People in the SEO business who act like magicians — as if they have some kind of secret SEO trick or hidden method — are merely carnival workers, hawking their booths to the midway. Unfortunately, the web is still a place where these folks can run around from town to town, virtually speaking, staying just ahead of the cyber-cops.

Of course there ARE legit web marketing companies who do search engine optimization SEO work. You can tell who they are by one essential fact… they make absolutely NO guarantees about results. They tell you what they are doing, everything they are doing and that is their marketing strategy to you. Some of them actually operate web-sites where they openly publish the how-to and tutorial techniques. They have no secrets.

Instant SEO Tune-Up Only $99

So, why would you hire someone who tells you there is no magic trick that guarantees success, and merely charges for their time to apply commonly understood, proven (relatively of course) web design and SEO technologies? Why?

Because they may be able to do a more complete, and faster job of this work than you could. They have more experience, etc.

But, given enough time, with enough reading and research, you could do about as good as most SEO firms. Problem is, do you have the time and energy to devote to this? It may take months or years for you to (1) discover what is needed, what techniques actually work, and (2) then do the work.

That’s what drives the success of legitimate SEO companies. They don’t hide anything. They aren’t magicians. They’re just workers in the vineyard.

And, workers who actually get something done will always have a job, even on the ‘net.

Samples of our Search Engine Optimization work:

IdeaPro Online Marketing – SEO & Web Marketing, since 1996 — #1  and also #2 in Google for main keyword “generate backlinks” — outranking millions of competing SEO gurus and Internet Marketing websites. Click the keyword to see our ranking in Google.

Level1Diet.com – Leading authority on the Anti-inflammation Diet & Health Research — #1 to #3 in Google for main keyword “anti-inflammation diet” — outranking millions of competing health oriented websites. Click the keyword to see our ranking in Google. We are beating famous health and diet gurus like Dr. Sears, Dr. Perricone, Dr. Oz, Dr. Green, the South Beach Diet, the Atkins Diet, Jenny Craig, Overeaters Anonymous, and all the rest.

Let us do our successful SEO work for you — Our “Instant SEO Tune-UP” costs only $99 and will be completed in only 3 business days. If you have questions, feel free to call us during business hours (Pacific time 8am to 5pm) at 323-203-0150 or you can also Email us with your questions. Get your own website Search Engine Optimized using our tested, proven, successful SEO strategies, starting now…

Instant SEO Tune-Up Only $99

For about 2 years or more, Google has been toying with the idea of reducing the SERP or Search Engine Results Positions for pages which take too long to load.

Well over a year ago, Google-watchers have been noticing that well known speakers from Google were mentioning page loading issues more and more often in their speeches to website design and marketing conferences. So, the warnings were out there for us all to notice.

Finally this April they lowered the boom. Suddenly new, much-lower SERPs for main keywords began to show up for millions of previously successful web marketing sites around the world. Sites which had been highly ranked — often in the top 5 positions — for popular keyword searches of only 2 or 3 words were slapped and slapped hard by Google’s new enforcement of page-loading time rules.

Content, and a Lot of It, Used to be King

If content used to be king, now it was merely a prince… SPEED is now king.

Yes, you still have to have good, relevant content, but now your page has to load fast, too… really fast!
How fast is fast enough for Google?

Well, from our preliminary testing, it appears that Google is enforcing some fairly arbitrary rules, at least as far as we can determine from looking at their Webmaster Tools pages.

When you register your site at Google’s Webmaster Tools, and let it run for a while to collect data like perhaps 2 or 3 days, then you’ll see their estimation of your page loading speed in their Site Performance -> Labs section. There will be chart that shows their testing of your page loading times, and a conclusion that ranks your site in comparison with other sites. Google will summarize your “page loading speed as averaging 5.5 seconds, which is slower than 89% of other websites…” or something like that. They also show you a line on the chart below which speeds are FAST and above which speeds are SLOW. The area above the line is pink or red, and the area below the line is light green.

So, of course, you want your site’s pages to test into the green. How fast is that? Well it looks like the line is currently set to about 1.5 to 2.0 seconds download time.

It may occur to you that the main factor in determining download time is the speed of the end-user’s connection. So, what connection speed is Google using? It appears that they are estimating that user’s are using very slow connections, something like 56k modems. So, they are giving you a “worst case scenario” that assumes that end users don’t have cable, DSL, T1 or faster connections. Okay, well, Google knows best.

Google Spokesperson Matt Cutts Says Speed Matters, but Relevancy is Still Important

Even though speed of page loading is now a major focus, one Google insider says that the relevance of your page to the keyword search is still the main thing. Of course, when we’re looking at the “top 10 results” on the first page of Google after a search, we’re looking at sites that are already winners in the relevancy contest. So, when Google adds a speed-factor to the mix as they did in their April re-ranking episode, many thousands of previously first page sites suddenly found themselves on page 2 or even lower in search results for their main keyword phrases. Here is a video from Matt Cutts explaining the “speed vs. relevancy” consideration:

The important thing to realize is that older, previously highly ranked sites that were heavy in content will now be lower in ranking compared to their previous successful page-one positions — and can be elevated back to their previous levels should they increase page loading speeds… at least in theory.

How to Speed Up Your Pages

1. Reduce the size of the text on the page. If your page used to have 100k or 150k of content in html, reduce it to only 30k or so. Provide links out to full “chapter pages” using a “Read More…” link under each of the main paragraphs, the way newspaper or magazine websites do. Then create that chapter page with the full story you have edited down from the front page.

2. Reduce the number of photos or images, and their physical size or dimensions. Remove any images or photos that are not vital to your page. Be tough on yourself. It is not absolutely required, throw it out! Move it to the chapter page. Use smaller thumnails and place a link around the smaller image to the bigger image for people who want to see the full size for more details… like this:

<a href=”images/reallybigimage.png”><img src=”images/thumbnailimage.png” width=”72″ height=”72″ border=”0″ alt=”description here” title=”Click to see bigger image…”/></a>

3. Reduce the resolution of your remaining images to only 72dpi, and then specify the exact width and height of these new smaller images in your image tag, like this:

<img src=”images/nameoffile.png” width=”144″ height=”72″ border=”0″ alt=”description goes here” title=”title goes here”>

4. Notice above that we’ve used a “.png” format for our graphic image file. PNG is now the preferred format for most images, replacing either GIF or JPG formats. The PNG format loads faster in most browsers, and usually produces smaller files for storage and transmission. Save your present JPG or GIF files into the new PNG format and change your onpage links so they will load properly. There are many online pages that will convert your existing GIF or JPG images into the more modern and efficient PNG format. One of our favorites is the Free Online Image Converter at CoolUtils.com. The CoolUtils.com converter also lets you change sizes of your new image file, and rotate it or flip it. You just click a browse button to upload the file from your computer, then make your conversion choices and then click the download button… only takes a few seconds. Very cool indeed!

5. If you have large images that you are almost sure are vital to your page, you should consider serving your images from a different domain that you purchase just for media files. Google does this for some of their own pages. Go over to GoDaddy.com or your favorite domain registrar and buy a new domain. That should cost you only $10 or maybe less. Assign the DNS for that new domain to your existing account where you can host more than one domain. If your hosting account does not permit hosting more than one domain, change hosts to someone who does, like Hostmonster.com — they should only charge you $6/month or less for an annual hosting account that will host unlimited domains. You can move your existing domains there easily. If you need help, call us and we can do it for you.

Load all your images into a folder on this new 2nd domain. Then change all your pages to get their images from that new domain’s image folder.

What does this do? It speeds up your image loading impressively, since all browsers can download both your text and your images at the same time… if they are coming from different domains! If they are coming from the same domain, then the browser gets your text and then it gets your images.

Neat trick, huh? Only $10/year and a bit of up-front work will do this speed up job for you. Then you can lay back and rest…

6. Turn on Gzip compression for your site or server. This may not be easy. If you use a shared host instead of your own dedicated machine or server, then you have to call your hosting company and request that they install “Gzip Compression” for your account. Most will do it for you at no charge. It may take a few days for them to get around to it. Once this is done, all your pages will be sent out over the internet in compressed format using GZIP technology that is recognized by all modern browsers, robots and crawlers. This will speed up your page loading dramatically. Your pages will appear to be only 20-30% of their previous size! Thus you absolutely MUST get Gzip enabled for all your sites, and you must get this done right away.

Dedicated Server Hosts May Need to Recompile PHP/Apache to Use Gzip

If you use a dedicated server, or share one with others, you may need to recompile PHP and Apache to use its built-in Gzip compression modules. If you’re using WHM Web Host Manager in a Linux OS system, then go into Easy Apache under Software and select Use Existing Profile, then walk through the setup to select the “deflate” option and have it perform the recompile. If this is scary or strange to you, then ask for help with your hosting provider administrators. They will sometimes do this for FREE and sometimes charge you a small one-time fee for their help. Under Apache 1.x, this function is called “mod_gzip” and under Apache 2.x and newer, it is called “deflate”. Recompiling needs to be done with care, because if the process is interrupted due to your browser running out of memory or you losing your internet connection or some other reason, the recompiling will stop and your server will need to have Apache reinstalled from scratch manually, and all the sites it hosts will be down… thus, you need to do this yourself ONLY if you know what you’re doing.

7. Combine all your little Javascript files into one file, hosted on your own machine. You can just copy all the code inside one of the files into one of the other files and resave it as a “combined-scripts.js” file. If you’re using a little javascript snippet program that you link to in your page that comes from another site… download that snippet and upload it to your own server and combine it into one big file with all the other .js files referenced on your page. Then remove all links to those old off-server separate .js files.

8. Combine CSS files. Just as you did with javascript files, take any separate .CSS stylesheets and code you may have referenced on you page and move the CSS code into one big file and get that served from your own server.

You should now have just ONE .js and just ONE .css file referenced on your page, and each should be served from your OWN machine, not from somewhere else or some other domain owned by someone else.

9. Now you should MINIFY or compress and cleanup these .js and .css files, so they are even smaller. There are free websites that do this for you. Here is a javascript that will do the work for you… and here is another free site for minify CSS work or… Just search for “minify css” and “minify javascript” to find them. Keep a plain, readable version of each for later editing, but use the minified versions as the final versions that you serve on your page. This process should save another 10% or so for each file in total size. Every KB matters.

10. Make sure you aren’t downloading any pixels or icons or logos from other sites. Often you’ll find that popular networking, social bookmarking, or tracking sites may give you a snippet of code to paste into your page that includes a small logo that loads from their own servers. This enables them to track your visitors and usage. Remove these, or you will suffer very slow page loading due to just these small logos! If you keep them, you’ll find that everything else you are doing may not work, and you may still be considered “slow” by Google. If you want to link to social bookmarking site, use just plain links, without their logos and tracking pixels. You’ll be glad you did.

And, eventually, Google will notice that you’ve done all this and re-rank your pages back up to their previous super-duper-high “first page” SERPs. And, you’ll be back in the money!

Google Wants to Speed Up the Entire Web

Now you’ve got work to do.

As promised, we’ve completed an initial testing as of December 10, 2009 between the new Google Caffeine search engine technology and the traditional Google we’ve known previously up until now. The old Google system will be in place through the holidays, with the new Caffeine search algorithm rolling out in early 2010.

From what we can determine at this time, Caffeine is everything Google promised in their announcements to webmasters about their new technology at the Search Engine Strategies convention in San Jose in August.

1. Caffeine is faster, sometimes by up to 50% or more.
2. Caffeine presents a much, much larger index of the total web universe. It will often show that they have indexed and analyzed up to 200% or even more of the web for any particular search term.
3. Caffeine appears to be more timely, or at least as timely as the current system. This means that even though they are much faster at indexing a much larger number of web pages, they are not missing stuff that has just happened or happened very recently. This is good news for news-oriented websites, and for site that present time sensitive information.
4. Caffeine is, if anything, even MORE accurate at presenting high quality websites relating to any specific keyword search phrase. This is probably the most important thing, together with the timeliness of the results, to most end users of any search engine.

Those are the big conclusions, but there is more, especially with regard to the actual ranking for any one site for particular search terms — the all important SERP, or Search Engine Results Position.

If you are a website owner and sell something or publish information for Google Adsense, and depend on traffic from “free organic” search results in Google, then you are extremely concerned with your SERPs for your main keyword phrases.

Our analysis shows some interesting things about the new Caffeine search technology:

1. The first three SERPs don’t seem to change much when you compare the old system to Caffeine. This is especially true for the much envied #1 SERP for most keyword phrases.
2. Also, number two doesn’t seem to change much as we go into the Caffeine algorithm. Sometimes you will see a new or reordered #3, but it also seems to remain the same for most keyword phrases.
3. Postions #4 thru #10 do seem to change under the new system. All-new websites are appearing in these bottom seven of the top ten — sites that had been on page 2, 3 or even lower under the old Google algorithm.

The Old Google Algorithm — Postions 1 to 3

OLD GOOGLE: The first 3 positions for "Internet Marketing" have not changed.

The new Google Caffeine — Positions 1 to 3

The new Google Caffeine page, positions 1 thru 3 for "internet marketing"

So, in positions #4 through #10, we see big changes (see the screenshot images below). In many if not most cases, these positions reflect all-new websites showing up that had previously been relegated to pages 2, 3, or even lower. Obviously, the sites themselves hadn’t changed their on-page content, since the comparisons are made from the same index date. And, we can also assume that the other off-page factors like backlinks, linked phrases, and inbound pageranks haven’t changed either between the two systems.

So, what can be causing this difference? A look at the 2 screenshots below for the bottom 7 SERPs for the keyword “internet marketing” can reveal some interesting and subtle differences. First lets look at the screenshots, then we’ll analyze the differences between them and extract some conclusions.

As you can see from the comparisons below, the new Google Caffeine appears to be much more sensitive to whether the exact keyword phrase itself appears in the TITLE tag of the page than was the old system. Each page showing up in these #4 to #10 positions now uses the exact keyword search term in the title. Early in the title means higher ranking.

Also, the new Caffeine approach is much more reliant on whether the exact keyword phrase being searched for appears early in the on-page content. You can see pages that didn’t have the exact phrase in the old system, but not in the new Caffeine. Earlier in the page content means higher rankings.

These means that off-page factors that were given more importance in today’s current or old algorithm are now down-graded and less important to the new Caffeine approach. Those factors were the reasons that the old listings showed up. The de-emphasized off-site, and some on-site SEO factors might include one or any combination of these previous considerations:

1. How many backlinks any website has and the pagerank of the inbound page itself.
2. The linked phrase of the inbound link — meaning the underlined words you click on.
3. The in-site architecture or organization of the listed site — meaning the categories, sub-cats, and internal links pointing at the page showing.
4. The actual page-name that shows up inside the URL, including the domain name.

There are other factors that may have been de-emphasized, including image file names, alt tag inclusions, and other factors like keyword density and keyword frequency, etc. However, the overwhelming evidence is that at least the TITLE, on-page CONTENT, and word-order inside those elements is now more important than ever.

What can we conclude from this early and somewhat cursory examination of Caffeine? Here are our main recommendations for internet marketers, and general webmasters to take in order to get ready for Caffeine.

Internet Marketing Advice for Google Caffeine

Getting Ready for Caffeine: Our Recommendations

1. Make sure your main keywords show up early in your page TITLE tag.
2. Make sure your main search phrases show up early in the first 50 words of on-page contents.
3. Make sure your main search term key word phrases show up early in your H1, H2, and H3 onpage headlines.
4. Be sure these exact phrases are emphasized or italicized, and made bold inside paragraphs, early on the page.
5. Then, you can, as always, double check that you’ve got good internal website organization or architecture, and a good number of high quality topically relevant inbound backlinks on sites that you do not control.

So, in some ways, this is a return to good solid website building, like it was in the early days of the internet.

Old Google Results for “Internet Marketing”, positions #4 through #10 (click on each image to see Google’s actual results page)

Today's Google traditional or current SERP search result positions 4 thru 10 for "INTERNET MARKETING"

New Google Caffeine Results for “Internet Marketing”, positions #4 through #10 (click on each image to see Google’s actual results page)

Here's the way the SERPs #4 to #10 look under the new Google Caffeine results for "Inteernet Marketing" keyword searches.

As your site’s popularity or Google Pagerank increases, you will find that it ranks higher for searches in all the search engines, including Google of course, but also Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, Ask, Metacrawler, and so on.

And, as your search engine result page listings improve, your visitor count or traffic will increase, and that after all is what we all want.

This Google page-rank is a complex formula that they don’t reveal to us, but they do admit that one of the biggest factors the number of non-reciprocating links on other sites that point back to your site, the pagerank of those sites themselves that are doing the linking to you, and the topic or subject matter being discussed on those linking pages.

So, if you can get one-way links on highly ranked pages that are topically related or similar to your site, then the relative Google Pagerank of your own site will increase.

The issue is simply “being in with the in-crowd” — to quote an old song from the 1960s.

There are thousands of sites that let you list your site free, or at a very small price. We recommend using only the free sites, of course, for obvious reasons. And, you should concentrate only on the sites with good Google pank-ranks themselves. We’ve researched to find the best ranked sites that let you generate a high quality link without charge, and present 100 of our picks below.

Some of these free directory or press release sites below were free at one time, but have since changed their policy. Visit them to see whether they still offer FREE links. For those that still do — which is most of them — the free link you get will still be relatively ‘high quality’ — meaning that there will be a topical page related to your own site’s content, so that the link is likely to be considered by Google to be worth something. For years, these types of free directories have been a mainstay for web marketeers. The time you spend in adding your site to these directories is well worth the sweat investment.

Start with the highest ranked sites, and work your way down the list. Links from higher pageranked sites are worth more to you.

Here they are, showing their Google Pageranks, as of today — March 12, 2009.

PR-8
*	www.dmoz.org
*	www.lii.org
PR-6
*	www.accoona.com
*	www.buzzle.com
*	www.ezilon.com
*	www.maxpromo.com
*	www.surfsafely.com
*	www.clickey.com
*	www.geniusfind.com
*	www.infotiger.com
*	www.spheri.com
PR-5
*	search.able2know.com
*	www.abacho.co.uk
*	www.netinsert.com
*	www.123kidzarea.com
*	www.canlinks.net
*	www.gimpsy.com
*	www.illumirate.com
*	www.info-listings.com
*	www.information.com
*	www.internet-web-directory.com
*	www.mastermoz.com
*	www.prolinkdirectory.com
*	www.re-quest.net
*	www.resourcehelp.com
*	www.searchsight.com
*	www.searchwiz.com
*	www.turnpike.net
*	www.wikidweb.com
PR-4
*	www.admcity.com/search
*	www.odp.in
*	www.pegasusdirectory.com
*	www.searchtheweb.com
*	www.strictlycss.com
*	www.worldsiteindex.com
*	www.consultant-directory.com
*	english.hispanoempresa.com
*	homepageseek.com
*	mkdir.anchorbase.com
*	www.aardvarkbusiness.net
*	www.ablazedirectory.com
*	www.add-url.googlepagerankings.com
*	www.all-linkdirectory.com
*	www.amray.com
*	www.anaximanderdirectory.com
*	www.anywhere.ca
*	www.arakne-links.com
*	www.automotoforum.cz
*	www.bhanvad.com
*	www.directoriobus.com
*	www.directorystorm.com
*	www.earth-directory.info
*	www.earthstation9.com
*	www.jayde.com
*	www.linkaddurl.com
*	www.gmdir.com
*	www.littlewebdirectory.com
*	www.massivelinks.com
*	www.mavicanet.com
*	www.onemission.com
*	www.pedsters-planet.co.uk
*	www.premierdirectory.org
*	www.searchwebworld.com
*	www.sitesondisplay.com
*	www.verticaldirectories.com
*	www.websavvy.cc
*	www.websitespromotiondirectory.com
*	www.zeezo.com
*	www.zunchdirectory.com
*	www.abilogic.com
PR-3
*	www.urlcable.com
*	www.zensearch.com
*	www.directory.ldmstudio.com
*	www.diroot.com
*	www.mostpopularsites.net
*	www.linkcentre.com
*	directory.cipinet.com
*	invo.info
*	www.best-websites.net
*	www.exactseek.com
*	www.fx1.co.uk
*	www.hedir.com
*	www.linksmatch.com
*	www.software-pointers.com
*	www.surfdirections.com
*	www.webolink.com
*	admart.ca
*	directory.trout.pl
*	fabaroo.com
*	www.4-every-1.ws
*	www.abydir.com
*	www.addlinksuggest.com
PR-2
*	www.1abc.org
*	www.achx.com
*	www.01webdirectory.com
*	www.friendly-links.com
PR-0
*	directory.ticketretriever.com
*	www.muslimmatrimonial.com
*	dir.mymaldives.com
*	www.nonar.com

If you find more free press sites you want to check, visit PRTool.info to check their pageranks all at once. Enjoy!

How you end up with long urls

A long URL usually comes about because most automatic Content Management System software platforms such as WordPress or Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla and so on have a setting or plug-in that magically produces really long URLs for each post. Sometimes you have to switch them into a search-engine-friendly mode. Of course, some web-masters actually create the document “name” in HTML manually — wow, image that!

CMS “search engine friendly” settings do this by simply taking the TITLE tag of the post of page and using it to produce a long URL that includes the main words from the title as a url-line or document name, buried down in the permalink for the page or post.

NOTE: A good plug-in for WordPress that lets you control these factors easily is All-in-One-SEO. We suggest installing it for all WordPress users.

For this post you’re reading now, the full search engine friendly, SEO’d URL might look something like this:

http://www.ideapro.com/seo-tips-do-long-urls-hurt-or-help-increase-google-pagerank/

This is usually considered okay by most of us “seo experts” or “web marketing guru’s”. The reason? Because it does seem to work well most of the time.

How We Got a #1 Position for “Generate Backlinks” in Google

For example, do a search in Google for one of our previous posts or articles “How to Generate Backlinks to Increase Your Google Pagerank,” which we wrote on December 6, 2006 about 1-1/2 years ago. If you search for “generate backlinks” in Google today July-2-2008, you will see that post in the #1 position, and #2 for “generating backlinks”.

Not too shabby, considering there are 3,870,000 other web-sites who are competing for this term in the Google search results. And, most of these lower-ranked sites were actually written by other SEO companies and web marketing companies. Beating them isn’t easy! The page has continued to pull-in good traffic for 18 months. This traffic is free — we didn’t buy a single click-thru visitor!

HINT — Want us to help you increase your web traffic with better free Google search results? Drop us a quick email using our Contact Us form. We work fast and our prices are reasonable.

The permalink URL for the page looks like this:

http://www.ideapro.com/how-to-generate-backlinks-to-increase-your-google-pagerank

If you scroll down the Google search results page that comes up on this search, you will notice that almost every single top-ranked site listed uses at least one of these 2 search term keywords in their URL. Some of the URLs are quite long. See a screenshot of today’s search results below…

How IdeaPro.com outranks 3,870,000 other sites

Ideapro.com is #1 rated in a
Google search for GENERATE BACKLINKS
in organic free search results as of July 2, 2008

Only 2 of the top-20 SERPs don’t include at least one of the terms. The higher ranked sites use both terms. Sites not using the terms in the URL rank lower. Sites using the term in the TITLE, description or on page content, and URL rank highest. Sites with the term(s) actually in the top-level domain or “term1term2.com” might rank even higher.

This may not be conclusive, but it IS a STRONG hint: Make sure your top keywords appear in the “name” of the page, so that they will appear in the URL. Copying the TITLE tag down into the URL appears to be the best policy.

Notice a few interesting things:

1. The length of the actual resulting URL does not appear to matter, if it includes the searched for terms.
2. The order of the terms does matter. They should appear in the order they are most likely to be searched for by the users targeted.
3. The complete phrase ranks higher than only part of the phrase. Using just one keyword of the 2 terms ranks lower.
4. Using hyphens or dashes to separate the words or using no-hyphens does not matter. Either works. You can simply run all your words together in the permalink, or use dashes — as far as Google is concerned. However, humans and other search engines may like the hyphens. That’s why I say use them.
5. Spell everything correctly. Spelling matters. Bad spelling gets lower rankings or no ranking at all.
6. Notice that none of the highly ranked URLs have really-really super long lists of keywords. You can believe that there are thousands of sites that have such extra-long URLs, but none of them show up. So, keep your URL to a “reasonable length” — something like 10-12 words tops — 6-8 is probably better

So, use long URLs. They don’t hurt, and they do give you a chance to match more searches. You can use a couple of different basic keyword phrases in one title or page name.

For example, this page title of the post you’re reading includes several popular keyword phrases:

• seo tips
• long urls
• increase pagerank

This post might also end up highly ranked for various combinations of these key phrases, like “seo pagerank tips”, “long url seo”, “pagerank seo tips”, “pagerank seo help”, etc.

Want Professional SEO Help?

If you want help in search engine optimizing your web-site, we’re available for a reasonable fee $50 and up, payable through Paypal. Usually only takes us a day or two to get the job done. Use our Contact Us form.

Or you can always do-it-yourself for free! Either way, happy SEO marketing!

The interview was done in person at Google by Jefferson Graham, a well known USA Today tech-writer.

Here are the 6 most-important LEGAL web-site optimization tips that Jefferson Graham pulled out of Matt Cutts:

(1) Include the most popular phrases that people would probably type-in to the Google search bar somewhere on your page. Yes, people often forget this. Sad, but true.

Matt tells of attending a user conference recently where a web-site owner asked “How can I get people who search for ‘San Diego chiropractor’ to find my site?” And, incredibly, when Matt asked him if he had that phrase on his front page, he said that he didn’t.

Oooooooooh-boy. Well so we want to “spotlight the most probable search terms on our page” he says. Include them in the page in headlines, top paragraphs, etc. Make the page is “mainly about” exactly that phrase.

(2) Be sure to mention the main things people will search for to find you in your TITLE page header tag. “Think about what people are going to want to type to find your site,” said Cutts.

I.E. If your customers are most often looking for a San Diego Chiropractor, be sure that you start your title tag with exactly that phrase. This is the title that people will see when and if your page is listed in the search result page after they search:

<title> San Diego Chiropractor – The Relief HQ</title>

Note that the actual NAME of the business comes AFTER the keywords. This is important. No matter how proud you are of your name, it will always come after the words people are likely to be searching for.

You can do some research on related phrases to find out what is the most popular search term using online SEO tools (click to see my category called “SEO Tools”). Another good way to find out what others think is to ask your customers. “What would you type into Google to find people like me, or businesses like mine?” You may be surprised to hear what real people tell you. Don’t suggest anything to them. Just ask the question this way… “If you didn’t already know about me, exactly what would you type into Google to find a business like mine?” Then shut up. Listen. Write down exactly what they say.

Writing vs. Saying

A better way would be to have them write it down. So, hand your customer a pen and paper, then ask them the question. That way they may surprise you with different spellings and word choices. People often say one thing, but type another. You want to know what they would type, not say aloud. These will suggest new ways to subdivide your page.

Now back to Matt’s suggestions:

(3) Be sure you write a short but accurate DESCRIPTION tag in your page header that also includes the most likely search term that people might use to find use. For the example above, start with the same keyword phrase. Then make the phrase work in a short sentence that uses a couple of other related possible phrases. You can get those other related phrases from the customer list you developed above, or from using online SEO Tools (see my pages on those linked above).

An example DESCRIPTION TAG in your home page header might look like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”San Diego Chiropractor certified in acupuncture, nutritional counseling, pain management and sports injuries. Affordable fees, established in 1973.”/>

You should limit your character count to be below 160, since that is all that Google or most other search engines will display. Smaller descriptions tend to make the main or first few words more important, which may help move you up in the search result listings for that phrase.

The Google Search Results Display

This is the way your listing will show up on the Google search result pages, after someone does a search for something like “San Diego chiropractor”:

San Diego Chiropractor – The Relief HQ
San Diego Chiropractor certified in acupuncture, nutritional counseling, pain management and sports injuries. Affordable fees, established in 1973.
www.yourdomain.com/ – 46k - Cached – Similar Pages

So, what about the “keywords” tag?

Don’t worry that MUCH about the keywords tag,” says Matt. “But there are a lot of other tags that you can use…” he adds, but he only mentions the description tag.

Pretty important point. What other tags? Well, fix the description and you’ve done most of the work, after you’ve established a great title tag that was based on the #1 most likely to be typed search term.

Notice that he doesn’t say NOT to use the keyword tag. So,I’d say use it — but don’t spend “much time” on it. Add a few keyword phrases that come up 2nd, 3rd or 4th on the list you developed, then stop. Do NOT use this to add irrelevant terms, and do NOT add too many of the terms that you think might be a tiny bit useful.

If you over-do this list, Google may actually subtract importance to your main keywords. But that idea is for another SEO article. I think that Matt is hinting here… he’s saying not to spend much time on it, meaning that it should not bee too long, and should not delve down too deeply into the less important keywords on our page. Shorter is better. Keep it simple.

(4) Get other sites to link back to you. You probably think that this is the hardest thing to do, right?

Not according to Matt Cutts! He points out one easy, simple way to get backlinks that help you promote your main “San Diego chiropractor” site — start a blog and post often.

Where to start a FREE blog

He suggests starting a free blog at a free blogging site like Blogger.com (which is owned by Google, interestingly). Of course there are many other similar free blogging sites, like WordPress.com or LiveJournal.com.

The Most Popular Free Blog Sites:

• http://www.blogger.com/
• http://www.wordpress.com/
• http://www.livejournal.com/

These sites give you a real working blog that you can post to quickly and often. Matt suggests building good content on these sites that is UNIQUE and fun to read that relates to the subject of your main site and link back to that site. He points out that you should write new articles on this free blog often, so that others will come and you’ll build a community. Then as both sites grow in popularity, the importance of your primary site will grow.

(5) Register for free tools. Matt says there are 2 main tools every webmaster needs: A sitemap and Google’s analytics tools. You can get them both free. These tools help Google find your content faster.

Getting a Google Sitemap

Cutts points out that whereas it may take several months for Google to discover and crawl your pages without a Google sitemap, it can happen in only a few days if you merely produce a properly formatted sitemap of all your pages. That way they know which page to look for and where it is located on your site. You can produce a free, correctly formatted sitemap file here:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Registering with Google Webmaster Tools

You will submit your sitemap file to Google by using their free Google Webmaster Tools, which you can find here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

On that page are links to their FAQs pages, the Tools login where you can register for their tools, and links to submit your new contents to Google.

Once you register as a webmaster, you will submit your new sitemap and begin to monitor how Google crawls your pages, which terms people use to find your site, and so on.

(6) Don’t overdo it adds Matt. Cutts warns people to avoid so-called “keyword stuffing” techniques. These tricks try to use the same keyword phrases over and over again throughout the page. The phrases are jammed into ALT tags inside images, into hidden text areas that are colored like the background or made very small, and similar tricks. This can get your site actually banned — removed from the Google index. It may not even show up at all, once it has been banned. So “use the keywords two or three times” and let the copy flow naturally”. “Weave the two or three phrases you want to be known for naturally into the page,” he suggests.

That’s a word to the wise from the guy who leads the team that removes offending web-sites from the Google index. We should pay attention to him when he cautions us about something… he knows what he’s talking about. Google pays him — and you can be sure he’s paid well — to make sure that we don’t stuff our pages with keywords.

That’s the list! Six easy (sort of) ways to promote our sites. Directly from one of the world’s experts.

And, the nice thing is, this is all free to anyone who will take the time to do the work.

Good luck to you!

—–

This review, was entirely written by us with our own editorial comments, and quotations taken from the original USA story. Our review first appeared on Qassia.com. You may want to read the original story in USA Today, or watch the video of the Matt Cutts – Jefferson Graham Interview, or visit Matt Cutt’s Personal Blog

Question is: Why would you want to do that. Answers vary from –

1. Our core business has changed, so we want to change our site’s name and headings on the front and many of the inside pages.
2. We didn’t think the title or headings through when we wrote them. Now we think adding a new word or phrase might do even better than the current content is.
3. Our competition is using a more popular keyword and ranks well. We’d like like to try that one.

Let’s consider each of these:

If Your Core Business Has Changed

Why not just create and promote a new web-site? Domain names are cheap at GoDaddy.com or their resellers — about $9.00 each for the dot-coms. Only takes a few minutes to buy one and install WordPress or similar content management software, like Joomla or perhaps Druple.

Why go to all this trouble? Because changing the TITLE or H1, H2 tags on an existing web page will create a “virtually new” page anyway for Google, Yahoo and MSN and the other crawlers. From their point of view, the site is now “about” something different. Your title and h1-h2 tags plus the first few hundred words of text inside the page, and the keywords of linked phrases pointing INTO the page from the outside, are the main determinants of what your page is ABOUT from the point of view of the crawlers.

If the page becomes “about” something different, then you’ll lose the old traffic. Plus the exterior or extrernal backlinks pointing into the old “about-ness” are now worthless. They are relevant to the new page, or at least not AS relevant.

So, your existing page rank will decrease for your old targeted keywords. And, any existing organic traffic you get from those keywords will decrease too.

However, if you don’t care about people coming into your new site anyway, because you are now selling hot dogs and used to be selling ice cream, then why not go ahead and change the title? A drop in irrelevant traffic shouldn’t hurt.

Internal Linking Now Counts More Toward Page-Rank Than Ever

All of us WEB GURUS or WEB MARKETEERS used to pretty much ignore internal page linking. We thought the only thing that mattered, essentially, was how many high quality back-links we got from external web-sites. We concentrated on getting links from sites with similar content as ours, and sites whose own pagerank was very high, or at least higher than ours. We worked at getting the right keywords inside these links, and surrounding them with a paragraph of related content. We made sure they were non-reciprocated, that they didn’t grow in number too quickly, that they were in a ‘good neighborhood’ of related sites and IP addresses, and so on. This took lots of work.

Sophisticated automatic three tiered and four-tiered link networks were built to help us do all of this. Sometimes this worked and our sites moved to the top positions in search results for our targeted keyword phrases. Until the page-rank of last October (2007). After that new algorithm took effect, the world of web marketing changed dramatically.

Millions of pages and whole sites that used to be highly ranked suddenly were de-ranked or completely disappeared from Google Index. Traffic plummeted. Income from Adsense bottomed-out and we all panicked. What happened?

Internal Ranking Became a Prime Factor in Page-Rank

Internal linking is the way you build pointers to each page of your site. Google now uses internal links as a major factor in the determination of the overall importance of any particular page. If a page in your site is linked only from the site-map, or perhaps from only one other link somewhere else on your site, chances are that Google will now place this page into its supplemental index.

What is the supplemental index? Well this is an index that the biggest search engine in the world keeps of pages that have been reviewed, but have been found to be either duplicated or not very important. And, when a page is in this index, it will be served out in search results only if there is nothing else in the main index.

Being in the supplemental index is something you definitely want to avoid. Why bother to add a page to your site if it will only be served out in search results at the very bottom of the result pages?

Automatic Page Building

If you’re building lots of pages with some kind of scraper program, news aggregator script or plug-in, chances are that nowadays these auto-generated content pages, whether virtual dynamically generated and served, will end up in Google’s supplemental index.

These days, building a site with a million auto-generated pages is a complete waste of time… from two points of view:

1. Chances are these pages are made from either 100% duplicated content or almost anyway.
2. There are probably few if any internal links to each of these pages

And, that’s enough to get the pages sent directly into the supplemental index. So, why waste your time building these automatic scripts and wearing out your server with useless bot traffic?

What Actually Works to Get More Traffic

Write genuine, fresh pages manually. Be sure that you do NOT duplicate someone else’s content. Be sure to build many links to each page, even if you have to have rediculously LONG menus in your navigation. A good rule is to build at least 5 internal links to point to each and every page you write. One way to do this is simply to have a series of departmental or section site-maps that list the titles of your pages, section by section, or department by department. One page for each section, division, department and so on. Make sure there are several of these pages that point down into each of your individual content pages. That should do it.

Time you spend doing this will work for you. Time you spend installing and managing auto-generation scripts is wasted.

Like a lot of things on the web, what is true today was not true a few months or years ago. Have you been building web-sites for 2, 3 or more years? If you learned how to optimize your pages for highest rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ASK and so on, chances are you learned your craft a bit too well. The web-marketing world has evolved into a new beast in just the last 2-3 years. The SEO rules have changed.

Read through some of our older posts or pages about how to optimize websites or pages. As recent as 2006, we were telling you to build short 150-350 word, punchy, keyword stuffed pages, using each and every SEO trick conceivable (as long as it was ‘legal’ or ‘white hat’ of course). Today, you want to learn different rules. The number one rule is — don’t over-optimize!

Signs That You’ve Over-Optimized

Here are some of the signs that you’ve over-worked and over-edited your site, pages and html code:

1. Your TITLE TAG perfectly matches your H1 TAG, word for word
2. You have carefully repeated the keyword phrases from the TITLE and H1 TAGS in your H2 subheadings, with exactly the same spelling and word endings
3. You have repeated the exact keyword phrases at least 5, 6, or more times throughout your content
4. You have repeated your TITLE and H1 wording inside the ALT and TITLE TAGS of images — a dead giveaway!
5. Your links to inside-site pages are stuffed with repetitions of your keyword phrases
6. You have also stuffed keywords into off-site links
7. You have virtually no off-site links, even to related content sites
8. Your pages have long lists of similar keywords, all built around a common root that is found in your TITLE/H1 tags
9. You have repeated your main keyword phrases in the actual page name in front of the .htm or .html or .php extension ending, separated by hyphens or dashes, underscores, or perhaps all run together without spaces or dashed of any kind
10. You have created top level domains using your main keywords
11. You have created sub-domains such as ‘keywordphrase.domain.com’
12. You have placed your pages inside directories or folders which are themselves named with keywords, such as — http://keyword2.keyword1.com/keyword3/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html’
13. Your pages’ content are usually relatively short, say from 200 to 500 words
14. Every single keyword and phrase in your TITLE and/or H1 tags is featured as the leading or first-word of an H2 sub-heading
15. You have several links on other pages that use the same keywords from your TITLE tag to point into each page

Years ago, these tricks seemed the right way to ensure that your page appeared at the top of search engine search result pages for targeted keyword phrases. But things have changed. And boy-oh-boy have they changed!

How Automatic Search Engine Optimization Changed the Web

What happened is that Google began to notice that millions and millions of pages began to show up around the web with high ‘relevancy scores’ for millions of keywords. The proliferation of SEO businesses and ‘web marketing experts’ began to average-up the relevancy contest. Millions of us began to understand how to write pages and design web-sites that were extremely keyword dense and potentially high-ranked for target phrases. The web itself was evolving into an optimized medium. Search engines’ job of finding out which page was the most relevant for any particular search was getting harder and harder.

To make matters worse, at first dozens, then hundreds, and nowadays thousands of automatic page-optimizing software programs appeared. There were plugins and scripts that worked so well that even an amateur could build truly focused, highly dense keyword stuffed pages.

Even though these simple techniques were innocent enough and ‘white hat’, when they began to spread throughout the web, they ended up producing a world where there were very few stand-outs.

Picture a world where everyone wears a crown of jewels and gold. Which one is the King?

Producing Sites and Pages That Win Today’s New Relevancy SEO Rules

Think of the web the way Google and the other web crawler robots see it. With so many crowns, who is the king for any particular search term? Which site wins the ranking and gets listed in the top-10 search results, or maybe even in the top-5?

What SEO Techniques Work Now?

Here are our best guesses about what seems to be working now, in early 2008:

1. Never repeat exactly the same keywords, in the same order, in your TITLE and H1 tags
2. Use similar words, and words that have different endings of the root keywords in your H2 and H3 sub-headings
3. Make your pages considerably larger. Small pages used to look better to the search engine crawlers, since the old robots could crawl them faster. Also they used to appear more dense for each of the main keywords. These factors have changed. The web as a whole is bigger. You need more content to compete with other pages for each of your keywords. Pages with thousands of words work better in today’s over-optimized, keyword-dense relevancy game. And, the search engines are themselves faster and more efficient. They can handle your bigger, richer, longer pages. Content-content-content. The SE robots are hungry for it!
4. Be sure to point several of your on-site links into each of your pages. Don’t use the same keywords in each link. Make them different, so they appear natural and organic. Put these links inside paragraphs of appropriate content. Avoid long lists of links.
5. Build more keyword-appropriate links to inside pages of your site from other sites that are themselves related by subject matter to your site. Be sure these links are not repeated from site to site. Make each one different, and place them inside of a related-content paragraph if possible.
6. Never build pages that obey ALL of the SEO rules we’ve listed at the top of this article. If your pages look too perfect, they will be considered as artificial, SEO traps. If they do show up in the SERPs (search engine ranking positions), they will be listed near the bottom. This is especially true for short pages, and pages with low on-site internal links and few or no off-site inbound links pointing into them.
7. The ideal page will look like this: A long page with at least 1,000 or more words, several relevant inbound off-site links using different keywords for each link, several internal links also using different keywords located inside relevant content paragraphs, no ‘keyword stuffing’ tricks like keyword filled ALT or TITLE tags inside IMAGE tags, and no more than a couple of the main keywords used in the URL of the page (including page name, folder or directory, sub-domain, and the top level domain). Highly ranked winning pages in today’s web marketing world will be well-written, properly spelled, grammatically correct pages with 100% unique, fresh content.
8. Today’s successful pages with be manually written, not auto-generated garbage.

Follow those rules and you’ll be near the top for your new pages. However, as you may have noticed, that means that you’ll be doing a lot of writing, and rewriting.

Momma never said it would be easy!

Search engine copywriting is all about re-jigging the content on your website so it becomes more appealing to the reader/customer but also is able to be searched and retrieved by the search engines. Writing for search engines takes skill and when it is done correctly you should receive higher search engine ranking and hence higher sales.

Many sites depend highly on certain search engines such as Google in order to accumulate traffic. Search Engines gather the different information from your site and bring up the keywords looked for by the user. The search engine in turn brings up anything close to what the user keyed into their search. Depending on how your copywriting is laid out will depend on whether your site is even accessed at during a search. Good copywriting will in turn bring traffic to you thus creating better potential buyers.

There are companies and professionals that specialize in search engine copywriting. Because it is so technical it is usually better to leave it to the professionals. While this can be a bit on the high side in terms of cost the results will reap rewards. If you have a website that could do with more hits then consider search engine copywriting.

About the Author: Tina Valiedi is the webmaster of MPStrategies Firm, an internet company specializing in super targeted pre-qualified web traffic that results in higher conversion rates and ROI.Visit http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com today