The post did ok on Digg and Reddit, nothing spectacular but it brought in some traffic. It may have gotten a few other links, but not a ton. A few days after the post was published, I noticed that I was getting some traffic the search engines. The post was on the front page of Google, around 6 or so for the keyword phrase “government stimulus package.” This is the first step in improving your SERPs.

1. Look at Your Stats

Find out which pages you are getting traffic to from the search engines and what keywords are being used to get there. This is where we need to focus. Improving your ranking for a term from 7429 to 43 takes your traffic from 0 to 0. If you can improve from 9 to 1, you will see a huge increase in traffic if it is a phrase that people are searching for.

Now that we have a few pages that are getting some traffic and the keywords they are getting it from, we have to do a little keyword research.

2. Keyword Research

The first step is to find out which phrases we want to target. Look at the keywords that are getting the most traffic and find out where you currently rank. You could use your web analytics program for this, and then check the rankings on Google.

At this point, you can also use a keyword search tool to find out how much traffic each of these phrases gets.

Now we want to focus our efforts on the terms we rank the highest for that get the most search traffic.

3. Internal SEO

Have you ever written anything similar to this before? Go through your archives and find where you have mentioned this topic before. Update the old article with a link to the new one using the keywords you are trying to rank for.

If this is a topic that people want to know more about, consider writing another post or two expanding on the first one. In each new post, link to the original article with one of the keyword phrases you are targeting.

Next, go back to the post you are hoping to rank higher. Is the keyword already in the article? Consider making it bold. Is there a section where the phrase would make a good header? Consider adding it. Don’t stuff the article full of keywords as you still want the people that come to enjoy your writing. However, if these changes can be made without affecting the quality, they may help improve your ranking a little bit.

These things do two things. They show the search engines what your pages are about (hopefully the keywords you are targeting) and they show them that they are important pages. The more links you have pointing to the page, the more important you are making it in Google’s eyes.

4. Watch your Rankings and Traffic Surge

I went back to my post and made the keyword bold when I used it. Then I went through the archives and found another post that talked about the stimulus package and added a link to the new post. I also wrote a few more articles in the following weeks that talked about the stimulus package, so I linked back in each of those as well. The result? I moved up to #1 in Google for the phrase “government stimulus package” before it passed. It brought thousands of visitors to my blog, and the week that the bill passed is my highest traffic week ever.

The part of this that is really powerful is that all of this was done several days after the article was posted. The regular readers had read it already, and anyone who was going to link to it already had. I was then able to move from #6 to #1 in Google simply by telling Google what the page was about and that I thought it was important. Never underestimate the power of linking to yourself internally.

I have since dropped behind irs.gov and recovery.gov, but that post has been viewed more times than any other. It also gave me a valuable lesson in SEO that has helped increase my search traffic to many other posts as well.

Now while I am willing to sing them praises when deserved, I also think that we should be vocal when they cross the line. If you paid attention to the launch of their expertise sharing website Knol, you probably saw a great deal of controversy coming together.

Knol is basically a Wikipedia clone, with some different features. One contributor, for example, can write several articles on the same topic (Squidoo style).

The main problem with this initiative, as many people have highlighted, is that fact that Google apparently is entering into the content business, creating a huge conflict of interest.

In the past Google executives have clearly stated to the web community that they would never enter into the content business. That was a required reassurance, else they would start competing directly with their partners (i.e. websites that appear on Google’s index, and websites that are part of the AdSense network).

Looks like they forgot about that reassurance.

Here is an example of how Knol could compete with About.com (property of the New York Times):

1. About.com authors and contributors decide to give Knol a shot, and start putting their articles there
2. Google gives high trust to Knol articles, and starts ranking them high on the search results
3. The Knol articles of those authors and contributes start getting good traffic
4. The authors and contributors put AdSense on the their Knol page (Google already allows that)
5. Authors and contributors start making good money, and decide to write more on Knol and leave About.com
6. The cycle repeats and reinforces itself, Knol starts to spread through the search results, and Adsense income soars
7. The New York Times gets pissed off, but there is nothing much it can do about it

Now keep in mind that this example applies to any content publisher. Even bloggers. Suppose you blog about pink mobile phones, and you have the first result for that keyword on Google. Then someones decides to create a Knol page about pink mobile phones, and Google starts ranking that Knol page higher than yours (just because its their platform). Your search traffic would go down the drain (and possibly your money too, if you were monetizing the website).

Looks like a fantasy scenario, but it is not that much of a stretch. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has been conduction some tests with Knol pages, and the results are surprising. 30% of all the Knol pages that he created for test pages were ranking on the first page of Google’s results after one day.

Aaron Wall also proved that with some backlinks involved a Knol page that duplicates a page of an existing web page will outrank the original.

I am not sure about you, but I don’t feel comfortable with that at all.

So what is your opinion, is Google trying to enter the content business with Knol? If so, do you think this is OK, or do you think they are crossing a line and should think better before going forward?

An interesting feature are the comparison charts that they created for each category, like the one below:

You will find backlink analysis tools, keyword research and brainstorm tools, domain name tools, on site analysis tools and search related tools, so check it out.

As you probably know this is just an update of the nominal PR, the one you see on the toolbars. The real one is updated much more frequently, and that is the one that affects your search rankings.

There are people that say “Hey, I don’t care for PR anymore.” Well, I would believe the ones that don’t have any toolbar installed on their browsers to check the PR of the different websites around.

Personally I do care for it. Not a lot, but still.

You can’t deny that PR is a metric used by people to evaluate the trustworthy of a website. Some advertisers and site buyers also take it into consideration.

Anyway, let’s see what will happen. I am hoping that some of my new websites will gain some PR from 0, and hopefully Daily Blog Tips will keep its PR7.

Do you have any websites where you expect changes?

So what is RankSense? It is an all-in-one SEO software that brings 12 integrated tools to optimize most aspects on your blog or website. I exchanged some emails with Hamlet Batista, the creator of the software, and the guy knows his SEO. He has made millions of dollars in search marketing and affiliate marketing deals, in very competitive niches like the Viagra one, just to give you an idea.

Here is what you will find inside the software:

• an advanced keywords research tool (search for keywords related to your content, to your competitors, by topic and so on)
• keyword analysis (estimated traffic, competition and so on)
• competition analysis tool
• website SEO check (the software will scan your websites to see if the essential SEO factors are there)
• link structure analysis (where your links come from, what anchor text they have and so on)
• link building tool (what are the best places to get links)

The interesting thing about the RankSense software is that their approach is towards simplicity and time saving. Some SEO tools there are really complex and have steep learning curves. RankSense, on the other hand, was developed to be as user friendly as possibly, so even beginners can work on their SEO efficiently.

You can try it for yourself though and see if you like. They require a credit card on the registration, but you won’t be charged for 30 days. If you find that the software is not what you were looking for, you just need to cancel before the first 30 days and you are good to go. Their basic plan starts at $25 monthly as well, which is considerably cheaper than some competitors. Click here to check the sales page with the registration link.

The clue is coming again from Mr. Matt Cutts. He stated the following on a comment on his blog two days ago:

I wouldn’t be surprised if new PageRanks started showing up this weekend or so.

Personally I find it weird to release a second PR update two months after the latest one. If you remember well, last year we passed almost 6 months without seeing one. Perhaps Google is tweaking their algorithm, so they need to update things more frequently?

That said, such networks also have a huge drawback, they usually eat half of your money. Text-Link-Ads, for instance, places simple text links on your site. You can decide the amount of links you want to put on your blog, and based on a couple of parameters (traffic, topic, pagerank, etc.) they will calculate a monthly price per link. Suppose the price is $50 monthly per link, this means that an advertiser will pay $50 dollars to put the link on your site, but you will receive only $25 and Text-Link-Ads will eat the other $25.

Subscribing with advertising networks can be an option if you don’t have time to sell advertising yourself or if just want to make a couple of bucks to pay your hosting bills. If you are serious about your blog and if the traffic is starting to grow steadily, however, I highly recommend that you create your own “Advertise” page to deal directly with potential advertisers, cutting out the middle man.

You can customize your advertise page in whatever way you prefer, but a good way to structure it is to divide the page in three main paragraphs. On the first paragraph you need to describe what topic your site deal with, who are your readers (age, geographical locations, profession, or anything else that describes them) and what kind of traffic or exposure the site is receiving. Notice that the more precise you get the better.

The example of the first paragraph for Daily Blog Tips would be:

Daily Blog tips is generating over 120000 page views per month, with a very targeted audience composed of bloggers, site owners and web designers. The site features daily tips on blog design, promotion, web tools, and more. If you have a website or product that is focused on blogging or online marketing in general Daily Blog Tips is the right place for you.

On the second paragraph you want to specify what kind of advertising you are looking for, preferably including the price and graphical specifications. A possible example would be:

There are two ways to advertise on Daily Blog Tips:

• sponsored link ($30 monthly)
• sponsored graphic ($120 monthly) *Graphics should be 125×125 pixels, without animations

Finally, on the third paragraph you should include general information about the advertising deals and how the person could get in touch with you in the case he is interested. An example for the third paragraph is:

Daily Blog Tips reserves the right to approve sponsoring sites. Advertising plans are agreed on a month-to-month basis where either party may terminate the relationship on 15 days notice.

If you are interested or need more information please send an email to info@dailyblogtips.com.

1. The three top performing ad units are: 336×280 large rectangle, 300×250 inline rectangle and 160×600 wide skyscraper. Consider using those units if possible, but bear in mind that other formats might be more suitable for your website design.
2. The most successful link color is blue. This fact is connected with the roots of the Internet where all major websites used to feature blue links.
3. Apart from blue links you can also use a link color that matches the pattern of your website (i.e. If you use green links make the Adsense links of the same color).
4. As a general rule of thumb, blend (no border, same background) your Adsense units if your website has a light color scheme and contrast (border, contrasting background) the units if you are using a dark color scheme
5. If the ads are placed within the content you should avoid using borders while ad units outside of the content can use borders to call attention.
6. If your website has mainly repeat visitors (like Forums) you can rotate the background color of the units to reduce ad blindness
7. Consider removing the “Advertise on this site” message from your units. This can be done on the control panel under the “My Account” section, disabling the “Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up” feature.
8. Test, test and test. Every website is unique so make sure you test with different colors and formats and track the results to fine tune your Adsense units.

Then a couple of days ago I received the following email in response to my advice (I’ll keep the identity of person anonymous for obvious reasons):

I have built many, many websites, and over the last couple of years of testing and re-testing, I have come to find out that my websites do better by NOT letting big G* have complete access to them.

I started out by doing exactly that. Submitting all my websites to big G’s Webmaster tools. Why? Because all the people “In the know” recommended it. Well, guess what? I could never figure out why I could never get my websites higher than the 2nd page.

Then, I read an article by a not so very well known Internet marketer who was making millions. Everyone blew him off and called him crazy. I was fortunate enough to be able to talk to him personally and what he revealed to me was simply amazing.

I decided to give it a try with some of my sites that were not doing very well. I took them out of G* Webmaster tools (there are many other ways of tracking you know) and low and behold. Most of them were on page 3 or worse before. After taking them off G tools, within 2 to 3 weeks, they were on the first page and making money.

The way I see it now, it’s like letting the government into your life. The more they know about you, the worse they make it!

As you can imagine I don’t agree with this argument, and here is why.

When you create an account on Google Webmasters Tools and submit your sites there you are not, by any means, giving Google more or less access to your website. You are not giving them any more information than what they already have by crawling and indexing your site over time.

The only thing they ask is that you confirm the ownership over your site (either by plating a meta tag on the header of your template, or by uploading an HTML file to your server) so that they can show you the information they have about your site, and give you advice to solve problems, should there be any.

In other words, signing up for Google Webmaster Tools won’t affect the information Google has about your site. It will, however, give you the opportunity to discover how Google sees your site, and this information can be very valuable.

Here is a personal example to illustrate the point. A couple of years ago I noticed that most of the pages of this blog started losing its search rankings. I couldn’t figure what was wrong, since I was not doing anything wrong or shady. After a couple of weeks I finally remember to log into the Webmaster Tools, and I found that I had a huge number of “Unreachable” crawling errors. This basically meant that the Google bot was not being able to crawl my pages for some reason. I then discovered there is a wrong setup on my server blocking the bot, and once I fixed that the rankings came right back.

There are many other valuable features and diagnosis tools offered by Google inside the Webmaster Tools. Now does Google offer all of this to webmasters because it is an altruistic company? Not all. Google is just doing what is sound for its business interests. If they help webmasters make their sites as good as possible, it will be easier for Google to crawl them and to sort the information around the web more efficiently (not to mention that better websites will get more traffic, and if they are AdSense users they will make more money both for Google and for themselves).

That is why I don’t buy the “Google is out there to get webmasters” theory.

What the person mentions in the email could even be true, but it would be just a coincidence. Adding or removing your site from the Webmaster Tools should have no effect on its search rankings. It is the same thing when people add or remove AdSense from their websites and search rankings go up or down. People think things are related, but it is just a coincidence.

Anyway this is just my opinion, and given that everyone is entitled to one, feel free to write a comment below with your thoughts on the issue.

This made me curious and went to check for myself. The first thing I wanted to know was if my post was indexed already by Google or not. I copied one sentence from the post and search it in Google, with quotation marks to find only exact matches. The result was pretty surprising: Google had already indexed 2 scraper sites, but my original post was not on their index yet, as the image below illustrates:

I repeated the search query today, and my post is now showing on the first position. Regardless, I find it pretty weird that Google would index first scraping material and only afterwards the original source. The same thing was happening to the indexation of the backlinks.

Anyone know what could be the cause for this flaw?