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Is PageRank Important. Just Enough Knowledge to be Dangerous There is a lot of great information available online for free, but it takes a lot of time & effort to sort through it. And to be certain if the advice works, you need to spend both time and money testing it. One of the bigger problems with learning in the field of SEO is that there are a lot of people who have a nugget of information. And they spread it far and wide without the proper context needed to evaluate the potential risks and rewards of any given strategy. Worse yet, as the stability in the ecosystem decreases, the less scrupulous individuals who offer various "guarantees" of dubious value sell more aggressively, as people new to the market place a greater premium on guarantees without understanding what exactly is being guaranteed or where the risks are.

Accurate Answers Need Context As the structure of the web changes and search engine relevancy algorithms change then so must the field of SEO. Does PageRank matter? The above people were: P. Filter, Filter, Filter. Why is Google so Valuable? If you think about what Google is, it is essentially an editorial filter for the web.

They organize information & return relevant results, and as a result of that they make a boatload of cash selling ads on commercial keywords. Using more information can create far better relevancy than better algorithms alone can. But humans have limits that computers do not. Drowning in too much information is inefficient - even deadly. Which is precisely why we rely on tools like Google to find reputable resources. Online you have access to just about anybody & just about anybody has access to you. That accessible from a distance aspect not only offers you great opportunities, but also opens you up to some types of anti-social behavior you would never (or at least rarely) experience in the real world: How much longer is the media going to milk this beyond tired story?”

Look Out For Bolts From the Sky! In the Business World, All People Are Not Created Equal Investing in Filters. Make Easy Money Online. Anything that is Successful Eventually Gets Copied Here are 3 different site designs* * Well, to be technically correct, we could call that 3 different sites all using roughly the same design. I paid for the design & the others used it without permission. In January of 2012 we updated our site design to a new one, but the same thing will happen again. Human nature doesn't change quickly! After we changed over our site design I decided to give the above one away as a free Wordpress theme.

Creativity is Lacking Amongst Theives There are probably a half-dozen sites in the SEO space which basically stole our website design and/or created some slightly different derivative of it. Some of our other successful sites suffer from the same fate. People not only copy design, but they copy keyword strategy, site structure, content, backlink sources, etc. Thus anything which is truly "easy" and "scalable" is not something you would ever want to go out of your way to highlight. Hiding Success Why? Join Today. Your Suite of SEO Tools. Some SEO Software is Crap There is a lot of money in selling software, which means there are a lot of ad dollars flowing into spreading the idea that you need some secret tool to compete in search. Further, the people who are most easily swayed by advertising are those who seek a magic bullet of some sort, which is why there are so many online ads for stuff like "ignorant illiterate man accidentally unearths silver bullet blueprint for automatically extracting millions in your sleep.

" (Just look at the types of bizop products sold on infomercials). Here is a vintage view of a tacky infomercial from the 80's ;) Like the person who is still selling get rich with real estate products today, some folks are still scamming folks pushing search engine submission services that simply lack value. As explained throughout this series, SEO has moved beyond being a mechanical process to being something that is far more social and subjective. Where SEO Tools Have Value The Best FREE SEO Tool Suite. Why Most People Fail to Make Money Online. The Business Failure Curve The failure curve for small business has been rather predictible. In fact, in a NYT article Scott Shane compared the survival curves from 1977-1988 & 1989-2000.

They roughly mirrored each other! Less than 1/2 of small businesses live to see the age of 5. But the cost of failure has dropped as technology & communications costs have dropped to almost nothing. Registering a new domains only costs $8. All these deflationary pressures that lower risk & the need for start up capital should make it easier to be successful, right? Not in my opinion. Because it is easier to start it is also easier to fail.

If an updated curve appears from, say, 2005-2016 my guess would be that the failure rate is even higher. Why? Online we are moving away from the economics of scarcity to the economics of abundance. It means it is easier to start a business at lower cost. Which lowers the perceived risk. But distractions are plentyful. And one thing is scarce online. Growing scarcer daily. Putting it All Together. A lot of people who sell stuff in the search space tend to over-simplify SEO. To boil it down to a single number. But search is *amazingly* complex. Each keyword and each market has its own unique characteristics. If you learn visually and want to get a look under the hood, check out this infographic on how Google works. You may want to save a copy of it to your hard drive (right click on the image and "save as"). Below we also embedded a YouTube video from Matt Cutts about how Google works.

We created the above infographic to promote our sister site on paid search: PPC Blog. Matt Cutts provided a brief introduction to search in the following video. Here are a couple additional resources to check out: Internet marketing mindmap - a visual overview of the online marketing landscapeJeff Dean video - Stanford guest lecture on the evolution of Google's complex search infrastructure. The above infographic was created a couple years ago. Cheers, Aaron Wall. Creating Linkworthy Content. Here are some tips on creating webpages that other website will want to link to—to save you from having to do loads of legwork requesting links. Buying Links is Getting Expensive The Google AdSense program (which pays publishers for placing contextual links on their websites) and automated spammy "can I buy a link on your site" emails have made virtually every important online publisher aware of the value of links. In mid 2007 Google began editing toolbar PageRank scores and rankings for many sites that were selling links.

It is getting harder and more expensive to buy your way to the top through link rentals. At the same time, more and more people are writing online. Setting up a blog only takes a few minutes. There are hundreds or thousands of people talking about every topic imaginable, so if you create something remarkable and capture the attention of a few thought leaders who like it, you are going to get links. Passion = Market Knowledge = Links Become a Platform Be Credible Join Today. Getting Started With Link Building. Link Building is a Pain in the Butt Prior to creating the SEO Book training program I conducted a survey of SEO Book members. One of the questions was, "What is the biggest thing stopping you from improving your website rankings and traffic?

" The most common answer to that question was "link building". If links are so important how do you build them? Here are some great techniques for providing content that people will actually WANT to link to: Quality Links You Can Build Today One of the easiest ways to start building links is to submit your site to leading general web directories and directories in your niche. Don't just think of directories as being places that accept websites.

Would some of your business partners be willing to link to your site? Web Directories This video covers directory submission. Here is a list of some of the most well trusted online web directories Yahoo! SEO Book subscribers also have access to a list of a dozen more top web directories & tips on how to find more. On-Page Search Engine Optimization Strategies. A Ranking Dropkick From Google, From #1 to #1,000 :( In November of 2003 Google did a major update to their search relevancy algorithms, which was known in the SEO community as the Florida update. That update marked the day that SEO became hard. Prior to that point in time, on-page optimization tips from many SEOs would have sounded something like this "use your keywords heavily everywhere. " But that update changed how on-page-optimization works. "Over Optimized" = Spammy Keyword density is an ineffective measure of relevancy, so excessive repetition is not an effective SEO strategy. In 2012 Google rolled out another on-page keyword classifier when they did the Penguin update.

Google's Matt Cutts described the type of pages that disappeared in this video Mix Up Your Keyword Usage Your on page SEO strategy should use semantically related phrases and mix up your keyword usage. 4 Ways to Include Variation in Your On-Page SEO Strategy Dealing With Problem Words Visualizing a Keyword Map Join Today. PPC Testing. Test Before You Build Here’s a simple tip that could easily save you 12 months of work: Setting up an effective SEO campaign in a competitive market can be a long drawn out and expensive process. Worse yet, if you are focused on the wrong keywords, you might need to start over again after you find out that your site is not producing the results you want. An easy way to avoid needing to start over is to test the value of keywords before you heavily commit to your SEO strategy. Buying pay-per-click ads (PPC) from search engines like Google (AdWords) and Microsoft (adCenter) allow you to see what keywords have the ability to drive traffic to your site.

Save $100 in the Next 5 Minutes Here are some free coupons to help get you started using paid search to test your SEO strategy. Bing Ads: get a free Bing coupon today. Back to today's lesson... How I Learned The Hard Way When I was fairly new to the search game a client of mine told me that he wanted to rank for a list of fairly broad keywords. Keyword Research Strategies. Use the Most Relevant Keywords Yesterday we discussed the precise targeting offered by keywords. But even if a keyword is valuable, it might not be valuable to your business. For example, if you are a dentist in Chicago, it is not worth the effort to try to rank for the word dentist. Why? 99% of the people searching for that phrase do not live near Chicago, and are irrelevant prospects. Chicago dentist Chicago dentists dentist in Chicago Understanding Searcher Intent Even within a niche like dental work, there are more specific types of dentists people search for, like implant dentist and cosmetic dentist.

Chicago implant dentist cosmetic dentist in Chicago etc. Free Keyword Tools There is a wide array of free keyword tools on the market. Every keyword tool has some data errors or anomalies. Here are some additional cool keyword tools Google's AdWords Keyword Planner is the most popular keyword tool is backed by Google's large search share however, it can be flaky because...

P.S. Why Search is Such a Powerful Marketing Channel. The Power of Keywords. Why is Google so Valuable? Have you ever wondered why Google is worth over a hundred billion Dollars? Or why a single click from Google can go for as high as $50? The reason is the precise targeting offered by search engine marketing. How Most Advertising is Broken Most ads try to club you over the head and beat you into submission. From there, things only got worse... Banners which bounce around in a jarring fashion, banners which play audio, banners which try to get you to "punch the monkey" ... anything for attention. It got so bad that people had competitions to see who could make the most annoying banner ad. With the ads being so irrelevant and annoying, people have been trained to ignore banners, developing banner blindness. ...thus creating a tragedy of the commons where online banner ads look like the following picture. And, as if banners were not bad enough, online advertising continued to (d)evolve...

Search is Different 2 Approaches to Marketing Are you from the United States?