SEO for 2009

The future of Search Engine Optimization

This past year I have been fortunate to rank a number of blogs on top of Google's search listings and the result has been a steady stream of income from Google Adsense, selling Advertising space and Lead Generation. This is passive income that is generated daily regardless of how much I post and is not dependent on social media or social marketing. My interest online is to make money with the least amount of effort required. My methods are widely used by Internet Marketers and almost completely unknown to Bloggers. In fact, the prevalence of social blogging has obfuscated what was once widely known - that search traffic is steady, it converts into sales or clicks and it can be grown almost exponentially by simply targeting more and more keywords.

The advent of social marketing has produced bloggers by the millions, each one chasing a dream of large readerships in hopes of generating buckets of income. Each one almost completely ignorant of search traffic or the benefits of high placement in the serp's. The irony is that social traffic is much harder to get on a consistent basis, consists mostly of other bloggers, doesn't convert into buyers and requires a huge time commitment. Worst of all it generates no income until you are able to achieve "authority" status in your niche and are pulling in thousands of visitors a day. Even then your revenue consists almost entirely of advertising fees generated by selling space to other bloggers trying to monetize your traffic. They find out soon enough that your traffic doesn't convert either - how many of you buy or click on the ads pasted on the A-List sites? The A-List is fortunate that there is no shortage of new advertisers willing to fork over large sums in order to replace former advertisers who learned that social traffic doesn't convert. In most cases the A-List is paid to promote sign-up programs - more social media networks for the most part. An endless circle...

The fact that there can only be a limited number of A-List sites or authorities in any one niche is lost to the masses who believe they have what it takes to reach the top. Everyone, it seems, believes they have the right stuff. I have seen a lot of bloggers rise quickly - develop a decent readership, some good PR and just as quickly lose interest in their blog in spite of thousands of RSS subscribers. Why? They don't make enough money to cover the time commitment required to keep the blog fresh in the readers mind.

The alternative to social blogging is of course SEO or Search Engine Optimization. In truth this can and should be applied even if you choose to chase social traffic. I don't chase social traffic at all but because of my high serp rankings I find that social bloggers find me anyway. I mention this simply to point out that those of you hoping to gain fame and recognition for your work can achieve it by dominating the top rankings in the serp's and save yourself the countless hours of work needed to make a name for yourself in the social arenas.

As 2008 draws to a close I have given a lot of thought to how Google will tweak its algorithm over the coming year. Without getting long winded it doesn't take a lot of imagination to assess Google's predicament; the search engine has to have a means by which to rank sites based on keyword relevancy - the easy part and it has to have a means for deciding which relevant site should rank at the top of the serp's - the hard part.

How would you do it?

Would you rank sites based on their RSS subscribers?

Would you rank sites based on their Page Rank?

Would you rank sites based on their social links and traffic?

Would you rank sites based on their Alexa Rank? Their Compete rank?

Would you rank sites based on the fame of the site?

If you would entertain any of these ideas then your ranking system would lead to a useless search engine. All these methods are easily gamed or have no relevancy for the vast majority of niches. How would sites related to "Oil Filters" be ranked if Google used RSS subscribers as a basis for ranking?

Google's predicament is that it has to have a system that works for all keywords and not just those that apply to social niches. Many a social A-Lister has preached that Google will use social media in its rankings - a belief that I find laughable. Google has been eliminating metrics that can be easily gamed - not adding them to the mix.

Ultimately the only system that works well but is not perfectly fair is to rank sites based on incoming links. Yes this can be gamed as well but for the vast majority of niches this is still the best measure of a site's authority.

Rather than find a new system Google has methodically tweaked its system to degrade or dismiss links of poor quality and give greater weight to links that are deemed high quality.

Almost all social links - Do-follow comments, Bookmarks, Digg, Stumbleupon etc are considered low quality and while they may be registered by G they will not gain you top ranking in a competitive niche. They will work fine in an un-competitive niche but even then a single link from a quality source will outrank all your low quality links.

Google's algorithm will reward you well if you follow my recommendations outlined below.

4 Steps to Search Engine Dominance

Keyword Research

Forget Quality Content (No such thing to a machine) - use Relevant Content.

On Page Keyword Optimization

Develop 1 way Inbound Links to your site.


Target the most popular keywords in your niche, add relevant content, use your main keyword in your URL, Blog Title, Page and Post titles and then spend the rest of your time developing quality inbound links.

I have said this many times - quality inbound links are the single most important aspect for ranking well in Google.

The 5 Measurements of Inbound Links

The Quantity of inbound links.

- This is least important but effective for low competition keywords.

The Title keywords on the page linking to you.

The Anchor Text used in the link pointing to you.

- You will only rank for the terms others use in their links pointing at your site. This is crucial for gaining top ranking.

The Relevance of the content on the page linking to you.

- The site with the most keyword anchored links coming from relevant content posts/pages will outrank all others.

The Quality of the inbound link.

- The best link you can possibly get is a PR10 link using your main keyword in the anchor coming from within a post relevant to your keyword. The further from this optimum the less quality the link. A few of these quality links will easily have you outranking sites with 1000's of lesser quality links.

I have not talked about Domain Age or the popular SEO blathering regarding keyword density, blog platforms, site design, posting frequency or any of the other "tips" spouted at length by all the so-called experts online. The reason is simple - it is all window dressing in the greater scheme of things and ultimately unimportant when it comes to serp domination.

The simple truth is that I can rank any site on top of the serp's with the right backlinks and provided the site has legit content (but only because it may get a human review - I could do it with spam if I only had to dupe the machine). How much content or how well it is written is insignificant for ranking purposes.

If you just have to chase social media then do yourself a favor - as you get yourself known ask your friends and readers to use your keywords when they link to you. Do you know how many times I have heard a social blogger tell me that social media is great because it gets them PR and backlinks. When I check they have hundreds of links using their name in the anchor. Yup - they rank really well for a term no one searches for. What a waste and yet the links could be so beneficial. As for PR - just remember this - your own PR has no bearing on your ranking. It's the PR of the sites linking to you that effects your ranking and only if they use your keywords.

Making Money Online is not complicated. Rank on top of the serp's for as many keywords as you can. Add Adsense. Collect money. Rinse and repeat.

It really does work and I hope many of you will achieve the same success as I have over the coming year.

Have a very happy and prosperous 2009

Cheers,

Griz

An Interesting Developement with Yahoo

I'm not sure when I first noticed an increase in Yahoo search visitors to this blog - maybe a month ago - but when the guests began arriving I did some investigating and sure enough I found this blog was suddenly showing up in Yahoo's serp listings for a few of my main keywords. This may not mean much to those of you who use Wordpress but for those of us who like using Blogger this has had some pleasant consequences.

Until recently it was necessary to use Meta Tags in order to rank well in Yahoo. You have to do a little coding to add Meta tags to blogger as Google (the owner) doesn't include the option in the default set up. This is because Google doesn't use Meta Tags in it's Serp algorithm. By not providing the option in Blogger they have also, if you read between the lines, told bloggers not to use Meta Tags if you want to rank well in Google. Google doesn't completely ignore Meta tags - they know they are there and if you use them like most people do - stuffing repetitive keywords into them, then Google will just write you off as spam. Get your tags wrong and you can hurt your rankings. Don't use them at all and you are safe. This is the primary reason I have long said not to optimize your sites for Yahoo or MSN et al. Google is the search engine you MUST rank well on if you hope to make money online. Don't screw up your Google rankings in hopes of ranking well on other engines.

I have never added Meta tags to any Blogspot blogs. I rank well on Google - they send me a lot of traffic - until recently about 85% of my visitors have been sent here from the Serp's. I used to get the odd visitor from Yahoo or MSN and a few of the other lesser engines.

Something has definitely changed in regards to the Yahoo Algorithm. As I said I noticed a sudden increase in traffic - not huge but noticeable - last month for a few keywords. Since then more and more keywords keep showing up in the serp listings. I have mentioned that this blog ranks page 1 on Google for more than 50 keywords and it appears that Yahoo is copying Google's rankings for all the same keywords.

A few days ago I finally did a little stat hunting because it was hard not to notice that Yahoo was sending me just about as much traffic as Google (turns out to be 50% as much) and my Adsense income has grown as well - partly because of the added traffic but also because my CTR has increased about 4% over the past month. At first I thought the increase was due to the fact that G had stopped smart pricing me. Turns out that smart pricing is only part of the story. This blogspot blog has had the most increase in traffic but I have noticed an increase across most of my deep linked blogger blogs from Yahoo. I still have a lot of other blogspot blogs that haven't seen much increase at all. Have any of you noticed more traffic coming from Yahoo on your Blogger blogs?

Considering I used to get maybe 50 visitors a month from Yahoo the stats below give you a good idea of how much new traffic is showing up. This is from a couple of days ago - Thursday's stats.

Click Image to enlarge.



That's a lot of new daily visitors to this site and I started checking the keywords that were bringing in the traffic. Turns out I was sitting in number 1 spot on Yahoo for a couple of the best terms - "How to Make Money Online" 1st out of a measly 1 Billion 7 hundred and 40 million pages... lol.



I even slipped into 8th spot for the big kahuna "Make Money Online".



The best part about all this is that while they are suddenly ranking me for my main keywords they are also ranking me for all sorts of long tails proving that they are still a crappy search engine and making me money in the process. They are ranking me for all sorts of irrelevant terms that practically guarantees an increase in my CTR. People are coming here looking for "how to make professional estimates" and not finding what they want - exactly the kind of visitors you want on an Adsense site. Most just leave but it appears 4% more of these folks are clicking out using the Adsense ads than my Google traffic is.

The end result is that this blog is now making a very decent buck. I'm not rubbing it in, just reminding a lot of you that Adsense is still the easiest way to make money online. And SEO is all that is needed. In a nutshell this blog makes money because of 2 things; the keywords I have used to optimize my pages and the backlinks that I have which use those keywords in the anchor text. That is all this comes down to folks. I'm not saying only use Adsense - always seek out multiple income streams - but remember that whatever monetization method you use depends on driving not just traffic but the right kind of traffic - search traffic. Search traffic boils down to just one thing - backlinks.

Get the best links and you win.

I'm curious - have any of you Blogger bloggers seen a surge in Yahoo traffic over the past month?


In case I haven't mentioned this lately - quit chasing social traffic folks - the money is in the search engines.

Cheers,

Griz



One more thing... Vic has a video up today regarding his Private Academy Launch. I can't seem to get any voice when trying to play it so if anyone would like to tell me what he is saying please feel free... I'm particularly interested in any mention of the words "Griz" and "Gets a free membership". If all those terms happen to go together in one sentence then please let me know...