Site Structure – What is Page Rank?

May 18 2010

Today I’d like to dive a little deeper into what exactly Page Rank (PR) is.

If you want to get the full story, I suggest heading over to Wikipedia.  There you’ll find all the fun and fancy math formulas that show you how Page Rank is calculated.  I’ll give you a quick overview here.

Basically, the Page Rank of a particular page can be considered its popularity on the internet as a whole.  Page Rank comes from a calculation of links pointing to that particular page times a dampening factor to simulate a normal person eventually deciding to stop clicking on links.

Toolbar Page Rank is what Google releases about four times a year for public information.  It’s a numeric value between 0 and 10 with 10 being the most popular pages.  Google.com has a Page Rank of 10.

The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank is what Google returns whenver a search query is initiated.  This is the true Page Rank and is considered to be a primary factor in how well a particular page will rank in the SERPs for a particular term.

Abstractly, you could say that for a particular search the highest PR page would be listed first and then on down the line.  In reality, there are many other factors that Google uses to display SERPs.  PR is not the only factor involved.

PR is distributed through the internet by links.  Each page will pass PR through all links that do not include a “nofollow” tag.  The amount of rank passed by each page will then be multiplied by a dampening fact of about .85.

Assume we had only 3 pages on the internet.  A, B, and C.  Each page starts with a Page Rank that is 1 divided by the total number of pages.  In this case, 1 divided by 3.  Each page starts with .33 amount of Page Rank.

As you can see here by this example, if we add another page to the internet… say D.  We have in essence sliced off a piece of Page Rank for ourselves.  1 divided by 4 (A, B, C, D) gives each page a rank of .25.

Now lets say that we own page C and D, but want page C to have more Page Rank.  We simply link page D to page C, but don’t link C back to D.  Now Page C will have .4625 Page Rank.  (D(.25)*Dampening(.85) + C(.25))

Now that we know what Page Rank is and how it is calculated, the next logical question is:  How is it used?

Every time a search is done on the Google search engine, it will return results based on a number of factors.  One of which is the Page Rank of a given page.  That said, we can use this knowledge to pool Page Rank inside our own websites to have specific pages have a better chance of getting into the SERPs.

Google also requires a minimum amount of Page Rank for your page to even be included inside it’s index.  So, just making a page doesn’t mean that you’ll have enough authority to get ranked or even indexed by Google.

Questions or Comments?

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Search Marketing – Site Structures

May 17 2010

In today’s post we’re going to go over a few basic website structures that you can find on the web and which of these will make the most sense for your first website.

There are two types of site structure that you’ll need in order to make the most of your SEO efforts.

1. Visitor Site Structure – This is the organization of links on your website that visitors can follow.  Your basic navigation.

2. Spider Site Structure – This is the organization of links on your website that the search engines will follow.  The important one.

Any link on your website a visitor will be able to follow.  You can stop the search engines from following a link by including a “nofollow” tag to the link.  Links that include the “nofollow” tag will not allow Page Rank to pass through that link.

This allows us to build a website that is both user friendly AND optimized for ranking with the search engines.

If you aren’t familiar with Page Rank, I will post some basic Page Rank concepts tomorrow.

There are 3 main site structures that I’d like to cover today.  Many others are out there, but I feel these are the most important.

1. YarnBall – This site structure is the most common on the internet.  A YarnBall happens whenever a site is built with a template and one simple navigation bar that cause each page on the website to link to each other page on the site.  Simply, every page links to every other page.  This structure distributes Page Rank evenly among all pages on the site.

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2. Circles – This site structure isn’t all that common and typically only used by SEO experts that are trying to rank for a specific term or two.  In this structure, each page links to a page next in line and never links back to the previous page EXCEPT at the starting point.  With this structure you have 2 pages that will gather page rank.

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3. Stacked Pyramids – This site structure I consider to be the best choice for most SEO campaigns.  With this structure, you have your home page linking to 3-5 Tier 1 pages.  Each of these pages links to 3-5 Tier 2 Pages, but NOT to each other.  The Tier 1 pages and Tier 2 pages all link back to the home page.

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By using the stacked pyramids, you are able to pool your page rank from the website back toward the home page of your website or toward your most competitive keywords.

This gives us two advantages.

The first, most naturally occurring incoming links will be pointing toward your home page.  Thus giving more Page Rank to your home page.

The second, if we start our link building campaign with some of our less competitive keywords, we will be driving links deep within our website structure pooling Page Rank to be pass back toward our home page.

I know this all may seem a little random at this point coming from our keyword research, but stick with me!

Tomorrow we’ll go over what exactly Page Rank is and how it relates to these site structures, get some images posted to help visualize, and then move on to organizing our keywords into pages that we’ll plug into the stacked pyramid structure.

From there, we’ll just need to build our website and start building links.

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Keyword Competition – Low Hanging Fruits

May 14 2010

Let’s start by pulling up our keyword spreadsheet we started last week.

Currently you should have a giant list of keywords with corresponding search volumes, a column with a relevance score, columns with weighted search volumes, a column for backlinks and title information to the #1 and #5 listing on Google.

Here’s what mine looks like:

Now what we need to do is decide how much effort we are willing to put into ranking for the keywords we’ve selected.  What we want to do is “Dress for Success.”  Starting with less competitive keywords will allow us to see some results early on and motivate us to start tackling some of the harder search terms.

As I discussed yesterday, one of the key factors in ranking for a search term is inbound links (aka backlinks).  As we can see from my keyword list, there are some pretty significant numbers here!

The leading site for “SEO Strategy” has 4,809,581 links!  If I managed to get a new link to my site somewhere on the web every 5 minutes, I would spend the next 24,047,905 minutes trying to get that many backlinks. That’s a little over 45 years of continuous brute force linking effort.  No thanks!

Now, don’t lose heart… we’ll implement some strategies in the future that allows us to put our link building efforts in over drive.  But, this keyword is going to be a killer to try and overcome.

Since my business will be based in Vermont, I’m going to go ahead and add Vermont to the beginning of my search terms and re-analyze the competition.  I’m not giving up on the more competitive search terms, I’m just going to save them for later and start with something a little more manageable from the start.

In general, I like to start my SEO campaign with search terms that have leading sites with less than 800 backlinks or less than 2,000 backlinks and don’t have the search term in the title.

The reason I don’t mind chasing down slightly larger sites with the keywords not in the page title is very simple.  It’s likely that those websites aren’t even paying attention to showing up for that search term.  Since one of the fundamental steps in doing SEO is putting your keywords in the title of your page, it’s unlikely that they’ve actually done any SEO to rank for those keywords.

This is low hanging fruit.

Keep working through this process until you have 20-25 keywords that you feel are in your “comfort zone” starting out.

Stay tuned!  Tomorrow I’ll give you a basic overview of site structures and how they apply to SEO.

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SEO Basics – Getting Up To Speed

May 13 2010

As I was writing about the beginning stages of competition analysis yesterday, I started to realize that someone new to search engine optimization (SEO) might need a little bit of a foundation to really understand the steps we’ll be taking as we move forward.  It can be difficult to read a post about keyword research without an understanding of the fundamental factors that go into ranking on the search engines.

Let’s take a moment an go over what I believe are the 5 main factors to a good SEO campaign.  I’ll be brief for now and really focus in on each factor as we get to building our website.

1. On-Page Fact0rs – Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, H1 tags, the content on the page, site structure and internal links.  Basically, you want the keywords you are trying to rank for to appear in all of these areas.  Keyword density, I believe, does not play a major role in your rankings.  The  keywords should appear in your content, but above all, your content needs to be relevant and natural.  Being natural will also improve the user experience and possibly increase sales response.

2. Inbound Links – Links pointing to the site from other web pages.  Inbound links should be text and not images for maximum benefit.  You want your keywords to be linking to your site, not your business name or product name (unless that’s what you want to rank :P ) There are tons of ways to get links for your sites, and you should use most of them.  Again, it’s important to be natural.  Running around and smearing links in comment boxes all over the web will NOT significantly help your rankings.  You have to have a healthy mix in the types of links you are generating to your site.

3. Size/Age – The age of your website does play a roll in how well you rank.  Older sites typically beat newer sites with the same optimization campaign.  The size of the site also plays a big roll.  Since we have control over the links on our own site, we can in essence control what pages the search engines view as the most important.  More pages = more control.

4. Authority/PR – Page rank is a common term for how much “weight” your site has with the search engines.  It’s a number between 0 and 10 that increases by a power of about 8.  Eight PR 1 pages = One PR 2 page.  Page rank is passed evenly between all links on a page.  Therefore, a link from a PR 4 page with 1,000 other links on it may not help us as much as a link from a PR 2 page with 3-4 links.

5. Visitors – Yes, the people visiting your site have an impact on your search engine rankings!  If the search engine sends a user to your site and they instantly hit the back button, then the search engine will assume that your page wasn’t what the person intended to find and therefore shouldn’t be listed for that search result.  The search engines have ONE goal.

A good user experience!

Would you use Google if you couldn’t actually find relevant content when you searched?  No, you’d probably switch and try another search engine.  Keeping searcher’s happy is the number one goal of search engines.

As such, your click through rate from the search engine results page (clicks divided by views), time on your website, and number of pages viewed all have an impact on your ranking results.

This all ties directly back to why we are spending so much time on researching keywords, thinking about keyword relevancy, and finally analyzing competition.  You want visitors that are actually looking for your product or service, and the search engine actually wants them to find you!

Targeting relevant keywords and developing relevant content for those keywords vital to a successful SEO campaign.

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Keyword Research – Analysing Competition

May 12 2010

Today’s step in developing our keyword strategy is actually going to be the most brute force work that we have to do for this phase of starting an internet business.  Before I go any further, I’d like to mention that there are some wonderful tools out there that can do this step for you.

The one I have the most experience with is Keyword Elite.  While it has a tendency to cause the search engines to block your computer from doing a search temporarily, it can and does end up saving a lot of time in the long run.

Keyword Elite (and the other tools) aren’t cheap either.  They can run anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand dollars.  So, let me show you how to do it the old fashion way.

First, start by sorting your list of keyword from yesterday by the “Weighted Local Search Volume.”  We want to start analyzing the most searched keywords first.  Simply… more searches equals more visitors for a number one ranking.

This is where finding the competition is key.  Putting a ton of effort into a keyword you won’t even get on the first page of the search engines for will NOT yield a lot of traffic to your website.  You want to target keywords that you have a reasonable chance of getting ranked for first and work on the harder ones later.

Keyword Competition 1There are some site structure techniques we’ll use in a few weeks that will help us rank for the harder keywords while still allowing us to focus on our less competitive keywords first.

Start by taking the first search term in your list and doing a search on it in Google.  This will give us a search engine result page (SERP) with the websites that are currently ranking for that search term.

I’ll be using “Search Engine Optimization Firm” for my example.

I want you to copy the URL for the first page listing.

Now jump over to Yahoo! and search for “link:<paste the URL>” IE) link:www.fathomseo.com/

This will drop you into the Yahoo! site explorer.  From there simply click “Inlinks” and then select “Except from this Domain” from the drop down menu.

You’ll now have a fairly accurate count for the number of backlinks that this website has.  Record this number in a new column on your spreadsheet.

My search term’s number one listing on Google had 5,887 links in Yahoo!

Start another column called “In Title 1.”  For this column I want you to put the number 1 if the title of that search result had the searched keyword in it.  In my search term the title was “SEO Firm – Search Engine Marketing | Fathom SEO.”  So I would enter the number 0 in my column.

Repeat this process for the number 5 listing on your Google SERP as well, starting a new column for the number of backlinks and “In Title.”

Now, repeat the whole process for your first 20 keywords.  Painstaking, I know… but totally worth it.

I’ll also do some more explaining on why the information we are gathering is important.  For many of you that have been around the internet for some years, you may already know the key factors to getting a webpage to show up on the SERPs.  For those of you that are new, we’ll do an SEO 101 tomorrow and then analyise our results in a few days.

As always, feel free to post questions and comments.

SEO Firm – Search Engine Marketing | Fathom SEO
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Keyword Research – Relevance is Key

May 11 2010

Today’s mission is going to be relatively simple. (Pun intended)

The mission is to organize the keywords we download by relevant search volume.  Every search on the internet is backed by some sort of intent from the searcher.  Our goal is to rate each search term in our list on how closely the searcher’s intent matches our idea or product.

Example:  I’m starting a website that will be geared toward “Vermont Internet Marketing and SEO.”

Search Engine Consultant – someone searching for “Search Engine Consultant” is very likely looking for… well a search engine consultant.  That matches very closely to what my website will be offering.  Score: 100% Relevant

Download SEO Tool – Who would be searching for this?  Someone who is planning on doing their own SEO?  Someone who already does SEO looking for some programs to assist them?  That isn’t what I’ll be offering, so this gets a score of 30% since there is still some chance it’s a small business owner looking for help.

Get the general idea?  If not, write a comment and I’ll explain more.

We’re going to start by opening our downloaded list of keywords we got from yesterday’s post and do a bit of organization.  So, open up that list of keywords and let’s get started.

When you first open up the file, you’ll notice that there are tons of columns.  For now, I want you to delete all but the Keyword, Global Monthly Searches, and Local Monthly Search columns.  No save this file under a different name so that you can still go back to your original file later if we need it.

Now, let’s add a column called “Relevance.”  Make this Column D.

Go through your list of each keyword and give it a relevance score of 0% to 100% based on how well you think the searcher’s intent matches your product or idea.  Keep in mind you are looking for CUSTOMERS not information junkies.  Let that guide your decision as you work though the list of keywords.

Don’t spend hours on each keyword.  This whole sheet should take you 15-20 minutes.

Finally, add another column called “Weighted.”

In this column we’re going to take the Global Monthly Searches and multiply it by our Relevance.  This will give us the amount of traffic searching that keyword each month that we believe is actually looking for our service or product.

Now sort your sheet by the Weighted column and you have an ordered list of keywords by relevance.

Tomorrow we’ll start looking at competition.  Stay tuned!

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Keyword Research – Finding Search Terms You Can Rank For

May 10 2010

Keyword Research is actually the second step to starting an online business.

Step one is coming up with an idea, service, product, dream… something worth building a website for.  What I’ll start showing you today is my method for researching that idea or product to see if there is a viable online market for the idea, and if the market has space for a new competitor.

Let’s start with the first market I’m hoping to break into:  Vermont Search Engine Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Keyword Research ToolMy starting point is always a search term dump or brainstorm.  I basically make a list of all the things that someone looking for “Vermont Search Engine Marketing” could possibly type into Google or Yahoo!.  Now, for this example I’m being very specific to Vermont.  I’m not looking to go after “Search Engine Marketing.”  I’m looking to stay local and work with business in my own area.  Or at least, that’s my idea right now.

Quick Brainstorm:

vt seo, vermont internet marketing, vt search engine rankings, vt small business seo, vt search optimization

Ok, that’s a short list but I think you get the idea.

Now we need to use some tools to help us find out what other terms are related to these that people might be searching for already.  Luckily, Google has some free tools available for us.  Head over to adwords.google.com and sign-up for a free Adwords account.  Once you get to the home screen click on the “Opportunities” tab and then “Keyword Tool.”

From there, simply enter your search terms into the search box and click search.

Google now returns a bunch of searches that are similar to your original list.  I just ended up with close to 500.

Keyword Tool Exact Match

IMPORTANT STEP:  On the left of the screen toward the bottom you’ll see a little box that says “Match Types”  Be sure that ONLY Exact Match is selected.  This will give you more accurate search volume numbers moving forward.

Now this is where we need to apply some good old human interaction again.  Many of the results returned may not have anything to do with your idea or product.  One of the words Google just returned for me was “vt motel” which really has nothing to do with SEO.

At this point we need to go through the list and check all the keywords that actually apply to our product or idea.  In my case I’ve also returned results like: seo positioning, seo article, why seo.

These could all be good keywords for me, but I’m really going to focus on Vermont.  So, I’m going to save them for now and return later to put the word “Vermont” in any of the search terms that look too competitive to rank for without targeting on the local level.

Trick! — Click the Check box at the top of the list to select the entire group.  Then remove the check for any boxes for keywords you don’t want.

Ok, I know this seems like it’s going to take forever.  I just completed checking my list of 500 in about 10 minutes.  You can do it.  It’s worth the effort.

Once you’ve completed checking all the relevant results, download the selected keywords to your computer.

I need to tell you that there are some very powerful tools out there that do a lot of keyword research and analysis for you.  However, they aren’t free.  My personal favorite is Keyword Elite.

That’s it for today.  Tomorrow we’ll begin going through our list of keywords and organizing them into an initial priority list.

Please feel free to post questions or comments.  Cheers!

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