The Latest Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines

PDF

I have just learned that the Google Qulity Rating Guidelines handbook has been leaked. Last time that happened was over 3,5 years ago.

It was back in April 2007. Now the blogger Pot Pie Girl found a copy from March 30. 2011 version 3.18 of the Google Search Quality Rating guidelines handbook. Its a 125 page long book.

Google said it is a copyrighted document, so I can’t link to it. But if you go to Pot Pie Girls blog you can read tons af very important information.

Wow .. a short article.. but a very important one. Because if we are understanding how Google Quality Raters are working we can do a much better job with the SEO – right?

Wishing you all a great day….’

Best regards Henrik

 

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How To Use “Call To Action” For Your SEO

quastionI think 80 percent of all the websites forget about the “call to action”.

If you are working with SEO – you are trying hard every day to get visitors to the website. You make great content, working hard to get backlinks, working for hours with Social Media to get awareness. All this to get traffic to your site.

But you want your visitors to do something on your site right?

Maybe you want your visitors to sign up for a newsletter (I want you to do that on my site here – sign up here), or you want your visitors to read a special page, to register, to buy something or maybe to bookmark your post .

But don’t forget to make a goal.

Its like you are renting a shop in real life – and …

You don’t just want the people to walk into your shop right?

There are so many websites with great content but the webmaster just pays very little or no attention to their “calls-to-action” when they are designing their pages. And then all the good resources from your search engines ranking is wasted.

 

The connection between SEO and “call-to-action” 

So you might think – well “call-to-action” is more usability than it is SEO.

And you are are right. Well almost right.

After Google has taken most of the value of PageRank away from its ranking algorithm – it putted more value to the bounce rate. So if you can make the visitor to view more than just one page, you will lower your bounce rate. And that will help your SEO.

But I will say don’t do “call-to-action” because of your bounce rate. Do it because you got to make it easy for your visitors do to want you want them to do…

 

We don’t read pages we scan

When you design your pages and think of where and how to place your call-of-action – remember when we are browsing the Internet – we are in fact scanning the pages.

Imagine yourself in a fast car – driving 60 miles per hour. And you see a billboard.

What will do you see?

Maybe the picture and the headline. If you think it sounds interesting you might even see there is a phone number. And that’s it right?

Well we also know that people are looking above the fold on the page.

So do a catchy headline and a picture above the fold. And be sure you “call-to-action” stands-out too.

 

Color of your buttons or supporting elements

Colors can help you to make your “call-to-action” stand out. Colors have different meanings around the world. But in general you can say that…

color

Red symbolizes: action, confidence, courage, vitality. A classic call to action color. I use the red color for my sign up to my newsletter too 🙂 And the new Google+ button uses the red color too.

Orange symbolizes: vitality with endurance. A combination of aggressive red and cheerful yellow. Perfect call-to-action.

Yellow symbolizes: wisdom, joy, happiness, intellectual energy. Draw attention to your call-to-action. In some countries this color symbolizes cheap and discount.

Green symbolizes: life, nature, fertility, well being.

Blue symbolizes: youth, spirituality, truth, peace.

White symbolizes: Purity, Cleanliness. Gives other colors prominence. Makes your call-to-action stand out if you are using a lot of colors on the rest of your page.

Be sure you use a color that will get attention from the viewer’s eyes. Make it stand out from the rest of the colors used on your page.

 

Giveaway “call-of-action”

Well if you sign up for my newsletter I will give you my “Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011” with a lot of tips and tricks from all the posts here on SeoCustomer.com from 2011.

That’s a call of action too…

 

Have a great day out there…

Henrik

 

 

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Infographic for Social Media

Did you know that 12 percent of all people in the world has a Facebook account? Check it all out here on the Infographic. You are welcome to use the graphic on your site as along as you make a link back to Seocustomer.com – thank you.   InfoGraphicEmails                                                                 Have a great day out there.. Henrik

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Would you like some juice – yes link juice

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juice

Links are very important for your ranking on Google. So you have to know about link juice. Link juice will make you beat your competitors. Because you dont what your competitor to beat you right?
 

So I will try to explain it very carefully what link juice really is.

Other sites would like to get some of your juice because then their sites will rank higher, and you should get some of the juice from other sites to higher your ranking on the web. So its all about getting the juice – you follow me?

 

 

 

 

 

So lets start with 2 sites. Site A and Site B. The 2 site is fighting about the ranking for the same keyword.

photoc

 

 

 

 

 

 

So to decide which one will get the highest ranking Google will look at the links to the two sites. Here site A get a link from site C – while site B doesn’t get any links. You can say C is giving some juice to site A. So site A will do best in the Google ranking.

photoc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now both site A and site B get a link from site C. Their are sharing the juice. So they will rank on the same level. So to decide which one will get the highest rank Google will have to look at other normally not so important things  (See How you get into top10 of Google).

photoc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now site A get another link from site D and site B get a link from E. So now Google has to decide – which one the two new sites are most important site D or site E. Who has most juice to give.

photod

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can see side D get much more juice then site E… so in the end site A will have the most juice.

photoc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And we all love juice right? This is really important guys… most of the ranking on search engines like Google is about getting links to your site.

Have fun out there … and remember to get your juice 🙂

Yours
Henrik

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Top 25 SEO Blogs

top

I want to share this article with you. It’s the 25 top SEO blogs.

Yes I know – there is one mistake in it. SeoCustomer.com is not on the list. Well my blog is still very new lol.

Maybe I should call it the top24 so I can put my blog in it. No I better be good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Top 25 SEO Blogs list ranks the blogs according to their Google Pagerank, Alexa rank, number of Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. Okay no more talk – let me show you.

Google Alexa Bloglines Technorati Total
#1

Search Engine Land

 7 10 9 10 36
#2

SEOBook

 6 10 10 10 36
#3

SEO Moz

 5 10 10 10 35
#4

Matt Cutts

 7 10 8 10 35
#5

Search Engine Watch

 7 10 10 7 34
#6

Search Engine Roundtable

 7 10 8 8 33
#7

Search Engine Journal

 7 8 9 8 32
#8

Online Marketing Blog

 6 7 7 10 30
#9

Pronet Advertising

 7 7 5 10 29
#10

Marketing Pilgrim

 7 8 6 8 29
#11

SEO Chat

 6 10 4 6 26
#12

Search Engine Guide

 7 8 4 6 25
#13

SEO Blackhat

 6 8 6 5 25
#14

Stuntdubl

 6 6 6 6 24
#15

Graywolf’s SEO

 6 7 4 7 24
#16

SEO by the SEA

 6 4 5 5 20
#17

Link Building Blog

 5 5 5 4 19
#18

Jim Boykin

 5 6 4 4 19
#19

SEOpedia

 6 5 4 4 19
#20

DaveN

 6 5 4 4 19
#21

Bruce Clay

 5 7 3 3 18
#22

Blue Hat SEO

 4 6 3 4 17
#23

Tropical SEO

 5 5 3 4 17
#24

SEO Refugee

 5 6 1 3 15
#25

Small Business SEM

 5 4 3 3 15

 

I got the list from www.dailyblogtips.com. Super blog. Dailyblogtips.com has made the list this way.

The blogs they considered were blogs with a high percentage of SEO related content.

 

This is how they made the list

Google Pagerank from 0 to 10. This PageRank was used in the algorithm.

Alexa rank from 0 to 10. The ranges were determined based on the Alexa Rank. So 100k and up, 80k-100k, 60k-80k, 40k-60k. Then each rank was assigned a number from 1 to 10.

Bloglines Subscribers from 0 to 10: They took the number of subscribers of each site. And then the number of subscribers ranges were determined into 10 groups.

Technorati Authority from 0 to 10: Ranges were determined based on Technorati’s Authority rank putted into ranges and each range was assigned a number from 1 to 10.

The total was the 4 numbers with a total. So the maximum total is 40.

Enjoy the list.

Wishing you all a great day.

Best regards Henrik

 

 

Grab the 3 free SEO books here for members here.

Remember to join the SeoCustomer LinkedIn Group

And the Facebook Fanpage here


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Don’t Use The Black Hat – Link Building

blackhatWe all know that building backlinks to our website is very important for search engines. Google will base a great part of your sites ranking on analysis of the sites that link to your site. The quality of the rank, the quantity and the anchor text. The analysis will tell Google how important your site is.

But we all know that link building is not so easy. So maybe you have been thinking of using a easier strategy? Why not pay 200 dollars and get 1000 backlinks in a week.

We all have limited time – so there is a choice to be made between being unethical and ethical link building. And unethical link building is much faster and requires only a minimum of time. Ethical link building on the other hand is hard work and is a long run strategy. We also call the unethical link-building for black hat and the ethical link building for white hat.

 

Black hat strategies
 Some webmasters are only looking for traffic and they build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking – and they will disregard the quality of the links, if the websites is relevant and the long-term impact.

One of the worse black hat link building strategy is hacking. Some companies are using computer codes to generate new web pages on existing, high PR domains like .org or .gov domains. Theses new pages will create backlinks to a website will pass on the link juice from the high PR domain. This strategy is very black, very unethical, very illegal and it can be a very dangerous strategy.

Another tool is spam-based link building strategies. Companies are sending out tons of stupid, meaningless, automated blog comments to thousands of blogs. Like my blog here. I think around 80 percent of the comments I get are spam. I have an anti-spam filter and I also try to trash all spam comments if my anti-spam filter is not working.

J.C. Penney (USA company) has a huge online shop for for women’s clothing, men’s clothing, kids, furniture, bedding, jewelry and shoes. J.C. Penny was earlier this year caught in what is considered as a black hat link building strategy. They claim that they need nothing about it – but somebody was spreading their link with anchor text on the Internet – mostly on websites which had no relevance for J.C.Penney. And their strategy seems to work. J.C. Penney got a high number of high volume keywords like “skinny jeans”, “furniture” and “area rugs”. But its still a black hat strategy. You can read about it here in New York Times.

 

Black hat Strategy and Google
Read more about Google Webmaster Guidelines here.

Here is some of the strategies that will get you banned from Google or will negative impact your ranking

  • Cloaking
  • duplicate content
  • Have a robot write your website
  • Add keywords that don’t relate to your content
  • If you repeat the same keyword multiple times
  • Link exchange and bad neighborhoods (Google is calling spamming sites for bad neighborhoods. If you link to a bad neighborhood – it could lower your ranking.
  • Title stacking (using the <title> tags for more keywords)
  • Hide text (write a lot of white text)
  • Distribute viruses, Trojans, or other Badware
  • Doorway Pages (pages made only to boost your search ranking)
  • Automated Inquiries (like programs checking your ranking)

 

BMW Germany was blocked in 2006

In 2006 Google change BMW’s page rank to zero. BMW was showing a different content to its visitors then it was telling the search engines. That was a violation of the webmaster quality guidelines. So after the page rank was changed BMW no longer appeared on top of the Google search page.

BMW acknowledged in 2006 that the company used doorway pages. Doorway pages are a large sets of papers only made for the search engines with the intention to boost a site’s search ranking.

 

Grey hat strategies
Grey hat strategies include strategies that is not all black and not all white.

  • Fake Social Media Account. Maybe somebody has made a fake social media account only for promotional purposes.
  • Article spinning is also considered gray hat. It’s good to write as a guest blogger on other websites. A article spinning software will change your words, so the search engines don’t consider your article as a double content.
  • Buying blog posts and articles

so gray hat is questionable and not ethical good – but it’s not illegal.

 

Free Marketing Give-away
Remember to grab my free Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011.

Well enough of black hat, white hat and gray hat strategies. Now its time for my black coffee strategy.
Have a great day all 🙂

 

Henrik

 

 

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Subdomains vs Subdirectories strategy


subWhat should you use sub-domains or sub-directories? Sometimes it’s almost like a religion when people are talking about it. But maybe it’s not a question about choosing but a question about the combination.

So what is a sub-domain and a sub-directory. Well a sub-domain could be www.red.cars.dk and a sub-directory could be www.cars.com/red.

So a sub-domain is in fact a separate site while a sub-directory is a group of pages. And the question is of course which one will work best.

Which one will get you more traffic and better profitability.

 

When to use subdirectories

  • When search engines look at sub-directories (sub folders) they think it’s a simple matter of cosmetic that can help the URL to look more structured and logical. Subdirectories are a good way to make your URL look good and meaningful.
  • If your site is small then a sub-directory can help you keep your authority and not spreading it too thin with sub domains. Remember that when you spread out your sites they can’t help each other.
  • Remember that authority takes time. If you keep your content in a sub-directory it becomes easier to rank new content for related keywords.
  • Easier to manage. Yes we have to think of that too. Its easier 🙂
  • Geo targeting. Using Google Webmaster Tools you can set a geolocation for a sub-directory. So if you have a site called www.cars.com. You can make the www.cars.com/France for a France location and so on.

 

When should you use subdomains

When using subdomains you have separated sites. So you will need each subdomains to be positioned separated. Remember it’s a good idea to use subdirectories when you are organizing your content on each sub-domain. So subdirectories and subdomains still go hand in hand.

  • If your content is very different. So if you are selling cars on one site and then you want to sell bikes. Then it might be a good idea to make two sites. Remember that you are competing against people and companies who are very dedicated to bikes. So it’s not just an add on.
  • On the other hand if you are selling red cars and now want to sell blue cars you don’t really need a new site right?
  • If you want to be competitive in many related areas. So if you want to be the best in blue cars and in used cars. You might end up having to build 2 separated sites. Then each site can compete much better again and win the separated searches. It’s a different search looking for used cars than it is for blue cars. So if you are going to win both markets you will have to build 2 sites. It’s very popular to search for used cars but also blue cars get many searches.
  • Make several sites to push out your competitors’ sites away from top 10. If you have a strong position on Google building a new site and get a high ranking for the new site can push out a competitor.
  • Multiple listings. It’s possible – but not always – to get more than two listing limit for a given query using sub domains in Google. So more sites will get more listings.
  • If you are targeting different regional markets. It can be more effective to get separated site when you can assign an IP address to a separated sub-domain – and set a geolocation for each sub-domain.

 

Let me hear what you think 🙂

Yours
Henrik

 

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How to get into top 10 of Google

icon googlesearchHow you ever wondered what to do to get on the first page on Google. Well you don’t really have to wonder anymore. I will tell you what to do.

SEO is all relative right? You can be very bad at it – but if your competitors are worse – then all is good. So for a start you have to check out the top 10 list. How many times do they write your keyword, how many times do they use the keyword in the headlines, how many inbound links do they have with the keyword in the anchor text and so on … pyha.

It’s all about being on the first page. Make more text with your keywords? More headlines with your keywords? Hmm… Or maybe you have enough text. You have to compare your site to the first 10 web pages on the top 10 in Google (or another search engine).

There are a lot of free tools around – but it will take you so much time to check it all out. So I will tell you my secret. I am cheating. I am using a program from Internet Business Promoter. The program is not free – and I know you can find free programs on the Internet to tell you the same things. But this one will put it all together for you – make the analyzing – write a report – and tell you exactly what you have to do.

IBP

I will compare your site to the top 10 on the list. It will tell you what are the important things to change, where you don’t have to do anything and so on. You will be amazed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBPscreen

Report overview

The program will analyze all this for you. But of course you can get most of it free on the internet too. But use this list as a checklist for yourself too when you do SEO for your website. With or without this program.

  • Keyword use in document title
  • Global link popularity of web site
  • Link texts of inbound links
  • Keyword use in body text
  • Age of web site
  • Keyword use in H1 headline texts
  • Keyword use in domain name
  • Keyword use in page URL
  • Links from social networks
  • Server speed
  • Keyword use in H2-H6 headline texts
  • Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes
  • Top level domain of website
  • Keyword use in bold body text
  • Number of visitors to the site
  • Keyword use in same domain link texts
  • Keyword use in outbound link texts
  • Keyword use in same domain link URLs
  • Keyword use in outbound link URLs
  • Keyword use in meta description
  • Number of trailing slashes in URL
  • HTML validation of web page to W3C standards
  • Readability level of web page
  • Keyword use in meta keywords
  • Keyword use in the first sentence of the body text
  • Keyword use in HTML comments
  • Search engine compatibility
  • Factors that could prevent your top ranking
  • Table: Number of keywords
  • Table: Keyword density
  • Table: Keyword position
  • Table: Number of words
  • Table: Number of characters
  • Table: Ranking factors digest

 

Here’s what you do

You have to tell the program what the keyword you want to analyze. Let’s take “used cars”. Then you will have to tell what search engine you want to optimize for. Let’s take “Google.com”.

Then you run the report – yes … I know … too easy. But that’s all.

Of course it sometimes can be a little difficult to get on top 10 still. What if the other websites have 200.000 backlinks each.. Hmm…. But with this tool you know what you are up against 🙂

The result is that you will be on the first page on google 🙂

Get the program here IBP and get a good start with your SEO. It’s really worth it 🙂

 


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Google Heat Maps And SEO

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Nielsen has made some usability studies to show the focus areas on a web page. Using this study you can get a lot of tips – both for your SEO and for your SEM.

Let me show you a typical Google search page. Heat maps  from user eye-tracking studies. The users are looking the most are colored red. The yellow areas have fewer views and the blue areas are the least viewed areas.

HeatMapso what do we learn from this.

First of all – its important to be above the fold. We read from top and down and from left to right. Not only do you have to be on the first page, but you also have to be above the fold to be noticed in the Google search results.

And of course the heat map shows that most people are looking for the natural search results and not the paid ads. But on the other hand – we know that people click on Google Adwords. So Google Adwords is still working.

If you are paying Google Adwords you have to be in the top 20%. You will have to get the 1. or 2. position if you really wanna get results. I have seen other heat maps and they all shows the same pattern.

Most people stop at the 1. page of the search results and some will go to the second page. But after the second page – it really doesn’t matter. The same pattern on the 2. page – you have to be above the fold to get noticed.

A sample of over 8 million clicks shows that over 94% of users clicked on a first page result and less than 6% actually clicking to the second page and selecting a result displayed there.

Get more ideas here  at BusinessInsider.

 

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How To Get Likes On Facebook

facebook like buttonIn February 2012 Facebook had more than 845 million active users.

The users have to register before using Facebook, and then create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and including automatic notification when they update their profile.

845 million active users … amazing right.

The world’s population today is 7 billion people. So over 10 percent of the people in the world are active Facebook users… Wow. And this is why you have to be on Facebook. Also if you have a company. But to be successful on Facebook you have to get some likes. So people can read about you or your company.

Are you ready for this list about how you can get likes for your Facebook?

 

1 Post a Status Update

Post an update where you are mentioning your Facebook page. Post the update on other social sites, websites, blogs. Tell people to join you on Facebook.

 

2 Get fans to upload and tag photos

Make or attend an event where some of your fans also attends. Get the people to upload their pictures to your Facebook page, and/or tag the pictures. Then it will show up on their walls, and will lead to more traffic from your fan friends.

 

3 Offer an incentive for people to sign up

Make a dynamic Facebook landing page using a reveal tab. This way it will only show for fans of your page. It’s important that the incentive is valuable to your fans. This could be a white paper/PDF, a gift, discount to your shop.

 

4 Use Interactive YouTube Annotations to Drive Likes

You can use linkedtube.com to add link overlays to your YouTube videos. So you can link out to external sites like your Facebook Page.
I haven’t made any video yet. But I am thinking about it 🙂

 

5 Facebook groups

Join groups related to your subject and make sure you can post update in the group. Pages send updates, but groups send messages directly to a users Facebook Inbox, triggering an email alert.

 

6 Join your page via SMS

You can send a text messages to 32665 (Facebook) saying ”fan yourusername” or ”like yourusername” (without the quotes).

 

7 Encourage Likes in Your Employee’s E-mail Signatures

How many emails do you and your employees sending out every day? This is an easy and quick way to send out links to your Facebook page. Try to go to your send box in your email account. How many emails did you send out last year?

I am using  www.wisestamp.com for my emails.

 

8 Install a ”Like Box” into your website

If you install a like box on your website – your visitors can become fans without leaving your website.

 

9 Suggest your page to friends

Remember to use ”suggest to friends” feature of your Facebook page. It can be a little annoying – so don’t use it too much.

 

10 Install a like page button on your website

With a like button people can post your website page on their activity stream. This will make you visible to the friends of the visitors that have visited your site.

 

11 Connect your page to Twitter

Post to your Twitter followers about your Facebook page, so you can convert your twitter followers into Facebook fans.

You can connect your Facebook status to your twitter account. So every time you make a twitter update, it will send the update to all your Twitter fans too. Remember to have a link back to your Facebook page.

 

 

12 QR codes

Use QR codes in the real world. Put QR codes with your products and make the people like it. When you are making an old fashion ad – show a QR code directly to your Facebook page – so it will be easy to like it.

 

Remember to like my Facebook page here… www.facebook.com/SeoCustomer

And go and grab my Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011 here.. It’s all FREE.

Best regards

Henrik

 

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