Rob Oresteen

Here is a video explaining Social Networking in simple terms. If you are thinking about joining Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn but don’t know why, check it out.

Get the Easy Tube plugin by Paul Blain. Drop it in your WP plugins folder on the server. Activate the plugin.

In your Wordpress post add the tag:

youtube:URL   or  googlevideo:URL

All you want are the [ ]   square brackets to encase them in the front and back.

Happy video posting…

As a review there are two ways a web page can get indexed by Google. Either it’s “on-page” or “off-page” factors.

On-page factors = page title, meta tags, alt tags, H1 header tags, content, keyword density, and location of keywords. Also, a good site map and proper intra-linking techniques within the site.

Off-page factors are how the rest of the internet links to you, more specifically, your web page in question. This is usually the home or “index” page but quite often it will be multiple pages in larger sites.

Google ranks individual web pages not entire web sites. Yahoo attempted to rank sites back in the 90’s with their directory and failed miserably. Google stepped in and has never looked back.

So when you say you want to get “ranked” in Google, what you really want is to get a web page of yours, probably your home page, to come up for a particular search term on page 1 of Google’s “organic” or non-paid search results on the left hand side.

Off-page factors, those who link to you, carry more weight in Google’s ranking algorithms than do on-page factors. But don’t you need good, solid content for Google to crawl? Yes. But let’s say Google ranked pages in order of importance for any given keyword or search term based on what the page is, what it says, its layout, the out going links it has. Page “A” is number 1 for the term poker cards and accessories. All anyone would have to do is look at what Google ranks number 1 and pretty much copy it. If the total sum of that page is good enough for Google, then a duplicate or similar page should rank as well.

Of course this would be a disaster for Google. Anyone can create a web page and create the content that goes into it. What then differentiates the “importance” of one page over another for Google? Links.

The cornerstone of Google’s philosophy are links and their tendency to telegraph the relevance of a page to a term. Google is tasked with indexing millions of pages a day. It has to not only record fresh content from old pages, it needs to document new content from new pages. Then, it also needs to filter out machine-generated “spammy” pages as well as those pages geared up to trick the search engines with keyword stuffing, invisible text, etc.

What Google believes, right or wrong, is that the importance of a page is in direct relation to the quantity and quality of the other pages that link to it.

Whether you personally agree with this assessment by Google or not, it is the most relevant factor in determining getting ranked on page one.

Some hearsay and falsehoods:

1.      “Reciprocal links don’t get counted”. False. They do and in a big way if they have enough anchor text as the keyword. More on this later.

2.      Google and some of the search engine guru’s say it’s best to get “natural’, one-way “editorial links.” True. Depending on your site, this may be easy or this may be next to impossible. If your website explains how to beat the lotto, many will link to you. If the local dry cleaner just posts some prices and store hours, well, it doesn’t make it on to too many blogs.

3.      If I trade links, will I be considered a link farm? No. There are many directories (Yahoo) that serve up 1,000’s of links. As a general rule, Google says to have no more than 100 links per page.

4.      Google doesn’t like “links” pages. False. Many links come with a website’s description. There are sometime 2-3 sentences that follow a link. Multiply this by 50 and your links page has content. All those descriptions make for a unique web page. So what if they are 50 links? There are now 1000’s of words on that page as well. No problem, no biggie. I have seen some links pages with a Google PR of 3 or 4 – that’s a better rank than some home pages!

5.      Too much anchor text as the keyword(s) will hurt me. False. From all the #1-#5 pages I have run back link checks on, over 70% of the links have keywords in the anchor text. Most if not all the links are reciprocal. And most of the links have a PR ranking of 2.7 or less.

6.      Don’t link to sites that have low PR. False. Not an issue. Google doesn’t care who you link to as long it’s not in a bad neighborhood – gambling, porn, file sharing, etc. Amazon once linked to a PR 0 page because the page was very compelling (http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine/).

So if you are not YouTube or Yahoo, or Facebook, how do I get links pointing to my site? By web page content & link swapping.

One, create valuable content, usually in the form of information that some one can use. If it’s good enough, some people may want to link to you. Further, if you have a separate “Link to me/us” page, you will start picking up one way links with the anchor text the way you want describing your site.

The second way is a little savvier. You ask another web master for a link from his site. But not just any site. You specifically target anywhere from 100-1000 sites that already have been “pre-approved” by Google. Say what? Well Google doesn’t maintain a bulletin board for you to check a good link from a bad one. But in effect it has.

Professional Link Swapping

Type in the keyword you want to rank for. Google will return 10 organic results on the left hand side. If there are forums or community type pages ignore them and go on to the next. Go to the second page of results if you need to get to ten. Just write down (or cut and paste) the urls to a text document.

Now enter each web site in the Google search box like this: link:website url. Example: link:http;//www.nobsphotosuccess.com. Google will return all the links to this web page it has in its index. Sometimes, it doesn’t return every link it’s indexed for various reasons; my guess because they don’t want you to know how many links it will take to rank for that term.

Save  these links as a web page and repeat the process with the next 9 results. It’s a lot of work. But what it’s worth to you to be perpetually employed if you are getting page one Google traffic?

Now do the same for Yahoo if you want to uncover more links. The reason is that Yahoo and Google crawl each other. So Yahoo may index a link that has been crawled but not reported by Google. In Yahoo enter url into their Site Explorer or simply type in any Yahoo search box link:url.

Once you have compiled a list you are ready to contact each unique web site and ask the web master to exchange a link with you. Create your own “Link to us” page and refer him or her to that page. Even better, place his link on your site already before you email him and refer him to it. Ask him to send you his text link requirements with as much description he wants about his site with in reason.

Because he is exchanging links with other web masters, he probably will want to exchange links with you. Tell him you will leave his link on your site for 2 weeks. If he hasn’t linked to you after that period send him another email as a reminder. Typically, most will exchange links with you with in the first week.

This is still the bread and butter of SEO. Some say exchanging links is dead and it doesn’t work. Well, they are flat wrong. After all the speculation and theorizing, web pages that consistently rank first page in Google typically have a bunch (50 – 500) incoming links that have the keyword as the anchor text.

What if I’m already ranking on the first page and I don’t have any links coming in? Good question. It simply means you are ranking for a term that is not competitive enough to where it requires links. If your town is part of that keyword phrase, it could mean there are simply not enough web pages with proper content and structure to compete against yours. That’s good for you. But it might not always stay that way. Go out and get 10-20 links for good measure. The chances are your ranking won’t slip the next time Google does its dance – also know infamously as their “updates”.

Coming up next: Typical anchor text code for your link partners. Sample “Link to Me” html page. What keywords should I rank for? Where do I place my partners links? And advanced - but so easy to do – 3-way linking for incredible 1-way links.

In a very short time you will know the fundamentals of professional link building – probably even more than the guy at the support desk at many hosting companies. My goal is to keep it simple and basic. Plan on building your links over a 30 – 240 day period. Slow and steady is the best course. Do not dump 20 – 30 links on your page in a single day. What ever rate you add them, try to keep that rate all the time. Vary it a little here and there. Don’t add 20 link partners one day , 2 the next 17 the day after that and 8 the next day. Is it crucial? No. But, it may help you get your links indexed sooner than not.

This was posted by a dude named Jai…

The 10 Commandments of Link Building

Link Farm.

Great question. That’s the obvious progression of thought so here goes…

Google says it’s OK to have up to 100 links on any given page. I thought that was a lot but if you check their Web Master Guidelines (hence their TOS!), it will mention something to that fact.

A Link Farm in its truest sense does nothing but harbor links from specific categories as to hopefully provide the user with traffic from that page plus passed PR rank from that page as well. But neither happen. Usually Link farms have thousands of links with in the same IP block so Google is aware of them.

If you have several pages that have links attached to them Google won’t care. As a matter of fact, this page is the #2 guy for chicago wedding photographer. This his one of his links pages which is pretty ugly and not meant for human consumption, but, it gets a Google PR of 3! If Google didn’t like it, it wouldn’t rank it. Also, notice the thread of his url. He may be getting a feed from a linking service as well. He also is hiding a bunch of invisible text on the page proceeding this one. He doesn’t realize it’s not necessary and Google may slap him for that, but what ever.

I have an idea about a good links page format that creates value for your link partners, gets some rank by Google, and can maybe bring in a few (I said a few as in little) bucks from AdSense and affiliate marketing. That post is coming.

Find a small out of the way to place a text link that says “Sources” or something like that on the index page? If not, put it on the first page in. One off the home page is usually best due to the fact most home pages get the highest rankings in Google but not always. The idea is that the link will pass on on some page reputation of your home page. But…

If a link partner has a problem with that, tell them that what really matters over time is the - yawn - sorry!!!!! - the anchor text of the link more than what part of the web site it is coming from. I’m not dreaming this stuff up - its what is happening right now, did happen two years ago and probably will continue to happen for years to come.

For great link-building software check out SEO Elite.

Link building takes work. It’s not hard. But it takes work and patience. Even though it’s considered “old school” by some, it is a fundamental not unlike blocking and tackling are to football. Not very hip to talk about but no games are won without a good display of both.

This is a “101” summary on how Google ranks web pages. The fundamentals can be the the same for Yahoo and to a lessor degree, MSN Search, but given that Google is the 800 LB. gorilla, I will concentrate on them.

In the title, you will see the word “pages” and not “sites”. Rising tides do not “lift all boats” when it comes to search engine dynamics. A page will rank on its own merits, not because it may be a part of a larger web site.

Also, to rank in Google is to rank for a particular search term or key word. A web page or web site just doesn’t “rank” in Google. A photographer in Chicago may rank #3 for the term “chicago wedding photographer”. He may also rank # 7,345 for the term “chicago”.

Before I go into the nuts and bolts of the Google machine, it is helpful to understand Google’s core motivations.

In their white papers and in their doctoral thesis, the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, made it clear that links were the arbiters of web page relevance more than any thing else. If you look at Google’s web master guideline, the majority of words are dedicated to linking and Google’s idea of what is good link and what is not. Whether you agree with the particulars and specifics of Google’s definitions, the clue is hard to avoid: Google gives relevance to links.

Google is in business to make money. They really don’t care (and probably shouldn’t) care about your web page rankings and if you make money. They do not own the internet – they are just another web site, albeit, a very popular one. While millions of people have made their livings and some, fortunes, directly or indirectly from the traffic Google has provided to their web pages, Google is not the 800 LB gorilla of the internet anymore. Of search, yes, of traffic, no.

Google feels if it provides its users with fresh, relevant content, then we will in turn have a tendency to click its AdWord ads as well as hire Google to display ads on our own websites (AdSense). Google is driven to figure out what are the most relevant web pages it can deliver on any given search term in hopes to appease the searcher. If it can do this on a regular basis, it will remain the king of search. Filtering out non-relevant results to include machine-made junk pages and pages created solely for search engine spam is a daily task.

The 2 ways a page can get ranked.

A page can either get ranked by its on-page factors or its off-page factors. That’s it. Google has created algorithms to determine each, then more algorithms to combine the two. Hence, a web page’s rank is for a particular term at a particular moment in time.

On-page factors.

This is what are web pages are. The content. The titles. The inter-linking dynamics. What we publish on our web pages gives Google an idea what the page is suppose to be about. Google determines this by way of its spiders who “crawl” the web page to “read” the information. The spider can read straight and simple HTML text. It understands meta data. It understands titles of pages.

It cannot see a picture. It cannot interpret a Flash-based animation. Even if you have text in either, the text is not in ASCII code, it is a picture. To Google you have virtually said nothing. That’s why text based HTML sites will do better in the Google index than similar (in idea) Flash based sites. If you are reading this and have a Flash based site should you trash it and start over? No. Web 2.0 will help you out. Plus there are work arounds to a Flash based site to make it very visible to Google and ultimately get traffic.

Off-page factors.

Off-page factors are what the internet is doing to your page. The only dynamic thing a web page can do to another is link to it. This is what makes the world wide web. The more links any one page gets from other pages, the greater the chance that page has relevancy for a particular topic or category.

It is one thing for 2 web masters flush with cash and time to create massive and impressive web sites. They can have the “correct” structure and keyword content. They can provide for a great user experience. But one thing they do not prove to Google is the relevance of their keywords. If Google has indexed two similar sites, how is it to determine which one you would rather see, #1 or #2?

While it’s relatively easy to create a site and make it into your vision, it is quite another to have other web masters link to it. Google feels that for other people willing to link to your web site, they are in effect, voting for your page. The more links, the more votes. With more of the internet voting for your site, the less Google has to guess about your page based on its on-page factors. After all, why would a web master place links on his or her site that would lead their visitors astray? They wouldn’t. Content can be created, links have to be earned.

Links say a lot about a web page. Where the link is coming from. How many and where the linking page’s links come from. And most importantly, what the actual link itself says. If you get a bunch of links to your pottery home page that say: Illinois pottery artist, click here, all Google really knows is that web page is linking to another and saying something about “click here”. It can determine what the linking page is and that it is linking to a page about pottery, but that’s it. If that same site changed its link to: …for an Illinois Pottery Artist, click here, well Google is now told that this particular hyper-link is definitely about an illinois pottery artist. This example is about using anchor text, the actual text of the link, to properly to maximize SEO for your page.

Anchor text is probably one of the most important off-page factors that can influence your page’s ranking in Google. If you do nothing else, get a bunch of links, 50-200 with several versions of keywords you want to rank for, and you should do very well in Google.

Reciprocal links. There has been some talk about the rise and fall of reciprocal linking. Two to three years ago, reciprocal linking was all the rage. Web pages were getting pushed up the rankings largely based on their incoming anchor text links. Then Google did an “update”. This is where Google will tell you one day such and such a web page is #1 for a term. Then the next day, that pages’ relevance dropped to #67. What?

For better or worse, Google is always trying to develop methods that they think will provide accurate and relevant results after you type in the search query. If they feel some page is getting to the top position due to too much user manipulation, well they just may knock it down a peg or two. It happened to John Chow, the internet marketing blogger. For a while Google didn’t even let him rank for his own name. Now I see he ranks for his name again and all is well at Google.

I did notice a lot of the web pages that had hundreds of back links with proper anchor text pretty much stayed the same through the last two Google smack downs. I’ll almost bet your next pay check Google can’t or does not want to mess with reciprocal linking! But they say to get “natural, editorial, one-way links”. Sure, that’s fine if you are Adobe (speaking of which, anyone want to venture a guess who ranks for the term “click here” and why?) or Apple or a super blogger like Aaron Wall – who I respect very much. But just who in the heck is going to link to the local business in any numbers that will make Google wake up and rank them? “Natural”? Not in the real world…

I use a good piece of software called SEO Elite. It lets me track the back links of any web page I enter into it. It also tells me if both web pages link to each other – a reciprocal link.

When I do keyword research for a client, I find out who ranks #1 - #5 for that term in Google. Then I enter each url into SEO Elite and let it do its thing. I really only care about what is indexed in Google and Yahoo. Results are often mixed but one thing is sure: for every “ranking” page (position #1 - # 5), they all have hundreds of links which most are reciprocal. Over 85% usually. Of those reciprocal links, most have the keyword as anchor text over 60%, and on average, most of those links have a Google PR ranking average of only 2.7.

That was a mouthful. What Google says is sometimes not what Google actually does.

So much for every guru telling you need to have 1-way links from just the right web sites with high Google PR if you want to improve your SEO.

Google PR stands for Page Rank.

Google PR is an arbitrary ranking of a page’s importance from 1-10. You can get the Google toolbar here to install the PR function. Some people feel their page has made it when it achieves a PR of 5, 6, or 7. Only a handful of web pages ever rank 8, 9, and 10. Those are usually the Google’s, Yahoo’, and super blogs of the world. With the onslaught of Web 2.0 marketing, Google’ PR is becoming less relevant as a barometer of a pages real value.

It is still accurate to believe Google does not punish but rather rewards reciprocal linking that has a good dose of structured anchor text. Don’t expect Google to admit this, or the heady SEO gurus. I’m just saying…

My next post will be on the nuts and bolts of linking and how to automate it so that people ask you to link to them.

This was a comment I posted on Brad Callen’s SEO Elite page. I figured it had some merit that it should go on my site as well. Content, content…

“Hi Brad - I’ve had SEO Elite and it’s made me money just being able to consult with a couple of companies about SEO, not even geting back links to their pages.

However, one question I have is about reciprocal linking. In the past , you marketed SEO Elite as going out and finding the top ranked web site’s linking partners and contacting those web sites and exchange links. Now, we all know that Google is trying to de-emphasize recips. Fine. But as you know, do a back link check on any site ranking 1-5 in Google for a search term and you find that almost all of their links are recips and that 70% of those are in the PR1 - PR3 range, Also, about half of all total links appear to be “off-topic”.

This tells me that Google prays for web masters to do one thing, but gives out rank on another. It appears that recips are ok. I understand doing a 3-way link scheme but not all of the people have several web sites to link to/from nor will they really understand it (at least not at first).

Also - it’s a known fact that Google lies about the links it has indexed for sites. For instance, on a highly competitive financial term, the #1 page had 24 links in Google. Yea right. These were ho-hum links, mostly 2’s and 3’s. Google can’t convince me that that used those 24 links to prove to itself that that page “was the most important” page for the term!?!

Please Google…funny, the same page had over 1,700 links indexed in Yahoo when I did a “linkdomain:url” check. I think SEO Elite had the Yahoo number at 700 or so. Why the discrepancy?

Anyway, I’m about ready to crank out a massive link campaign on one of my sites. I’ll let you know how it goes.

- R. Oresteen”

For those of you who want to check out SEO Elite, click on this anchor term: The very best SEO building software known to mankind!