1. 7 Secrets to High Google Rankings:
By Stephan Spencer,
Founder and President, Netconcepts

2. Secret #1: How to Gauge the Missed Opportunity Costs
Calculate the missed opportunity cost of not ranking well for products and services that you offer?
# of people searching for your keywords
engine share (Google = 60%)
expected click-through rate
average conversion rate
average transaction amount x x x x
Or being outranked by affiliates of your own company name - like Bissell.com is for "Bissell cleaners” and LernerCatalog.com is for "Lerner catalog"?
E.g.10,000/day x 60% x 10% x 5% x $100 = $3,000/day

3. How Frequently Are People Searching For My Keywords?
Tools to check popularity of keyword searches
Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool (
WordTracker.com
Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com
Google’s Keyword Tool
Google Trends
Google Suggest

4. Overture Keyword Selector Tool
Pros
Free!
Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (including all searches on Yahoo!)
Cons
Variations of keywords are aggregated (e.g. verb tenses, plural & singular, misspellings)
Rife with bogus data from automated searches
Only a month’s data. No historical archives.

5. Keyword Popularity – According to Yahoo!

6. WordTracker.com Pros Cons Based on last 60 days worth of searches
Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out
Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel, synonyms, …
Cons
Requires subscription fee ($260/year)
Data is from a small sample of Internet searches (from the minor search engines Dogpile and MetaCrawler)
Contains bogus data from automated searches
No historical archives

7. Keyword Popularity – According to WordTracker

8. KeywordDiscovery.com Pros Cons Full year of historical archives
Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (9 billion searches compiled from 37 engines)
Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out
Can segment by country
Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel, synonyms, …
Cons
Access to the historical data requires subscription fee (~$30/month)
Contains bogus data from automated searches

9. Keyword Popularity – According to KeywordDiscovery

10. Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Pros
Free! (Must have an AdWords account though)
Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (from Google)
Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out
Can segment by country
Synonyms
Cons
No hard numbers
Augment this tool with other free Google tools:
Google Suggest (labs.google.com/suggest)
Google Trends (

11. Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool

12. Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool

13. Keyword Popularity – According to Google Trends

14. Keyword Popularity – According to Google Suggest

15. How To Factor in Competitiveness When Looking at Keywords?
Competition for that keyword should also be considered
Calculate KEI Score (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator) = ratio of searches over number of pages in search results
The higher the KEI Score, the more attractive the keyword is to target (assuming it’s relevant to your business)

16. Secret #2: How to Make Your Pages “Sing”
Each web page should have a unique keyword focus (i.e. every page has a “song”)
The higher up in the HTML on the page, the more weight the keyword is given
Have at least words per page
Title tag is most important element on the page
Home page is the most important page

17. Secret #2: How to Make Your Pages “Sing”
Heading tags (H1, H2)
Contextual links
Text links much better than graphic links
Alt tags may be mildly helpful, for images that are links
Meta tags don’t improve rankings
Meta description can influence what’s displayed in the search results

18. Secret #2: How to Make Your Pages “Sing”
Remember, you’re writing for humans & search engines equally
You still have to be compelling, interesting (voice/personality), succinct, relevant (WII-FM) and reader focused (“you” vs. “we”)
Anything you’d be embarrassed to show your customers or a Google rep should not be fed to the search engines!

19. Pretty good title

20. Not so good title – where’s the phrase “credit card”?

21. Good link text and body copy

22. Good link text and body copy

23. No link text or body copy

24. No link text or body copy

25. Take a peek under the hood

26. The “meta tags”

27. Unnecessarily bloated HTML

28. Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank
Inbound links play a key role in determining rankings
It’s not just about quantity (“link popularity”); it’s about quality (importance of the page, topically relevant/authoritative)
PageRank™ – Google’s algorithm for measuring a page’s importance; Yahoo & MSN have similar measures
Each web page (not site) has its own PageRank score
PageRank scores from 0 to 10; logarithmic scale

29. Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank
Check your link popularity at
Check your PageRank with the Google Toolbar (download it from toolbar.google.com)
And/or check your home page’s PageRank using the Google Directory (directory.google.com)
Listings are ranked in order of PageRank

30. Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter

31. Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank

32. Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank
Find link targets
Review links of competitive sites, sites in your keyword market
Again, use the Link Checker tool at
Yahoo’s linkdomain: query operator & Yahoo Site Explorer tool
Run a link: query on
Check sites with high rankings for relevant keywords
The fewer the number of links on their page, the better
Offer link-worthy content. Keep it fresh.
Consider providing an RSS feed

33. Conduct any Google query and get results organized by PageRank

34. Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank
Try to get good keywords in the hyperlink text
Types of links that are likely to get discounted:
Reciprocal links
Affiliated sites (on the same IP range or hostname)
Footer links (at the bottom of the page)
Site-wide links
Don’t participate in “link farms” or FFA (“Free For All”) sites
Hallmarks of a link farm = more urls per page & less organization
Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods”

35. Secret #3: How to Build Links, Strengthen PageRank
Sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper by Googlebot
“Google Bombing”
Inbound contextual links alone can drive a site to the top of Google (e.g. “miserable failure”)
Also works on Yahoo, Live Search, etc.

36. Secret #4: How to Rejig Your Internal Linking Structure
It’s not just about inbound links; internal links matter too
Your home page’s PageRank gets distributed to your deep pages by virtue of your hierarchical internal linking structure
Links are the currency of the Web as far as search engines are concerned; spend it wisely w/in your site
Site hierarchy (tree structure)
Breadcrumb navigation
Site map

37. Dynamic Sites Can Kill Your Internal PageRank “Flow”
The issue lies with “spider traps”
Avoid stop characters (?, &, =), complex URLs
Session IDs are death to search visibility
Options
Recode your site to not pass “query strings”
URL rewriting (using a server module/plug-in)
Remote-hosted “proxy serving” (e.g. GravityStream)
catalogagemag.com/mag/marketing_right_page_web/

38. Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs

39. Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”

40. Duplicate pages

41. Avoid PageRank Dilution
Careful about having multiple URLs serving up the same content
Multiple homes for your content
Multiple domains registered and resolving to your site
abccompany.com vs.
version of your site
Session IDs or User IDs in the URL
301 redirect them all to the definitive version of the page
Removed pages
301 redirect rather than 404

42. Avoid PageRank Dilution
Example of multiple homes for the same content: Laura Ries’ blog

43. Optimize PageRank Flow
Link gain dissipates due to
Dynamic URLs
Session IDs or User IDs in the URL
Superfluous flags in the URL
Link gain is typically blocked by
Links based in JavaScript, Java, or Flash
Overly complex URLs (e.g. 7 parameters in the query string)
Forms (including pulldown lists)
Temporary (302) redirects

44. Optimize PageRank Flow
Manage the flow using “nofollow” on unimportant links
<a href=“/privacy-policy.htm” rel=“nofollow”>
Does it flow? Tools to check
Poodle Predictor (
Server Header Checker
SEOChat’s PageRank Lookup
Do a “site:” search on SEOChat’s PageRank Search

45. Server Header Checker

46. Secret #5: How to Influence the Click Decision
Zipf’s Law applies - you need to be at the top of page 1 of the search results. It’s an implied endorsement.
Synergistic effect of being at the top of the natural results & paid results
Entice the user with a compelling call-to-action and value proposition in your descriptions
Your title tag is critical
Snippet gets built automatically, but you CAN influence what’s displayed here

47. Where do searchers look? (Enquiro, Did-it, Eyetools Study)

48. Search listings – 1 good, 1 lousy

49. Secret #5: How to Influence the Click Decision
You may be #1 for some but not others… Search results are tailored to the user
Google Search History, geolocation, etc.
Vertical search results offers multiple paths to visibility
Google Base, Google Co-Op, Google Blog Search, Google Maps (Local),…
This also has translated into visibility in the “onebox”
Google’s new “Universal Search” results

50. Google’s “Onebox”

51. Secret #6: How to Check Your “Pulse” and Benchmark
Number of pages indexed (netconcepts.com/urlcheck)
Google PageRank
Link popularity
Alexa ranking (alexa.com)
Positions in the search results for important keywords
What keywords are they targeting? (check their metatags)

61. Secret #6: How to Check Your “Pulse” and Benchmark
Measure what’s important to your bottom line
Not “hits” or even unique visitors
Number of orders delivered by search engines
Sales volume delivered by search engines
Profit delivered by search engines
Conversion rate
Cost per conversion, Cost per lead
ROI

62. ROI – Sales by keyword

63. ROI – Sales by referrer

64. Secret #6: How to Check Your “Pulse” and Benchmark
Advanced metrics that most analytics packages don’t measure:
Page yield
Keyword yield (keywords per page)
Spidering behavior
More metrics at multichannelmerchant.com/webchannel/seo/beneath_surface_search_012007

65. Secret #7: How to Avoid SEO “Worst Practices”
Target relevant keywords
Don’t stuff keywords or replicate pages
Create deep, useful content
Don't conceal, manipulate, or over-optimize content
Links should be relevant (no scheming!)
Observe copyright/trademark law & Google’s guidelines

66. Spamming in Its Many Forms…
Hidden or small text
Keyword stuffing
Targeted to obviously irrelevant keywords
Automated submitting, resubmitting, deep submitting
Competitor names in meta tags
Duplicate pages with minimal or no changes
Spamglish
Machine generated content

67. Spamming in Its Many Forms…
Pagejacking
Doorway pages
Cloaking
Submitting to FFA (“Free For All”) sites & link farms
Buying up expired domains with high PageRanks
Scraping
Splogging (spam blogging)

68. BMW.de hosted many “doorway pages” like this one

69. “Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to this page

70. Doorway page spam

71. Doorway page spam

72. Keyword stuffing

73. Keyword stuffing in the “meta tags” too

74. Not Spam, But Bad for Rankings
Splash pages, content-less home page, Flash intros
Title tags the same across the site
Error pages in the search results (eg “Session expired”)
"Click here" links
Superfluous text like “Welcome to” at beginning of titles
Spreading site across multiple domains (usually for load balancing)
Content too many levels deep

75. Case Study: Homestead.com
What worked
Comprehensive SEO & usability audit
Intensive on-site training sessions with their IT and marketing teams
6 months of support
What didn’t work
No significant changes to the look of the home page were allowed for political reasons, significantly reducing the options available

76. Case Study: Homestead.com
Results
Within 8 weeks of launch of some preliminary optimization work, on page 1 for “website hosting” in Google
With our audit as a blueprint, later that year launched an internally built site redesign which landed them the #1 Google position for “website hosting”
Consistently held #1 position for 2 years! Still on page 1

81. SEO Tools For keyword research WordTracker KeywordDiscovery
Overture Keyword Selector
Google Suggest
Google Trends
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Googspy
SEOSleuth

82. SEO Tools For link analysis and PageRank TouchGraph Live PageRank
WebmasterEyes
Google Toolbar
Google Directory
SEO for Firefox
SEOpen
Page Strength Tool
Netconcepts Link Checker
PageRank Lookup
PageRank Search
Neat-o
SEO-Links
Google Webmaster Central
Thumbshots Ranking

83. SEO Tools Miscellaneous User Agent Switcher SwitchProxy Scrutinizer
Copyscape Poodle Predictor
Xenu Link Sleuth
Robot Replay
CrazyEgg
What’s That Site Running
Wayback Machine

84. SEO Tools For indexation checking Other reporting
Yahoo Site Explorer
Netconcepts URL Checker
Netconcepts Product Page Checker
Other reporting
Alexa
DigitalPoint Keyword Rankings
Urltrends
Hitwise ($$)
List and links at &

85. Further Reading
google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
blog.outer-court.com

86. Q&A!
For an ebook on Google power searching, SEO checklists & worksheets, and audio recording, executive summary & transcript of an SEO thought leaders teleconference, and this Powerpoint, give me your business card
Any questions come to you later, contact me: