Website SEO Audit

Website SEO Audit will not just measure current SEO performance but will also explain why it is performing the way it is. This is accomplished by analyzing a website for specific SEO-related factors: the website’s Google PageRank, the relevancy of the site’s meta tags, the time it takes each page to load, and the number of backlinks the site contains. What’s more the site’s image alt tags and HTML heading tags are also analyzed for relevancy. Results from the Website SEO Audit can be saved for later access.

SEO Pro

SEO Pro contains multiple SEO functionalities. To begin with it monitors the page ranking of a website from numerous search engines (supporting Alex Rank, Google PageRank, Compete.com Rank as well as Yahoo Indexed and Yahoo Inlinks). It will also search the number of times the site has been posted on Digg. It also produces a site’s meta tags.

Analytics App

Designed primarily to produce detailed information of Google Analytics in an iPhone friendly format, Analytics App naturally supports Google Analytics’s Advanced Segmentation features. This is important since it can quickly ascertain important elements after sifting through large amounts of analytical data. What’s more it can produce 55 different reports with 100 rows of data. An overall view of the information on a given site can also be created, as can a “Today” report which collects and displays only the information Google gathered for that day. A user can also register multiple logins and accounts on the same iOS device. There are also analytics apps for Android like gAnalytics, so T-Mobile 4g phones can contain the personal information you want to store and use while on the go. The makers of Analytics App claim that this app is easier than searching the same information using a desktop browser and extremely more accurate.

Ego

The Ego app is based primarily in the analysis of social media sites. It will produce the statistical information on services such as Vimeo, Tumblr, Mint, RSS feeds and Twitter – for this reason it is crucial to have excellent mobile broadband service. Since social media sites are becoming increasingly more important in maintaining a strong web presence, Ego’s social media monitoring abilities will be indispensable in assisting SEO specialist in planning their SEO strategies. Like SEO Pro and Analytics App, Ego also supplies Google Analytics data.

SEM Calculator

The SEM Calculator is designed to facilitate the planning of SEO and web advertising programs. It contains several different calculators commonly used by SEO specialists. This powerful app is capable of calculating whether a CPA or CPM ad purchase is most effective considering a given site’s use details. This is also a convenient and reliable app for those who advertise through Yahoo!, Google Adwords, or MSN when it comes to creating advertising based on Analytics App information.

These apps will make things easier while out of the office, if they don’t fundamentally change the way a person does SEO. The SEO functionality of these apps is convenient and intuitive, making working outside the office a much better experience.

Why is my PageRank Gone Today?

So when I click on the PageRank button in my SearchStatus SEO Toolbar at the bottom of Firefox, you’ll notice in my screenshot it shows as blank (even when I’m on the Social Media SEO homepage.  Below shows a quick look at the Search Status menu.

The reason your PageRank disappeared today

There are many user’s complaining about dead PageRanks, however it seems that it’s all unnecessary whining as Google has simply updated the URL used to query PR.

Although it does seem that most extensions aren’t yet savvy to the update as we’ve updated/uninstalled a couple in Chrome which still aren’t working (you can obviously tell from the ‘last updated’ date of the extension). This also seems to be the case with more PR checker websites so out guess is we’ll need to wait for an official announcement from Google before tools start getting updated.

How to get your PageRank Back

Well, as mentioned your SEO tools and ad-dons will need to upgrade their extensions, so in the meantime you’ll just have to wait.  We’ll also be awaiting Google’s announcement about this issue.

Did you know that Google will make upwards of 500 changes per year to their search algorithm?  This is an ongoing process to optimize search results and deliver a better, more relevant user experience?

It is not very often that we, as the average Google user, get to see very deep into the algorithm that drives the ranking of Google’s search results.

In fact, in the world of SEO‘s and Internet marketers, Google’s brand has become one where their algorithm and ranking methods are like the dark, secret powers of the Jedi.

However, lately Google has been opening up quite a bit more about their search algorithm, PageRank, and what changes are going into their engineering to help deliver better search results to the end user.

According to Yahoo News, Google recently updated their search algorithm with its Panda update (versions one and two).  These updates were downright destructive to many content site owners and to a degree ineffective.

Google’s been continuing to crank out adjustments (500 in the last year) and is (relatively) happy to keep us updated of this progress – but algorithm insights are far and few between.

On Thursday, Google put together a video giving a much deeper look at the search algorithm and the changes that are continually analyzed and implemented.  The video also shows the rigorous process that changes must go through before they are actually implemented.

Here’s Google talking about their search algorithm:

I’m surprised I didn’t catch this earlier, and if someone from Mashable is reading this they are probably laughing at me.  But I just noticed that Mashable.com now has a PR8 (PageRank of 8).

What’s PageRank you ask?  According to the meta data of the PageRank button on the Google toolbar, PageRank is “Google’s view of the importance of this page.”

For as long as I can remember, Mashable.com carried a PR7.  And then when I looked this morning, I noticed the PR8.

I haven’t really noticed the PR ranking of Mashable so much lately because I hardly ever use Firefox as a web browser.  I’ve pretty much converted whole heartily over to Chrome.  And why wouldn’t I – I can open and close Chrome about 5 times before Firefox will load once.

So congrats to Mashable.com for the PR8.  Here’s a list of other PR8 sites that Mashable has now joined the ranks of:

HuffingtonPost.com

TechCrunch.com

Engadget.com

Technorati.com

Gawker.com

Gizmodo.com

TheDailyBeast.com

BoingBoing.net

CNN’s Political Ticker

NYTimes Krugman Blog

Google Blog

There’s probably a lot more (maybe, maybe not…) sites that have a PR8, but this is a list I grabbed by doing a great search through Technorati’s Top 100 blog list.

I have to be honest with you here, the concept of preventing your tags and categories from being crawled, indexed, and thus generating PageRank (PR) from Google is ludicrous to me.

Why in the world would any blogger using WordPress want to prevent the crawling and indexing of content pages from their blog.  The more tags and categories that you have indexed, the more exposure you’ll get in Google search results.

Let me give you an example from this blog of the benefit of allowing your categories and tags to be indexed.

Below is an image of the keyword phrase “apple iphone 5”, which drives a fair amount of search traffic to my blog each day.

Notice in this graph that the main pages of my site that are getting the most traffic for the keyword phrase “apple iphone 5” are tags – to be more specific the “iphone-iphone-5” tag and the “apple-iphone-5-images” tag.

In fact, you’ll also notice that the tag “apple-iphone-5” has increased nearly 8500% in impressions and over 13,000% in clicks in Google.

This is something that would have never happened in my blog if I had categories and tags blocked from Google crawlers.

And then there’s the PageRank being delivered from this particular tag. As you can see in the image below, this tag alone carries a PR3 which dramatically helps all of the unique articles within this tag to earn more PR and authority.

Here’s the image of the PR for this tag:

And that’s just an example of one tag within my blog that is driving high levels of traffic.  And this traffic is a result of the PageRank and exposure in Google’s search results.

Then you have categories.

I think this is the easiest part for me to explain because you can verify that all 12 categories along the top of this blog carry at least a PR4.

And the categories themselves, because they are found in Google’s search results, help contribute to the overall traffic coming to my site.

Why this is safe from a content standpoint

The tags and categories within your blog, if you are building them strategically, will have a unique mix of your articles underneath them.  And these articles make up the unique content found within each category and tag.

This mix of articles, which are unique for each category and tag, allows Google to see unique content per category and tag.

Each category and tag is a page within Google just like any one of your individual articles.  This is true because each category and tag has it’s own unique URL.

And Google will see each URL as an individual page that is available to receive PageRank and be ranked for search results for specific keyword phrases.

Again, blocking Google from your categories and tags is something that makes absolutely no sense to me, and in fact, works directly against the whole premise of SEO – and that is, to get exposure in Google search results in order to increase traffic to your blog.

What are citations in Google Places?

Citations are to Google Places pages as backlinks are to your website – basically, they are votes, in the form of links (or mentions) throughout the web that are directly pointed at your business.

Google PageRank algorithm, all the way back in the beginning of Google when they first started crawling and indexing websites, back link analysis has always been at the core of their algorithm used to determine authority and ranking for web pages.

In fact, in the paper that Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote back at Stanford in 1998, the Google founders specifically referenced citations when they said the following:

2.1.1 Description of PageRank Calculation

Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page. PageRank is defined as follows:

We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one.

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this paper.  [REF:  Stanford INFO labs]

So as you can see, citations were critically important (and still are) in determining the authority and rankings of particular sites in the Google’s search results.

Citations are now equally important when it comes to your Google Places page ranking in local Google search results.

One way to start building highly authoritative citations (references and links) back to your Google Places page is by using the “Discussions” search element:

As you can see above, the “Discussions” search filter is along the left hand side.

This is a great way to find new potential opportunities for building citations back to your Google Places page.

In the example above, I typed the phrase “flower shops in athens ga” in the search bar, which is a very local based search phrase.

Now I want to click “Discussions” to change the search results to show me only those sites that Google thinks are actual discussions taking place around my business and market.

By clicking through some of the sites in the “Discussions” search results, you now want to find sites where discussions are happening, and there are opportunities for you to join the discussion as your business.

Adding your comments to a discussion will sometimes open the opportunity for you to leave your business address and / or link back to your website.

These would be “citations” – the things your Google Places page needs desperately to building higher rankings in the local search results on Google.

So what’s the ultimate goal of any business using a Facebook Fan Page as a marketing tool?

To get into the newfeeds of thousands, or perhaps millions, or Facebook users and for those users to comment, “like”, and share those updates.

However, what most businesses (and most people in general) don’t realize is that Facebook’s news feed is driven by an algorithm that determines what updates are seen at the top of the news stream, and what updates are never seen at all.

The algorithm is called EdgeRank.

EdgeRank is to Facebook’s news stream as PageRank is to Google’s search results.

At the end of the day, EdgeRank will determine whether or not your Facebook Fan Page updates get high levels of exposure, or just get buried in a mound of never-to-be-seen wall updates.

And just like with Google search results, if you can produce Fan Page updates that earn high quality EdgeRank scores, you’ll reap the benefits of massive exposure and increased fans because you’ll be found at the top of everyone’s news feed.

The 3 components of EdgeRank

1) Affinity Score – this is the weight given between the user who is viewing a wall update, and the creator of the update.  The more frequent a “viewer” and “creator” have interacted in the past, the higher the affinity score will be between the creator’s wall update and the viewer.  For example, if you send out an update to someone who interacts frequently with your updates, your update will more likely appear higher and more often than on someone’s wall who has never interacted with your updates.

2)  Edge Type – since the algorithm is actually called “EdgeRank”, then there must be something called an “Edge”, right?  Anytime something happens in (or derived from) a wall, it’s called an “Edge”. When you send out an update from your Facebook Fan Page, that update is called an “Edge”. When someone “comments”, “likes”, or “shares” your update, those interactions are called an “Edge”. From the perspective of the algorithm, not all “Edges” are created equal. For example, a “comment” or “share” might carry more weight than a “Like”. EdgeRank calculates all of the “Edge” interactions when determining rankings.

3)  Time – since Facebook is all about the “here & now”, time obviously plays a huge role in determining what is relevant, and what is old news. The older an “Edge” (or a wall update) is, the less weight that “Edge” carries. Also, any interaction (or other “Edge” interactions) that occur with older updates, the less weight those interactions carry (the less important the “Edge” becomes).

What does this mean to me?

So now that we now there’s an actual algorithm driving the ranking of our updates in our fan’s new stream, we can now take steps to creating higher quality wall updates that will have more authority, and get seen by more people – thus increasing our rankings, exposure, traffic, and fans to our page’s.

Following the underlying concept of EdgeRank, it makes sense that as a Facebook Fan Page admin, you’d want to create more valuable updates that people will actually want to interact with, and create them more often.

If all you send out from your Facebook Page is marketing and promotional type updates (advertisements) then it’s unlikely anyone will interact with your fan page, and in turn, no one will ever see your updates.  This will work adversely toward your goal of leveraging your Facebook Fan Page to build your brand and generate more revenue.

One of the best ways to create high quality updates that earn a high “EdgeRank” score is to create updates that encourage your Facebook fans to interact, respond, or share your updates.

Launching a content, a give a way, asking questions, sharing relevant news, sharing tips or tricks, providing exclusive (insider) information, etc…

You have to start thinking differently about the updates you send out from your Fan Page, because the “less” interactive potential your updates carry, the less performance you’ll get from your Facebook page.

It’s all about “EdgeRank” my friends – live it, learn it!

As a blogger, I obviously spend a lot of time in front of my computer. Doing things like writing new articles, tweeking websites and other web projects, and providing consulting to others has caused me to use multiple browsers.

I use multiple browsers primarily because I want to see that the CSS styles I change are loading properly in the different browsers.

So this morning, my eyes were opened to a scary reality.

I realized I know use 6 different browsers and 2 different operating systems.

My list of browsers:

• Chrome – which I use about 70% of the time simply because it’s super fast.
• Firefox – I use about 25% of the time, primarily for checking Google Pagerank, SEO variables, and mostly for the Firebug addon (a must have for site design and hacking)
• Safari – falls in the 5% of the time somewhere and I use primarily to check how changes look
• Internet Explorer – again, within the 5% piece of the pie and I use for things like access wireless routers (wireless networks) and also to see how site changes look in IE.  To my unending confusion, Internet Explorer is the most used browser in the world, yet every time I open it I’m painfully reminded of why I absolutely can’t stand IE.
• Opera – I actually just started using Opera on my desktop not too long ago, and again I primarily check website changes and configuration. After all, Opera does now have 150 million users worldwide.
• RockMelt – now RockMelt is something I just got an invite to install last week. It is basically a mashup of Google Chrome and Facebook… no lie! The only problem I have with RockMelt so far is when I have the sidebars (Facebook widgets) enabled, the style sheet doesn’t adapt and my text box in my WordPress blog overruns onto the sidebars – something that is very frustrating.

My list of operating systems:

• Windows XP – I use Windows XP most of the time primarily because I do not have a MAC.
• Mac OS X – even though I don’t personally own a Mac, I use a lot of Mac’s throughout the week. I do IT, live streaming, and editing (Final Cut Pro is amazing…) work at my church and help other people out on their Mac’s, so I get a lot of exposure to Mac OS X. What I love more than anything is when adding Fusion or Parallels to a Mac which in essence converts you Mac into a PC – ironic huh?
• Linux – the Linux version I use, and have ever used is Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu mostly on my laptop and primarily just to try to learn more about the Linus environment.

So there is it… pretty scary huh?

I know, I just realized it this morning myself.

6 browsers and 3 operating systems – welcome to my world.

How about you?

Tell me about your world of browsers and operating systems.

Is their one particular platform that you use all the time?

Do you split your time between other platforms?

Anxious to read your responses.

Does PageRank Really Matter Anymore? I say ‘Yes’

I keep hearing comments from people saying that Google PageRank doesn’t matter anymore. Why doesn’t PageRank matter anymore, you might be asking – well because Google says so, that’s why. But my response is just because Google says so publicly, doesn’t mean a hill of beans!

Check out this question and answer exchange between a forum user and Google:

Question and answer taken from Google Webmaster forum:

Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months

A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

I definitely understand why people feel that PageRank is not important, however of the “over 200” signals Google uses to determine authority, PageRank is one that is equally made up of hundreds of variables that are all represent authority – and it happens to represent a variable that is visible to us all.

There is, without question, a direct correlation between a site’s authority and ranking and their PageRank. For example, HuffingtonPost.com is a PR8 and #1 in Technorati’s 100.  Mashable is a PR7 and typically #3 in Technorati 100 and dominates top rankings in Google search results for a myriad of high traffic keywords.

I believe Google says “don’t worry about PageRank” as a position and strategy to fight spammy, artificial back linking. No sooner does Google say “Hey guys, PageRank means everything to a site” and instantly the spam cess pool grows.

I definitely understand why people feel that PageRank is not important, however of the “over 200” signals Google uses to determine authority, PageRank is one that is equally made up of hundreds of variables that are all represent authority – and it happens to represent a variable that is visible to us all.

There is, without question, a direct correlation between a site’s authority and ranking and their PageRank.

For example, HuffingtonPost.com is a PR8 and #1 in Technorati’s 100.  Mashable is a PR7 and typically #3 in Technorati 100 and dominates top rankings in Google search results for a myriad of high traffic keywords.

I believe Google says “don’t worry about PageRank” as a position and strategy to fight spammy, artificial back linking. No sooner does Google say “Hey guys, PageRank means everything to a site” and instantly the spam cess pool grows.

What do you think?

Do you think that PageRank still matters in representing a website’s overall authority?

I wrote back in November about Google’s idea of adding “site speed” to their already complex algorithm that determines website rankings in the Google search results.

The world is changing fast on the web, and people want data and information faster, more up to date, and from sites that can give it to them more efficiently.

People’s attention spans are growing more narrow and it’s unlikely someone will stick around if you website doesn’t load fast.

Today, Google officially announced the implementation of “site speed” into their algorithm for ranking websites.

But don’t worry too much – unless your site is extremely slow – because the speed of your site is not going to have more influence over the relevancy factor.

According to Google, “while site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.”

Some things to consider regarding site speed:

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance

Read more at Google’s official announcement

Updating your blog frequently is critically important for the health, crawlability, and exposure of your content in search engines.

It’s not something people think about too often, but did you know that the frequency in which you update your blog has a lot to do with the authority, rankings, and exposure of your blog?

Authority

Let’s take authority for example.  When I mention authority, I’m referring primarily to Google’s PageRank (PR).  The frequency in which you post new content can directly impact your blog’s authority because new article’s are what attracts the Google crawlers back to your blog.  New articles mean new crawling and indexing opportunities in Google.

So the more Google comes back to your site to crawl and index your content, the more healthy your blog will become in Google’s index.  And a healthier blog (from a technical perspective) typically means more authority and higher PageRank (PR).

Rankings

The more frequently you update you blog, the more authority your blog will build over time.  The more authority your blog has in Google, the higher rankings your content will receive for comparative keyword phrases.

For any given keyword phrase that someone searches, there are typically thousands of pages in which Google can display in the search results.  What determines the pages that will be shown on the front page (the top 10)?  It’s simply a matter of authority.

Ranking in Google is a visual representation of authority for any given query.

So by updating your blog more frequently will allow your blog to build more authority.  This authority will allow for higher comparative rankings for any given search query.

Exposure

Of course, the higher your articles rank in Google for search queries, the more exposure and traffic your blog will receive.

It’s critically important for blog owners to understand that each page (or article) within your blog is an entrance point to your site.  Whatever people see at the top of your blog (the header), and the sidebars of your blog are what is typically seen by every single visitor.

So the more exposure your blog has, the more aware of your sites design, layout, and type of information that is being exposed in the parts of your blog that are present on every single article.

But the button line is that if you want to have more authority, which results in higher rankings in Google, which results in more traffic and exposure, then you need to start increasing the frequency in which you post articles.

Blogging is the new SEO

People who are still hiring “SEO” types to go out build spam links in comments, or include your website in a link farm, have failed to keep up with the search engine industry.  You cannot – I repeat, cannot – achieve high levels of exposure on the web from just a link building campaign.

I know, there are going to be some of you SEO types who will immediately clamor back at me in utter disgust!

“How can you say that link building isn’t relevant and can’t increase your rankings in Google?  I thought Google looked at the links pointing back to a site to determine it’s rankings!”

It is true that Google organizes and ranks web pages by analyzing links.  But the key point to that phrase is “analyzing links!“

If you assume that you can simply build links to improve your rankings in Google, then you don’t quite understand the depths, the technology, and the shear brilliance of the “analyzing links” factor that determines what websites get top rankings.

It’s been nearly 10 years now since Google first launched their algorithm that “brought order to the web.”  And it would be quite an understatement to say that Google’s algorithm has evolved since then.  One of the ways Google has improved considerably is in determining what links were generated manually and what links were built naturally.

You see, when links are built to any particular website, there are patterns that develop.  Google has gotten really good at determining what patterns closely resemble “spam link building”, and what patterns resemble natural link building.

The sites that have a reputation for “spam link building” are ultimately discredited in Google’s index.  This means that no matter what you do, nor how many links you build back to you site, you are basically blacklisted from the index with no chance of ranking for your competitive keywords.

Blogging is the new SEO

In my view, blogging is the best way to build high quality, natural links to your website.  Unless, of course you are Coca Cola, Nike, or Huffington Post, and you already have a strong reputation that will attract authoritative links.  But most of us mere mortals aren’t so fortunate!

So you have to work hard and find ways to get exposure and build an audience.  And blogging achieves that faster then any other method.  Plus, for the most part, businesses are working within a budget and need inexpensive solutions to build their rankings in Google.  Fortunately, starting a blog can be free, or very inexpensive at the most.

As you generate new content in your blog, each new article is considered a new page that’s published to the web.  That new page, from Google’s perspective, is part of the overall “web” that makes up the Internet and needs to be crawled and indexed like any other web page.

So the more articles you produce, the more frequently Google will come back to your site crawl and index your content.  And this process continues, within a short period you’ll find your PageRank increasing.

And continuing on from there – as your PageRank increases, each new article that you write will get a little bit higher rankings because of your blog’s new authority.  Which in turn will attract more visitors and more frequent crawling from Google.

This cycle will continue indefinitely so long as you continue to produce high quality content on a consistent basis.

As you PageRank continues to increase, so does your exposure and rankings in Google.  This exposure is what presents your content to a wide, diverse audience of people who will begin to link back to you for various reasons.

And all of the backlinking is 100% natural.

The more people “naturally” link back to you, more profound the cycle described above becomes.  This is because Google wants to present the absolute highest quality pages at the top of their search results.  So the ones that make it are the ones that have “authority” behind their pages.  And authority, from Google’s perspective, entails natural link building, lots of traffic, and consistent content production.

And a blog, as I’ve already stated, is without a doubt the most effective way achieve high levels of exposure and top rankings in Google search results – otherwise known as SEO!

I don’t want to carry on here about old, outdated SEO strategies.  So let me get right to the point… the best way to build the highest quality backlinks to your website (or blog) is to actually forget about building backlinks to your website or blog.

And what I mean by that is this – the website that is going to get the highest quality back links, and in turn the highest possible PR and Google rankings, is the site that is producing high quality content that people on the web find valuable!

It’s a natural thing for people to link to high quality, informative, and updated content on the web.  And if you just forget about building backlinks to your site, and instead focus on how your website can deliver high quality and informative content to your readers, then you’ll build better backlinks than what you could have built through a targeted backlinking campaign.

Google’s analysis of backlinks has evolved to where it nearly mimics the natural browsing habits of people.  And the best, most authoritative PR (PageRank) is going to flow to the sites that have the highest quality (most natural) backlinks and traffic.

Most importantly, traffic is not going to be increasing to your website if you are not providing high quality, informative content.  And what’s one of the most common sources of traffic for a website???  Referring links!

So forget about building backlinks to your website, and instead think about what’s most important for your business and your website, then build high quality, consistent, and frequent content around those subjects.

And if you focus on the things that are most important to your visitors, readers, and customers, then backlinks will build naturally.  And when backlinks are being built naturally to your website, then you’ll experience the highest possible PageRank, traffic, and rankings in Google!

Governing Dynamics of the Web

Most anyone you talk to who has an online presence wishes for the same thing – more exposure, more traffic, and more sales conversions.

However, taking Google search results for example, when you only have 10 spots on the front page out of millions of search results, not everyone is going to be seen.

In fact, only a select few web pages will ever see the front page of Google.

Let’s take social media as another example.  Only a select few individuals, web properties, or businesses will capture the lions share of traffic from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and blogging.

Why is this?

The Governing Dynamics of the Web

I’m going to call this phenomena of comparatively few web properties (blogs, web pages, websites, etc…) gaining the majority of exposure, and the major of web properties gaining very little exposure, The Governing Dynamics of the Web – or universal laws that apply to all web properties.

Let’s look at Google for example.

One of the ways the Google algorithm attributes authority to any web property is through the frequency of freshly updated content.

So the more you update your site, blog, etc… the more authority Google will attribute to your that property.

This site (socialmediaseo.net) is a great example of this process, and proof that I’m right.

I started this site less than 3 months ago, and we’ve already achieved a PR3 (Google PageRank of 3).  To verify this you’ll need the Google toolbar.

But the point is that in less than 3 months, through the frequently updated content, this site has achieved a PR3 – a modest level of authority in deed for such a new site.

Fresh Content = More Authority

So one of the governing dynamics of the web – or universal laws of web exposure – is that the more you update a web property with fresh content, the more authority that property will build, and the faster it will build it.

Keeping your site updated with fresh, on target content is in my opinion, the most important thing anyone can do to build an authoritative online presence.

It’s just not possible anymore to build a static web site, just let it sit with the same content you built it with, and achieve high levels of authority and exposure on the web.

Google PageRank Update

For those of you that follow your Google PageRank, you might have gotten a good surprise today (or bad, depending…)

Google’s PageRank seems to have updated on the Google Toolbar.

A lot of webmasters and SEO’s follow the Google PageRank indicator in an attempt to visually get a feel for how “healthy” their website is in the Google index.

What is Google’s PageRank

You can head over to Wikipedia to get an indepth description of Google’s PageRank.

But to summarize, Google PageRank is a ranking system that attributes a number from 0 – 10 to webpages that are indexed in Google.

Any web page that is able to be retrieved by Google in the search results will have a PageRank assigned to it.  Some pages are too new to have any PageRank attributed, but that doesn’t mean the page isn’t accounted for in Google – it’s just that Google hasn’t assigned a number to it yet.

The PageRank Number

For websites that are new, they will typically get a PageRank of “0” (zero).  This is because new pages have yet to establish any level of authority, backlinks, or content.

Websites that are old and established, such as Yahoo.com that has a PageRank of 9.

The perspective here is that the higher your PageRank, the stronger your rankings, presence, and authority you have in Google.

That’s why webmasters and SEO’s are always trying to do everything they can to increase their PageRank – more PageRank = more authority!

From SEO RoundTable:

SEORoundtable.com provided more insight into the PageRank update, plus information about the previous updates:

“There seems to be a Google Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. We have threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum. The update seemed to have started sometime yesterday afternoon and many SEOs and webmasters are chatting about it now.

The last PageRank update prior to this one was in June 2009, which may have just been a technical quirk because the one prior to that was just a month before in May.

In any event, like I say every time:

Yes, a Toolbar PageRank update means nothing in terms of your ranking changing anytime soon. The PageRank scores shown in the toolbar are outdated and have zero direct impact on your Google rankings. That doesn’t mean that PageRank has no influence, but the toolbar score does not have any influence. Google shows us one thing, but yet uses another thing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum.”

Gourmet Magazine, a Conde Nast publication, is being forced out of business.  The reason:  a slump in ad revenue.

And when I read the article on Yahoo.com, I kept asking myself this question – what is Conde Nast thinking?  Or what have they been thinking all along?

Did Conde Nast really believe they could continue forward with high end printed magazines (in other words, expensive magazines) in a down economy that is also a web based economy?

Apparently they thought they would come through it – but today tells iof a much different outcome.

Conde Nast needs to be looking at ways to build their already strong online presence with these brands.  And in fact, they should’ve been doing this quite a long time ago.

For example, Gourmet.com has a PR7 – this means they have a strong online presence, especially in Google search results.  And with a PR7 (PageRank of 7), they have a very strong foundation for increasing their online brand.

Wired.com is a great example of how Conde Nast can be successful online.  This is a great online publication with tons of traffic, and probably tons of ad revenue.  But Wired.com is only one of the many brands that Conde Nast runs.  I think all of the brands should’ve been shifted to building their online brands a long time ago.

That’s why, if you desire – I mean really, truly want to dominate the search results of Google – then you have to do it in a natural, organic way.

There is no more fooling Google into thinking your website has strong backlinks, or a lot of backlinks, when they were all hand built by you!

So here’s the 3 ways to build your brand naturally in Google:

1)  Build a blog for your business, product, service, or desired mission.  Just Google “wordpress” “blogger” “typepad” etc… it’s wide open with free bloggging platform.

2)  Do your keyword research.  Find the keyword phrases that are more reflective of your business, products, and services from the customers perspective.

3)  Generate Content Continuously.  If you write in your blog everyday with keyword targeted, on topic content, then Google’s crawlers will come back to your site sometimes as quickly as you post new content.

And the more Google crawls your site, the more pagerank you obtain.  The more pagerank you have, the more traffic and exposure you build on the web.

But a recent study from Burst Media shows that the amount of time spent by Internet users on social networks is smaller than the amount of time spent on, and searching for, content sites.

Below is a graph showing online activity:

What does this mean for a business?  It means if you want to connect to more prospects, generate more leads, and build a strong brand name, then you must start generating content!

And what’s the easiest and cheapest way for a business to generate content?  Build a blog!

Blogging for business is, in my opinion, the most effective way to market your products and services.  Content (blog postings) on the web have a unique way of atracting a niche audience.

Let’s say you’re a carpet cleaner in Orlando, Florida.

If you build a blog, and start writing about carpet cleaning – how to’s, best practices, customer experiences, mistakes to avoid, etc… – and you highlight your content with the fact that your business serves Orlando, Florida, then your blog will begin attracting people in the Orlando area that are interested in, or searching for way to best clean their carpets.

And since the study shows that more people are online pursuing content than hanging out on social networks, your content will, overtime, begin to attract a large audience of readers and customers.

Plus, the more content you generate, and the more frequent your blog posting, the more Google will come back to your blog to crawl and index your content.

This process of generating content and Google crawling your content, contributes to the PageRank of your blog.  And the PageRank formula is this – the more you have, the higher your rankings in Google will be and the more traffic you’ll get.

So if you’re a business, large or small, then I strongly recommend you build a blog, start generating keyword targeted content, and do it on a consistent basis (daily, weekly).

The return on this effort, over time, will pay off handsomely for your business, and you’ll soon find that you’re getting more calls from people who are online searching for what you offer.

And the best reason of all to get started with blog is that your competitors are more than likely not doing it either!  This leaves a huge opportunity for you to gain a competitive edge both now, and into the future.

Here are some observations that are popping up across the web as we speak:

From Digital Point:

Caffeine bouncing in and out of serps – Big Fluxes today

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Today I have noticed some big changes happening gain. My site was rocking and rolling the last week in the serps. I noticed that the caffeine results and main results were almost identical however about 2 hours ago that all changed. Looks like a rollback to me. I remmber this bigtime during th Big Daddy update however we never returned until about 1 week ago. Anyone else seeing this happen.

I just came across another anomolous result, just as I was thinkging things were settling down.

Results 1 – 10 of about 4,490,000 for widget

Only 9 results appear on page 1. We see

“Image results for widget – Report images”

Nine listings, with the ever present wikipedia as #1. (No indented results)

“News results for widget” (One totally unrelated listing)

“Video results for widget”

“Searches related to: widget”

First time I can remember seeing Google count to 9 and call it 10.

The changes were beginning to pop up over the weekend and just today we are starting to see more discussions unfold.

Google has recently launched it’s Google Caffeine search engine, so obviously we have changes in the making. To what extent, and to what degree website owners will be effected has yet to be seen.

I do know this, Google Caffeine is a move designed to compete with Twitter, and now Facebook, search engines that are showing results of real time search data – content that is being produced now on the web.

So my recommendation to you is this – start a blog, integrate it with a Twitter and Facebook profile, and start producing content.

This way, when Google does (and they will) begin to make sweeping changes to their ranking algorithms, you will have fresh data ready to be presented.

Welcome to Part II in ourWordpress SEO Tips Series. This article is going to show you what is probably the most critical component to new start-ups, small businesses, even large corporations, in achieving high levels of exposure in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Here it is:  Get Started Now!

I believe it was Seth Godin who said, “How did I become successful?  I showed up!”

That means, very simply, he started writing content.  And when it comes to the web, CONTENT IS KING!

So you want to increase your exposure in Google search results?

You want to have 15,000 page views a month from people who are searching for what you offer – your business, products, and services?

If so, then you need to build a WordPress and you need to get writing now!

Don’t worry about how good your writing is, how eloquent, how refined.  You aren’t going to start out an expert.  But getting started is critical, and you will develop and hone your skills as you progress.

Google PageRank Is Key

The sooner you get started producing content for your blog, the sooner Google will crawl, index, and start attributing PageRank to your site.

Very simple – the more PageRank you have, the higher your rankings will be in Google, the deeper Google crawlers will crawl and index your site, and the more exposure you’ll have in Google.

PageRank is basically a measurement of brand.  The stronger your brand, the more exposure (rankings, traffic, authority) you’ll have in Google – PERIOD!

There are no shortcuts to building your brand and achieving authority.

That’s why it’s critical for you to get started writing now!

Don’t wait… the longer you do, the longer it’s going to take to start building traffic, subscribers, PageRank, and ultimate success from exposure in search engines.

Get Started Now!

Make sure you stay tuned as we progress through out 10 Part Series on SEO For WordPress, How To & Strategies For Success!

Subscribing to our blog is probably the best way to ensure you don’t miss a thing.

SUBSCRIBE HERE NOW

This is the beginning of my 10 part series on “WordPress SEO Tips – How To & Strategies.”

WordPress is, without question, the most powerful tool for achieving high levels of exposure, and top search rankings in Google’s search results (the ultimate goal and purpose of SEO).

Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, has even stated that WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the technical SEO elements automatically!

That’s a strong statement coming from Matt Cutts, and if he is willing to put his name, and Google’s, on the line with a statement like that, then I’m willing to believe that WordPress is a powerful SEO tool.

More than just hearing people say that WordPress is a powerful tool, I’ve actually experienced it with many of my own, and my client’s, WordPress blogs.

I’ve seen WordPress blogs get crawled, indexed, and up to a PageRank of 3 within 4 weeks, and I’ve seen new postings from WordPress blogs achieve #1 rankings in Google within hours!

Hey, why use a blog for SEO anyway?

That’s a great question! Let me give you 2 reasons why a blog, be it WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, or whatever, is your quickest path to top search engine rankings.

1) Blogs build page inventory in Google. Each blog posting is actually a new page that is crawled and indexed in Google search results. So, the cumulative effect of writing a lot of content is that you are continually building an inventory of pages that are accessible in Google for a wide range of keyword phrases.

2) Google loves freshly updated content. Google’s algorithm is changing from the days of old! It used to be where you could just build a static HTML site, stuff keywords throughout the title, description, and keyword tags in the code, and you’d be able to rank for those phrases.

Well, things have changed!

Google has gotten a lot smarter about how people attribute authority to web pages, and about how black hat SEO’s try to game the algorithms.

So Google has turned to favor sites that feed a continual flow of freshly updated content – something that is impossible to achieve with a static HTML website (non-blog site).

If people are finding your content, bookmarking your site, subscribing to your RSS feed, and coming back for more, then that means people will also be linking to your content. The more traffic, subscribers, and links you have, the more PageRank will be attributed to your site. The more PageRank your site has, the higher it will rank in Google, the more often your site will be crawled, an the deeper those crawls will be – all of which adds more PageRank to your blog.

To satisfy Google’s insatiable hunger for fresh content, you have to feed Google with freshly updated blog posts. In return for your giving, Google will give back with PageRank and authority. It’s actually a great relationship!

Why WordPress?

As I mentioned earlier, just having Matt Cutts promote WordPress as the best SEO tool is enough for me! Beyond that, WordPress is a super clean CMS (content management system), that Google finds easy to crawl and whose coding is well structured.

Also, some other reasons why WordPress is such a powerful SEO tool, and I’ll be covering these in more detail in later parts, is that:

1) WordPress allows super efficient keyword optimization of posts

2) SEO plugins help you optimize your overall blog

3) You can control / custom URL structures

4) Permalinks ensure keywords are present in URL

5) Customization of tags and categories

6) Eliminate / control duplicate content issues

These are just a few of the many SEO advantages that WordPress delivers.

Make sure you stay tuned here at Social Media SEO as we dig down into the “How To” and “Strategies” of leveraging WordPress for SEO!

Finally, here’s a video of Matt Cutts talking about WordPress! It’s a great primer for the remaining posts in my series “SEO for WordPress – How To & Strategies”