’s dashboard.

You check out the site and think “much coolness, another small step in my march towards market domination.”

But besides having an ego-glow moment, there are a couple other small steps you could take to turbo charge the value of that new incoming link.

Backfill The Link

Backfilling is something that when I saw it in action amazed me. Here’s how it worked…

I linked to a site off of my other blog. The person I linked to went out and commissioned 3 pay per post articles all pointing to my page with the anchor text that best matched the primary keywords of my post.

Why wouldn’t they just purchase links to their own site? Simple, my site was a trusted site, by pointing a couple (even low quality links at a particular page) it was likely that my site would now rank highly for their keywords, and since my article linked to their site, they would now have accomplished a boost for both of the two link valuations above.

With this brilliant strategy they now had potentially doubled the value of that incoming link. Since now both my site (which directed traffic towards their site) and their site (because I linked to it) could both be ranking well for their term.

Fortifying The Article

Fortifying is a very similar technique and it has the power to work the same magic as backfilling only with exponential results.

For this one when you find a story with a link to your site, and then bookmark it on Stumble or Digg. Take some time, write a great headline and intro, then ask all your friends to help you increase it’s popularity.

If you’re lucky the story gets to the front page or to the popular list and the person who wrote it gets a whack of traffic…some of them link to the article (which does the backfill work for you) and/or they click through and discover your site and you have a new reader and someone who may also link to your site.

A possible exponential boost to your traffic and rankings just by helping someone who was kind enough to mention you on their site.

Increasing Search Engine Traffic Action Steps

Watch those stats and take full advantage of any new interesting incoming links.

You want to pay particular attention to any links originating from high quality or easily bookmarkable (like lists or top 10s) articles. Especially look for ones where the writer has used keywords in the anchor text.

I’ve seen people on numerous occasions bookmark stories that I’ve written, just because they had links in the articles and it has turned out very well for their traffic as well as my own.

Backfill & Fortify Search Engine Rankings is a post from: Art of Money

Free SEO News has the results of a very interesting reverse engineering study by German website Sistrix (in German).

The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

* Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.

* Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.

* Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.

* Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.

* Keywords in the file path don’t seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.

* The file size doesn’t seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.

* It’s no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

Not really any big surprises here…except:

Keywords in the file path don’t seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites.

Do you realize that this means that the “common wisdom” of the WordPress permalinks structure, like the one I’ve used here on Art of Money

domain.com/category/article-title

…may be hurting your site’s search engine rankings.

One thing interesting about this to me is that James Brausch posted the same findings in his own Google reverse engineering product (now off the market). I own a copy of James’ report and spent considerable time studying it, but I found that particular fact too difficult to believe.

The other reason I didn’t use it is that I’m a stats-aholic and found it difficult to see a bunch of entries like this (p=12, p=234, p=34) in my logs and not be able to tell which actual stories they were.

Possible Reasons

The first possible reason for lower rankings is probably not that the keywords are in the URL, but simply that the URL is shorter.

If you consider the almost always the home page (just the plain domain.com) is the highest ranked page on any site, then it would follow logically that Google will favor shorter URLs as being “closer” to the domain root and therefore more important.

When using James’ other URL scoring tool, which I assume is based on the same data, there is a clear correlation between length of any URL and a lower score in ranking for a keyword.

The other most likely reason for the lower rankings of sites using keywords in URLs is that the technique has been used to death by spammers and Google’s algorithm has that data factored into it.

Is It Worth it To Switch Your Permalinks Structure?

That I can’t say. I do know that even if you have set up your site to use a custom permalinks structure as I gave as an example above, you can still use the default path in WordPress and it will go to the correct page.

For example this:

http://www.artofmoney.org/?p=400

and this:

http://www.artofmoney.org/tools/is-scambusting-an-online-goldmine/

but once you go back to the default structure the second URL will produce a 404 Page Not Found error.

There is a WordPress plugin called Permalinks Migration Plugin, designed to safely allow you to change your permalinks structure. (NOTE: I haven’t tried this plugin, so use at your own peril.)

Personally I find making these type of changes on an established site, VERY HIGH RISK but any new sites I create, I will likely pay attention to this ranking tip and not use a fancy custom URL structure.

Can a Common WordPress Permalinks Structure Hurt SEO? is a post from: Art of Money

When I was scouring the Google results measuring the lay of the land for my topic, I made notes about linking possibilities.

Here are my observations, they should give you some good ideas about how to gain some high quality incoming links, that you may never have discovered if you didn’t do your market research properly.

1. There were several Squidoo pages in the top 10 results for very competitive keywords.

Action step: create a “make money online” Squidoo page with at least some links pointing back to my site. Throwing in a few affiliate links for products that I like wouldn’t hurt either and if the “lens” begins to rank, may provide a decent alternate income stream.

2. There were several eZine Articles pages in the top 10 results for my terms.

Action step: create at least one article, a series would be better, and submit them to eZine Articles. These articles need to target my site’s audience and have a strong call to action in the resource box, with an optimized link back to my site.

3. John Chow has a call for reviews.

Action step: create a review of John’s site and post it with the correct requirement to qualify for his backlink.

4. Can I Make it Big Online has a call for entries into his weekly Internet marketing tips column. His site currently ranks #6 in Google for “make money online” so that would be a valuable link if my tip was accepted.

Action step: create or find an article that is on-topic for his column and submit it.

Those are my action steps for the week. If they are all successful they could net me 4 high quality backlinks all from trusted authority sites. If you were to try and purchase equivalent links on Text link Ads they would likely cost $150-$200 a month by the time they were fully aged.

That’s the value of market research in action!

Bonus tip…if you find any Wikipedia pages showing up in the results for your niche, try and create an article that adds value to the Wikipedia page. Then post it on your site and link to it in the “external links” section. Wikipedia links are marked “no follow” these days but they still may carry some SEO weight and they will also be a source of traffic and establish you as a respected source of information on the topic.

Free Quality Links – Market Research Discoveries is a post from: Art of Money

After 3 years of trying to earn money online, I can tell you I wished many times for someone that would teach me what was really going on, the fundamentals of online business, without a pile of hype, without a slick sales pitch and no $67 e-books please.

Have you even wished there was something like a community college style Internet Business 101?

Well, guess what, there is…and despite the fact that I consider myself a pretty savvy Internet business guy, I enrolled.

Here’s the class excerpt:

How to locate interesting / potentially profitable markets

How to investigate those markets for profit potential

How to choose products for those markets that are proven and provide the highest profit margin.

How to conduct deep market analysis to uncover:

• Content strategy
• Selling strategy
• Consumer psychology – which will give you an important edge in the marketplace.

Keyword research based on market analysis

Web site blueprinting based on market/keyword research

LSI (latent semantic indexing) Content structure

Search Engine Optimization (how to achieve top listings)

• Getting indexed properly
• Theme giving site / content construction (siloing)
• On and off site ranking factors
• Proper link building
• Proper internal linking

Growth scheduling – ensuring the smooth and profitable growth of your business

Much of what I’ve been writing about related to market research lately has been a direct result of this course. The course has been developed by 2 people who are professional market researchers, so it makes sense that this would be the emphasis.

How It’s Structured

Basically what happens is that you walk through the entire process of performing market research to setting up, building and monetizing a website as a project while you take the course.

The goal of the class is for you to come out of it with a profitable niche (us Canadians can’t figure out why Yanks say ‘nitch’ but that’s besides the point) website and a complete and profitable online business system.

University 20/20 Support

One of my key benchmarks for any product I purchase or system I’m involved in, is how good is the support. So far I can say that Charles, who created the course is ever present on the member’s only forums answering strategy questions as the members move through the lessons.

Who Should Take It?

• People who are new to Internet business and want a great foundation in how to make money online minus the hype, constant sales pitches and hidden agendas of most forms of instruction on the topic.
• Anyone wise enough to realize that something has been missing in all their previous attempts to make money online, and that something is solid fundamental business intelligence as it relates to the online world.

What Else You Need to Know

While you can go through the course and do all the lessons with out signing up for their advanced research tool, University 20/20 is really a stepping stone to a keyword and market research uber tool called Theme Zoom.

I have known about Theme Zoom for a year or so now and even though I never signed up for the tool (it costs $200 – $1000 a month) I have stayed on their mailing list because they sent out the wildest in depth Internet business information I have ever encountered.

I suspect that University 20/20 came about because there were people who wanted to use Theme Zoom that needed to be brought up to speed, since the things they teach are so mind blowing that many of their perspective clients, having been previously indoctrinated in traditional SEO and web business techniques, required extensive re-training so that they could grasp the complexity and power of Theme Zoom.

[insider tip: if you join Theme Zoom as an affiliate or even sign up for their newsletter you'll get access to valuable information that will give you a taste of just how advanced their techniques are. You can also check out the Theme Zoom User's Guide for in depth learning about SEO, website silos, vertical market analysis drilldowns, etc.]

The Value to Students

While what I have covered so far in University 20/20 is based on nailing down the profit potential of a niche before beginning work on a website, the real value to a the student is the advanced search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that they have developed based on latent semantic indexing (LSI) and siloing.

Traditional wisdom, when it comes to optimizing for search engines (and what I’ve always done) is to optimize a page for a keyword. So that when someone types “make money online” into a search engine, your page, optimized for that term shows up in the search results.

The University 20/20 SEO Revelation

…with people typing in longer and longer search queries into search engines, as many as 50% of all searches are unique.

What this means is that targeting individual keyphrases is the least efficient way to gather traffic from a search engine. What University 20/20 teaches is that it is much better, through proper SEO techniques, to convince Google that your site is the best resource for the massive number of long tail search terms that will never show up in a traditional keyword tool.

Even more profound is their claim that by building what they call a “wide synonymic net” that a site can target and claim very competitive and valuable keywords due to Google’s preference of this type of site architecture and information structure.

My Final Thoughts

Not sure what the price will go up to, but we’ve been informed that it will increase on May 15th, 2007. I wanted to get a little further into the course before writing my review, but I didn’t want you to miss the chance to get it at this price.

The current cost is $20 a month, with the estimated time of completion being 4 months, although if you’re motivated you can probably finish in less. Also, we’ve been told that if you sign up before the May 15th price increase, you rate will be locked in at the current price.

I take it as a sign that the idea of making money online is maturing to see courses like this coming on to the market. The thought “where was something like this 3 years ago, ‘cuz it would have saved me so much trouble” goes through my head quite a bit as a progress in the course.

Why some people will make more money online is because they will get training from real professionals who can pass on the wisdom and knowledge. There is so much “common knowledge” on the web that is really not much more than rumor or a hunch; perpetuated on forums by people who have never made more than lunch money.

It actually feels like a real school (you have to pass a quiz on each section to advance to the next lesson, so you can’t just skip ahead to get to the so-called good stuff until you grasp the fundementals.)

You can visit the Building Profitable Websites course home page, where if you click on the image that looks like the one at the top of this story, you’ll see a short video that will give you a good idea of what the school offers and how the content is delivered.

Why Some People Will Make More Money Online is a post from: Art of Money

When I first started thinking about a city-based blog network I realized that one of my primary revenue sources would likely be link sales, since it would roughly mimic the Yellow Pages ads which were becoming gradually extinct.

What I really wanted was a way to efficiently offer text link ads on specific pages, since I know that they have the most benefit to the advertiser in terms of search engine optimization juice and for direct click-throughs.

To me, with Google discouraging site wide linking and link purchasing in general, it just made sense that to somehow get the links embedded into related content was going to be the future of link sales and search engine marketing.

Sweet Spot Ads

I started writing the specs to the system, click the pic to see my rough notes about how the system would work. I registered the domain name SweetSpotAds.com
and tried to get a couple friends on board to help out.

To make a long story short we all thought the project was a great idea but none of us had the time to get it done.

Text Link Ads To the Rescue 

Today I received an announcement from Text Link Ads that they have implemented a system that is almost identical to my Sweet Spot Ads. It was obvious to me that they are the ones who would stand the best chance of pulling it off since they already had a large inventory of link buyers, which would have been a big struggle for me to build up.

Their system allows you to buy and sell post level ads.

Each Post Level TLA will:

• Be exclusive to one Advertiser.
• Allow Advertisers to have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description.
• Be positioned directly at the end of top posts making it ideal for click throughs.
• Each ad will be on a single page only.

Despite the fact that I may have missed out a chance to bring a killer idea to market, I’m very excited about this news. I think that this is the future of link buying and selling and I’m sure someone is already working on a WordPress plugin to allow bloggers to sell ads on their own posts without too much maintenance work.

Hit the Sweet Spot by Selling Post Targeted Links is a post from: Art of Money

My name is Tyler and I am an avid Art of Money reader and fan of Jon’s work.  I am honored that he allowed me to write this guest post for him while he is away soaking up some rays in Arizona!

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a banker and have no background in technology whatsoever.  However, I am a huge hockey fan and a clumsy amateur blogger.

I started my blog, NHL Digest.com, in September of last year in an attempt to get my feet wet with this whole blogging craze. I also wanted to see if I could make a little bit of money while having some fun with my favorite sport.

We all know that one of the key ingredients to making any sort of money online is traffic.  I can honestly say that NHL Digest started off with almost nothing.  I actually got excited one day when I checked my stats and I had 40 page views.  I later realized that the stats being tracked were my own as I cruised around the blog making adjustments. Sad…I know.

I realized then and there that what I needed to focus on was creating and maintaining traffic.  I decided that I needed to develop a strategy that consisted of different channels to get some traffic.  I also decided that I wasn’t going to pay money for traffic.

Here are the tactics that I used at NHL Digest.com to build my traffic.

1.)     Humor  

I noticed that even though Hockey wasn’t a very popular subject with social media sites like Reddit and Digg, everybody like a good laugh.  That’s when I decided to submit this post to Digg, where it reached the front page and received over 1000 Diggs.

2.) Categories 

When I was setting up my blog, with a lot of  Jon’s help, I decided that the category titles should be of some keyword significance.  I really don’t have any proof that this makes a hill of beans difference in SEO, but I do know that NHL Digest shows up in the search engines for some of my blog categories.  It really doesn’t hurt to do this because your content should be developed around your keywords anyway, so each post should fit within one of the keyword categories.

3.) Post Titles  

This is standard SEO, but it needs to be emphasized that post titles do create a great deal of clout in the search engine rankings.  I use post titles such as Nike Bauer Vapor XXXX Skates and see it show up on the first page of Google in just a few days.

You will also notice that the post title is arranged prior to the blog title in this search.  Jon says that this doesn’t make much difference in the rankings and didn’t include it in his Real Blog Videos tutorial, but it has seemed to help me.  If you are not doing this, it doesn’t hurt to give it a try. 

Just open up your header.php file in WordPress and replace your <title> XXXX </title> with the following:

<title><?php wp_title('',true); ?><?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> | <?php } ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title> 

4.) Make Friends  

It doesn’t matter how great you think your content is if nobody links to it.  Links are huge in building a successful blog.  This subject has been beaten over and over again, but that is probably because it is so important.  It is my contention that the best possible way to get links is to give them out.

I like to use summary posts or NHL Links Around the Rinks where I will link to some blog posts that I like as well as some main stream news.  I have gotten the attention of other bloggers this way and I also think that linking to highly respected main stream sites might have a small ranking factor with search engines. I do this link posting in a “Speedlinking” type format, where I am sure to include some of my own links as well…let’s talk about this.

5.) Anchor Text and Deep Linking  

Even if we are successful in getting links back to our site, we can’t control the anchor text that the other blogger uses.  However, you can control the anchor text that you use when linking to your own past posts.  For instance, to help solidify my ranking in Google for Nike Bauer Vapor XXXX Skates, I always use that anchor text when linking back to that particular post.  The same goes for my ranking for the new RBK
9K0 Reebok Hockey Stick.  Let’s take a look and see how I rank for the Reebok 9K0 in Google.

There you are, 5 blogging tips from an absolute beginner.  I guarantee that they are worth at least as much as you paid for them

Tyler

-Writing posts that make Jon money so he can chill in the Arizona sun. 

5 Practical Tips for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog is a post from: Art of Money

This is the final installment of my domain naming series. It’s just a bunch of tips and tool that I’ve used for brainstorming and selecting the perfect domain for your projects.

Consider that the domain name is the single most important part of your website and it’s also the most difficult piece to change once your site is live. It’s worth taking care to make a good choice to avoid domain name regrets down the line.

1. Avoid Keyword Ambiguity in Your Domain Names

Humans understand word meaning with a level of sophistication that search engines don’t have. “Art of Money” is clearly about money to a human ear, but to a search engine it’s a site that is equally about “art” and “money.” You can read my full breakdown of choosing keywords in domain names.

2. Use a Domain Naming Service

With good domains getting harder and harder to find, a new professional industry has popped up: the domain namer. In my article on domain pickers, I’ll tell you about a service where you can get a killer domain name (from tons of possibilities) by putting dozens of professional domain pickers to work for you for a only $50.

A poor man’s version of a domain naming service, DomainsBot provides a pretty damn good suggestion software. It is software, so don’t expect subtleties in the suggestions, but it can help. I’ve used it a lot in the brainstorming process.

3. Use Scoring Software

I personally use a piece of software that rates potential domain names (and even URL structures) based on a huge database of statistical analysis of top ranking web sites. You can read my Nemeas review for a complete walk through of how it scores possible domain names.

4. Backorder an Existing Domain Name

Sometimes you’ll find a domain name that has expired but hasn’t become publicly available for repurchase. The public are told that these domains will come available in 30 days but the reality is a little different than that.

If you find a domain that you like that is expired (actually the term is Pending Delete) and that domain has any kind of positive history (meaning it has a Page Rank, any decent Alexa rating or a DMOZ link for example) then it is unlikely it will ever hit the open market. You’ll need to register with a backorder broker. I use Snapnames and you’ll have a chance to grab the domain before it gets released to the general public.

There will be a 2 or 3 day auction and you can expect there to be stiff competition for most keyword rich domains, but if you’re really attached to the perfect domain it may be worth the investment. Many of these domains can come with good inbound links, or traffic already in place.

5. Buy an Existing Unused Domain

Doesn’t it just burn you up when you finally think up the perfect domain name and it has been registered but there is no website there? The last statistic that I heard was something like 70% of all registered domains did not have a website on them!

A whois lookup allows you to find out the contact information for the domain owner. Don’t be afraid to shoot of an email or even phone a domain owner. Many times it will be a professional domain speculator, who wants full value for the domain, but you never know when you might get lucky and someone has just lost interest and will let you have it for the cost of a transfer.

6. Look Out For Skeletons in the Closet

Watch out for domain names that have been trashed and banned from Google or other search engines. What happens to search engine spam sites? Google bans them from their index. So if you purchase a site that has been banned, it can be difficult to get Google to put it back into the index, no matter how great the site is that you build on it.

Make sure you visit the Internet Archive and look up any domain name that you are buying on their “Way Back Machine” to see what kind of sites have been on it. Besides search engine spam watch for other types of sites that may not be harmonious with your brand (porn, drugs, warez etc.)

7. Sleep on Your Domain & Vet It with Friends

Sleep on it and vet it – I have a friend that, two days after he registered it, found out that his latest “killer domain name” actually contained a very unpleasant slang term in it.

Especially when you are working with multi-word domains it is actually easy to miss unintended words if you are focused on the keywords. Take away: get fresh eyeballs on your domain name before you commit to it.

Also, make sure you vet with people you trust and that won’t steal your idea; I wouldn’t post it to a public forum to ask for feedback.

8. Take Your New Domain for A Test Drive

Mostly used by professional domain investors, domain tasting allows you to register a domain and throw up a page and see if the domain gets any traffic. For up to five days you can test drive the domain and then, if it doesn’t suit your taste or you change your mind, you can get a refund.

That’s it for my domain naming series, I hope these tips and resources will help you find the perfect domain name and avoid that unpleasant situation of needing or wanting to rename your site after it is launched.

Any other tips that you have that I haven’t covered? Or other questions?

- Jon Symons

8 Tools & Tips for Picking a Domain Name is a post from: Art of Money

In this, the third part of our domain naming series, I’m going to talk about a cool tool that is used for scoring domain names.

The tool is called Nemeas and it attempts to answer a simple question, “How do you know if a domain name is any good?”

Well it’s a tough question to answer, and in order to answer it you probably need to ask another question, “What is considered to be a successful domain name?”

According to Nemeas a successful domain name is one that appears at the top of the search engine results; which seems like a very reasonable yardstick to me.

Nemeas is based on statistical analysis and reverse engineering of search engine results. Specifically related to the domain name and the URL. The application contains a database of statistics that allows it to “score” your potential domain name (or complete URL) against a keyword.

A Walk Through of Nemeas

When you fire up Nemeas you are greeted with a very humble looking screen:

 From there you need to input a keyword to test against and then fill the input.txt file with a bunch of options for Nemeas to score. Here’s the input that I used for this review:

http://www.realblogvideos.com/

http://www.realblogvideos.net/

http://www.realblogvideos.org/

http://www.realblogvideos.info/

http://www.realblogvideos.us/

http://www.realblogvideos.ca/

http://www.realbloghowto.com/

http://www.createablogvideos.com/

http://www.realblogmovies.com/

http://www.easyblogmovies.com/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123

http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

And here is the Output.txt file which gives the scoring, for the keyword “blog”

443,http://www.realblogvideos.com/
376,http://www.realblogvideos.net/
383,http://www.realblogvideos.org/
382,http://www.realblogvideos.info/
302,http://www.realblogvideos.us/
323,http://www.realblogvideos.ca/
411,http://www.realbloghowto.com/
390,http://www.createablogvideos.com/
443,http://www.realblogmovies.com/
401,http://www.easyblogmovies.com/
237,http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/
372,http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123
237,http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/
379,http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

The scores are at the beginning of the lines. You can go through the data and see which domain name gets the highest score, which permalinks structure and folder structure are most likely to lead to high search engine results, based on Nemeas’ analysis of past search engine results.

Things Learned from Nemeas

URL Structure

The most surprising thing I discovered from Nemeas is that in the following example:

1. http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/
2. http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123

 Number 2 scores MUCH higher than number 1 for the keyword “blog” or the word “money” (put slightly less for “monetize”.)

This goes against a lot of the common wisdom of using a category/post-title in your blog or other website folder structure.

I used this minimal structure on my Step by Step Blog site and of course it is a difficult thing to test, but I certainly wouldn’t say that it hurt the site’s search engine rankings. The site does receive targeted traffic related to the keywords in the articles.

The downside of this URL structure is at when you look in your logs, you can’t tell what stories people are on or coming to…a minor trade-off though, for more search engine traffic.

Shorter Is Better

If I had to boil Nemeas down to one thing it would be that, in general, the shorter the better, when it comes to the domain name and the URL structure.

Nemeas can help with setting up your folder structures as well as just on deciding domain names.

Here’s another surprising example:

1. http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/
2. http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

Number 2 scores significantly higher for both “monetize” and “blog” which goes against almost all SEO wisdom.

Summary

I wouldn’t exactly consider Nemeas to be a “must have” tool, but it certainly is unique. The problem is that it is difficult to prove it’s value, put it’s difficult to discredit it as well. Common wisdom puts domain name as a roughly 20% factor in search engine results ranking factors. If that number is even close to true, the money spend on Nemeas, especially if you are creating many sites or registering many domain names, either for yourself or clients, could be very easily recovered.

If you have any questions about Nemeas, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer…I’ll even run a few tests for you if you post a few options that you’d like to have scored by the application.

- Jon Symons
Finding killer apps so you don’t have to.

P.S. This was the third of a three part series about choosing domain names. We’ve covered keywords in a domain name, domain name brainstorming and the article you’ve just read about a tool that claims to actually score domain name (and complete URLs to tell you which ones are most profitable).

Nemeas Review – How To Choose a Domain Name – Part 3 is a post from: Art of Money

For a long time I couldn’t quite figure out why Google was sending so much traffic to this site for terms related to “art.” While the word is in my domain name and site’s title, 99% of the content of the site is about money, so you’d think that search engines would leave me off the list of resources for the keyword “art.”

As I investigated more, what I discovered turned into information that I felt was worth sharing and revealed some interesting (beginner) SEO tips for how search engines work and why it is important to choose your domain name very carefully.

There are two things to realize when choosing a domain name.

1.) Keywords Matter – A Lot

What’s a keyword? It’s just a word with meaning to searchers. In “Art of Money,” art and money are keywords and “of” although a word, is just dismissed…it doesn’t have any meaning to a searcher.

By choosing the domain name ArtofMoney.org, I’ve told Google that this site is about Art and Money. My thought was that if the content was overwhelmingly about Money then Google would get that it isn’t a site about Art.

It turns out that this isn’t totally true so I wanted to think about why. Then one day I was poking around in Google’s webmaster tools and I took a look at the list of terms that are found in external links to this site:

Here’s a partial list of words that Google has discovered in external links to my site (I assume in order of number from most to least)

In external links to your site
art
money
the
list
system
jon
artofmoney
org
note
business

Then I got it, not only does my domain name have conflicting keywords in it, but since most of the links to my site look like this Art of Money then most of the anchor text of the links pointing to my site. Ouch!

No wonder Google thinks the site is about Art and/or Money, there are ##### links pointing to the site telling them that they feel the site is about Art – Money.

With the exception of the domain name itself, the anchor text of an inbound link is probably the strongest indicator of the content of a web page or site; especially if there are a lot of them all indicating the same thing.

2.) Google is Good, But It’s Far From Great

“Art of Money”…most English speaking adults will easily know that this site is about money. You may define “art” as; creation, making, talking about, thinking about, pondering etc. No matter how you define art, the subject is “money.”

But Google isn’t smart enough to realize whether “art,” or “money” is the intended subject of the site.

When choosing a domain name if you are all targeting search engine traffic, it’s important to make sure it passes the dead dumb simple test:

–> Take out all the small or meaningless words and forget every “meaning” that you attach to the words that would be left and ask yourself if this reflects what your site is about.

“ArtOfMoney” = Art + Money = Bad. Does not represent the actual content of my site.

“ProBlogger” = Professional + Blogger = Good!

“EnGadget” = Gadget = Good!

“Business-Opportunities” = Business + Opportunities = Good!

“CaffeineMarketing” = Caffeine + Marketing = Same Problem as Art of Money

Summary of Part One of Choosing a Domain Name

The lesson here is to avoid clever phrases unless they are really on target and completely unambiguous.

If you boil your domain name down to just it’s keywords, does it 100% accurately represent the topic of your site?

- Jon Symons

P.S. This was the first of a three part series about choosing domain names. We’ll cover keywords in the domain name, domain name brainstorming and lastly a tool that claims to actually score domain name (and complete URLs to tell you which ones are most profitable).

How To Choose a Domain Name – Part 1 is a post from: Art of Money

There’s a rumor on the web that the famous Overture keyword suggestion tool’s end is imminent as Yahoo has decided to pull the plug.

The tool was very widely used and it is great to see that a few companies have jumped in to fill the void.

I’ve been able to find three new keyword tools and they are all very high quality and good for any basic keyword research; nothing fancy but great for getting into the head of searchers in your niche and generating article or post ideas.

Keyword Discovery Free Tool

WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool

OVT Keyword Tool [use the suggestion tool]

Enjoy.

- Jon Symons

3 Great Free Keyword Tools is a post from: Art of Money

I was interested in a post that popped up in my RSS reader today by SEO guru Brad Fallon of StomperNet and MyWeddingFavors fame. Since it was Saturday, I figured a little diversion from Internet business obsession couldn’t hurt.

Here’s the entire post from his site [source]:

Who doesn’t enjoy a good magic show? In the last two weeks, I met two professional magicians turned internet marketers. One of them pointed me to this link with a video that’s a spoof about David Blaine. If you like magic or David Blaine, you’ll find it hilarious. (Warning: adult language.) Click here.

I clicked through…the video is hilarious, and heed the warning the language is definitely adult.

After watching I did what most people do when they get to YouTube, I grabbed the URL from the address bar to either blog about it or send it to a couple friends or both.

WAIT A MINUTE…the URL, even though I’m clearly on YouTube, says:

http://www.whatwouldptbarnumsay.com/

Mmmmm, Brad what are you up to?

Let’s figure it out, shall we?

Here’s the link from Brad’s site: http://www.whatwouldptbarnumsay.com/

Which goes to here on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d5ac-cD0L4

Let’s say you were a top SEO Guru who had a very popular blog and you wanted to launch a new site about…say, magic tricks. How would you give that domain a nice boost in backlinks, traffic and search engine status.

1. Buy a cool domain name: http://www.whatwouldptbarnumsay.com/
2. Find a very funny video on YouTube, that with a push from a popular blog could go viral
3. Set up the domain name you purchased to “frame” the YouTube video’s original page
4. Link to the video from your popular blog with a link to your new domain
5. Hope that when people watch the video they will love it and blog about it and send it to their friends using the link in the address bar, rather than the one supplied by YouTube
6. If it works your new domain could have hundreds of quality, in context, links pointed to it
7. When your site is ready to launch, kill the “frame” and put your new site at that address
8. Instant high quality site launched with high SEO status the day it goes live!

Here’s the code that drives the “frame” page. You can see that it pulls the YouTube page in:

——————————————————————————————————

<head> <title>What would P.T. Barnum Say? </title>

<META name="description"

content="What would P.T. Barnum Say">
<META name="keywords" content="What would P.T. Barnum Say Bengsmack">

</head>

<frameset rows="100%,*" border="0">

<frame src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d5ac-cD0L4"

frameborder="0" /> <frame frameborder="0" noresize /> </frameset>

——————————————————————————————————

Wonder if that is a StomperNet official technique?

if so I just saved you some big bucks for your net site launch It will be fun to watch the WhatWouldPTBarnumSay.com domain and see what, if anything, Brad does with it and if the SEO magic trick pays any dividends.

- Jon Symons
Pulling back the veil for your Internet business

SEO Guru Brad Fallon’s Magic Tricks is a post from: Art of Money

I just noticed that all the external links on Wikipedia are marked with a nofollow tag.

Why does this matter?

Links from Wikipedia have been seen as highly credible and therefore they carry a lot of weight in determining search rankings. With the nofollow attribute, in theory at least, that weight will be gone.

This could have a big effect on positioning for some websites.

Will it stop spammers?

Not sure, judging by the number of spam messages I receive on this blog on a daily basis [approx 250 / day] my guess is not really very much. The links on my site are all marked nofollow and still the spam keeps coming.

In the case of Wikipedia, there is a lot of value in the traffic that uses it, since its pages rank highly for just about everything, therefore the value of a link on Wikipedia is greater than just for the SEO benefit.

Will Wikipedia Lose its Rankings

Outbound links is a search ranking factor, and I have to wonder if now that Wikipedia is publicly admitting that it’s links are not trustworthy that it will begin to lose some of its spectacular rankings. From everything I’ve seen about the way Google works “trust” is a primary factor and Wikipedia was seen as a golden boy of trust due to its demographic and user policed methodology.

But if the spammers have won the war then all bets are off for Wikipedia’s rankings and future.

For Newbs…What’s a nofollow tag?

In early 2005 Google announced that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.

(rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”)

Using rel=”nofollow” is a much easier solution that makes the improvised techniques above irrelevant. Most weblog software now marks reader-submitted links this way by default (with no option to disable it without code modification). A more sophisticated server software could spare the nofollow for links submitted by trusted users like those registered for a long time or on a whitelist or with a high karma. Some server software adds rel=”nofollow” to pages that have been recently edited but omits it from stable
pages, under the theory that stable pages will have had offending links removed by human editors.

Read more about the nofollow and spam in blogs.

To read more about this change check out External links in articles are now “nofollow” per Jimbo Wales on, where else, Wikipedia.

Need to know who’s using the nofollow attribute? Then you can install the SEO for Firefox extension and it will highlight any that are on a page for you. If you’re buying links you want to make sure that the site you purchased them from is not using nofollow [and also make sure that they aren't linking to their links pages using nofollow as well - a common trick].

Hat tip for the story to Search Engine Facts.

External Wikipedia Links Now Marked nofollow is a post from: Art of Money

News Flash

Art of Money achieves Google Page Rank of 1!

SEO Reporter: “Jon, how did you accomplish this fantastic feat of advanced SEO in only 10 short months online.”

Jon: “Gosh, it was nothing. A couple hundred high quality unique articles, a few thousand high quality incoming links from trusted sites and that’s about it, an Alexa rating of under 80k; it’s a pretty simple formula.”

SEO Reporter: “No seriously Jon, a PR of 1 in only 10 months, you must have used some black hat techniques. Hidden text, CSS trickery, .html injections, referral spam…spill, hat’s the real secret?”

Jon: “No mam, I swear, anyone could do it.”

==============================================

Seriously, it looks like the price of links on my site are going to be a bargain for the next little while. What I suspect caused the drop was the for the first 8 months online I used http://artofmoney.org as the site address. Then I got my hands on this search engine ranking factors study course [aff] and the data in it said that there was a positive correlation between high search engine rankings and having “www.” in front of your domain name.

Based on that info, I decided to switch over and forced all traffic coming in to use http://www.artofmoney.org. I figured the site would take a hit PR wise but I really didn’t think it would be to a PR1. Interestingly, about the same time I made the switch I started receiving a lot more traffic from Google and the traffic has continued to grow ever since.

In some other anomalies from the latest PR update the main site of my blog network did not receive any Page Rank, despite having some high quality incoming links and being online since November 16, 2006; while one site on the network, which went live a month later now has a Page Rank of 3. Kuala Lumpur is Home, which came online only a couple days after Chattanooga is Home has a PR of 0.

Another strange thing I noticed was Ben’s excellent Instigator Blog, which came online in April 2006 and has tons of great links and content, is also a PR of 0.

Maybe they changed it and lower numbers are better now? Or maybe Matt was just having a bad day when he rolled out his Page Rank update export.

- Jon Symons
Going backwards in the search engines, so you don’t have to.

How To Go From Page Rank 4 to Page Rank 1 is a post from: Art of Money

There have a been a couple Carnival of Entrepreneurs in the last 2 years, but Ben from Startup Spark has taken up the project and he’s doing it right this time.

I submitted my Internet marketing cautionary tale, Pipeline Profits: Tempted? If so You Aren’t Ready to Be Rich! to this weeks edition and I was very pleasantly surprise by the quality of the Carnival of Entrepreneurs
Edition #4.

The Picasso Award *

The award goes to Trusted Adviser for his story Trust Tip 3: The ABC 20 Question Rule which is great advice and particularly relates to me. The story outlines some basic tips to develop a curious attitude to transform from being self-oriented to customer oriented:

But most importantly, your self-orientation will drop. Self-orientation is the biggest factor affecting personal trust—if your objectives, goals and focus is on yourself, then to that extent, customers and clients won’t trust you. As well they shouldn’t. Being constantly curious transforms self-orientation into customer focus.

The Matisse Award

This award goes to The New Marketing World for his practical explanation – Product’s Life Cycle: How Long You Have to Sell. I love good clear concepts presented well. They are some of my favorite blog posts in general and this one is a classic example:

The product’s life cycle is the term used to understand the life in which the product still appeals to consumers. Eventually the product will get old and need replacing, will be surpassed by new products, or will no longer be of interest to consumers.

The Basquiat Award

This award could be given for the title alone. On J. Timothy King’s Blog he presents What Chocolate Says About Entrepreneurship. It’s a review of the movie Chocolate, which I haven’t seen, but I’ll be looking for it after reading Timothy’s review:

But the story of the movie Chocolat is about something greater than catering to the lowest common denominator. It’s about passion and innovation. It’s about being an entrepreneur, about independence and self-actualization. Vianne represents this entrepreneurial spirit, which is why I identified so fully with her character.

That’s it for my first look at the Carnival of Entrepreneurs I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out.

- Jon Symons

* P.S. I’ve decided to use more references to “art” on this site, just to mess with Google a bit. Google consistently sends traffic to this site for art related searches, primarily because of having the word in my domain name [a good SEO tip there - even when there is little reference to a word if it is in the domain name a search engine will give the site "weight" for it.]

Best of the Carnival of Entrepreneurs is a post from: Art of Money

I just ran across an interesting thread on Digital Point forums that is essentially a nicely detailed description from a 21 year old university student describing how he built a website that currently is earning him about $800 a week.

Even though he is using AdSense to monetize the site, there are some good take-aways in his post.

Don’t get obsessed with SEO, but follow the basics:

• Giving each article an individual highly relevant page title.
• Using meta descriptions and keywords, but not abusing them.
• Using H1 and H2 tags.
• Using good keyword density and specific phrase targeting.
• Using good quality, unique, original and focused content.
• Building some well anchored backlinks.
• With a good navigational system between articles.
• Using an aged domain with good TrustRank.

From there he touches on a couple areas that are where I made my biggest mistakes when I first started trying to make money online:

Another issue that is often brought up is the issue of creating lots of sites for high paying niches. Personally I have never wasted my time with such things because I’m focused on providing good quality expert content and if I’m going to do this I need to make sure that I’m knowledgeable in the niche that I’m creating the site on, and unfortunately for me I’m just not that knowledgeable on mesothelioma, cancer, debt consolidation or lawyers, nor do I have any passion towards developing my knowledge on such niches
so creating a site for such things would just be a waste of my time and any visitor’s time that came by my site, because the information on it would be next to useless.

What is a much smarter idea, that I believe I got from one of Shoemoney’s posts was that you should establish a good quality site in an industry that you are familiar with and knowledgeable of then when you have built the site to close to its potential and you are looking to make a new site to diversify, you should look to make a site that is still in a similar industry but has only a degree or two of separation from your original site.

And another mistake that I made was being cheap and thinking that I could figure it all out on my own to save myself a bit of money. Chris, the post author says:

The reality is [forums] don’t have it all and a $20 book from Amazon on AdSense or SEO could make you thousands of dollars. Let’s face it, if you aren’t willing to part with $20 at bare minimum to extend your expertise, chances are you aren’t going to be the next person here making $XX,XXX/month from anything online. That said there are definitely exceptions to that but it’s extremely rare. Plus you can certainly fast track your development and earnings if you are willing to shell out a few dollars to increase
your knowledge, or get a good quality design made, or some special feature for your site. Plus if you have invested money into your projects chances are you will be a lot more committed to gaining a return from them which will only further contribute to your development.

Making Money Online Tips

These are the basics of making money from a website presented clearly.

• Stick to a subject that you have expertise in
• Get good quality information from someone who has done what you are trying to accomplish
• Be persistent over a long period of time. It took Chris 64 weeks to get to $800 a week

Read Chris’ story on Digital Point forums and make sure you take a look at the sketch of his page template that he embedded into the post, it is a good example of a web page that is nicely optimized for advertising.

How To Go From $10/Week to $800/Week is a post from: Art of Money

Google says that there isn’t such a thing as a sandbox, but as every stats addicted webmaster knows, there is a point usually between 6 and 10 months from its launch, when a website will suddenly receive a huge boost in referral traffic from Google.

Most speculation is that the sandbox is not intentional but just repercussion of how link weight is factored into a sites ranking. For example since the age of a link is a significant factor in ranking a website, it is difficult for new site to get decent rankings since it is impossible for new site to have aged links pointing at it.

All I know is that it is at least the third time now that I’ve had one of my sites, overnight, triple or quadruple the traffic it receives from Google.

My first post on this site was on February 20 of this year, meaning that the sandbox effect lasted just over 9 months [is that a Google joke...maybe they should call it the gestation period rather than the sandbox] almost exactly the same as my other sites.

I guess if there’s a point to this story it is for beginning bloggers and webmasters to realize that time is a BIG part of SEO. Time is a tough one to trick, the only way I can see is to get started ASAP.

What’s funny about Google is, it is also the fastest search engine to deep index and add new pages to its index. So you can do well with individual items quickly but for a site to rank well and achieve its full “power” seems to take about 9 months.

On my blog network, I launched a site on December 1st and on the 4th it received the first referral from Google. The fasted I’d ever seen before that was 7 days on another recent project. But I’m sure that the sandbox effect is real and so if you’re just getting started be patient and realize that you won’t really know how your site is doing until it has been re-born from the Google sandbox.
Jon Symons
Gestating websites…so you don’t have to.

Art of Money out of Google’s Sandbox is a post from: Art of Money