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We say this is “guaranteed”. Okay, maybe we should have said “probable” or “likely”. After all, the only things in life that are guaranteed are death and taxes, right? But, this is, according to Google marketing experts or engineers like Matt Cutts and others, the right way to promote your new site and give it the best chance to get a good page ranking. (Matt didn’t specifically endorse my recommendations below, but these are the KINDS OF THINGS he has said in the past, less a detail here and there.)

So, you’ve just established a brand new shiny web-site. Chances are that after a month or two, it got a nice Pagerank from Google. Boy were you pleased, right?

Then something terrible happened… the page-rank it used to have suddenly disappeared or dropped down a notch or two. What happened?

Assuming that you’ve not done anything wrong or nasty, there is a good chance that what you’re seeing is all very natural.

Here’s what happened, and more important — what you can do to fix it!

Google often gives a new site a “first look rating” that’s pretty high… sometimes a PR-4 or 5, which seems outstanding. This is based on a couple things…

1. What the site’s first page has on it, the “contents” or “about-ness” of the page
2. What the overalll structure of the domain underneath the front page is like

These two factors only consider what the contents and structure of the ON PAGE elements are like. If everything is pretty good, your new site will get a “first look” rating that reflects Google’s estimate of what the site MIGHT deserve, based on some mathematical algorithm that we’re not party too, naturally, compared to other sites which were similarly-well (or not well, as the case may be) and those sites’ keyword relevancy outlines.

Ahem.

What that means is, a first look rating is basically worthless, or nearly so.

As you’ve read above, the REAL and more-or-less permanent (nothing is permanent these days) Page-rank will be based on a very complicated list of factors, probably only 40% of which have anything at all to do with what is actually ON YOUR PAGE. In fact, this figure may even be lower, considering the big changes in Google’s ranking system last October and again in December, March, etc.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR “ON SITE” CHANGES

Your site probably looks okay, from what I could see in the code on the pages… looking at the source itself. I do have a couple of recommendations that apply to most new sites:

1) Remove any links to off-site page in your footers, site-wide. Move them to a credits page or about us page. Do not show them on every page. You don’t need those silly W3C buttons, page counters and other credits and links that amateurs often put at the bottom of their pages. Even “credibility logos” are probably a bad idea. Move them to the About Us page — anywhere but at the bottom of every page on your site. They create duplicated content and make it look like you’re selling links — which is a no-no.

2) Religiously apply a rel=”external nofollow” label inside EVERY external link that points off your site. Do this on every page. This tells Google that you are not selling links, which they are very sensitive about these days. Your links will end up looking like this…

<a href=”http://www.somesite.com/” rel=”external nofollow”>Some Site or Keyword Here</a>

You can also put a target=”_blank” label inside the tags, which tells the user’s browser to open the linked site’s page in a new window. Optional.

IncredibleHelp, a moderator at WebProWorld.com suggests that I’ve gone too far with this instruction. After investigating around the web, I think his remark that I’ve gone too far is most likely correct. So, we might want to apply the NOFOLLOW tags merely to external sites that we don’t trust. — Thanks, Incredible!

QUICK STEPS TO ENSURE YOU GET RE-RANKED

You need to build quality back-links pointing to your new site. These can be accomplished quickly and will cost you absolutely nothing. Depending on how well and how quickly you can write some new articles, this should only take you a couple of hours, from start to finish.

What you’re going to do is create 3 high quality back-links from 3 new free blogs, plus you’re going to write 2 free press releases or articles on highly ranked free press release or article sites.

CREATING THE FREE BLOGS

These are the 3 most popular free blogging systems:

1. Blogger.com — Pagerank: 10? (Google owns it!)
2. WordPress.com — Pagerank: 9
3. LiveJournal.com — Pagerank: 8

On each one of those, you will create a new account/blog.

1) Name the blog something related to your site, one of your main keyword phrases.

2) On each of these blogs, write one nice long article or “post” about your main topic related to your NEW or TARGET site. Do NOT write about the target site itself, nor any product you may be selling. Write these posts about the details of (your new site main keywords or topic), details about how to do things, the history of the craft, where to find good (your topic here), how to use (your topic), etc. Write about some related to your new target site, but avoid repeating stuff that’s already on that site. Do NOT duplicate something from any other site on the web, especially your own site. Make it completely, 100% original content. Organize the structure of the post nicely with a headline, sub-headings and topical paragraphs that reflect the keyword phrases (3 or 4 of them) that are similar to those of your main site. Make these posts at least 500 words. Longer is better. Remember NOT to duplicated phrases, sentences, headlines or anything between any of these new blogs and your main target site.

3) Near the top of your new article-post on each of these blogs, insert a link around the number-1 most important keyword phrase that your main site is about. Make this link point directly at the front page of your site, and do NOT “nofollow” this link. Be sure this link is in the first paragraph at the top of the page or post. Put it INSIDE the paragraph, not above or below it. Make sure that this link is surrounded by related “good content”. Do not put any other links on this post that point to any other site. Only one link, and it points to your target main site. Near the top of the post. In a well constructed paragraph. Check this post/article over carefully to ensure that it is spelled properly and uses excellent grammar. That’s important to Google.

4) Save that post and “publish” it so that it is available to the world.

If you’ve done this well on the 3 free blog sites above, these 3 posts will earn you some nice rating value from Google. You don’t need to “publicize” these blogs. They do that automatically, all by themselves. Blog technology magically notifies the world about each post you make in seconds.

There is only one more thing to do…

WRITE TWO PRESS RELEASES ABOUT YOUR MAIN SITE

Now you can write about your main site itself. Here’s the way we’re going to make these press releases “news worthy”. We’re going to debunk an idea or thought that people may have about your industry.

What does “debunking” mean?

To debunk is to take something that is commonly thought about a topic, and to prove conclusively that this thinking is NOT TRUE.

By doing this, you will guarantee that your press releases get accepted by the free press release sites, and that they will ultimately be READ by readers over the months and years to come!

Another thing, debunking is a negative. Readers and editors alike will find it irresistible. They get sick and tired of all the “positive” junk that is all over the web — fake press releases that are filled with repetitive claims about how wonderful something is. Debunking works!

In your press release you are going to quote yourself as the owner of your targeted main site as an “expert” in the field. You will say whatever needs to be said to disprove the common misconception that you are debunking. At the top and bottom of your press release, you will refer people to your main site, where they can find more information.

You will write these two press releases in a way that the most important stuff is near the top, and less important stuff is nearer the bottom. Mention your target site 2 or 3 times without links. Put a link somewhere near the top (if they allow it). Otherwise, they will give you one single link at the bottom as the “contact” person for the press release.

Here is a pretty-good list of well-ranked “free press release” sites. Most will try to sell you a wider distribution for $30 or more. Don’t do it. Just use their free distribution. You will have to sign up and give them your email address and site name, etc. Do it. Then submit the press releases you’ve written.

Here is high-to-low-Pagerank sorted list of some great “free press release” web-sites to try… it’s fairly current (as of this writing), but some sites may have gone “pay only” instead of “free”, by the time you read this article. Check them out. I recommend as “first bets” these — PRWeb.com (PR-7), NewswireToday.com (PR-6), PR.com (PR-6), PRLeap.com (PR-6), PRLog.com (PR-6) and finally PressBox.co.uk (PR-6). There is no limit to how many you can submit to, but those are great places to start. We recommend writing an all-new press release for each site, since it’s not nice to create duplicated content on the Internet, right? Here is the full list:

Pageranks were accurate on June 30, 2008:

1. PRWeb.com - PR 7
2. NewswireToday.com - PR 6
3. PR.com - PR 6
4. PRLeap.com - PR 6
5. PRlog.com - PR 6
6. PressBox.co.uk - PR 6
7. 1888PressRelease.com - PR 5
8. ClickPress.com - PR 5
9. eCommWire.com - PR 5
10. Free-News-Release.com - PR 5
11. Free-Press-Release.com - PR 5
12. Free-Press-Release-Center.info - PR 5
13. IndiaPRWire.com - PR 5
14. PRFree.com - PR 5
15. PRzoom.com - PR 5
16. PressAbout.com - PR 5
17. PressReleasePoint.com - PR 5
18. TheOpenPress.com - PR 5
19. AddPR.com - PR 4
20. FreePressReleases.co.uk - PR 4
21. i-Newswire.com - PR 4
22. MediaSyndicate.com - PR 4
23. PR9.net - PR 4
24. PR-Inside.com - PR 4
25. PRCompass.com - PR 4
26. PRurgent.com - PR 4
27. PressMethod.com - PR 4
28. Yudkin.com - PR 4
29. 24-7 Press Release - PR 3
30. BizEurope.com - PR 3
31. FreePressIndex.com - PR 3
32. MyFreePR.com - PR 3
33. PressRelease.com - PR 1
34. Express-Press-Release.com - PR n/a
35. FreePressRelease.co.cc - PR n/a
36. PageRelease.com - PR n/a
37. PressFlow.co.uk - PR n/a
38. TechPRSpider.com - PR n/a

Just pick 2 or 3 of these outfits that appeal to you. Visit their own front or home pages to see which of them is the highest page-ranked by Google at the moment. Of course this changes from time to time. So be sure to check. Give your best written press release to the highest ranked site.

Wait a few days. They usually publish your press release 2-3 days after it is submitted.

A few hours spent now the way I’ve outlined here will pay off big dividends in the months and years to come.

And, you have violated no “Google Rules”. Everything is white hat. Just do the steps, and wait. It does take time. How long? Well, maybe only a few weeks, but usually several months.

Good luck and happy promoting!

A first-edition, somewhat less detailed version of this post was created as one of my comments on WebProWorld.com. That site is a great web marketing resource for newbies and experts alike.

Filed under: Backlinks by IdeaPro - 7 Comments →

If you’ve been slaving away at maximizing Google page-rank for your blog or non-blog type sites, chances are that you’ve been ignoring today’s hottest SEO technique. If your site is at least a few months old, you will have noticed some major changes in its ranking and in the way its SERP (search engine result pages) are displayed. Google has made at least one big, big, big change to the way it ranks pages. What is it?

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.

Filed under: SEO Search Engine Optimization by IdeaPro - 2 Comments →