Do you have a question releated to Search Engine Optimzation, AdSense, WordPress, or a related topic? E-mail me (mickey@mickmelseo.com) and I’ll round them up and post the answers in a few days. Thanks!
What happens when you search Google for [your name]? Do you like what you see?
Part of that depends on your name. If your name is common (Joe Smith) or owned by a celebrity (if your name is Michael Phelps and you’re not a swimmer, good luck) you might be in trouble. For the rest of us, there are some things you can do to help.
Ed Kohler has just written an excellent post on the best ways to control the results that come up for your name. In a nutshell, you need to create accounts using your name on popular sites, then get them to rank near the top. In Ed’s case, he owns all of the top 10 results and 89 of the first 100. I own all 10 for my name, and 49 of the first 50.
So how do you do it? Between Ed and myself, our top 10 consist of pages such as:
The vast majority of those are sites that you can register for in under a minute. The more you can contribute to each site, the better. For example, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, then you have a lot more links pointing to your profile (from your followers), thus raising your ranking for that profile.
However, even if you don’t have time to build each profile out, at least get registered, get your name reserved, and try to get back to it eventually. Building up your search results will take some time, so do it now while it’s not a big deal, and it’ll be ready for you if you ever need it (job hunt, etc).
I apologize for not posting very much lately. I’ve been working with a handful of bloggers to try to get their traffic (and revenue) beefed up, and I’ve not had much time for this site lately. The techniques I’m using are really working quite well, and now I’m opening it up to other people. I don’t want to try to assist too many people (it takes a personal relationship with each blog), but if you’d like some help with your blog, let me know. Here’s the simple version of how it works:
To help explain this idea to potential clients, I’ve set up a simple site outlining how it works. The first question that most people have is: “Wait. I’m trying to earn more revenue, and I’m not sure I want to give up 25% of my revenue.” It’s a fair question. However, my clients (so far) have all been very pleased, as they’ve started earning much more than the 25% that I get. Here are some stats froma recent client I’ve started helping.
Those are genuine stats from Google Analytics, snipped just a few minutes ago. Each dot represents one week, leading up to last week.
The beauty of the revenue-sharing is this — you pay nothing. Nada. $0.00. Also, because I’m getting a small portion of the ad revenue, you can rest assured that I will work hard to get your blog running as smoothly as possible.
If you’re already WordPress-savvy and doing well, then you certainly don’t need my help. However, if you’re having problems keeping your site running well, or if traffic just isn’t increasing as quickly as you think it show, shoot me an e-mail and we can chat.
TechCrunch has just hinted at a major search engine announcement next week. In this post, we read the following:
Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”
That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.
Big news from Microsoft? Yahoo? Someone else? What do you think it might be?
Google has just announced that they are watching over a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) pages on the web now, which is more than double the number of stars in our galaxy!
The Official Google Blog has details and some history. Any way you look at it, that’s quite an impressive number. That leads to the next question — how many of those trillion pages are yours? Based on a “site:” search on Google (like this one), I’d say I’ve got about 500,000 pages in their index. I know I’ve got more pages out there, but that’s all that they’re showing. I would assume that their index has far fewer than a trillion pages, but they’ve not released numbers for that in quite a while. How many do you have in there?
As reported on the Official Google Blog, Google has just launched their “Flash indexing algorithm”, which means that data buried in Flash applications on your site can now be seen by Google!
In terms of SEO, you’ll still be far better off using normal, well-written HTML instead of Flash, but this will certainly help. Google will at least know what’s in your Flash files and help to rank your page based somewhat on that.
If any of you have Flash-heavy sites, keep an eye on your traffic from Google and see what it does over the next few weeks. Let us know in the comments if you notice a gain in traffic from them, or if things hold pretty steady.
BlogStorm has an excellent post today about something very simple you can do to help protect your site.
The problem, as they see it:
Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.
I agree with them — it’s a substantial issue. The bigger problem is that many sites don’t realize they’ve been hacked for a quite while; often they only realize it when their traffic from Google dries up.
If you get hacked, Google will stop sending traffic to your site but they won’t tell you about the problem. However, you can build a few simple Google Alerts to notify you instead. BlogStorm suggests you set up and alert that looks like this:
viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:mickmelseo.com
If you get hacked even a little bit, one of those terms is bound to appear. If it does, Google will let you know about it very quickly and you can dig in and fix the problem.
I’ve used Google Alerts for a while now to notify me of any news items that might have slipped past my Twitter and RSS reading, but this is a new take on it. It’s simple and effective. Great tip!
The hot thing for the last year or so is to proclaim “PageRank is useless! Ignore it!“. Some of the dumbest things I hear are statements like “A PR2 site can outrank a PR7 site, therefore PageRank is meaningless.“ Duh! If a higher PR site always ranked better, then Google.com (PR10) would rank first for every query. There are certainly other factors in play, and PageRank is just a piece of it.
I’ll certainly admit that PageRank isn’t as valuable as it once was. However, it is still presumed to be a small piece of the Google algorithm (along with 100+ other factors), making it not completely worthless. It might not help much, but if it helps at all then it can’t be considered “worthless”.
More importantly, it’s crucial to understand what PageRank represents. It’s the little things that contribute to your PageRank that are worthwhile, and the green bar is a representation of that.
Let’s use a football analogy. Suppose your team is 10-0, and you’re about to play the team that’s 0-10. Chances are good that you’ll win. However, you aren’t going to win based on the fact that you’re 10-0. In fact, your previous record is of no value in this game. What is of value are the things that contributed to that 10-0 record. For example, your team would likely have:
The green PageRank bar is like your 10-0 record. It won’t help much on it’s own, but it represents other things about your site. If a site has a PR7 and is ranking well, it’s not ranking there because of the PageRank itself, but because of what that PageRank represents — lots of inbound links, many coming from other quality sites.
This site is a great example of that. I’ve watched traffic slowly grow since I started writing, and our PageRank has gone up as well. The PageRank is an indication of the growing number of inbound links that we’ve earned, and those links are helping us rank better, thus increasing our traffic.
Is this a fair assessment of the current state of PageRank? Do you think it still means more? Or do you maybe think it’s been pulled from the algorithm and is indeed worthless?
Yesterday we discussed how the long tail can be one of your best allies. Coincidentally, Jim Karter wrote a post yesterday with a great suggestion on how to discover more great long tail keywords to blog about.
His suggestion is very simple – keep track of what people are searching for on your site, then blog about the items that haven’t been discussed yet. He is using the “Fluid Dynamics Search Engine” script, but there are other options as well. If you use WordPress, there is a great little plug-in called Search Meter that will record all of the searches performed on your site. In addition, I highly recommend that you use the service provided by HitTail. They track your incoming visits and suggest new keywords based on the previous visitors. Between Search Meter and HitTail, you’ll quickly have a long list of new topics to blog about!
If you’re more aggressive, you can even write your own script to track searches. On our church site, I’ve done just that. I built a custom search engine using MySQL’s fulltext search, and I record each query in our database (along with date, time and number of results found). I breeze through it from time to time to see what I’m missing.
Some of the things I’ve discovered in the past year or so:
The list could go on and on. By tracking the searches, I can not only improve the quality of the search engine, but I can build the content that people are already looking for.
The longer you can stretch out your tail, the better!
About 3-1/2 years ago, Chris Anderson of Wired coined the phrase “the long tail“. If you’re not familiar with it, the term is a way of expressing the advantage of going after thousands of unique search queries (or products) rather than focusing on just a few big ones.
Product-wise, Amazon is the king of this. They sell many copies of popular books, but they’re also able to sell millions of copies of obscure books simply because they’re not constrained by the square footage of a single store. Those individual sales of lesser-known books generate a massive number of sales each year.
The same idea works with search engines. While it’s great to rank well for some power terms, the real magic (and money) is when you rank well for thousands of less-popular searches. According to Google, 20-25% of the searches they see each day are queries that have never been searched before. That’s a staggering number! Millions of searches today will be brand new to Google. The wider you can rank in your niche, the more of those visitors you might pick up.
Here is an example using the website from our church. In the past month, we’ve had 7,084 visits from search engine visitors, and they’ve used a total of 1,958 different queries. It’s not a huge number of visitors, but it’s pretty good for a church site. Let’s dig into a few of those searches to see what they’re so helpful to us.
Here are a few of the queries that landed on us. I’m glad we rank well for these, but they’re not especially beneficial:
How about the long tail? These are searches that occur far less often, but are very valuable:
The list goes on and on. In the past year we’ve had over 9,000 different queries that attracted two or fewer visits. These are big, long, ugly queries like the ones shown above — but they’re the ones that work. If someone enters a long, precise search query and your site is near the top, you have a good chance of getting the sale/lead/visit/whatever.
So how do you build long-tail traffic? It’s pretty easy. Just follow basic SEO principles to help Google really understand your content. Things like:
Build lots of quality content, then make sure Google can fully understand what your content is all about. Do that, and over time you’ll find yourself loving the long tail.