Over the last year or two I’ve been tracking the top Google search engine results pages (SERPs) for a number of industries, and I have to admit there has been a disturbing trend that I’ve been noticing in Google’s SERPs.   It seems Google is favoring the following type of websites more and more: government and state sites, community driven sites, free sites, it’s own sites (like Youtube), and sites with an already well-known branding.

Of course I have no evidence, just like any other person who doesn’t work for Google, that Google is manually manipulating its SERPs to favor these sites, but from experience it definitely looks like this is what is occuring.  On the other hand, you can also argue that the type of sites listed above should be listed at the top because by nature they attract natural links all on their own, therefore ranking highest in the SERPs.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide which argument you believe while I make an argument for the former statement in this post.

If you look at the type of sites I listed above you’ll see all these sites have one thing in common - there is no interest for these sites to ever purchase Google AdWords advertising.  When have you ever seen a government or state site do AdWords advertising, or a free site like Wikipedia, or Myspace, or a newspaper?  Maybe in rare cases it does happen, but the majority of the time these sites never advertise through AdWords.  Well, these are the type of sites that are populating Google’s first and now second page SERPs more and more, while also knocking down regular webmaster sites in the SERPs.

Again the next statement is all speculation and I have no solid proof, but the reason I think Google is doing this is the search engine is trying to make it harder for regular webmasters to get traffic organically through the SERPs.  Advanced SEOs and webmasters already know a large percentage of search engine traffic goes to listings in the first page of the SERPs, and for high traffic terms possibly even the second page of the SERPs.  If Google populates these pages with the sites listed above then the only way “Joe Schmoe” webmaster can get some of that valuable search engine traffic is to bid for keywords through Google AdWords.  The result of this, of course, is inflated CPC keywords since there are more advertisers competing for keywords, and more profit for Google.

In addition, a secondary effect this causes is the stifling of the buying and selling of text links, which Google has been diligently trying and unable to stop to this day.  Buying and selling of text links has grown into a huge business that cuts into Google AdWords profits because instead of funneling their money into AdWords, many webmasters choose to buy text links to rank in organic SERPs.  Google knows this and sees the text link market as a competitor and enemy to its business model; which is why for the last few years, and more aggressively within the last year, Google has been going after sites that either buy or sell text links.  Populating the first and second page SERPs with the sites mentioned in the first paragraph, and making it nearly impossible for regular webmasters to outrank them for organic search engine traffic will stifle the text link market because if webmasters can’t turn a profit through organic SE traffic by ranking in the top spots they won’t buy text links anymore.  Any smart webmaster wouldn’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for text links to get mediocre rankings which receive barely any traffic through the search engines.  All that money which was going into text links for SEO will certainly be used for AdWords advertising after all things are said and done, and Google will be smiling its way to bigger profits.

So you can see that Google benefits in every single way by favoring the aforementioned sites in its SERPs;  benefiting specifically by forcing regular webmasters to use Google AdWords if they want any type of traffic from Google’s search engine. It’s Google’s monopolistic way of forcing webmasters to use AdWords, and increase its profit if you ask me.

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Remember that famous line muttered by all SEO experts back in the day - “Content is King”? Well those days have been long gone for a few years now! A semi-decent website with enough backlinks can easily outrank a website that has tons of content in today’s search engine world. Inbound links are the single most important factor in search engine optimization for getting your site to the top of the SERPs, and don’t let anyone else tell you differently!

The more advanced SEO experts probably have known this for quite some time now, but when I surf around many of the webmaster boards I still see a lot of confusion out there among webmasters. Many of these webmasters, after spend several days doing on-page optimization for their site, decide to start doing some link building. They get a good number of inbound links from directories, posting in forums, social bookmarking, etc. thinking their website is going to shoot up in the search engine results, but it doesn’t happened leaving them scratching their heads thinking what went wrong. Next thing you know they stop their link building journey and find themselves posting on boards like Digital Point or Webmaster World looking for advice on search engine optimization and why their site isn’t ranking high. This is where I catch myself reading their forum post looking for advice. The two mistakes these webmasters just made are 1. they stopped link building because they didn’t see immediate results in their website ranking and 2. going on a forum asking for advice is getting in the way of what they should continue doing, link building.

In addition to being the most important factor in today’s SEO industry, gathering inbound links is also probably the most time consuming and frustrating part of search engine optimization because there are so many variables that the webmaster has no control over: sites remove links constantly, sites get closed down, sites don’t want to waste their link juice by linking to you, Google tells you not to buy/manipulate links or you’ll be banned, etc. - the list goes on and on! In addition, when there are no immediate results to show for all those long hours of hard work the frustration continues to add up even more.

Webmasters have to understand there is a huge lag time between the actual link building tasks and the benefits that come with the link building process. This is where many webmasters get caught up! Our natural tendency during the link building phase of SEO is to gather a good number of inbound links over a couple days or weeks, and then wait for the search engines to recognize these inbound links and rerank our site in the new position. Once the search engines update the rankings and your website position in the SERPs several weeks, or even months, usually would have past. This is the wrong way to build inbound links; instead webmasters should gradually but continually add inbound links to their website, never stopping the process in anticipation of waiting to see what their new rankings will be when the search engines update or maybe because they are disappointed they don’t see immediate results from all their hard work. Persistence and patience is key when it comes to link building!

Now that I have explained the importance of inbound links, and how to go about the link building process, there is one catch to this whole “It’s All About Inbound Links” post. If you remember in my opening statement I mentioned that inbound links are the most important factor for SEO and mediocre websites with enough inbound links can outrank websites with tons of content. Although true, here is the catch: Even though inbound links are the driving force which push your site to the top of the SERPs, once you get to the coveted first page results you better make sure your website looks like an authority site for that particular topic, which means having tons of unique and exceptional content! The reason I say this is the search engines scrutinize websites taking their top SERP placements more than websites ranking, lets say for example, in the 1,345 position. There is more manual intervention and policing at the top of the SERPs, compared to a more algorithmic ranking of websites on the lower end of rankings. Getting your site ranking in the top pages of the SERPs puts it under a magnifying glass so to speak. When you have reached this stage in your search engine optimization journey without a doubt having unique content and looking like an authority site can bump your site up those few extra spots and help your website maintain its position in the SERPs. So even though inbound links are the most important SEO factor, coming in a close second is unique, quality content and tons of it!!!

Content isn’t king anymore, inbound links are, but content comes in a very close second!

P.S. - I know I said I would wait until after the new design was up to make another post, but I was getting the blogging itch and couldn’t wait.

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I had some time to kill after a long day of hard work and decided to take the SEO quiz over at SEOmoz. I suggest that if your learning SEO to go on over to their site and take the quiz yourself. The quiz at the time of this post is 75 questions long and takes about 25-35 minutes to complete. I was surprised to see there were actually some questions on the quiz that I had trouble answering; it seemed like multiple answers were right for some questions. I guess people can’t know everything! Anyway, it is a good learning experience that I feel readers of this blog shouldn’t miss out on.

Here’s a question for everyone and my second point of bringing up the SEOmoz quiz in this post: What type of internet marketing technique are the guys at SEOmoz making use of by creating this quiz?

If you guessed “link bait” you answered correct. For those of you who didn’t know the answer and are asking what is “link bait” here is how Wikipedia describes link bait:

“Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention. Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”

Yes, link bait is also a form of viral marketing that I just recently blogged about in the post titled “More Drama Concerning that Wicked Fire Post“.

So how exactly is the SEOmoz quiz link bait? First, the quiz offers people who take the SEO quiz to place a “SEOmoz SEO Quiz badge on your site to let the world know how hard you rock the SEO game” which of course is a fun little thing to do. Placing the badge on a site draws attention to the SEOmoz website and gets other people to visit SEOmoz’s site - basically free advertising. In addition, webmasters will tell other webmasters and friends to go take the quiz so they can compare scores; which is an indirect way of promoting/advertising for SEOmoz.

In a future post I’ll discuss link bait in more detail and show more live examples from other websites that have utilized link bait techniques.

What was that? You wanted to know what score I received on the quiz? Well keep wondering…

Popularity: 13% [?]

When determining how difficult it will be too rank well in organic search engine results there are quite a few factors every affiliate marketer needs to consider when assessing the competitiveness of a particular niche. This becomes extremely important when you have climbed to the first or second page of the SERPs and your trying to reach that number one spot! In this post I will be discussing the different variables for sizing up the competition, so you can determine exactly how your competition is outranking you for those valuable SERP spots.

If your just starting out with affiliate marketing and haven’t decided on which particular niche to promote here are the different factors that can help you in figuring out the competitiveness of the niche/industry.

1) Number of results in SERPs - The number of results displayed when doing a search on your particular niche/topic is an important indicator on the competitiveness of the niche. Below is an image of the number of search results in Google for the topic “blue widgets”. The statistic is displayed on the top right of Google every time you do a search for a particular topic. You can see that the search for topic “blue widgets” produced 411,000 results. By comparing search results you can get a better understanding of a niche’s competitiveness.

2) Number of search queries - The number of search queries the topic receives within a given month can help you in determining its competitiveness. If a topic only receives 34 search queries a month it is fairly safe to say that there will be very low competition compared to a topic that receives 500,000 search queries a month. A popular tool that I used back in the day to determine search queries was Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool, but they stopped updating it back in January 2007. There are several other tools on the internet, both free and paid, that you can use to figure out search queries but I’ll leave it up to you to go and find them.

Now that you have a general overview of the competitiveness of various niches/industries it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty! Let’s say your an old-timer with a pretty established site in a particular niche and your site is currently ranked at the bottom of the first page on the SERPs. You’re not settling for this and want that number one spot, but don’t know why the search engines aren’t ranking your website higher. Here’s how to determine what needs to be done to move up in those rankings:

What I would do is create a spreadsheet listing all your competitors sites that are ranking above your site in the SERPs in one column and then create a separate column too record each variable that I will be explaining below. So if you site was listed at the bottom of the first page of the SERPs in Google (ranked #10) you would have 9 rows in your spreadsheet - one for each listing above yours. If your site was ranked on page 10 of the SERP’s you can just randomly select listings above yours in the SERPs to get an idea of what you will need to accomplish to rise in rankings. Okay, now for the variables:

1) Number of Backlinks - Find out the number of backlinks accumulated for those sites that are outranking your site. You can do this by using a special command in the search box for the major search engines (for Google it would be “link:www.domain.com”). The search results will tell you how many backlinks a particular site has obtained. See image below for an example:

In a separate column in your spreadsheet write down the number of backlinks for each site so that you can get an overall picture of how much work you will need to do in order to beat your competition.

2) Number of Pages Indexed - Figuring out the number of pages your competition has indexed in the search engines will help you in your efforts. To get this information also requires a special command you need to type in the search box. For Google the command would be “site:www.domain.com”. Just like when you checked the number of backlinks, the search engine will display a total number in the results which will be the number of pages indexed. Again, write down this number for each of your competition’s sites to get an overall view later.

3) Keyword Density - You will need a third-party tool to get the keyword density of your competitions pages that outrank yours. There are hundreds of free keyword density tools on the internet, just do a search in Google for “keyword density tool” to find one. Once you get the keyword density for the sites write them down on your spreadsheet.

4) Important Site Listings - There are four sites that I believe all serious webmasters should be listed on - these are Business.com, Yahoo Directory, DMOZ/Google Directory, and Wikipedia. You will need to figure out if your competition is listed on these sites and record your findings on the spreadsheet. Just create a separate column for each of the four and write “Yes” or “No” based on if your competition’s site is listed. More than likely websites listed on the first page of the SERPs are listed in 2 or 3 out of the 4. Getting your site listed in as many as these as possible can give you a good boost in the SERPS.

5) Domain Age - Although you can’t really do anything to improve on a site’s domain age it’s good information to know. If you know your competition’s domains are really mature compared to your domain you know you’ll have to work much harder beating your competition in the other variables!

Oh, instead of typing in all those commands in the search engines to figure out backlinks and indexed pages there are websites out there like http://www.xinureturns.com that make it much easier to figure those variables out, all you have to do is type in the URL and it will collect the information for all major search engines for you! In fact, Xinu Returns offers a wealth of information on many other variables you can include while doing research on your competition. So why didn’t I just say that in the first place? Because I wanted you to understand how these sites come up with their results by querying the search engines.

Once you have completed your spreadsheet you will have a really good perspective of what needs to be done to outrank your competition, and when you get that number one spot you can thank me later!

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