Stuart McHenry - My Internet World

The title might be a little misleading but you can read my points. Sometimes keeping up with the trends can get you in trouble or not provide the desired results. As far as search engine optimization goes trends are often turned into filters by the major search engines.

A few months ago I did some consulting work for a Southern California company looking to increase there web presence. More specifically they wanted to increase their Google rankings through search engine optimization. Over the past five years so much has changed in the techniques and methods used to get a website quality search engine traffic and companies haven’t stayed up with the trends or were caught in the trends.

This specific company has been paying Google Adwords $45,000 per month in advertising. (ouch) You can see why they wanted to rank very badly in the natural search results. A handful of good rankings with some decent keywords could bringing them more traffic and they could in return substantially reduce their advertising budget. This is the single reason why SEO is so powerful. Most people don’t click the advertising results on the Google search pages, at least not compared to the natural search results.

Some of the old techniques used that don’t work as well anymore:

Reciprocal Links
Sure, a few of these here and there are no big deal but this should be a small part of your link building campaign. About 3-6 years ago everyone traded links with anyone and the person that traded more than the others was the one that ranked higher. This lead to poor quality search engine results but worked great for SEO while it lasted.

Off Topic / Paid Links
Trust me it’s easy for the major search engines to detect 90% or more of the paid links. Things like sitewide links, footer links and links under a “sponsors” area are all signs. Companies buying these links are wasting their money and time. These links won’t count and can even harm your trust in the search engines.

The best links for increasing your rankings are natural looking links. These are the type of links that Google and other search engines count as votes towards your website. It helps to have great content that people *might* link to but the best SEO’s in the world will go out of their way to find the links that look natural. These are the type of links that will stand the test of time and will always help your website in some way via it direct traffic or increasing your site’s trust in the search engines.

My single biggest SEO tip is to not get caught up in the “current trends” and go out and find links that are natural looking. What is a natural link? You can visit a few web pages yourself and analyze the different links on the pages to see which ones look natural and which ones don’t.

People often ask me how to start out in the dot com business. The first thing I tell them to do is to read the many books, blogs and forums that are out there. Once you have a good idea of what you are doing then it’s time to get a website design. What does that involve?

You cannot just go to a designer and say I need a site for (insert idea) but rather you need to surf the web and see what designs catch your eye. When we launch a new site we spend anywhere from 4-6 hours looking at site designs and colors. The layout and design of your site can effect conversions and your overall profitability. Once you pick the colors and layout it’s important to communicate this to your web designer. What comes after the design phase?

Now it’s time to find hosting for your new site. There are different hosting plans out there from business web hosting to ecommerce web hosting and going through the plans is important. So offer more bandwidth while others offer more storage. If you’re launching an ecommerce site then more than likely you’ll need a hosting plan with a MySQL database and not all hosting companies offer this.

Once you get the design and hosting complete then it’s time to learn about search engine marketing and optimization.

Google Paid Links Algorithm Update

Just around the first of September (a few days ago) Google laid the smack down and tweaked their Algorithm. If you’ve visited a webmaster forum in the past few days you will notice it’s all the talk. Some webmasters are calling Google evil and bitching about the update. I’ve heard comments like:

They (Google) make it harder for sites to have some what of a chance in SERP’s and force them to purchase paid links through Adwords.

I’ve given up trying to rank well in Google and now just focus on Yahoo and MSN.

What a complete load of shit! First off their is a huge section of webmasters out there that don’t know there ass from a hole in the wall. They read a few post in a forum and have some basic success with a three or four word search phrase on MSN and think they are SEO’s. I’m going on five years in the dotcom world and I’m still learning stuff everyday but settling for 25% of the search engine traffic is like going to play professional baseball with a dream of only playing in the minors.

Anyway… Google’s recent algorithm update seems to target paid links. Most webmasters have noticed the change in SERPS. Some search keywords disappeared all together when others either dropped or gained a few. Why???

Well… that’s easy.. Google has said now for a long time that they will get better at detecting paid links. Some links stick out like a sore thumb. Here is my list of the top three types of links that are easy for search engines to detect.

1) Footer Links
How natural do you really think this looks??? Most are below the copyright… how important is that link really worth??? Nothing!

2) Site-Wide links
Most site-wide links are purchased… so why count them???

3) Links with the word “sponsor” or “advertising” near them
Duh! This one is a no-brainer.

Keep in mind Google doesn’t care if you are buying a link for traffic or for PR… they treat it the same way. Once they detect that the link is paid they simply discount the link so it won’t pass PR. I’m sure in some cases the link *might* not even be paid but these are few and far between.

So what are the best links to get??? Well… during this update my big sites have been virtually unchanged and one has actually moved up a decent amount. The one that moved up has tons of natural links from articles, bloggers, radio stations, newspapers and industry leading websites. Those links within the content have really sent me above the sites that had tons of paid links.

People are always asking *how many websites are too many?* The answer to the question is a it depends. I often feel many webmasters bite off more than they can chew. You can see evidence of this everyday on the forums… people selling off sites and/or trying to rank for the top keywords on a limited budget. Again… here are the reasons people are not successful with their online adventures:

1) lack of money to market their site(s)

4) lack of man power - creating a successful site *often* takes resources from several people (designers, programmers, etc.)

So… back to the question… how many websites is too many??? Well… for most people 2-3 successful sites are hard to archive…. provided you can get over # 2, # 3, & # 4 you are still faced with the money issue. This is listed as number one for a reason…. people often don’t really have a good idea what the cost involved will be.

Most recently I spoke with someone about a mortgage website and what it would cost to get it to rank for some geo-targeted keywords. Now if done right… the cost just for links (market value) could easily be $10K++ for the first year… sound expensive? Maybe not when you are selling $500K mortgages BUT… point being most people/companies don’t set aside enough budget to set themselves up for success.

So for *most* people 2-3 successful sites are a reality. (unless your a blackhat)

Pubcon 2006

I attended Pubcon again this year… I enjoy going to Vegas and any excuse works for me. Like last year *most* of the sessions I attended where *yawn* boring as hell and some of the advice given by the so called experts was… how should I saw… so 2 years ago. Don’t get me wrong not every presenter was bad… just most. Here is a tip for anyone speaking at Pubcon in the future:

Don’t spend 75% talking about what you did before you got into your current webmaster job. I’m sure myself and the other webmasters don’t care that you taught school or worked at Burger King unless you worked in a department that had to do with the Internet.

On a brighter side I enjoyed the keynote speech from Guy Kawasaki. Guy has been involved in the computer world for a long time and is currently a managing director of a venture capital firm. He also has a blog (who doesn’t even my 7 year old has one) and has some interesting things to say and some decent Interviews.

Anyway… I was happy to see some familiar faces and met some new ones. Maybe going this year taught me to rank better for no fax payday loans.

I wanted to start off the “Beat Today’s 36,000” series with something that is very basic… biting off more than you can chew. Sure most people have heard that expression before in their life usually from their dad, mom or colleagues but I see this happen way too often on the Internet.

Somebody makes a posts how they make $XXX,XXX dollars per month on the Internet with KW’s (KW’s = keywords) usually dating, viagra or ringtones and tons of newbie webmasters run out and register new domain names and start optimizing hoping to rank for these highly competitive KW’s. Now let me tell you the facts of what is going to happen and why.

99.99% of these people are biting off more than they can chew.. why??? Here are the top three reasons:

1) They lack the knowledge to rank for such a highly competitive KW
2) They lack the funds to rank for such a highly competitive KW
3) They lack the commitment to get the job done

First… you have to have the knowledge. Sure maybe the person has had some success with small KW’s like “blue widgets in Bumblefuck, IA” but that is often little league Vs MLS. It can take several years to gain the knowledge and then you have to stay on top of it as it’s always changing.

Second… how much money do you think it will take??? I have sites that rank for some of the most competitive KW’s in finance. This takes tons of money… the old saying “it takes money to make money” is still true today. Some of our link budgets are well over $5,000 per month. I’ve never been afraid to spend the money… people might think $5,000 per month is a lot but when you get a site that makes that in two days… you can see it’s totally worth it.

Third… some people spread themselves too thin by trying to get too many sites to rank or they let other things distract them. This has happened to all of us at one point but the key is staying focused.

So what do I recommend… well unless you have been in the business for a while and have a decent size budget don’t go after the top KW’s. So if you start a dating site don’t go after “online dating” stick to smaller KW’s that you can handle. Focus on cities or even states like “San Jose Dating” or San Jose Online Dating” and your success rate will go up.

In order to make money online a website needs traffic. Traffic can come from off-line advertising (Magazines, TV, etc.) PPC (Pay Per Click), website referrals (links and articles) and organic search. Organic search is what comes up when you go to a search engine and type in what your looking for. Most people skip over the paid advertisements and look through the search engine results. In the Internet Marketing / Search Engine Optimization world this is where everyone wants a website to rank.

Now with that said I would like to you ponder some stats for a minute. Currently there are an estimated 80,000,000+ websites (Netcraft Numbers) on the Internet of which 40,000,000 have come online in the last three years. That’s 36,829 new websites per day.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to start writing articles and giving tips about getting your site to rank well and whatnot in the search engines. I’m going to call this series of tips the “Beat Today’s 36,000″ and I hope some parts of it will be helpful to some.

So over the past week I have got a few emails and PM’s about the v7ndotcom elursrebmem contest. People have seen this blog starting to show up in the top couple of pages for the contest KW’s. Below are some of the questions and comments I have got:

“Don’t you know you need to add a link to win the contest money?”

“I thought you were not going to enter the contest. Now that your in can we trade links?”

“Don’t even try it Stuart you are no match for the dark side”

“I’m in the contest too. I enjoy reading your blog about the v7ndotcom elursrebmem contest. Please read my blog howseoworks.com/v7ndotcom-elursrebmem/”

Well let me clarify a few things… first off I’m not in the contest. Second off…. I’m not in the contest. I have said from the start that I will be backing one contestant. (more about that in a minute) So why am I showing up in the contest results? AND… what is my agenda???

I wanted to show up in the first couple of pages for several reasons.

1) Because it’s fun

2) I wanted to ensure that the SEO community knows about our Site Sift Directory. I know I could have used Adwords or bought advertisement on some of the contest pages… but this is a little more fun. Anyway.. you can find more information about Site Sift here.

3) Everyone’s doing it

4) Did I mention Site Sift?

Now.. who am I backing for the V7N Contest? My buddy Alek Komar and his page for the Celiac Disease charity. This truly is a great cause and as I see it… the best way for the money to be spent.

So today John Scott of V7N announced the KW’s for his search engine optimization (SEO) contest that has been getting all the buzz.

KW = v7ndotcom elursrebmem

He did a good job (IMO) in picking the KW… at the time of the contest when you Googled “v7ndotcom elursrebmem” it returned zero results. If anyone is interested in competing in the contest here are some of the rules:

1. In order to win the first prize, you must place first in Google (organic rankings) for the search term on May 15, 2006, noon, Pacific standard time.

2. Prizes for 2nd place through 5th place will be awarded based on web page placing in the corresponding positions in Google on May 15, 2006, noon, Pacific standard time.

3. For the purpose of this competition, indented listings in the SERPs will not be counted.

4. In order to qualify for the prize, a web page must include one of the following: (goes on to talk about link back requirements)

The link can be just about any type of link and in his thread over at V7N he provides examples of the links: http://www.v7n.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23744

Good luck with the contest guys.

So I belong to a few private forums and one of the subjects that came up was about the Google Sandbox. Most of the forums members rarely discuss the sandbox most of the time it’s contextual advertising/link development and helping each other out.

We got in a little discussion about the sandbox and some people think it cannot be beat. I for one will tell you right now it can be beat. You aren’t going to rank for poker or viagra within the first couple of months but you can get traffic from Google from day one. I do not want to go into specifics on this post myself (but will at a later date) I would just like to hear if anyone else was able to outwit the Google Sandbox.