Higher Search Engine Rank

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You have probably already heard of reciprocal linking, where two websites link to each other for mutual benefit, but what about three way linking?

Three way linking can easily be explained in the example below:

 You have three websites - website A, website B and website C.

• Website A links to website B.
• Website B links to website C
• Website C links to website A

As you can see, there is no direct reciprocal link here. Each website is linking to another website, but getting a link back from a different website.

The reason for doing this is because reciprocal links can easily be detected by search engines as “unnatural” links, therefore you won’t get as much benefit from a reciprocal link as you will from a one way link. Doing a three way link exchange makes this look more natural as site A is linking to site B, but getting a link back from site C.

If you decide to use three way linking as a strategy for link building I would recommend only linking to websites that are related to your own website and ensuring that your backlink is coming from a site that is also related. By related, I mean the same theme. So don’t link your home business website to someone’s dieting website.

How do you set up a three way link?

It is easy to set up a three way link if you already have two or more related websites of your own. You can email a webmaster and propose a 3 way link exchange. The disadvantage of this is that it is a manual process and it can be difficult to keep track of your links and be sure that the other webmaster has kept his or her link to your website in place.

An alternative is to join a 3 way linking system such as Jonathan Ledger’s 3 Way Links. This system allows you to add up to 50 of your own websites into this member’s only 3 way linking network and set up 250 three way links. The good thing is, all the sites are reviewed manually by the Three Way Links staff, so you don’t have to worry about poor quality websites linking to you. Also, the links are checked automatically so there is no need to worry about webmasters removing their links.

I used Three Way Links in a test for one of my own websites and was pretty impressed with the results - it was easy to use and setup and I saw an increase in the search engine ranking of my website, despite not using any other methods for linking.

Three way linking is definitely a strategy that you should consider using as part of your overall linking campaign along with other methods such as article distribution, forum posting, directory submission and press releases.

Many people want to know “how do I submit my site to a search engine?” and some people even go on to purchase services which will submit their website to a search engine on a monthly basis (for a monthly fee of course). If you are one of these people I have three words for you…. “Don’t do it!”.

Read on and learn a little bit more about the search engines and how they work before going off and paying for some search engine submission service that will probably do absolutely nothing for you apart from cost you money.

 First of all, the main search engines are:

• Google (approx 47% of the searches)
• Yahoo (approx 13% of the searches)
• MSN (approx 9% of the searches)

None of these search engines require you to submit your website to them.

Why not…? The reason is that these search engines find websites by themselves without the need for anyone to submit them. All of these search engines have software programs known as “spiders” which basically go and visit  (crawl) different websites on the internet, following links on each of these website, which lead to other websites, which lead to more websites and so on.

All you need to do to get your website indexed by a search engine is to get some backlinks to your website. A backlink is simply a live link from one website to your website. There are many easy ways to do this including distributing articles with your resource box in them containing a link to your site, submitting your site to online directories, exchanging links with other websites, distributing an online press release and more.

Once you have been indexed by a search engine there is absolutely no need to submit your website to them once, never mind every single month. Submitting your site to search engines won’t do you any harm (apart from wasting your time or money), but it is not going to do you any good either.

So if you have already started a search engine submission campaign I recommend that you stop immediately and spend your time or money on building good quality backlinks to your website instead.

I hope that answers the common question of “how do I submit my site to a search engine”. The short answer is, “you don’t”.

However, submitting your site to manually edited link directories such as Yahoo Dir and Dmoz is a completely different thing. This will benefit your site and it is a worthwhile exercise.

If you are trying to get a higher search engine ranking, you will probably have come across the term “Google Pagerank” or “Google PR” while you have been doing your research. If you are not sure what page rank is or how it can affect your search engine rank, read on for an easy to understand explanation of Google Page Rank and how to get a page rank.

In simple terms a page rank is an indicator of the quality of a particular page on website. By quality I mean the number of links that the web page has pointing to it rather than the actual quality of the content on the page. 

A page rank is a whole number from 0 - 10, where 10 is the highest quality and 0 is the lowest. To find out the page rank of a particular page you need to download and install the Google Toolbar which is free. Page Rank applies to a page on a website, not to the whole website.

If the toolbar is grey, this means that a page has no page rank. If your website has pages on it that have a grey toolbar this could mean that

• The page is very new and has not yet been indexed by Google OR
• The page contains duplicate content and is in Google’s supplemental index rather than its main index OR
• Your website has been de-indexed/dropped from Google for some violation (less likely

If the toolbar is white, this means you have a page rank of zero. A PR0 is very common for a new website or a new web page as it take some time to build enough links back to your website to achive a higher page rank. It is also worth noting that Google typically only updates the page rank on the toolbar every few months so if you have a new website it may take  months for page rank to show on the toolbar for your website. However, Google is always updating the page rank of sites on an ongoing basis, so the page rank shown on the toolbar is not a true pagerank, it is a snapshot of your page rank from a given time.

To increase your page rank you need to get high quality backlinks to your website. A backlink is simply a link from another website to your own site. The best way is to get links naturally by writing such good content that other webmaster’s want to link to your website, but in reality most webmasters build backlinks by distributing articles, submitting their website to directories, exchanging links, distributing press releases, commenting on blogs and more. You can find out exactly how to increase your page rank here.

It is not just the number of backlinks to your site that count towards page rank, it is also the quality of these links. So for example, a link from a PR6 page is will increase your chances of getting a higher page rank, more than say, a link from a PR4 page. The number of links on the page that is linking to you also affects how much page rank (also known as “link juice”) is passed on to your web page. A link from a page that has 5 other links on it is of more value than a link from a page with 40 links on it.

Page rank is not linear, so it is much more difficult to get from say a PR4 to a PR5 than it is to get from a PR0 to a PR3.

Google Page Rank plays an important part in how a web page is ranked in Google’s search engine results but it isn’t worth much if you haven’t researched your keywords and optimized your web page. Page rank is a useful indicator of how popular a website is, but it is only part of the equation. So, do take notice of your website’s page rank, but don’t get hung up on that little green bar. The most important thing is that your traffic is increasing, not your page rank.

Is your website converting?

Setting up your website is one of the initial steps of an Internet marketing campaign, but the success or failure of your website is dependent on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t have any idea what you would like your  website to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.

If you expect visitors to your website to perform some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them,  signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product, there are some steps you can take to make sure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any out of the ordinary offline promotional activities.

If you find that thousands of visitors have come to your website this does not necessarily mean that your website is successful. Usually,
you want those visitors to actually do something on your site. The number of visitors to your site who made a purchase is usually called the site conversion rate, and it is one of the most important figures in determining the success of your website..

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 4,000 hits to your site, but only 50 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this percentage, just take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100.

If your website is designed to get your visitors to fill out a form or sign up for a newsletter, make sure to also figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually purcahse something. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

If your conversion rate is poor you may want to consider how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible? Does the visitor have to jump through hoops to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just give up and move on to another  website. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

It also makes sense to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

It is important to check your conversion rate before embarking on an SEO campaign to get a higher search engine rank. You can use pay per click advertising to check the conversion rate of specific keyword phrases. This can save you time upfront as you do not want to end up optimizing and promoting your website using a keyword phrase that does not convert well for your product or service.

Do you own a website or blog? Are you disappointed with the number of free visitors that you receive every day from the search engines? If the answer to these questions is “Yes”, then read on to find out how you can quickly and easily get a higher search engine rank.

Each of these 7 methods can make a vast difference to where your website or blog ranks in Google or any of the other major search engines.

(1) Double Check Your Keywords

If you are getting very little or no search engine traffic, this will be for one of two reasons. Either because you have chosen a keyword phrase for your website that doesn’t get searched on very often, or you may have a good keyword phrase but your site is not on the first page of search engine results for that phrase.  Alternatively you may not have even thought about keywords.

Whatever the answer, if you are receiving no search engine traffic it is worth taking a second look at your keywords. Use a keyword tool such as Wordtracker to generate a big list of keywords related to your website and take a look at two very important statistics for each keyword:

• The total number of searches in a 24hr period
• The number of competing pages

You need to be sure to pick a phrase that has a good number of daily searches, but you also need to be sure that the competition is not so tough that you will never be able to reach the first page of the search engines. It is a bit of a balancing act, but once you have found the right keyword phrase, read on for more tips about how to get a higher ranking for your keywords.

(2) Make Sure your Keywords are in the Right Places

Many people believe that you just need to list your keywords in the meta keyword tag of your web page to get a good ranking, but this is a myth. Most major search engines including Google do not even take these tags into account when ranking a web page. The main reason for this is that they have been spammed so much in the past that they are no longer worth considering.

Two of the most important places to put your keyword phrase are in the <TITLE> tag of your web page and in the heading tags <H1>. Try to mention only your keyword phrase(s) and nothing else in these tags to ensure that you don’t dilute your efforts.

You should also aim to mention your keyword phrase throughout the body of your web page. Mention it a few times at the beginning, middle and end of your web page, but don’t go over board  - a spammy page with your keywords mentioned too many times can have the opposite effect on your ranking than you would like.

(3) Check your Web Page is Perfectly Optimized

As well as putting your keywords in the Title and heading tags of your web page you should also mention them in the anchor text of some of the links on that web page or on other web pages on your site and in the alt and title attributes of links and images. Again, don’t go overboard with this.

When you have finished optimizing your page you may want to check your keyword density. There is no exact formula for the keyword density and it should normally be around the 2-5% mark. Use a free keyword density tool to check the density and compare it to your main competitors. Try to aim for a similar density.

(4) Create a Sitemap

Creating a sitemap can be beneficial to both the visitors to your website and to the search engines. It will help to ensure that the search engines can find and index every page on your website. You can create a site map by hand, but it is much quicker and easier to use a tool to automatically generate one.

Here is a free sitemap generator. 

(5) A Little Bit of LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It sound very complicated, but it is a relatively straightforward concept.

LSI is about the meaning of the words on your web pages and how they relate to each other. If you have optimized your web page for a particular keyword phrase the search engines will analyze your web page to see if there are other words that are related to these keywords or have a similar meaning.

As well as putting your keywords in the right places and checking your keyword density you should think about including other keywords on your page with a similar or related meaning. This will strengthen your page overall and improve your chances of ranking well. 

(6) Understand Who your Competitors are

Even if your keyword phrase returns a million pages when you type it into Google, the only pages of real importance are the first few websites on the first page of results. Most people don’t go past the first page or two when searching for something, so you have to aim for a page one ranking. To do this you need to take a close look at who your competitors are. Enter your main keyword phrase into Google and take a good hard look at the websites in the first few positions. How well optimized are they? What is their Google Page Rank (PR)? How many backlinks do they have? Who is linking to them?

Doing this analysis will give you a very clear picture of what you need to do to beat this competitor. In some cases you may find that the top competitors are huge multi million companies with many staff working on the website and in this case you may decide that this keyword phrase is too competitive and you may want to rethink your keywords. 

(7) Boost those Backlinks

Finally and most importantly you must continually build high quality backlinks to your website. This is one of the most important factors in getting a top ranking. You can do this by writing articles, submitting your site to directories, distributing press releases, posting in forums and making comments on blogs and websites. You can get a good idea of how many backlinks you need by comparing your website to your competitors’ websites. Use a backlink tool to compare the number of backlinks on your site to your competitors.

Read about more Ways to Improve Your Google Page Rank here.

If you would like to learn about these methods in more detail or find out even more ways to get a higher search engine ranking download my report 10 Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking.

Earlier I talked about researching keywords to get a higher search engine rank. Once you have a big list of keywords from Wordtracker how do you go about picking the right keyword phrase for your website?

Luckily Wordtracker uses an indicator called the KEI, which is the Keyword Effectiveness Index. This gives you a rough idea of how effective a keyword will be. The more searches per day that a keyword has, the higher the KEI will be and the less competitors a keyword phrase has, the higher the KEI will be. In an ideal world you want a phrase that has a high number of searches and a low number of competing pages, but often these are hard to come by. Usually a highly searched on phrase has a lot of competitors and a phrase that is searched on rarely has a much lower number of competitors.

It’s all about finding balance. If you are optimizing an important page on your site such as the index page or a product page, you need to consider your keywords carefully and ensure that you pick a phrase or combination of phrases that has a good number of searches per day. Use the total number of competing pages as an indicator of the competition, but also pay a visit to Google and enter your keywords (without the quotes)  to see which sites have the highest ranking for these keywords. Take a look at these websites and ask yourself is this keyword too competitive for you? If the answer is “yes”, then it is back to your keyword list to check out some other phrases.

When optimizing an inner page of your website of a blog post you don’t need to spend as much time analyzing this. You don’t need to worry as much about picking a phrase with a high number of daily searches. You can pick a low competition, low search phrase and benefit from optimizing lots of different inner pages and blog posts for a wide range of low competition phrases. You can generate a lot of easy traffic to your website using this method.

This is one of these questions where the answer is “it depends”!

When you are choosing a keyword phrase to optimize the main page of your website for you should always as the question “is this keyword phrase too competitive”? Being on page 10 of the search engine results aint gonna do you much good, so you need to be sure that you can climb above your competition and get that higher search engine rank.

The “competing pages” statistic in Wordtracker will act as a good guide for you, but you need to go further than this.

Here is what I do:

(1) I use the “competing pages” as a quick guideline for me to narrow down my keyword list

(2) The important part - I choose a potential keyword, then I go to Google and I type in that keyword exactly as it is (without quotes). I then look at the websites that are on the top of page 1 and page 2 of Google and ask myself the following question:

Can I beat this website?

By this I mean, is this a website that has so many backlinks that I am never going to get anywhere near it? Or is it an authority or big company website (e.g. Microsoft) with so many staff working to promote it that I will never get anywhere near it?

I usually use http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to check the backlinks of these site.

If you do this, then hopefully you will be able to answer this question, which boils down to “have you got enough time to build more/better quality backlinks than this website”? It really all depends on you, your experience and how much time or money you have available!

Of course, there are other factors as well, but this one is the biggest factor when it comes to ranking well in Google.

Keyword research is an area that many webmasters forget about when they launch a website, with more time and effort being spent on getting the design and the content right. Often it is only later on, when they don’t see a good ranking in the search engines or a flood of visitors, that they start thinking about Keyword Research and SEO.

Keyword research is the first stage in any search engine optimization campaign, ideally done before you have even got to the website design stage. If you are thinking about keywords retrospectively as a result of a poorly performing website, don’t worry - it is still possible to do your keyword research now and go back and update your poorly performing web pages.

There are many tools and methods available for doing keyword research, but the best keyword research tool is Wordtracker. Wordtracker is the industry’s leading keyword research tool and has a massive database containing over 330 million search terms. It can let you know with a few clicks of your mouse what the most popular keyword phrases in your niche are, along with the number of competing websites and the number of searches per day for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Altavista, Ask and AllTheWeb.

 The easiest way to use Wordtracker is to use the Universal Search option. Type in your keywords and use the Thesaurus to find related phrases and synonyms, then click on the words that are interesting to you and simply add these to your “basket”. You can also click on the dig icon to find all phrases that contain that phrase. Once you have built up a list of at least 1000 keywords, choose step 3 and select a “Competition Search”. Within seconds you’ll then be given a report of the number of searches per day for each keyword and the number of competing webpages. This will really help you to narrow down on the right keyword phrase for your website.

In my next post I’ll be talking a little more about how to choose the right keyword phrase from your list and how to use the KEI to help you.

Hello and welcome to 3 Steps to Search Engine Success! My name is Suzanne Morrison and I would like to assist you in achieving higher search engine ranks for your website.

Search Engine Optimizing is often though of as a complex process, but I like to break it down and think about it in 3 simples steps.

• Step 1 - Choose the right keywords (aka Keyword Research)
• Step 2 - Optimize your website for your chosen keywords (aka On Site Optimization)
• Step 3 - Build up your site’s link popularity (aka Off Site Optimization)

Here you will find lots of tips and ideas for achieving a higher search engine rank for your website and I will share with you my ideas on finding the best keywords, optimizing your website, building backlinks, using tools to help you with your SEO and more.