Top Ten Google SEO Ranking Factors

People don’t really understand that there are many different factors that fall into place when determining where a website ranks in the Google search engine results. Some things to keep in mind when you are wondering why your site doesn’t rank well. It is not always just the obvious reasons that are holding it back.

Over the past years by reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google SEO Starter Guide, many other industry blogs and by actually doing professional SEO and internet marketing since the late 1990’s, I have gathered data and come to a boiled down short list of the most important Google search engine ranking factors.

Here is the list of my top 10 of important Google SEO ranking factors to consider:

1. Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. If you just bought your domain a few weeks or even months ago you have a long road ahead of you. The reality is the age of your website helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.
2. Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? Find out through your hosting company what continent or country your site is hosted in. This can often times play a large role in search rankings. Always use a reputable hosting company. If your company is US based then use a hosting company in the United States. Also, I always recommend a dedicated IP when you can. There are virtual dedicated and cloud hosting solutions that are more affordable. Never use the cheapest hosting. The reality is, if you cannot afford hosting you should re-consider the business…I know this is harsh but very true.
3. Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server, which sites like Godaddy usually are have been known to house hundreds of websites on one server. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not classified as spam.
4. URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is part of the onsite search engine optimization process as well.
5. Content: Content is very important. To start make sure you have text on all your important pages, then make sure it is good text consisting of your targeted keywords spread throughout naturally. Simply put, ALWAYS write your content for humans, your website visitors first and NEVER write content for the solo purpose to achieve Google search engine rankings. Chances are the content will not be user focused or provide value to your visitors.
6. Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should have easy made pathways connecting to your other pages from every page of your website. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Essentially make sure the site is clean, easy to use and interlinked to help the user experience.
7. Trust: Do you at least have a mailing address listed on your website? You should if you don’t. Google likes to see trust factors on websites so anything you can add that could help build trust for your audience will benefit your rankings. I always recommend having a phone number on each page of your website. Make it easy for people to do business with you, it all starts with establishing trust and that starts with contact information on your website.
8. Keywords: Make sure your website is optimized using your keywords. This means any alt tags for images, meta page information and existing content at the very least of things. Remember to naturally optimize your website based on the content of each page of your website.
9. Bounce Rate: Although bounce rate might not seem important if Google sees that nobody hangs out on your website for more than a few seconds before they leave this could be a ranking problem over time. Make changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things, like video, newsletter sign up, call to actions, etc will help improve your bounce rate over time. Make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics.
10. Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. If you sell animals toys but you are linking to a site that sells shoes that is not very relevant and over time could really impact your rankings. Bottom line is if it makes sense to link to another site, then do so, but remember you could be sending your visitors away from your site.
11. Inbound Links: I know this was a list of my top 10, but I felt I had to mention inbound links. The key here (speaking as a white hat SEO person), don’t buy or exchange links. Market and promote your business online to build visitors to your website over time. If you do, then the relevant links will follow!

**Note: As the Google (and yes there are 2 other major search engines!) algorithm changes there are always new ranking factors that come into play, such as the page load time and many others. I am sure when I re-do this list a year from now, there may be another one or two additional factors.

There are many extensive factors that Google uses when determining website rankings. Very important to get these factors correct otherwise you could find yourself just spinning your wheels. The bottom line is it is all about relevancy and earning your visitors (and yes Google’s) search engine trust over time.


Source: http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/

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Tips For Promoting Your Blog

You’ve finally gotten your blog set up. You have written a few posts. Now you sit back and wait for the readers to start rolling in. Only you soon discover there are no visitors. Your dreams of having a well known blog are dashed and you give up blogging after a few short weeks.

This happens all too often in the blog world. People have unrealistic expectations for their blog. Blogging doesn’t follow the you build it( or write it in this instance) they will come. You have to do some work promoting your blog if you want to develop a following of readers.

Here are some tips to help make promoting your blog easier.
1. Have plenty of content. There has to be something worth promoting.
2. Be patient, even with lots of promotion it takes time to develop a following.
3. Have guest bloggers. A guest blogger will most likely publish a link to the blog post they do on their own site. This will bring you visitors and maybe long term readers.
4. Join social media sites. Promote your blog whenever possible. Don’t spam!
5. Make a video about your blog topic. Post it on YouTube with a link to your blog. People like videos.
6. Comment on other blogs. Include a link to your blog when you leave the comment.
7. Blog frequently. Try for everyday, if that is too much, shoot for at least a couple times a week. In the beginning you may need to blog several times a day.
8. Use Stumble and Digg to bookmark your blog posts. Also bookmark other blogs and sites you like. This will help you develop a relationship in those communities. If you only bookmark your posts people will see you as a spammer.
9. Make sure your blog posts are optimized for search engines with the right amount of keyword usage.
10. Include a link to your blog in your signature on email and any message board you use. The more people you get seeing your blog the better.

Building a blog following can take months if not years to do. You need consistent blog postings that interest your readers if you want them to keep coming back. Don’t give up, be persistent.


Source: http://dotcomreport.com

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Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns (part 4)

Factors for Success 4, Optimal Ads Position and Design

Adsense allows a number of different ads design and position to choose from. Depending on your blog design and content, some of these ads position and design work better than the others. Which ones the best for you?

One thing for sure, it work differently for different people and different blog. The best way is to test them all. But there are some pointers to follow to cut your work short:

• Blend content and ads - Most Adsense users found success when ads and content are blended together as if the ad blocks are not advertisements at all. A few tricks to do this is making the ads background and borders the same color as the content background, ads titles and links to be just like the content links. Many guides mention that blue is the best color for ads titles because they are the most common link color.
• Place ads in content - Ads will blend better with content if they are placed together with the content. For example, see this page where you have the ads wrapped with the content just below the Post Title. But too much ads wrapped with the contents can annoy your reader. So try to do this moderately. You can look for examples in well-established blogs and see how the pros do it and adapt those strategies into your own blog.
• Above the fold - Above the fold means that you put the ads where readers can see it without needing to scroll down the page. A substantial amount of visitors just check out sites for a few seconds only. Any ads that need scrolling would have missed their eyes.
• Follow the heat map - The heat map below has been produced by Google based on the statistics of visits to Adsense ads. Clearly, based on this map, the best place to put ads is just at the beginning of the post, blended with the content itself. The other good section is on the left and above/below the post.
• Not too much ads - The main purpose of a blog or site is to serve information to its readers. Crowding it with too much ads defeat the purpose, and people are not blind to see what you're trying to do. Avoid over-crowding yours with ads. Find a balance. There are other types of sites that are more commercial in nature - serving quick infos with lots of outward links. This maybe a place for you to place more ads to provide your visitors the option of finding the best products (i.e. ads) to go to.
• Keep changing ads position and design - Regular visitors and frequent readers to your blog are more 'blind' to your ads, meaning that they've seen it too often that they know where NOT to look at. Avoid this 'Ad-blindness' by frequently moving around the ads position and changing their designs. Many bloggers found that this technique improved their click-through-rates after the changes, until the next ads-blindness kicks in again.


Source: http://www.ourblogtemplates.com

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Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns (part 3)

Factors for Success 3, Relevant Ads

Imagine a blog that wants to target 'making money online' as keywords but have the word 'blog' or 'blogging' too many times throughout the content, even the title and URL. The keyword 'money' or its related keywords are not frequently used. As a result, the ads served are more related to 'creating blogs' and not entirely relevant to the whole content of making money online. This is one example scenario of irrelevant ads.

There are a few things that you can do to get more relevant ads served on your blog:

• Are there ads available? - Make sure the keywords you're targeting have ads available to be served on your blog. If not, look for other keywords or different keywords with similar meaning that serve more ads.
• Increase keyword density - Words that are used more frequently bound to be recognized as the main keywords of your blog. Try to increase the number of keywords in your content, title, header, URL, sidebars, footer, menus, outward links, bold text, etc. But don't repeat too much to the point that it becomes to obvious and annoying to the readers. Keyword Density at SEOChat.com is a good tool to use for this purpose.
• Reduce irrelevant keywords - Check for words that are not your keywords but have quite a high density in your URL, header, menus, content, sidebars, footer, etc. They may be recognized as important keywords by Adsense bots. Make sure that the ads served are not related to them. Otherwise, you have to change them a bit to reduce their density.
• One topic per page - Do not focus on too many keywords per page. This confuses Adsense bots to decide which keywords are the most relevant. If this happen to you, it's better to split the text into a few series in different pages.
• Block irrelevant ads - Adsense gives you the option to block ads unrelated to your blog content that may appear without you wanting it to be there.


Source: http://www.ourblogtemplates.com

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Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns (part 2)

Factors for Success 2, High Paying Ads

It's pretty obvious that you should target high paying keywords to get a higher money return from Adsense. There are some sites on the internet listing out a limited number of keywords that are high paying ones. The downside of targeting these keywords are that they are highly competitive too: others are doing it as well. It's now becoming more difficult to rank well in search engines on these keywords. But that this does not mean that you shouldn't do it if you're confident to write excellent and quality content on those keywords.

A more common high paying keywords are the ones related to technology products as those are expensive products and businesses are willing to pay more to get advertised. Examples of successful blogs running these types of contents are Engadget, Gizmodo, and PVRblog just to name a few.

Targeting these high paying keywords alone doesn't guarantee success. The rules of getting high traffic still applies - and you have to be able to build high quality content for that. If you're more comfortable writing on moderately paying content and get more traffic on these niches, then this is a better strategy to do.

There are some strategies and tools to use to find and research more on these high paying keywords:

• Do these keywords serve ads? - The first thing you want to check is whether the keywords you want to target serve ads. Simply type those keywords in Google and see if ads are served. If not, then your content related to those keywords are unlikely to serve ads too. By searching this way, you can also see other sites and blogs focusing on those keywords.
• Buy them - There are many professional tools available at a cost that gives you hundreds of thousands of these keywords.
• Use WordTracker - They have the best tool available related to finding and researching on keywords. They also tell you the number of other competing sites/blogs on any specific keywords.
• Use Adwords - If you are ready to invest some cash, try becoming the advertisers yourself and see how much people are bidding for any keywords and get a better feel how to optimize the keywords you use.

Remember again that you have to focus on building high traffic levels too. If you're not able to do this using the extremely high paying keywords, then they're not worth it. Try the more moderate paying ones, as long as you can build quality content on it. But at the other extreme, targeting those low paying ads is not worthwhile.


source: http://www.ourblogtemplates.com

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Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns (part 1)

Factors for Success 1, Traffic Levels
As the number of visitors increases, so does the total number of clicks.

How to Increase Traffic
These are some practical tips to increase traffic levels that have worked well for many experienced bloggers.

• Build useful, quality, interesting and original content - Reflect on the blogs that you read often and think again why you read them.
• Good blog design - Do you tend to think that a blog has quality content if the design is terrible?
• Link to others - You'll only have others linking to you if you have shown your generosity in linking to others first. Linking helps in two ways: (1) Bring more visitors. (2) Increase your ranking.
• Comment on other blogs - Interact with others genuinely (not spamming) by giving thoughtful comments in other blogs. People will grow their interest in your blog as you interact more with them.
• Update frequently - a significant part of large traffic comes from frequent readers, who wants to see fresh contents all the time.
• Interact with readers - Interact with your readers actively. Answer comments, questions, create memes, games, etc.
• Optimize for search engines - Visitors that tend to click on the ads the most come from search engines. Doing SEO will increase your revenues and your rank as well.
• Add your blog add in your email signature - This can help increase visitor numbers to your blog too.
• Create RSS feed - Let your readers have the option to subscribe easily to your blog's content. Visit Feedburner.com for more details. This method eases their connectivity to your blog.
• List your URL in directories - This increases the chance for people of relevant interest finding your blog easier through many mediums and portals.
• Submit to search engines - Send your blog URL to search engines too and similar sites such as Technorati. Use the right and relevant keywords to describe your blog as this is the most crucial information that connects your blog to your visitors.
• Create a newsletter - This is another option to update your readers of new postings.
• Get involve in other blog projects - Make yourself visible in the blogosphere by actively participating in other projects or memes. The more visibility you have the better.
• Participate in forums - This are the places to find other with similar interest. You can draw visitors to your blog by making yourself visible through helping others in the forums.
• Promote your posts - Send your great posts to others or submit them in social media if you think they have a chance to get votted up. Be selective of which posts to promote to avoid being too annoying.
• Add an 'Email a Friend' button - Add this button below each of your posts to let your readers have the option to email their friends.


Source: http://www.ourblogtemplates.com

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One Blog and Many Topics, or Many Blogs with One Topic?

Suppose one blogger has multiple interests , like Books, Gadgets and Cars. Will he get more readers and traffic when he writes about them in separate blogs, or if he writes about all of them on a single blog?

Both strategies can work. Let’s analyze the pros and cons of each of them.

Pros of One Blog with Many Topics

The largest advantage of this model is that you will have a very strong domain, since it will receive the link juice from all the different topics and content channels. Over time it will become relatively easy to rank for keywords because of the high trust that the root domain has. That is why websites like Wikipedia or Digg rank so well in Google.

Another advantage of this model is the unlimited potential for expansion. Provided your domain is a generic one, you will be able to add and remove topics over the time without needing to rework the brand.

Cons of One Blog with Many Topics

The main disadvantage of one large blog covering many topics is the fact that it will require a huge amount of time, energy and money to become successful.

Why? Because you would need to shape it as a content portal. That means that you should have a design that supports the portal structure, different channels inside it, and different writers to keep each of the channels updated regularly.

Trying to do a content portal by yourself and with no investment would probably yield mediocre results.

Pros of Many Blogs with One Topic

The advantage of having many blogs, each with a niche topic, is the fact that it will be easier to attract loyal visitors on each of those sites. The sharper your focus, the easier it is to convince a first time visitor that he should come back tomorrow or subscribe to your RSS feed.

Secondly, niche websites are also easier to be monetized. Advertisers like to be able to control the audience that is going to see their ads.

Cons of Many Blogs with One Topic

The disadvantage of having many blogs, each with a niche topic, is the time and energy that you will need to spend managing them. You will inevitably need to worry about the web hosting, web design, software, maintenance so on. The higher the number of sites you have, the more time they will consume with those tasks.

Additionally, there is always the risk to spread yourself too thin. If you can’t keep up with the content production and promotion activities on all the blogs, they will probably tank over the time.

Conclusion

As you can see there are pros and cons related to both strategies. Choosing one over the other is a personal decision. My preferred strategy is to go with niche blogs. You just need to make sure that your niche is not too narrow. For example creating a blog about “Nepal Photography” would probably not be a good idea. If you choose “Digital Photography,” however, you should be fine.

I also prefer to focus on the development of one website or blog at a time. Trying to do too many things at once is one of the most common business mistakes.

What do you think?


Source: http://dotcomreport.com

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Making Money Efficiently from Blogs

The chance is that you know about Adsense and how to make money from it using your blog. If you haven't heard about it, well, you can generate money from your blog and the most popular way of doing that is using the Google Adsense Program. In fact, successful bloggers earn more than $100,000 per year from their blogs.

Most of the tips come from extremely long articles of successful bloggers that I've compressed to make the readings much much shorter for you. Trust me, if you have no idea about monetizing blogs, learning to do it from the basics can take a really long time. Having short articles that compresses all the important points can help you a lot, because you don't want to spend too much time on learning how to do it. There are 3 basic questions you should be asking yourself when learning to build a monetizing blog:
• How to get more visitors to your blog?
• What's the best programs to monetize your blog?
• How to optimize your blog and ad designs to maximize your earning?
If you're a first timer on this, I'll give you some quick pointers on what are some of the major things you should know if you want to successfully monetize your blog. It can hurt you a lot if you don't know these things (hurt = cost you time and energy with little in return). This list isn't the most comprehensive ones on the subject, but will give you the big picture on what to learn.
• Adsense - Know Adsense and learn how to optimize its use in your blog. Using Adsense isn't just about putting the codes in your blog. There are tips on how to maximize your earnings by optimizing you Adsense placement, colors, and overall design.
• SEO - Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is needed to help you get your blog to rank high on search engines, e.g. Google. In other words, you'd want your blog to be in the first page of Google search result when somebody googles keywords related to your blog.
• Keyword Research and Niche - Think carefully on what niche area you want to blog about and what keywords are the best for your blog URL, titles, descriptions, and post titles. Simply using www.yourname.com as a URL will put you at a huge disadvantage at getting rank well, unless your name is Paris Hilton, which gets search the most (to learn from what she has to say about life, I guess).
• Blog Promotion - Money only comes in when there are visitors to your blog, thousands of them. How to get them to your blog isn't easy. You have to learn how to promote your blog.
• Monetizing Programs - Bloggers out there don't just use Adsense. There are tons of other programs, affiliates, and sponsorships. The trick is to know which is the best for you and how to optimize their use in your blog.
• Quality Blog Content - Anybody can write anything on their blogs. But what articles attract the most readers? Blogging isn't just about posting articles. You have to learn the tips and tricks to get others read what you write.
• What NOT to do - There are things that if you do will hurt your monetizing effort. For example, if you have Adsense put in blogs that are 'smart-priced' by Adsense, you'll earn very little. Read also the Adsense Terms and Conditions so that you don't do anything that'll get you banned from the program. 'Smart-pricing' is explained below.
• Social Media - One way of promoting your blog is through networking inside social media networks, such as Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, etc. There are tricks to get the most out of them.
• Getting Visitor Traffic - How to bring visitors to your blog? And how to get more and more of them, over time? There are many ways to get people to your blog - social media, search engines, word-of-mouth, recommendations. The more you know about this the better.
• RSS Subscribers - People will subscribe to your blog if you have good contents, which means you'll get more readers, more visitors, and most importantly more exposure. Are there tips out there how to increase the number of subscribers? Yes, there are (read some of the articles below).


Source: http://www.ourblogtemplates.com

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How to Improve Your Search Rankings on Google Caffeine

Google Caffeine will significantly jolt the SEO game, especially when it comes to the top results that are displayed. The revamped search engine’s emphasis on real-time results gives savvy webmasters the opportunity to propel to the top of Google results.

What Constitutes Google Caffeine’s Top Results

Real-time search results are one of the major foci for the Caffeine update. The traditional top results will be superseded by the “latest results,” which aggregates and displays all of the most recent blog posts, press releases, social network updates, and news stories that are related to the search term.

This real-time search has already made its debut, even before Caffeine’s official release in 2010. For example, right before New Year’s Eve, a small earthquake hit Baja California and San Diego. Within two minutes of the quake, typing “San Diego earthquake” into Google returned the “latest results,” which included Tweets and news stories.

Subsequently, each time you publish a blog post, submit a press release, or Tweet, you may just appear at the very top of Google’s search results – which will pour natural traffic from the “latest results” right into your website.

Taking Advantage of Caffeine’s Real-Time Search

Real-time search presents an incredible opportunity for your website to enjoy the top limelight on Google, even if it is not permanent. Commission your content writer to compose fresh blog posts, and upon publication, your website will appear at the top of relevant search results. You can strategically time the publication of your new content with your marketing campaigns; for example, if you are launching a new product, then your content writer can compose blog articles that specifically target the niche keywords – bringing in a surge of traffic just in time for your product launch.

Don’t Decaffeinate Your Website

Even before the advent of Caffeine, content reigned king in the SEO world. However, with the introduction of Caffeine and its emphasis on content, commissioning your content writer to publish fresh and original text on your website and blog becomes even more important. The purpose of the Caffeine update is to generate more accurate, relevant, and timely search results – and Google can only achieve their goals by placing a heavier emphasis on content.


If you only make one change to your SEO strategy, it should be a renewed focus on content, which will generate both short-term and long-term results. In the immediate future, you will enjoy a surge of traffic from being at the top of Google’s “latest results,” and in the long-term, you are continuing to build your authority and relevancy in Google for permanent search results.

Caffeine certainly changes the SEO game, but for webmasters who understand the power of content, the update is good news. With a lessened emphasis on arbitrary backlinks, Google Caffeine will reward those who commission their content writer to publish quality, relevant, and fresh text. If you are ready for a shot of caffeinated traffic, then simply order a mug of words from your content writer.


Source: http://www.site-reference.com

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How can I make my blog load faster?

The speed at which your blog loads is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it. Here are a few tips and tricks that will help your blog load faster and attract more users:

Posts

Your blog's load time can be affected by the number of posts you display on your main page. You can easily edit the number of posts displayed of the main page from the Settings | Formatting tab. You can then select the number of posts you want to display on the main page. We recommend displaying 10 or fewer posts on the main page.

Third Party JavaScript and Links

For optimal blog load speed, we recommend using Google/Blogger widgets, JavaScipt and links. However, if you need to use third party JavaScipt and links, your blog will load much faster if you put all JavaScript at the bottom of your blog. If you have third party JavaScript and links in your sidebar, put them in at the bottom of the sidebar.

Images and Media

The more images, videos and other multi-media you have on your blog the longer it will take to load. However, images and other multimedia are important to attracting users to your blog, so it is important to optimize the load speed of your images and media. Here are a few tips to increase the load speed of your media:

• Decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image.
• If you use third party images, consider uploading them to Picasa Web Albums via the Blogger post editor.
• If you have a large number of images to display, you can upload all your images (from a vacation or event) to a Picasa Web Album and link to the album in your post or sidebar.

Other suggestions

• If you've added any custom CSS to your blog, make sure you put it at the top of the page.
• The most important content of your blog that catches readers attention should load the quickest. To help you identify which items are taking the longest to load you can use Stopwatch. To use Stopwatch, enter your blog's URL into the text box and click "Start StopWatch". Stopwatch will then open your blog in a frame and will record the time it takes for everything on your blog to load, including images, videos, widgets, etc. Take note of the items that take the longest to load and modify them appropriately using our suggestions.


Source: http://www.google.com

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