Links Program Changes and SEO Tips for Better Rankings

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IMPORTANT LINKS PROGRAM CHANGES:

I’ve decided to cap the growth of the links program at 225 partners per pod, maximum. The reasons for doing so are several but all designed to promote the health of the program even though it may crimp my revenue flow. Let me elaborate.

The program has been successful. Well over 90% of program partners get to PR3 (from PR0) in one year, many in much less time. Some get to PR4 though mostly those are partners that are not in other links programs at the same time. And, as I’ve been wont to say to folks lately, PR4 is the new PR5. Holland America, one of the largest cruise-lines in the world, is ‘only’ a PR4. The #1 site on Google for ‘skin care’ is also a PR4. PR4 is now highly desirable.

I don’t want to tamper with our success. I feel the success has come from the modest, low-key approach we’ve taken in many aspects of the program. I don’t want unbridled growth to become our Achilles Heel.

I also feel that limiting growth will improve the quality of the sites in the program. Historically I’ve given discounts when partners have added additional sites to the program. I no longer do that. Indeed, for several months now, cost-related attrition has opened up spots for new members and kept some freshness in the program. As well, we lose a few members each update, due to natural attrition. Not all business ideas succeed. The reality is that most don’t. But it’s getting tight in the pods. We are in a waiting list position right now in Pod B and close to it in Pods A and C. I’m hoping attrition will create openings for clients who want to add second sites (at full price) and create openings for new partners.

I will also begin a new program shortly. It will be free for about one year. It will be identical to the present program but will not involve any of the sites in the present program. Partners in the present program will not be allowed to transfer their present sites into the new program. It would be counter-productive anyway since the pages in the new program will all start out at PR0 and take quite some months to accrue value. If some of you have secondary sites that you want to place in the new program, you can send them to me. I suspect we’ll start out with one or two program pages. I will not accept sites created simply for ad words campaigns or any other spam-type information sites. The objective is to create a quality program.

The present program renewal fee is $150 (heretofore known as Program I). The fees will increase to $175 beginning in October. Any member can circumvent that fee increase by renewing early at the present rate of $150.

YOUTUBE VIDEOS AND OTHER OFF-SITE STRATEGIES:

I don’t really trust most bandwagons designed to help sites rank. I think the engines are simply too smart. Maybe social networking helps but I don’t see much sign of it and it seems to take a huge amount of time. People don’t seem to realize that getting multiple back-links from the same website doesn't do much. Back-links are like voting. You really get to vote for a site once and any additional votes are discounted. So, getting a lot of back-links from something like digg.com probably has limited value, though certainly if you have the time for it then every little bit helps. I do encourage diversity.

But I do believe that videos can help. I discussed this in my last newsletter and a few of you have done videos since then. One of the great values of videos is that they are not housed on your own site (though they can be posted there). But they are on sites like Youtube.com, owned by Google. And, they can rank. And, if you can get them on page one for even some small search phrases then you’ll get clicks. My feeling is that when search engine visitors find a video icon in a set of search results, they’re much more likely to click.

If you do this, be advised that it may take months for the video icon image itself to appear beside your Youtube video. I lamented about this in my previous newsletter wondering why my video icon only appeared at Google.ca but not at Google.com. Now it’s at Google.com too. I’m not sure what the mechanism for that is.

My Youtube video is now #10 on Google.com for ‘best seo ebook’. It’s a small search phrase but it’ll get clicks and grow from there. That gives me two page-one listings for that search phrase and I can’t be accused of spamming since one is from my site and one is from Google’s own Youtube page. It’s the same on Yahoo but on Yahoo my site and the Youtube listings are side by side at #3/#4.

It’s even better for Jack. His personal self-defense products site isn’t on page one of Google for ‘bear pepper spray’ (although he has other page one rankings) but his Youtube video is #7. Guaranteed - when people search for ‘bear pepper spray’ and they see only one site on the page with a video icon, that site’s going to get clicks.

One of our new clients has hit the ground running with both a new website and a new video for the Shakes, Popcorn and Ice Cream Diet.

But remember, a Youtube video is a website page and to rank well on Google (or other engines) you need to drive PR to it. A Youtube video will pick up some links naturally as there are video sites out there that post videos, so Youtube videos have link bait built-in. I can also put your video into our links program but since you can’t have outbound links on your Youtube page you’d have to put the program links on another website of comparable PR value. If you can do that then I can accept your video into the program.

If you need help preparing a video contact Giselle (gisele2@earthlink.net). She's done several videos for partners including this one a few weeks ago for my long-time Tooth Fairy Gifts client, Gary. His site is #1 for 'tooth fairy gifts' and his Youtube video is already #22 though it's not showing any PR yet.

GENERAL RANKING TIPS:

Every day I write folks individually about different things they should be doing. Most of the tips have previously been included in newsletters but some folks don’t read that far back. So, I thought I’d give you a bunch of general tips right here.

Google ranks sites based on on-page SEO and general trust (which includes off-page SEO and a number of other factors).

1) Renew your domain name for 10 years (or so). This is about trust. Google admits that this is a ranking factor included in its algorithm. If you believe in your website enough to renew it for 10 years then Google believes in you and you’ll beat out some of your competition. Earn Google's trust.

2) Frequent content changes, minimally to your home page. Some SEOs believe that this is the single biggest ranking factor (assuming you’re optimized in the first place). By ‘frequent changes’ I don’t mean automated content changes such as when the date changes each day. I mean hard-coded html content changes, even if you have a template site where the coding is generated for you.

If there’s no reason to freshen up the content every week then maybe find a paragraph or two in the body of your page and write up 3 or 4 distinctly different versions of that and substitute one for the other every week or so. What happens when you do that is that the engines notice that you frequently have new content and they come back more often to feed on the fresh content. Think Jaws. Hear the music. Stick your toes in the water. Pay the price.

I have my own theory on this as a trust factor. In the last couple of years I completely neglected my website at http://www.handsubmit.com. Simply, my links site began to drive my business and most of my optimization work was coming from my links clients, rather than from people actually searching for SEO. So, I started to neglect the site and as a function of that almost never made any content changes even as the site started to lose rankings.

Relatedly, in terms of PR, at one point the site was a PR6 (though only for one update). It dropped to PR5, then PR4 and now PR3. The site’s almost five years older than my links website, it’s in dmoz.org and the Yahoo Directory and yet it’s PR steadily dropped. It should have better PR than my links site but it doesn’t. Some of that drop in PR was expected as most Internet sites lost absolute PR in that interim. But the site also lost rankings.

A few weeks ago I went in and added fresh content to the home page and then went back in a few more times. In just a couple of weeks I rose to #2 on Google.ca and #4 on Google.com for ‘seo services canada’, a good search phrase for a PR3 site. Business started to flow once again to that website with no perceptible change in PR. Fresh content is trust as far as Google is concerned. I certainly had enough PR to rank for ‘seo services canada’ but I’d virtually lost all my rankings. All it took was fresh content buoyed by the pre-existing PR.


3) On-page optimization. Blame the links craze, but for some reason people have completely forgotten about on-page SEO (search engine optimization). They join the links program and want to make sure that their anchor text includes ‘penguin flippers’ and then I go to their website and see that they have absolutely no on-page optimization for ‘penguin flippers’, not even a mention of the intact phrase. Now, in my view, the main value of a links program is getting back-links from trusted websites. People also seem to have forgotten that. But if there is some value in anchor text then it has to correspond with on-page SEO. I don’t think you’re going to do much to help your rankings for ‘penguin flippers’ if you’re not actually optimized for ‘penguin flippers’ and even the briefest of mentions of ‘penguin flippers’ on your web page represents at least a modicum of optimization.

Beyond the connection between off-page SEO and on-page SEO some folks just don’t have good home page SEO. Here’s the essence of good on-page SEO. You have to get these things right: title tag, description tag, keyword placement on the page reflective of title and description tag, keyword density, copy-based keyword phrases text-linked to relevant lower level pages, text-based menu links. I'm amazed at how many folks settle for a top ten ranking when most of the traffic goes to the top three sites.

4) Variety in your anchor text. If people were linking to you naturally would they all be using the same anchor text? Most new program members send me up to 13 sets of anchor text. I think this has value as it looks a bit artificial if everyone links to you with exactly the same text. But some of you older program members have never done that. I think you should.

5) The supplemental index. I did a whole newsletter on this last year so I’ll keep it simple here. Google has two indexes, a primary index and a supplemental index. Only the pages that get into the primary index have a chance to rank.

Generally pages that have unique content will get indexed by Google but only some of those pages will get into the primary index. First of all, to make sure Google views each of your pages as unique, give each page a unique title tag. Don’t just use the title and meta info from your home page and then put that on all of your pages.

Then work to get your pages into the primary index.

How do pages get into the primary index? PR. According to Google, PR is the only factor determining which pages get into the primary index. That takes us to the issue of good intra-site architecture or good intra-site linking. Most of the PR that your lower level pages receive comes from the home page and the other pages on your site linking to them. You might have some external PR coming to those pages but for most websites, the PR of lower level pages comes from internal linking.

Pages that you absolutely want to rank should be linked to from your home page, your site map and from lower level pages on your site. But there’s only so much PR to go around so be selective. Even a site with good PR and good intra-site architecture may only end up with 10% of their pages in the primary index. But if that’s 10 or 20 pages then that’s a good base for rankings assuming those pages have some optimization. Remember that PR0 does not mean PR0. It means that your PR is somewhere between PR0-PR1. PR0 web pages can end up in the primary index because they do have some PR!

Here’s how to see which of your site’s pages have generally been indexed by Google (combines supplemental and primary listings):

site:www.mywebsite.com/

And here’s how to see how many of your pages are in the primary index:

site:www.mywebsite.com/*

Your long-term objective should be to make sure any pages you have in the primary index are optimized. If they can rank, then you should help them to rank.

6) Some of you need to be more aware of what’s called Google Canonical Optimization though I dread that a bunch of you will be contacting me about this and asking for my help. I do not function as a webmaster or website maintenance person (I don’t have the skill-set).

What this concerns is whether your site is known as a www.example.com site or an example.com site. One of the things I usually try to do when new partners join the program is to check on how their site is indexed at Google. Some people will tell me that their site is example.com but when I go to Google I discover that it has been indexed as a www.example.com website. This is really important (apparently). Simply, if you’re indexed as www.example.com but all your links are pointing to example.com then it could hurt your PR. You need to know your canonical identify and always refer to yourself properly (even in emails). Here are two articles relating to this issue:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3187045.htm

http://www.seo-e.com/seo-tips/tip-canonical-domain-security-105.htm

7) What the competition is doing. This also affects your rankings. You’re not the only one out there trying to rank. The competition is active as well. The natural tendency is for rankings (and PR) to drop not only because the Internet is always growing, making room for new websites or more pages from established websites, but also because the competition isn’t simply standing still. Be active with your website.


MISCELLANEOUS STUFF:

There’s a new search engine called CUIL which you are probably already in. Could it be the next Google? Thanks to Michael of Discount Real Estate San Francisco for the heads-up on this.

Speaking of Google, Scott of VPN Client Software – TheGreenBow advises me that Google has launched knol.google.com (http://knoll.google.com) where folks can write articles. The articles are “owned” by the authors and can include as many back-links to their sites as they want. I haven’t tried this out myself yet but Scott swears by it. You gotta figure Google wants Knol article to rank.

But a general caveat about articles. If you write an article as link bait and get 10 websites to post the article, you’ll still only get one back-link credited for it or maybe one and a bit more. The first time Google finds the article, the back-link will be credited to you. From then on, the article will be duplicate content and website pages posting the article will probably not get into the primary index, only the useless supplemental index (trash). So, write articles but recognize their limitations. The vast majority of articles that get written end up in the supplemental index. Seriously, if you have a website and only maybe 5-10% of your pages are ever going to get into Google’s primary index, are you going to post other people’s articles on your website and see those pages get into the primary index at the expense of some of your own product pages? If you’re not prepared to do this for people, why would anyone else? I’m not saying don’t write articles, just realize their limitation.