Another PR update so soon…

Okay well it seems that a June Google Page Rank update is underway right now, which is weird since the last one was just last month, but all my newer PRO sites went to PR1 or PR2, and 2 PR2 sites went to PR3 and other bloggers are posting the same updates on their sites.

And, this explains the shake up in the SERPS that I talked about the other day.

I do not think the update is done, because a couple of my sites went to PR2 which they surely did not deserve due to very few links, I’m not complaining but I think that it will go down.

Again for the newbies to this business, the toolbar PR is mainly useful for our own egos

and link building.

the real PR (the one that matters) is updated daily behind the scenes of the Google Algorithm.

The SERPS, traffic and sales is what really matters, but it’s always fun when the update comes around.

SERP Update:
Just checked the SERPS and they are still all over the place with odd page 1 results and several of my sites, though given an increased PR falling radically, so most likely they are not stable yet.

Do you guys see PR updates on your sites as well?

Have you guys checked your SERP positions lately? There are definitely some shake ups going on with Google and their algo.

A couple of my good aged site’s home pages just plummeted in the SERPS. One site, while it still ranks for other keywords, was pushed back to the black hole for a keyword that it has ranked for for over 1 1/2 years and the keyword is very low competition and now there is a whole lot of junk sitting on page 1 for that keyword.

And the same with other SERP results that are also showing a lot of crappy and spammy sites, as well as irrelevant sites.

Now in doing some reading around the web this seems to be an on going issue for many in the last couple of weeks with even aged authority sites losing major rank and sites dropping several pages in the SERPS. Coincidentally a very similar thing happened in June of 2008.

There also seems to be a pattern with index pages (home pages) losing rank while inner pages remain solid across the SERPS.

Now, while there will always be fluctuations in the SERPS , this seems to be something bigger and on a larger scale and similar shifts happen several times throughout the year.

Some guess that Google is trying out a new filter to catch paid links, and others think that the filter is negating blog comment links. I doubt the latter because my sites that lost rank have very few blog comments as backlinks.

Google just announced that they added external resource loading capabilities capabilities for Flash and indexing of flash, this may also be a part of this, learn more at Google Webmasters Blog post on this.

Really it could be anything. As that famous saying from The Godfather goes, “this is the business we’ve chosen” and dealing with Google SEO is always a roller coaster rider

I am not sure how major this one is, but I, as well as others do not think (at least I hope not) that this will last, most likely things will calm down and the SERPS will return to normalcy.

The most important thing to remember: DO NOT PANIC!

One of the biggest mistakes that webmasters make when their sites see a significant drop in SERP rank is to start making drastic changes on their sites.

1. This is often a mistake because it can trigger alarms and filters such that when the SERPS do return to some normalcy your changes may have adverse effects for your original rank positions.

2. The traffic is all that really matters. Another factor to consider is look at your traffic patterns, usually losing SERP positions for a couple of pages or even the home page will not affect traffic that much because most sites come up for lots of keyword searches, especially the long tails from inner pages.

This is where Google Analytics really comes in handy for analyzing those SERP patterns affects on your sites.

3. Remember to have faith in your work and if you are not doing anything extreme or super black hat then do not worry, just keep on working as usual, add some content to your sites, that is always a solid and safe route to take.

4. And also remember that this is probably not personal but a web wide change.

…Best thing to do in these types of situations is to wait it out.

If you go over to this thread in Webmaster World you will see a very interesting discussion on this topic with lots of webmasters sharing their experiences with this shift.

Have you guys noticed the SERP changes? Anyone lost major rankings?

For most Internet marketing endeavors there are two main subjects of great interest, SEO and traffic and images are powerful tools for both of those goals.

1. They are really good for the look of the site design, look and enhance the visitor experience, especially with product guides and tutorials of any kind.

2.  They are great for on-site SEO because they add keyword relevancy via image alt tags and this includes any header graphics for site-wide keyword relevancy.

3. They can also bring you lots of website traffic and money.

Search engines cannot read images you must use alt tags for descriptions, which should be keyword relevant to the page. By the way, it is blackhat to give inaccurate descriptions for the purpose of SEO trickery in the Alt Tags.

Image HTML Code:

<img src=”http://mydomain.com/image1.jpg” alt=”Keywords- Descriptions”>

Link Image to URL code:

<a href=”http://mydomain.com/”><img src=”http://mydomain.com/image1.jpg”  alt=”Keywords- Descriptions”></a>

The above code is for images that are hosted on your servers. With Wordpress you can upload images directly from your computer via the Browser Uploader and the Title area in the Image dashboard is the Alt Tag.

The Traffic Connection via Images

The best benefit of images is traffic. Google often shows image results when people search particular keywords.

Lately I think they must really be doing more of this than before because I have 3 new sites that have been getting a lot of traffic from Google Images and its converting to sales.

To make sure my images show up in correct keyword search results I name the image file in detail, for example:

SonyEricsonMobilePhone.jpg
SonyEricson350.jpg

And, I also make sure the Alt Tag is there with the correct descriptive words.

I launched a new site last week and within 4 days I had something like 2,000 visitors all coming via Google Images and 6 sales and that is pretty good for a new site. I think this is especially good for shopping sites that use product images.

What I like to do is place at least 2-3 images on my content pages that are related to the topic of that page. They really make the content pages look better and more professional, especially with guide type pages.

I also make sure to have several images on my home pages like around the welcome message, that is a great place to provide keyword relevace for the sitewide keywords.

I am happy to report that I won a nice fat jackpot in Vegas, $1400 from one spin on the slot machine with my last $20! Was planning to just take that $20 home and then my son said just play it, what the heck you got to lose, and bam, hit 4 wilds on the Wizard of Oz slots! And for those of you who remember my last trip to Vegas you know that dang machine owed me, plus it was my birthday trip so I guess my luck was good - Happy Birthday To Me!!

And then when I got back home last night I noticed there has been another Google Page Rank update, which was another nice surprise as several of my sites went up from PR2 to PR3 and they are all money sites. This blog stays a PR3 because I have not been doing any manual link building, been busy focusing on my money sites.

One of my sites went from PR1 to PR0, have no idea why, have to do some checking.

Remember that PR is all about link building and there is about 2-3 months till the next update to get those backlinks up and running.

Congrats to Matt for getting his PR4 back on Sacramento Weddings!

How did you guys do on the PR update?

Time and again I see little niche sites using trademark brand names in their url’s. This is a truly reckless and a very stupid thing to do.

Here you are spending valuable time, working hard on your site designing, promoting, link building and your site has high search engine rankings and making you money and then the brand name company notices you and it’s over. At the very least your site will have to come down and at worst the brand name will sue you for copyright infringement.

It is illegal to use any copyrighted brand name trademark within the url or as the name of a site, many people do not even think of this fact and find great keywords that include brand names and use them.

Most of the big companies have a long page of legal terms that list all their trademark names and their variations and they clearly state how they can be used.

When doing keyword research for Internet marketing we inevitably come across tons of great keywords that use trademark names and especially within the electronics and computer niches, Apple ipods, Dell laptops, Sony, Acer laptops, the list is endless and it is really tempting to use them in the url because the ranking power increases greatly when using keywords in the url, but for the long term this is way too risky.

I was reading a blog post the other day, I didn’t save it or I would link to it, but the marketer made the mistake of using Dell in his url and Dell had contacted him and demanded he take his site down. Of course, the site was ranking on page  1 for the keyword, which is how Dell noticed him, and making money and now that’s all over.

Did he have regrets? Of Course! It’s just not worth it.

Can You Rank Without Using Keywords in the URL?

Yes, but it will usually take more keyword anchor text backlinks, how many depends on the competition for those keywords.

So there are two choices:

1. Choose similar non-trademark keywords for the url and do all the on-site optimization for the trademark kw, such as h1 tags, keyword density, title tags etc… and focus your link building to get lots of anchor text links with the trademark keywords.

This is the best option when you come across really highly searched for trademark keywords that have low competition, well worth the effort.

2. Choose completely different keywords within that niche that do not have trademark names.

Sorry I have been remiss in updating too much, I have been redesigning this blog and it is taking a lot of time as I am not a blog or web designer, and right now I REALLY HATE CODE! By the way I finally figured out how to redesign a blog behind the scenes so stay tuned for that tutorial!

Anyway, here is my take on how to rank for high competition keywords, sort of a follow up to higher search engine ranks with proper keyword research, but on a positive note.

Ultimately the best keywords are those that have lots of competition, often in the millions, because those are the ones that are searched for the most, cause and effect people! It is very difficult to rank for those keywords, but there is a way.

When doing keyword research there are always long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is simply a phrase with the main keyword in it.

Example:

Main keyword: Computers

Long Tail: Buy Cheap Computers

Now, if you look at the competition for most any popular main keywords it is usually very high, keywords like, money, credit cards, loans, mortgage, insurance, health, cell phones, computers, laptops, cars, the list can go on and on. Ranking for these keywords is going to be a long hard road. So, what you need to do is target the long tails for them and rank for those.

Let’s say I want to rank for cell phones, which has 2,700,000 competing sites with allintitle search query. So, I will find a couple of good long tails that still have a good amount of searches and much less competition, for example, cheap cell phones (15,000 competing sites) and buy cell phones (8,910 competing sites).

Now I build my links with those phrases in the anchor text and over time my site will rank for those long tails, but because the main keyword cell phones is in those longtails I will inadvertently begin to climb in the SERPS for cell phones, and depending on the link building efforts and the quality of the backlinks will get there sooner or later. Make sense?

You can do this over and over again with any keywords, but again I always check Page 1 of the results, because there are some keywords that are just not worth it because too many big guns sit on Page 1, all though nothing is impossible ;-), just takes more effort, experience and time.

Time is always key here, as for some of those main keywords it could take a while to rank, but, that is okay because the long tails I pick will get me decent traffic, sales, Adsense revenue and whatever else I am targeting in the meantime, and once I get to Page 1 for the main keywords, which usually have gizzillions of daily searches then it’s all golden and I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.