What Is User Data?

Without being rude, you should already know what user data is as part of your site evaluation. Any owner of a site on the web should be constantly looking at user data found on site servers.

The site server should have an administrative program telling you what searches are being used to reach the site, better known as “search strings.” The program should also be telling you how many pages the user looks at on each visit and where in the site they go. By reviewing these statistics, you can identify the sections of your site that appeal to potential customers. If clients are leaving after visiting only one or two pages, such statistics should tell you that you have an abandonment problem. The new information from the Google patent should motivate you to closely monitor your site.

Essentially, Google is also looking at your server statistics to determine the value of your content and factoring it into the rankings. Specifically, Google claims in the patent application that it tracks the amount of time that users spend accessing a page on your site. Having filed a few patent applications in my time, what this really means is Google is looking at how long a user spends on your site and how “deep” they go into it.

Expanding on this subject, Google details an additional factor. As with the Adwords program, Google is monitoring the click through rate on search results. The more click-throughs to your site from its listings in Google, the higher it will be moved in the search results.

Every Little Bit Helps

Google claims that it looks at what users are bookmarking. The apparent jist is that Google considers a site with a lot of bookmarks to be “worthy” of a higher ranking. In short, get out there and bookmark your sites!

Conclusion

The effort of Google to look for depth in a site should be commended. There is nothing worse then clicking onto a promising search result to find one crappy page full of links. With this new policy, Google rewards sites with healthy amounts of relevant pages. In short, content is king again.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing and advertising company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.

1. GoogleRankings.com is an incredible tool that every webmaster should consult. Now, because Google rankings fluctuate multiple times a day, the site is sometimes a couple hours delayed, however it provides a great resource in quickly finding how your competitors stack up against your website. Not only that but you can use different key words in conjunction with a website to see how they rank. Incredibly useful in determining which key words should be used in your content and advertising. As an example, if you were to decide on using a specific keyword phrase. Type in that key word into GoogleRankings.com, along with your competitor’s website, and you will see how they rank in regards to that specific phrase and/or word in Google. This will allow you to specifically pinpoint which phrases and/or keywords your competitors rank low in, which you will in turn begin to focus your attention on.

2. Google Suggest is used to determine the frequency of various key word searches. http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en As discussed before, not only is it important to find out how your competitors rank for a certain term in Google, but it is also perhaps even more important to find out how many times that specific phrase has been searched for. Google Suggest Beta is the perfect answer for this problem. Just type in a few words and it will immediately display multiple results for that specific term, and variations of it.

***Hint*** Remember, it is not always necessary to have a top 10 listing for the most popular searched phrase. Just imagine the potential of having 5 top listings for keywords that are not quite as popular. Not only will it be easier to achieve a top 10 listing, but while all your competitors fight over 1-3 key words, you are capitalizing on all the others. In the end this will mean a literal financial windfall depending on your product, etc.

Darren H. currently owns and is involved with various online marketing and management companies. He is the author of “How to Get Listed in Google within 72 Hours.” and prides himself on helping many individuals and business customers achieve top 10 rankings within Google in an extremely short time frame. To learn more and get started today please visit: http://www.top10googlerankings.com

In the beginning, I used to submit my site all the time to Google but soon realized the magnitude of my failure. Of course, it’s a known fact that Google relies solely on your link popularity and content.

Link Popularity?

What that means is the amount of links (yousite.com) listed on other sites that are related to yours! The more sites that link to you, the greater your popularity!

So again, Google depends on your link popularity! If you don’t have a google rating (In other words, is your link found on google?) some sites WILL NOT link to yours. There are many sites that have a great google rating and have specific regulations to whom they will accept within their resource sections. They will specify that your site must be listed within Google and if they type in your site in the google search bar, your site should be listed within the top 5 sites.

Here’s The Theory:

Of course you want all sites to link to you, especially the ones who already have a great google rating because that means that your site will be picked up by google. Some people only try to get links from those sites but just remember, we all had to start somewhere.

My suggestion is to do as many link exchanges as possible and especially make sure that each site is specifically categorized by their content. You will get penalized for having one page full of links to sites that do not relate to each other.

Another little “Timbit”, try to keep your pages to 1-20 links within each page. Once you have 20 links, add a button to a (PAGE 2) and continue your resources that way.

Here’s an example of our “Resource Section”
http://www.smartads.info/resources

You’ll notice how each category has specific sites that get listed within them.

Ok, so I went a little off topic with respect to this article but you’ll see how everything is connected together. Once google starts ranking your site, you don’t want to leave any stone left un-turned.

So back to getting a google rank without submitting your site. Once you start performing link exchanges with other sites, just keep on going and going and I promise that eventually, Google will start picking up some of your links on other sites. Once this starts to happen you’re google rank will rise.

So just keep doing what you’re doing and let Google do it’s own thing.

When your ready and you’re link popularity grows, then you can submit your site to Google and reap the rewards.

So many companies do this process backwards and wonder why they don’t get listed in Google. Or like what happened to me, Google lists your site right away but then in a couple of weeks, presto, your site is gone from their listing and your left confused as to why!

In this article I talked about Link Exchanges & popularity, feel free to learn more about this in my 2 part series:

Link Exchanges, what they can do for your business, part 1
http://www.smartads.info/articles/le/10.html

Link Exchanges, what they can do for your business, part 2
http://www.smartads.info/articles/le/11.html

About The Author

Martin Lemieux
President
Smartads Information Centre
Advertising, Marketing Resources & Web Design
http://www.smartads.info

Want To Use This Article???

GO AHEAD! Just keep it in it’s entirety!

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support@smartads.info

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

As discussed in before, not only is it important to find out how your competitors rank for a certain term in Google, but it is also perhaps even more important to find out how many times that specific phrase has been searched for. Google Suggest Beta is the perfect answer for this problem. Just type in a few words and it will immediately display multiple results for that specific term, and variations of it.

***Hint*** Remember, it is not always necessary to have a top 10 listing for the most popular searched phrase. Just imagine the potential of having 5 top listings for keywords that are not quite as popular. Not only will it be easier to achieve a top 10 listing, but while all your competitors fight over 1-3 key words, you are capitalizing on all the others. In the end this will mean a literal financial windfall depending on your product, etc.

Just hold on, we’re not done yet. It is also important to pinpoint your key words even farther, and most people always seem to miss this step. Use the same keyword(s) in Google Suggest, but this time place apostrophes around the term and hit “submit”. This time you will find out how many competing sites exist for that exact phrase, not just every word in your phrase.

For instance the phrase ? Natural Acne Cure shows 796,000 results However, now do a search for “Natural Acne Cure” as of today it shows 9,820 results.

In the end, if you can find a specific term that ranks 5000 or less, you have an excellent chance of receiving a higher ranking within Google once you start marketing and implementing successful strategies to maximize your specific key word.

Remember, while the marketing and promotion, and “how to’s” are extremely important, you must always start with the correct keywords first, and properly understand your competition or else you will fail before you ever begin. Or at the very least, you will be climbing a mountain of adversity instead of a leisurely stroll in obtaining your first Top 10 ranking.

Darren H. currently owns and is involved with various online marketing and management companies. He is the author of “How to Get Listed in Google within 72 Hours.” and prides himself on helping many individuals and business customers achieve top 10 rankings within Google in an extremely short time frame. To learn more and get started today please visit: http://www.marketingoutlet.com/google_article.htm

GoogleRankings.com is an incredible tool that every webmaster should consult. Now, because Google rankings fluctuate multiple times a day, the site is sometimes a couple hours delayed, however it provides a great resource in quickly finding how your competitors stack up against your website. Not only that but you can use different key words in conjunction with a website to see how they rank. Incredibly useful in determining which key words should be used in your content and advertising.

As an example, if you were to decide on using a specific keyword phrase. Type in that key word into GoogleRankings.com, along with your competitor’s website, and you will see how they rank in regards to that specific phrase and/or word in Google. This will allow you to specifically pinpoint which phrases and/or keywords your competitors rank low in, which you will in turn begin to focus your attention on.

Once you have figured out which key words your competition ranks low in, you are well on your way in implementing specific strategies in achieving a Top 10 ranking in Google. Part 2 will discuss how to become even more specific in targeting your keywords, and virtually ensuring a top 10 listing.

Darren H. currently owns and is involved with various online marketing and management companies. He is the author of “How to get Listed in Google within 72 Hours.” and prides himself on helping many individuals and business customers achieve top 10 rankings within Google in an extremely short time frame. To learn more and get started today please visit: http://www.marketingoutlet.com/google_article.htm

First a quick overview as to what the Google Page Rank actually is…

Google Page Rank (or PR as it is often referred to as) is simply an indication of the number of websites that link to a specific website. It also attempts to indicate the quality of those links. PR ranges from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the ‘best’ PR and 0 being the ‘worst’). The vast majority of small business websites will usually find they have a PR of between 0 and 5.

To calculate a particular sites PR, Google uses a fairly complicated algorithm based on the number of web links that it is aware of that link to the site in question. This algorithm will also take into account the PR of the page that is providing the link, thus a link from a web page that has a PR of 7 will be considered more valuable than a link from a page with a PR of 4.

Because of the way in which links from higher PR-ranked sites are considered more important, many people are choosing to buy links from websites with high PR’s just so that they can increase their own PR. I have seen sites selling a simple text link on their home page for over $700 a month purely based on the fact that they have a PR of 7 or above. This may seem like a lot of money but when you consider that the website owners that are buying these links often have websites that are in no way relevant to the content of the site linking to them, it is absolutely ridiculous.

Take this example, let’s say you have a website about health and fitness and you buy a link for $500 a month from a random website because it has a PR of 7. This random website has no relevance to your health and fitness site so what is going to happen? Well, your own PR may increase as a result of the link. You may get a bit of extra traffic but probably not much since people don’t click on links that that they are not interested in. You will definitely be $500 poorer at the end of the month!

Instead, why not spend the $500 on pay-per-click advertising and benefit from some quality, targeted traffic?

Of course, there is a bit more to it than that and the reason that most people want to increase their PR is because Google takes this statistic into account when determining where a website will be displayed in their search results. Many people assume that a high PR automatically equals a high search engine placement for their chosen keywords. Not so….

PR is just one of over 100 different factors that Google takes into account when deciding where your website will feature (and these factors and the main algorithm change on a very regular basis). It is perfectly possible for a website with a PR of 5 to get a higher ranking than a PR 7 site if it has better content or is more relevant for the search term in question.

Remember that relevance is all important with Google and a link from a website that is not relevant to your own site will be considered far less important than a relevant one (which makes buying links from random sites purely because they have a high PR even more crazy).

I have read several rumours lately that Google haven’t updated PR’s for a couple of months and they are considering phasing PR out or modifying it in some way. This is pure speculation but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. PR is easily manipulated (for example by purchasing links as described above) and Google doesn’t like to have their calculations or search results manipulated. It stands to reason that they will be looking at ways of preventing this.

So, in summary, is Google Page Rank important to your business?

Well, it is a good indicator of how many other sites link to yours and how important Google considers your site to be BUT I personally don’t place too much importance on this statistic and I certainly won’t be paying out for a link from a website just because it has a high PR.

As I said above, Google changes it’s rules on a regular basis and I see little point in chasing a particular PR on the basis that it might get you higher search engine rankings. If Google do decide to do away with PR, all your work will have been for nothing.

Instead, concentrate on building quality, relevant links from sites that are connected in some way to your own site content. This will ensure that any traffic you receive via these links will at least have an interest in your site. Building links on this basis will automatically increase your PR over time (without the need to pay out for overpriced, irrelevant links). If you do things this way and Google does scrap the PR indicator, it shouldn’t affect you in any way and the links you have in place will continue to benefit you.

Remember, in the same way that a low Alexa rating doesn’t guarantee traffic or sales, neither does a high PR. Sure a high PR is a ‘nice to have’ but lots of traffic and high sales is even nicer

Copyright 2004 Richard Grady

About The Author

Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998. Find out more about Richard at: http://www.thetraderonline.com Free wholesale search engines: UK- http://www.wholesale118.co.uk and US http://www.thewholesaletrader.com

Forget that Google is a search engine. Just for a moment, imagine it is a style guide. A very different kind of style guide.

Instead of this particular style guide being written as a static book by an expert or two, it is written by studying the searching and browsing habits of hundreds of millions of web users.

Get the idea? Not a search engine. A style guide. A constantly evolving style guide that works from its insights into how people use and read web sites.

A style guide that puts the visitor first, puts their needs ahead of the academic opinions of experts.

A style guide that automatically rewards sites that serve their readers the best.

If we study Google not as a search engine, but as a style guide, what does it tell us about how we should write our web pages?

>> 1. Make the subject of each page absolutely clear.

As visitors arrive at your site, regardless of the entry page, the first question in their minds is, “Am I in the right place? Will I find what I want here? Can I achieve what I want to achieve here?”

Fortunately, the web page format gives us a title, headlines, first paragraphs and subheads we can use. So it makes sense to use them to make it abundantly clear to our visitors what the page is about.

We’ll do this for our visitors. But, because doing so helps our visitors, Google will reward us.

>> 2. Make your home page short text clear

First-time visitors to your home page are unlikely to be able to achieve their objective through that page alone. So you need to write short text that will quickly and clearly let them know if you have what they want deeper in your site, and how to get there.

This means using the right words in your headings, subheads and short descriptions. It means anticipating the words and phrases most visitors will have in their minds and will scan for. It means understanding which words and phrases best correspond to your visitors’ needs.

Write these headings and short descriptions with your readers in mind and, once again, Google will reward you.

>> 3. Make your text links relevant and descriptive

A text link that says, “More…” or “Click here” or “Learn More…” tells the reader nothing about the destination page.

Visitors scan your text links in the same way as they scan headings, subheads and short text. So provide them with clues. If you have an interior page about a weight-loss hypnosis service, write a link that says something like, “More on weight-loss hypnosis”.

Do this and you’ll be helping your readers a great deal. And yes, Google will reward you for your efforts.

>> Concluding thoughts…

By all means use a traditional style guide. They are great for getting your grammar right and choosing the right words. That said, many of them conflict in their recommendations as to the correct online terms. To some, a web site is a web site, to others it’s a website.

But back to Google as a style guide for a moment. This whole exercise, this make-believe about Google being a digital, interactive style guide is all about the importance of writing for your readers.

Yes, what I have been talking about it using the correct keywords and phrases in the appropriate places.

However, too many people write their pages with Google as the primary audience. I think that’s the wrong approach. You get a clunky text flow that, intuitively, feels wrong to the reader.

Instead, write with a clear understanding of what your readers need. Do this and you’ll find that the best keywords fall into the right places with an appropriate frequency.

And Google will reward you.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author and speaker. You can access all his newsletter articles on writing for the web at his http://www.ExcessVoice.com site. You’ll find articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at http://www.FreelanceWritingSuccess.com

Yahoo, on the other hand, looks at on-page factors more, such as keyword density, keywords in headings, etc. That is where the problem comes in.

Of course, they both look at everyting, but keep these two very important points in mind when you are trying to optimize your site.

When you search both Google and Yahoo for a keyword phrase, you will usually find a BIG difference in the Search Engine Results Pages or “Serps” as it is usually called. Serps just means the list of websites that show up when you do a search on any of the search engines.

Back to Yahoo and Google. Here’s why the results are different and in a nutshell what you have to do to rank high on each one of them.

Links from other websites are the most important thing to Google. The higher the ranking of the actual page your link is on the better. Remember it is NOT the ranking of the Home page of the site you are getting the link from, but the ranking of the page your link is actually on that counts.

The text in the link to your site is VERY important. It needs to have the keyword phrases you want to rank high for included.

Then the next most important thing to Google is the keywords in your Title tag and then the content on your page. If your content is over-optimized (too many uses of keyword phrases or too many keywords in your headings, etc.), that will hurt your ranking with Google instead of help you.

Of course, there are 101 other factors that count with both Yahoo and Google, but get the basics right and you will be well on your way to high rankings.

As for Yahoo, the content that is on the page is the most important. To rank high with Yahoo you need to use a lot of keyword phrases on the page, have a lot of keywords in the headings, have a high keyword density, etc.

Basically, Yahoo likes all of the things Google used to count as being important before Google decided that too many people knew this and were making the most highly optimized websites show up at the top instead of the most relevant sites.

Now you can see why the sites that show up high on Yahoo don’t show up high on Google and vice versa.

Bottom line: You could say that Google likes off-page factors (i.e. links) and Yahoo likes on-page factors. That’s an over simplification, but it is a good rule of thumb.

If you understand this one thing, you can get your rankings higher than most of your competitiors. Of course, you will have to get it all right if you want to be at the very top.

The problem is that you can’t completely do what it takes to please both Yahoo and Google. Of course, links help you with both Google and Yahoo, but the other factors seem to be either or.

If you have a reasonably good ranking on Yahoo and not Google and want to increase your Google ranking, I would recommend that you work on incoming links and particularly the text in those incoming links (and don’t make them all word-for-word the same).

Then start cutting back on the over-optimizing of on-page factors and see when your Yahoo rankings start coming down and your Google rankings start coming up. Try to see how close you can come to making them both happy if ranking as high as possible on both is your goal.

Of course, this has to be done slowly because Google and Yahoo don’t change their rankings that fast.

If you want to get the highest ranking on just one of the search engines and not worry about the other one, your job is much easier.

One last point.

Even though Google counts incoming links as being a lot more important than Yahoo does, the recent “search engine bombing” by political pranksters with the term “waffles” shows that Google is more immune to this than Yahoo. Obviously, Google wants a few other things to be in line before they will award top ranking to a site. Google is harder (if not imposible) to trick. Yahoo is not.

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership website software

1. On several of my own sites, I have some pages with zero page rank despite having links pointing to them PR 5 pages on the same site. These pages are now 2-3 months old. Shouldn’t they have PR by now?

2. Most of these pages rank well despite the apparent PR 0.

3. Doing searches on Google show up a lot of anomalies. Many top ranking pages have PR 0.

For example, go to http://www.prsearch.net/

This is that great search tool I mentioned last week which gives you the PR and backlinks of the search results. Do a search for Bratz dolls..

Here are the top 10 sites when I search:

#1 PR 6 Backlinks – 151

#2 PR 7 Backlinks – 5

#3 PR 0 Backlinks – 18

#4 PR 4 Backlinks – 2

#5 PR 0 Backlinks – 0

#6 PR 0 Backlinks – 0

#7 PR 0 Backlinks – 0

#8 PR 0 Backlinks – 0

#9 PR 6 Backlinks – 46

#10 PR 0 Backlinks – 11

4. Backlinks at Google don’t tally with known backlinks. This has been reported a lot in various publications recently. Google use to only show backlinks from PR 4 or more sites, but it has been reported that backlinks from lower PR sites are showing and backlinks from some higher PR sites seem to be missing.

Reading through these observations, it is clear that something is going on.

It might look at first glance that PR is not being updated since lots of pages which should have PR don’t. I don’t think this is the case, and I will explain in a moment what I believe is going on. However, before we do that, let’s consider some of the other stuff listed above.

Look at those top 10 results again.

How can it be that 6 pages with PR 0 rank in the top 10 for a competitive term?

Also, how can it be that some of those PR 0 pages don’t have PR, yet they do have backlinks? Look at position 10. PR 0 yet 11 backlinks reported by Google. Go look at those backlinks and they all have PR 0 as well. So is Google now reporting backlinks from pages that are PR 0?

It all seems very weird, yet I believe the answer to this is very simple. Google has not updated the Google Toolbar for some time, yet in its own database, PR is largely up to date. This means that pages that appear to have a PR 0 may in fact have much higher PR.

From a webmasters point of view, this is a real pain. Imagine putting up a site, adding a page to get some link partners, but not getting any PR on the links page for several months. You contact other webmasters for a link exchange, but the other webmasters ignore your request because you are PR 0!

Could it be that Google have decided to update the Google Toolbar far less frequently, or not at all, so that webmasters cannot find out the true PR of pages in the index?

If so, why would they do this?

Google use to show only backlinks from pages with PR 4 or more, yet now appear to show backlinks from pages with much less PR, even PR 0. Does this mean that Google have changed their policy on which pages they show as backlinks?

Possibly, though doesn’t it make more sense that Google still only shows PR 4 pages as backlinks, but since PR on the toolbar has not been updated, we see these backlinks as significantly less PR than they actually are?

For any search engine to return the most relevant results possible, those engines must try to stop webmasters using techniques that get their web pages better rankings. For Google, this includes manipulating PR.

Google state this clearly in their Program Policies for use for Adsense advertising.

Read through the section “Site Content” and look at the last point in the bullet list. Google specifically mentions PR manipulation. If Google is applying these rules to Adsense advertising, does it not make sense that they also apply these rules in their algorithms?

If Google is trying to:

a) prevent reverse engineering of its algorithm, and b) prevent webmasters from using techniques that might get a webpage ranked higher than it deserves based on its content,

Then surely, not updating the PR on the toolbar is a good thing for Google.

In doing so, it makes it very difficult:

a) for webmasters to find out why top ranking pages rank so well, and b) for webmasters to get links from other webmasters (which is a way of manipulating PR and increasing rankings).

I know Google want to make their engine the best it possibly can be, and they should be applauded for that. It makes it easier for searchers to find things of relevance. I believe that the whole idea of Pagerank was based on the premise that quality sites would get links from other sites because of their quality, not because of artificial linking like link exchanges. Link exchanges have just gotten out of hand and made a mockery of the Pagerank idea.

So what can you do about it? Well, my suggestion is the same as always. Add quality content to your sites. Other sites will naturally link to yours because your site offers value to THEIR visitors. In addition, write some quality articles and submit them with your own resource box that links back to your site. Submit these to sites that reprint articles, and you will naturally grow your own backlinks and PR through quality content. Your rankings will improve, and Google should love your site for the value it adds to the internet.

For details on how to use Articles for better rankings, why not re-read the fr.ee report available to my newsletter subscribers.

*****************************************************
Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO
internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date
information on all aspects of internet marketing.
*****************************************************

More and more we tend to see NO consistency with page ranking at all. Please don’t confuse the difference between “page ranking” & “search engine ranking”. The two are completely different.

With this method of measurement, we could quickly see how much or how little a person has put into promoting their website. A high rank of 6,7,8,9,10 is sometimes held as something honerable to have for your site but does it really matter?

In some aspects it does and in some it doesn’t.

As I mentioned above, page ranking has nothing to do with your search engine success. It (did) have everthing to do with “importance”. The only problem is (like so many marketing ventures online), this measurement method is dying off with the rest of them. People online are very intuitive about these sort of things and tend to over saturate ways to beat them and/or improve on them quickly.

People all over the world are even still wondering how to increase their page rank. Now why would they do this???

Simple, it’s all about prestige. Eventhough marketing experts like myself weigh absolutely no importance on page ranking anymore, there are still literally 1000′s of business people out there that consider a high rank a good thing.

So how do you benefit from increasing your rank?

- You will attract better quality websites to yours
- People will think your website has lasting power
- People will want to mimic what you do
- People will even think highly of you

Even now, many browsing people look for high ranking websites to exchange links with.

So does trying to increase your website page ranking help you? Not really. What you ultimately want to do is promote your website as much as you can in as many “RELATED _ RELATED” places that you can and let search engines do their own thing.

Playing into search engines hands won’t help your company. Building a great web marketing foundation will attract exactly what you’ve been after….. MORE EXPOSURE!

Please take this seriously and always be on the look-out for other ways to promote your business, let Google’s page rank go and look at the future beyond PR ratings.

Hope this article helps you out!

Read more of Martin’s articles online here:

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About The Author:

Martin Lemieux
Smartads – President

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