You can see the competition has started by my SEO SERPs post.
A quick recap of the competition: To get a blog post or page highest up on Google SERP rankings for the term SEO SERPs within one week.
Who’s taking part ?

Well it looks like Joel has dropped out.. leaving me and last minute entry Andreas Johansson in the running. I must add though I am more interested in how well anyone does in this competition, what tactics work well, and learning a bit more about SEO and seeing some statistics from this than in it for the winning or prize, as its not big :p
You can view Andreas SEO SERPs site at freeflashportals.com, and no im not giving him a backlink while the competition running :p

He’s started a fresh site and is targeting all his links to get the site ranking higher, a nice option, but does have the indexing issue to solve at the moment. However that should not be much of a problem, he just needs to get links in to his site to force google to index him : )

So good luck to Andreas, and me : ) Will document our standings over the week for you guys to see, and let you know what I have or haven’t been doing SEO wise to improve my rank.

Ciao!

These are the pages displayed by a search engine after you have typed in a term to search for and clicked search, as a Google result page is shown below.

search engine result page

When people are talking about a results page they are normally refering to Google, as it is the most used search engine.

SERPs are important to those involved in SEO because it tells us who ranks highest for what terms, what adverts are running (displayed on the right) and allows us to view competitors or opporunities within a search term.

how many pages for key phrase

In the image above we can see a SERP. In the top right of this image is how many resulting pages there are for the search term entered. This is a good way for someone looking to start a site to see how much competition they will be up against. They can then other details about the sites listed on the front page for factors such as PageRank, number of back links etc.

Getting to the front page of the SERP’s is every Search Engine Optimizers goal, and getting to number one their dream. This is why the SERP’s are so important to SEOs, forgive my use of anagrams here but they save a lot of time!

For checking where a website ranks for a given key phrase within the search engine results it is often best to use a tool, such as this one for google. (Please note this will not display any positions sometimes, AKA it brakes for a while)

Any thoughts on this please comment. Thanks.

You want your site indexed within a day?

1. Start your site at wordpress.com or blogger.com or a self hosted wordpress setup.

2. Have your url optimised for keywords you want to target. see choosing your niche if you don’t know how to do that.

3. Optimise your titles and come up with a description.

4. Post about 2 meaningful posts on your site, fill out an about page.

5. Now the fun part, to get your site noticed. You’re going to be using rss feed directories.

• www.feedage.com - Do get your site on here
• www.readablog.com - Do get your site on here
• www.tweetwire.com
• www.bumzee.com
• www.2005lions.net

The above should be enough to get you indexed within a day.

If you want a more extensive list of RSS directories check out Joel’s RSS redictory list.

I’ve been having a lot of success with this, what you do with your site and where you go from there is upto you..  so goodluck, hope this has been useful.

Let me know how you get on!

]]> http://www.seogoogletips.com/seo-explained/new-site-indexed-in-a-day/feed/ http://www.seogoogletips.com/progress/pagerank-update/ http://www.seogoogletips.com/progress/pagerank-update/#comments Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:03:30 +0000 seogoogletips http://www.seogoogletips.com/?p=103 Ok it looks like there’s been a PageRank update.

page rank update

I could be a little disappointed my PageRank is 0, but im not. My site has only been live for 2 weeks and no extensive back linking has taken place.

So lets look at the tips to improve PageRank:

• Get more back links coming to a site

• Have more site pages indexed in Google.

I will simply continue following these two guides, this post is acting out the second point above in fact!

Now onto some positives stats… I now rank 3rd for the key phrase seo google tips in Google, moving up from my place of 6th on September 21!

google ranking seo google tips

Some more rankings listed below:

• 6th for phrases seo google.
• 14th for the term google tips seo.
• 54th for the term phrases google seo.
• 102nd for the term google tips.
• 140th for the term google seo keywords.
• 230th for the term seo keywords google.

A favoured phrase to rank for here is google tips for which there are 2,900 average searches a month. I will probably target this one with a post and see the results, I’m expecting atleast a 20 rank climb else its gonna be a tough fight!

google tips keyword

For my position checking and ranking for keywords / key phrases I use this Google position checking tool.

This is a better tool to use than just typing into google to check your rank, for a couple reasons:

• If your not on the first page of google, this will find you quicker than you can search through all the pages yourself.
• It stores your past searches on a front page for you, allowing you to search again quicker.

A note on this tool, sometimes it will not work altogether; if you find your not ranking for terms you think you should be, type in a keyword, like your URL, your certain you should rank for, if you don’t the tool is temporarily not working, so come back later

More updates to come,

Ok so I was looking for a way to improve my internal linking, I even started doing it manually, finding posts, putting links to related ones, using my brain like a sucker. Then I thought of Matt Cutt’s blog and how Google’s main SEO man is using related posts, telling me its a good idea. A little search on his blog and we find Matt himself has done a post on Related posts plugins.

Really it is great, it calculates how related posts are by: body content, title, catergories etc, and you can influence all these calculations, then say how high, or how closely related a post needs to be to show up, and if its not related, dont show it.

A view of some of the options within YARPP:

yet another related posts plugin

Some more reasons why its useful for your blog;

• Applies the plugin to all posts already published
• Updates related posts as new and more relevant ones are added
• Competely automated, don’t need to touch them again

I think that’s enough praise, you can see it in action below.

What we have to do: Get a blog post targeting the term “SEO SERPs” as high as you can in the Google SERPs with ONE WEEK. The highest ranking post according to this Google ranking tool wins the prize.

The prize: Small but it’s gonna be fun and pretty interesting how I do against other SEO people. The victor will recieve backlinks and maybe a small cash prize, money coming from me and Joel, backlinks from everyone taking part.

My thoughts? This is gonna be competitive, who’d of guessed? Well there’s gonna be a lot more effort expended in some hardcore SEO efforts here than I have done so far on this blog, partly because I have taken a relaxed “slow and steady” attitude so with in pushing my site up the rankings. Also have been working on some other sites.. don’t worry i`ll update you all with my findings on them ; )

Some notes about the term “SEO SERPs”:

seo serps searches

It has roughly 110 searches a month, tiny yes but atleast  optimizing for this key phrase will has a little benefit besides just this SEO competition. And also getting a key phrase ranked higher has an effect on your other phrases in Google, so it’s all beneficial.

Competition kicks off this coming monday at 12pm GMT +1 so if you wanna have some fun and compare notes after, or try kicking mine or Joel’s butt, signup in comment on Joel’s blog, all results are listed there!

I`ll be updating my statistics etc the whole time also, give you guys as much as I can from this, not just me!

Decide what you want to write about and what you’re gonna make money with, how do you do this ? Pick something:

• You’re interested in or passionate about.

• Something that will get people clicking and buying, aka products as opposed to purely information.

• Gap in the market, high searches, few sites.

The next step is seeing how many pages you are possibly competing with in the search, throughout all of this, if you run into a niche with 500 mill searches or are not happy about your niche, go back and start again.

niche search

If both words are underlined and shown as links in the top right, all the words are being used in the search. When you’re searching for a key phrase you may need to put speach marks around the whole phrase to make sure it is included in the search.

Ok this this view shows you how many sites you are competing against. as a guide, below a million is not a lot, as many of these are small pages off a larger site,  100million + is a lot.

Results 1 - 10 of about 43,600,000 for farming is a relatively low amount for such a keyword.

We can now have a look at what sort of traffic this keyword is getting, using the Google keywords tool, these numbers should be used as a rough guide.

farming keywords statistics

Here we can see compared to the amount of 1,830,000 a month on average versus the 43,600,000 pages in Google for farming. This is a great traffic to pages ratio, however we must take into account how well this potential traffic we recieve can be monetized, not very by the thought of farming, but still people want ads for farming, we continue…

So now you have your farming niche. For our site just starting up, with friends or backlinks ready to be set up, aiming for the front page for “farming” is a bit ambitious. Firstly with your new site we will target a key phrase as opposed to one keyword.

To do this we will go back to the Google keywords tool and see other sources of traffic, or type in random phrases that people might search for in Google. We will see the page results numbers, and then check what traffic there is for that phrase with the keywords tool.

After finding a niche, you will want to look at an URL name. This can be based on generally what you want to do, or a keyword or phrase you are targeting.

how many pages for key phrase

Here I have found a key phrase, “potato farming”, with a small number of pages.  We can also check how strong the competition is, like how the sites page ranks and what their on page and off page customisation is like. A way to view this all in one screen is the SEO for Firefox tool shown in my screen shots.

Depending on how targeted towards the keyword / key phrase the other pages are and how high their PageRank is effects how easy it will be to knock them off that spot. A PageRank of 6 or higher  on the front page is bad news, 5 and below it’s possible to overtake them in the SERPs for that key phrase.

Indications that the site has good on page optimization:

• The page title matches the keyword / phrase exactly the title is well targeted,
• The words are included in the  description without too much babble and isn’t too long, the description is well targeted.
• The key phrase is included in the sites meta keywords, guess what? Its keywords are well targeted.

Here the competition has a page rank of 2, and is not very well targeted for OUR term, so we proceed, lets see how much traffic our term gets:

key phrase traffic

720 searches a month on average, OK this is not massive, but this is just one key phrase for our site, and we can reach the front page for this term easily, and then move onto our next targeted key phrase. This will be a good introductory key phrase for our site, and after establishing ourselves within Google and having some pages indexed etc, further related key terms and phrases will be easier than others to conquer.

Now for a domain name?

you want to include at least one of the keywords your site is about in your URL, and if it’s a very competitive market, making your URL from your key phrase - like i have done, again not making too long.

Tips for deciding on a good URL:

• The more keywords in your URL, the less value each one gets.
• If possible keep the main keyword at the beginning of the URL
• Prefix or suffix your keyword with related terms, like organicpotatofarming, organic potatoes and organic farming could be related key phrases we then target later on.

So you’ve got your domain, you’ve got your targeted key phrase - how do you get higher in the SERPs rankings?

Stay tuned : >

Things to be pleased about:  I’m on the front of the Google SERP’s for one keyword and my chosen phrase.

As a site launching into a crowded market I thought I’d give some new comers and those interested, an idea of how well I’m doing.

OK guys i launched on the 13th September, I had no friends or other sites to get backlinks from and taking on world in a crammed seo “niche”.

A run through:

I started off just trying to submit to a few general web directories, and made a comment or two on other peoples blogs, along with setting up accounts on the usual social bookmarking sites but then not really using them, I have since been using stumbleUpon and got good percentage of my traffic from there.

Things were slow at first, only having one page indexed in google about 1 day after launching, and another a couple days later. The one site that was indexed was the one I had linked to from indexed and active related site http://joeldrapper.com -  making use of his dofollow comments, thanks Joel : )

Within 10 days I have had all my pages indexed eon Google.

I am ranked number one for the keyword “seogoogletips” - no surprise there, and I’m probably the only one searching for it.

Ranked sixth for the search phrase “seo google tips” with an average of 390 searches for the term a month, according to google keywords tool … not totally accurate, but a rough guide, so we can assume more than just me searches for this term.

seo google tips keyword data

Ranked fourth for the search phrase “SEO GOOGLE TIPS” and “SEO Google Tips”. Yes sites rank differently in Google based on character case, this is probably due to my backlinks being mostly anchored with “SEO Google Tips”.

On first page seo google tips SERP

Some key things to note,

I have started off targeting a key phrase with far less competition than other SEO related phrases.

So my viewer statistics, for all to see:

starting website traffic statistics

Ok they’re not massive, but that really doesn’t bother me right now, why? I don’t have much on my site, and other than a couple posts and submissions, have not started promoting my site or building backlinks. How am I gonna do that and what results will I get? I`ll be posting how and around some other subjects related to this post so stay tuned!

dofollow as an HTML attribute doesnt exist. dofollow is a term coined by the SEO community, and means not nofollow, meaning a link does NOT have a nofollow attribute.

<a href=”http://www.google.com” ref=”nofollow”> This is nofollow.

<a href=”http://www.google.com” > This is dofollow.

A dofollow link will give linkjuice and therefore help the linked-to domains PageRank, a nofollow domain will not.

I hope this explains cleary for everyone.

To stop a link from affecting PageRank rel=”nofollow” is included in the <a> within the html. So if anyone is wishing to create backlinks for the sake of having backlinks and PageRank, will be no use on these sites. However you can still get organic human traffic from people clicking your links.

How to tell if they have nofollow on the links? You could right click and view source code on the selection of a hyper link. You can also download a free addon for firefox SEO for Firefox Extension. I use this myself, basically it highlights any nofollow links in red, and also gives u details in search engines, like pagerank etc. Can be disabled by clicking its logo in the bottom right of firefox.

Links that are non-nofollow tend to be nicknamed dofollow and these are what you want to in a web directory or wherever your putting a link if your joining one.

seogoogletips