Matt Cutts Praises Google’s Index Time

August 7, 2007 at 8:58 am · Filed under SEO, Search Engines

clipped from www.mattcutts.com Minty Fresh Indexing The Google crawl/indexing team has continued working hard, and several people have noticed Google’s index getting fresher and fresher. Now some documents can show up in minutes instead of hours or days. I’ve noticed that as search engines have gotter better (fresher, bigger, more relevant), people keep adjusting their expectations upwards. I can’t imagine waiting over a month for search engines to update their index with news events any more, but just a few years ago that’s how things worked. And it only takes a few encounters with a fresh index until you ratchet up your expectations. My previous mental model was “normally it takes a day or so to show up in many search engines,” but I had my own “Zoiks! That’s fast!” experience tonight, which I’ll describe for you.

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Keyword Traffic vs. Social Traffic

July 6, 2007 at 6:24 pm · Filed under SEO, Web 2.0

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a stats obsessed freak when it comes to my personal projects. I simply can’t stay away from my Google stats, raw log file stats and of course my Ad Sense stats.

After my last blog posting on the iPhone 2 I detected a large increase in keyword searches that landed people on that article. A quick check on Google and I was ranked #5 for the search phrase “iPhone 2″ and that was resulting in 79 (so far) incoming visits. 79 may not sound like a lot but it’s almost 3 times the previous month’s top keyword total and there’s only been 6 days in July.

This got me thinking, is traditional keyword targeting a better traffic/income generator than the new breed of social sites (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon)?

With each article I publish, I attempt to ride the social wave just like my original 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website article did several months back. I’ve had the lucky experience being on the front page of Fark.com, Reddit.com, Digg.com and Shoutwire/TorrentSpy and it sends a ton of traffic and assuming your web server stays up (I didn’t survive the Digging) it also means a good chunk of money gets racked up in your advertising/affiliate programs you’ve implemented on the site. But getting into the home page of any of these sites is not an exact science and there’s a ton of competition just like there is for keywords. However the pay off is a “long tail” effect on traffic, and if I gain traction for any of these keywords, I can leverage that for a longer more sustainable gain in traffic.

One of the other things I’m most obsessed about is keyword and search engine usage reporting. I’m a sucker for any service or tool that shows me what real users are searching and in what proportion to each other. One of these tools I subscribe to is WordTracker’s weekly keyword report which shows me the top 200 keywords people are using in two time frames 48 hours and 90 days.

This got me thinking; I should experiment to see if keyword targeting is more worthy of my time blogging than social site bait.

Here’s the plan: I’m going to attack this list and start at the bottom, crafting articles using the non adult, n non offensive keywords in an attempt to place in the search engines for searches of this popular term. Some of them won’t relate to my current blog theme, but running Oomny.com has shown me that you can rank for some fairly weird stuff.

First up on the list: global warming

There’s no way in iceberg melting hell I’m going to rank for the keyword “global warming” but I guess I’ll start with it. Maybe some obscure or second rate search engine will find it and give me some rank loving. But it brings up a concern for this experiment, will the top 200 be too competitive? This will only be solved by playing out the experiment and measuring the results.

My next post will be on global warming and won’t mention this experiment as it will attempt to be helpful and contain relevant information.

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4 Excellent Keyword Suggestion Tools - All Free

June 26, 2007 at 10:20 am · Filed under SEO

One of the first steps in search engine optimization or “SEO” is to research what keywords you need to target in order to begin building or buying traffic.

If you are going to build traffic, you need try to locate a good mix of keywords and phrases, maybe 10-15 that apply to your business or service. Make sure the keywords aren’t too broad or competitive (example; an art gallery should not optimize for the keyword “art”) and also make sure the keywords have enough traffic to warrant spending time optimizing/setting up CPC campaigns.

The same advice goes for people looking to buy traffic using Google AdWords or a competitive service from Yahoo/MSN. The broad and competitive keywords will be the most expensive and least profitable for you as they will most likely not be targeted specifically at your business. The only exception maybe being competitive keywords with low volume that price themselves out of profitability by head to head competition or high profit margins.

There are several free tools out there to help you find these keywords and determine which ones apply to you.

1. The first keyword research tool comes from SEO Book dot com and offers a database that is based on all the other top keyword databases such as Overture/Yahoo, Google and WordTracker. The great thing about SEO Book’s Tool is that it combines all these separate tools into one, and provides additional data in the results such as links to Google services like Trends, Estimator, and Suggest. These additional tools and fast speed really set this tool out from the others.

2. Google provides it’s own search volume tool that is pretty quick on it’s toes and provides some valuable information straight from a trusted source: Google itself. However, the service is meant to sell you keywords (so beware), and is somewhat basic compared to offering from SEO Book. Plus the CAPTCHA verification is annoying.

3. An oldy but a goody, Overture’s keyword inventory tool is simple and to the point. However it frequently goes down so you may find yourself venturing off to a competitor to do your keyword research.

*/Yes the screenshot is intended to show a 404, as I mentioned in the description, the site has troubles keeping it’s crap together.

4. Coming in last but certainly not least comes WordTracker’s free keyword suggestion tool, not to be confused with their pay service which offers a lot more features. Another very simple interface, WordTracker offers up data from only a limited set however, as explained on their site:

* Every day, on average, we collect about 4.13 million search terms from Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com, who according to Netapplications.com account for 0.63% of searches across all engines. By combining these two figures, we estimate that the total daily searches across all engines is 655.7 million.

It’s still a lot of searches and the data remains consistent with the tools above so it’s still a wise choice.

Overall you want to do your research and try a few of the services above in order to get a nice wide sample of data and find a service/interface you like. Find the keywords that have just the right amount of traffic, and the right amount of competition so that you don’t waste your time going after keywords that won’t give you the highest profit.

BONUS: SEO Book dot com provides an embeddable search form that I’ve pasted below:

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6 Proper Link Trading Techniques & Tips

June 18, 2007 at 2:13 pm · Filed under SEO

From time to time clients and potential sales leads query my expertise on link trading as it relates to SEO and building traffic. Typically my response covers a few main points, mostly related to informing the client of the various types of link exchanges and their value, as well as relaying any techniques to avoid. Here’s a 6 item break down of basic link trading guidelines:

1. Ignore and don’t respond to unsolicited email link exchange emails. They are either complete spam, from an automated link building bot or from some Grey hat SEO firm looking to artificially boost their client’s website rank.

2. Seek out websites and contacts in your industry and a related field to trade links with, find their contact information and contact them via email in a personal matter. Work out these deals by hand which allows you to hopefully gain a more valuable link exchange.

3. When setting up link trading deals with friendly sites, try to have them publish an article or short blurb on their site/blog which includes linked keywords relating to your industry or specific keywords you are targeting. Getting your URL hyperlinked on their “Links” page isn’t worth the trouble unless it’s surrounded by copy and keywords related to the topic of your site. A 200-300 word paragraph or post with 2-3 linked keywords (ex: “your product name” or “your industry”) linked to your home page page is ideal.

4. When evaluating websites in which to trade links keep an eye on their Google PR levels, Alexa rank and Compete.com stats as well as any other stat metric you have available. If they rank higher than you in 1 or more places it’s probably going to benefit your site more than a lower ranking site link trade will. Because these services all share well documented inaccuracies, don’t rely solely on this data when making the decision to trade links. Even low ranking sites can be well worth the time.

5. Deep linking. Google and presumably the other search bots like deep links into your site from other websites. So while getting a link to your home page is good, a link to one of your sub pages can benefit you more, once you have the home page links well covered. Have sites link to your Products or Services page instead.

6. Links within your industry are better than random links from an unrelated field. Simply put, if the website linking to you contains keywords and content relating to your industry, the bots will weigh that more in their consideration of rank.

Do you have an additions to this list? Comment and I’ll post them with a link to your blog.

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