Newsletter59
EzSEO Newsletter # 59
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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Hi again
What a week. Firstly a huge thanks to everyone who sent in advice on my vomiting daughter. On Monday we phoned a new doctor who gave us an alternative game plan. We changed Luna over to a 6th type of milk and started feeding little and often. You can have a look at this picture and decide for yourself whether Luna is happy with the new milk - see this photo:
http://andrew-williams.fotopic.net/p9776033.html
This week I started reviewing a few new products, but with so many other things to talk about this week, I will have to leave those for a later date - they are worth the wait - these products are knockouts.
This week:
1. What caused this Traffic Spike on Friday?
2. A great f.r.e.e. tool
3. Page Rank Out of Date?
4. Story About Positive Thinking
5. A quick Poll
6. A useful resource
7. Anatomy of a top web page. Part I
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1. What caused this Traffic Spike on Friday?
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On Friday 10th December, I noticed that the traffic to my wife's pregnancy site had spiked. And extra 100 visitors over the normal Friday traffic. On checking the logs, I was surprised to see that she was being found in Google for a lot of keyword phrases relating to someone I had never heard of - Dawn Flemming. Apparently this radio DJ from Orlando had died from pregnancy-related complications.
To our knowledge, my wife did not have any reference to this woman on her pregnancy site (neither of us had ever heard of her).
Anyway, the mystery was solved when I looked at the web site.
The RSS feeds on her homepage had been responsible.
My wife was ranking in the top 10 for a lot of Dawn Flemming related searches because the RSS feeds (which show the latest news articles) had links to articles about Dawn's death.
Not only does this show that RSS feeds can get extra traffic (in this case it wasn't very targeted), but also that Google had indexed the ever changing webpage on my wife's site and shown her page hours after the news had changed.
Conducting the same searches on Google now, my wife's page has disappeared (because the RSS news feed has changed) and the currently cached page in Google is different to the one that was showing on Friday.
Conclusion? Google is updating this page several times a week because of the constantly changing content introduced in the form of RSS feeds.
When my wife adds new content to her site, it is being indexed and included in Google within a few days. Now that is the power of RSS feeds.
If you want an idea of how this might be used for making more money on your sites, the poster site I suggested a few newsletters ago would be worth a try. Create pages for well known personalities and sell posters and other stuff related to that person. Add an RSS feed using that persons name as the key phrase, and when they make the news, your page will have links to those news item. There is a good chance that your page will be found at the top of Google for a lot of related searches.
Because the visitors are interested in that person, you may well find that they buy something from your site!
If you want to learn more about how to add RSS feeds to your site, I still recommend the same book by Adrian Ling. It has added thousands of extra visitors to our sites since we introduced RSS, and it can do the same for you.
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/rssmadeeasy
Very little technical knowledge is required!
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2. A great f.r.e.e. tool
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This week I downloaded a great f.r.e.e. tool. Copernic, with its Desktop Search has taken on the big boys and won.
With competing tools from some of the search industry giants, Copernic desktop search won the editors choice award at CNet.com.
Quickly and easily find information on your PC.
Get this great tool from the Copernic Website:
http://www.copernic.com
Incidentally, why not get Copernic Agent while you are there. It is a great web search tool, and is f.r.e.e. too.
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3. Page Rank Out of Date?
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In the Axandra (the people who brought us Arelis) Newsletter dated 7th December 2004, they published an article called
"Google Toolbar PageRank only for entertainment purposes?"
Essentially the article suggests that the PR displayed by the Google Toolbar is out of date. If that sounds familiar, it is. I discussed the same thing back in September.
If you missed my article on this, read newsletter #48. You can find it in the archives, and it may well change the way you evaluate potential link partners:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/archives
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4. Story About Positive Thinking
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Following on from last weeks article on positive thinking, I thought I would share this e-mail from one subscriber:
"Andy
Here's another suggestion for a positive thinking book.
A fellow friend in affiliate marketing suggested to me
this book right after I got let go from my full time
job in August. It's called "What to Say When You Talk
to Yourself" by Shad Newsletter. She used the book
when she was going through a rough time. So I read
the book front to back then wrote out my positive self
talk according to the book. I then recorded myself
saying the self talk into the computer as an mp3. I
listened to it all day long while I worked at home
every day. It is now December and my outlook is so
much better, and the income from affiliate marketing
jumped 14x what it was before! Amazing. It really
does work. Read the book reviews on amazon.com for
more reviews."
Christine
http://www.dna-testing-1st.info
If you have any stories you would like to share, e-mail me, and if I include it, you can get a fr.e.e. link pointing to your site.
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5. A quick Poll
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This week someone sent me an e-mail asking if I would review 2 of his eBooks. I am always happy to have a look at eBooks (and software) and review all those that I consider good value.
However, with this eBook I am left in a bit of a dilemma.
You see the eBooks themselves offer great content, especially for those who are quite new to affiliate marketing.
The problem?
Well these eBooks are in exe format. They are obviously built with one of those eBook generators. I hate this type of book. For me, there is never enough time in the day to sit at my computer reading a complete eBook.
I much prefer to print off the book and take it around with me, so I can read it when I have a few spare moments during my day. Can I really recommend a book in this format? The only way to print it off is page by page!
Asking around, the majority seem to agree with me - PDF is the only way to go (not to mention its cross-platform nature). However, I thought that before I go back to this guy and try to persuade him that PDF is better, I should give you the chance to vote.
PDF or EXE eBook?
You can vote here (it will only take you a few seconds:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/ebookvote
I'll publish the results of this vote next week.
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6. A useful resource
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Check out the difficulty of your niche before you start your website:
http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/
This resource was sent to me by a reader of this newsletter who wanted to remain anonymous.
If you have any useful resources you would like to share, please e-mail and let me know. If I use them, I will happily publish a URL of yours - that means a free incoming link to you!
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7. Anatomy of a top web page. Part I
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Today we start to look at a few top ranking pages in Google and try to determine what factors are important in that page to make it rank so well.
I want to have a look at a range of pages that rank well, from those with low competition to those with high competition.
First, let's consider what we mean by competition.
There are two ways to look at competition in Google. There is the competition a page has when you type the phrase with quotes, and the competition when you type the words without quotes. The number of results returned by Google in each case is YOUR competition.
The main differences between these two types of search are as follows:
Search with Quotes - this returns only those pages that have been "optimized" for the exact phrase.
Search without Quotes - this returns all pages that have been "optimized" for the words making up the phrase.
e.g. (in simple terms)
a) If you search Google for
alsatian dog
Google returns 41,000 competing pages.
b) If you search Google for
"alsatian dog"
Google returns 6,390 competing pages.
In (a) above, there are 41,000 pages that refer to alsatian AND dog, but not necessarily to alsatian dog.
In (b) above, there are 6,390 pages that refer to the exact phrase alsatian dog.
Now, if you want to rank well for the term "alsatian dog" on Google, you only have to compete with 6,390 other pages for this exact term.
However, there are 41,000 - 6,390 = 34,610 other pages that are related to this search, and might still beat you if Google sees them as more relevant than your page.
We have discussed before the importance of link reputation and PR in ranking. It is possible for a high PR page to rank well for a term like alsatian dog, even if it does not have the exact phrase on the page.
This fact clouds the issue somewhat, and so although I recommend searching with quotes to find the real competition, I also recommend that you look at the top few results in Google (as searched without quotes) to determine how important those "partial match" pages are.
A quick search at:
http://www.prsearch.net/
for alsatian dog, shows me that the top pages for this search without quotes have a low PR (0-3) and many of those pages have 0 incoming links.
The same search at PRSearch.net using quotes around the phrase show very similar results. The competing pages for the exact term have low PR and low incoming links.
This phrase should be easy to target and get top rankings if done properly.
A word of warning: Because the PR reported on the Google toolbar is out of date (see earlier), you cannot be 100% sure of the PR of the pages, even using a site like PRSearch. They will use the same formula that the toolbar uses, and so will be equally out of date. Only Google knows the exact PR it is using in its ranking for any one page.
A second check I often do is to check what the PR of the homepage of the site that is ranking well, as this gives me an indication of how important the site as a whole is. For the phrase alsatian dog (with or without quotes), the top page is:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/alsatian.html
The homepage
http://www.castleofspirits.com
has a PR of 6 - quite an important site.
However, there is no link to the alsatian page on the homepage, so the PR 6 homepage wont directly help towards the high ranking of the alsatian dog web page.
Doing a backward links check on Google does not help since there are no backlinks listed for this top ranking page.
OK, putting on my detective hat, I see a link at the bottom of the Alsatian page called "March 02 Ghost Stories". There is another link to "Ghost Story Page".
Clicking on the link to Ghost Story Page, I am taken to a PR 5 page:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/storypg.html
where I find a link to March 2002 Ghost Stories. Clicking that link takes me to a PR 3 page:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/mch2002.html
And on this page I find a link to Ghostly Alsatian dog.
So, the top ranking alsatian dog page has one link I know of from a PR 3 page. I might assume that this site also has a sitemap (although I cannot find one) where it contains a second link to the alsatian dog page. That means a total of 2 links, both internal.
I can assume from this that the alsatian page with a PR 2 is probably the correct PR, and the page itself has very few incoming links. I am confident that if I targeted the phrase alsatian dog, I would easily get a top ranking.
The phrase alsatian dog is therefore an EASY phrase to target.
As a final check I went to the searchguild difficulty tool mentioned in section 6 of this newsletter and typed my phrase into that. The Search Guild rates this term as EASY.
With relatively few off-page factors contributing to the high ranking of this page, I can only assume that the on-page factors are what makes this page stand out from the rest and rank at number 1 on Google.
There are a variety of tools available for calculating density, but I use a tool I wrote for myself and is not available for purchase.
Running this URL through my tool tells me a lot of useful information.
Density of the phrase "alsatian dog" on the page is 0.49%
The keyword is found ONCE in the title (11.11%), and TWICE in the main text on the page (a density of just 0.34%).
The keyword is not found in any header or meta tag!
As a second check I always look at what I call the partial density. That is the sum of the densities of all words that make up the phrase.
e.g. the phrase "alsatian dog" is made up of two words - alsatian AND dog. I look at the density of alsatian, and the density of dog, and combine the two densities.
This is useful because it tells me the density on the page of the words that make up the phrase (remember it is possible to rank well without the exact phrase on the page) - a kind of simplified page reputation.
The partial density of this page is 3.09%, made up of 7 occurrences of alsatian, and 12 occurrences of dog. This page is obviously about alsatians and dogs!
Let's look at the prominence of this phrase on the page. First an explanation of what prominence means.
Prominence is a measure of where on the page a word exists.
A prominence of 100 would mean it was the first word on the page.
A prominence of 1 would indicate it was the last word on the page.
A prominence of 50% would indicate it was the middle word on the page.
If the phrase was the first word (100% prominence) and the last word (1% prominence) on the page, the average prominece onthe page would be about 50%. That means the keywords are well spread out on the page. As prominence increases, the keyword is found higher up the page, as it decreases, it is found lower down the page.
For analysis of top ranking pages, I look at not only the average prominence of ALL occurrences of the phrase on my page
i.e. how the keywords are spaced out on the page,
but also the prominence of the first occurrence on the page.
i.e. how close to the start of the document is the phrase first found?
The prominence of the first occurrence of the phrase alsatian dog is 99.67%. That means it is almost the first phrase on the page (only the word ghost comes before it).
The average prominence of the whole page for this term is 62.62%. That means that the keywords are distributed more in the upper portion of the page. Haven't I always told you that it was important to get your main keyword in the top one-third of the page?.
This page is a good one to study. It shows a top ranking page for a low competitive keyword phrase. Because of the low competition, incoming links and PR are less important (though if you have both, you could dominate this phrase), while on-page factors will make or break the ranking.
Even though the exact phrase is only found 3 times on the page, the fact that the phrase is in the title of the document and in the body text seems to be enough. This low density is backed up by using the words that make up the phrase several times on the page. Google will be in no doubt what this page is about.
A final help to the ranking of this page is the filename. Notice that part of the keyword phrase is found in the filename - alsatian.html
That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed today's newsletter and that you will recommend it to your friends and colleagues who you think will find it useful. Next week we continue our look at the Anatomy of a top ranking web page, and hopefully shed a little more light on this webmasters Holy Grail.
Have a great week!
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http://www.ez-search-engine-optimization.com/nls
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at webmaster@ez-search-engine-optimization.com. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That's extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
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