Internet Business Daily

A little over a year ago I made a post to try to get my name, Matthew Berman, to the number 1 position in Google for my search term. When I started I was at #7 and there were at least 3 .edu domains ahead of me. Since then I haven’t put too much effort into it but I have made the move to #2.

Today, my friend Skwerl informed me that he saw my site in position #1. When I took a look, I still saw #2. Now the first thing people will think is: sure, if you’re in different locations you are going to get different results. This is not the case since Skwerl works at the same company as I do. He is on the same IP address as me. He then sent me the screen shot shown below:

Skwerl then noticed that when he went to the search results page in Firefox, I was actually in position #2. I checked it out myself and to my surprise, Firefox was showing different results than Safari. Here is what the same exact search results page looks like in Firefox:

So basically what we see here is Google’s thought process that people who use different browsers want different search results. I wonder how they came to the conclusion that people using Safari wanted to see more of me than people using Firefox. Since I’m a die-hard Firefox user, I must say I’m a little offended.

This is part 8 of my SEO Tips series. I am going to talk about an underused whitehat SEO technique. Properly naming images, folders (directories), and files (in some cases) can be a great way to easily improve your SERPS ranking. Here’s what to do:

• Proper Image Naming: Image search traffic is something a good number of webmasters underestimate. Although users have to suffer through Google’s frame, your website still appears when they click on an image in the image search results. This means there’s a chance the user will like your site, and continue reading, and quite possibly become a loyal user.

  That being said, the proper way to name an image is by using a very descriptive title separated by dashes (“-”). An example would be:

  frog-jumping-off-rock.jpg

  A few words that directly describe the picture is key. Even if you think no one would ever search for something like this, they will. Trust me, I’ve searched for some odd images in my time.

  URL Structure (Folder Naming):

  There are a few different methods of organizing your site in terms of complicated backend stuff I won’t get into right now. Regardless of your method, your URL structuring should stay fairly consistent. I like to use 2 or 3 levels of categories before the specific page, or specific image. Here are some examples:

  www.basketballwebsite.com/basketball-players/kobe-bryant

  OR

  www.basketballwebsite.com/basketball-teams/los-angeles-lakers

  OR

  www.basketballwebsite.com/clothing/basketball-shorts

  There’s some flexibility as to exactly how you level your categories (which categories are closer to the root) but you should always try to go broad to narrow. Also, remember that URL’s need dashes to represent spaces just like our image naming.

  Many of you will be asking what to do since you already have a site with pages indexed. I know you don’t want to loose your search ranking for specific pages, but if you have to make a site-wide change to URL structure, remember to use 301 redirects in every instance.

  That’s about it. These are some great examples of ways to improve the SEO on your site. Please feel free to email me about individual questions or comments.

I decided to finally setup my Google Reader for all the websites I read on a regular basis. These websites give me ideas every single day on how to make money online and improve my search engine optimization. Here is a quick list of the sites I read, which can also be found at my Google Reader Page, which also has a RSS Feed that only shows articles of my chosing.

• Engadget
• Mashable
• Tech Crunch
• John Chow
• BlueHatSeo
• Matt Cutts
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Pedia
• SEO Moz

These are just some of the good ones. I have many feeds about SEO, but not as many about Internet business as I would like. If anyone has suggestions for good Internet business blogs or any marketing, or SEO blogs please send them my way! For now just check these out.

Google has finally fully updated their PageRank for all sites. Internetbusinessdaily.net has moved up 1 position to PR4! Juicefeed.com finally received a PageRank and surprisingly has jumped to PR4 after only being online for about 2 months.

A bunch of my mini-niche sites also got PR3, which is good. They include: Cheap Dishwasher, In Stock Wii, and DSC Cybershot.

A better PR (PageRank) will give my sites more traffic, better leverage on link exchanges, and better search results. Check out your site’s new PR, but be sure to check the difference between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com! You can goto Google’s webmaster tools to set the preferred domain to make them have the same PR.

Three is such a perfect number sometimes. Three strikes, three stooges, three’s company…ok well those are bad examples but I believe there is a real power in the number three in regards to SEO. Everything on your site should be in three levels. You should be able to describe anything on your site with three levels of detail. This rule is not written in stone, but it is something that I believe is true. This not only makes it easy for the Google spider to come read your site, but it also makes it very easy for your readers to navigate.

Three Levels of Navigation
You should be able to get to anywhere on your site within three clicks. Let’s say for example you have a video game website. One of my favorite navigational tools is a cookie trail, and should never go more than three levels deep. Let’s use a review of the Xbox360 game Gears of War as our example. So when a reader comes to the homepage looking for the review the first thing they should see are the different types of consoles (assuming the site covers all consoles). They click on Xbox360, which takes them to a page that contains things like reviews, previews, hardware etc. The second click will be reviews, which takes them to a page with all the games that can be reviewed for Xbox360. The third and last click should be Gears of War review. So the cookie trail should look like this:

Xbox360 >> Game Reviews >> Gears of War Review

Game reviews and Xbox360 can be interchanged but you get the point. This makes it easy for the user to navigate and for Google to read your site. Also, the site map becomes very easy to read.

Three Keywords
I also think you should have three main keywords to describe your site. This is another theory of mine and is not proven. I have chosen “make money online” “blogging for money” and “internet business daily.” With these keywords I hope to build a large combination of long-tail keywords. Long-tail is currently the best way to get traffic on a smaller site, because we can’t compete with the big dogs. So choose the 3 keyword phrases that best describe your site and eventually you will start getting combinations of long-tail keywords having to do with these keywords.

What is Anchor Text?
In my opinion one of the most important factors in SEO is anchor text. A link from another site to yours is like a vote of confidence from them to you. Google sees this and gives your site more respect based on that vote. There are two things associated with a link: the URL and the anchor text. The URL is the address to which the link points and the anchor text is what the link says. For example: make money online. The URL of this link is internetbusinessdaily.net and the anchor text is “make money online.” When Google looks at this they associate that keyword with the URL it is pointing to. There are many other factors that go into the Google calculation of links but this is generally how it works.

Why Anchor Text is Important
So when doing link exchanges or link baiting, you really want the other sites to use your most popular keywords. This will give you better SERPS and therefore more traffic. The surround content is also important. If the entire site and article you are being linked from is about cooking but the anchor text is about search engine optimization, it will not mean nearly as much. A great example of the power of anchor text is John Chow’s site. He had a link baiting contest where many bloggers linked to him with the keyword make money online. Within 4 days he was #3 SERPS for that keyword. So, get those keywords in the links!

Tracking Progress
We have reached part four of the SEO tips segment. This is just a quick little tip I picked up today. I have always wondered the best way to track a site’s SEO performance, and now I know what that is. The first thing to consider is the research: how are we going to determine how well our site is doing with regards to a specific keyword? The site I was shown is McDar Internet Marketing Consultants. They have many useful tools but we are going to only focus on one: Datacenter Q- Check.

The Tool to Use
The Datacenter Q- Check (located on the left side of the page in the menu) basically checks a website’s SERPS (search engine results page) for a given keyword. It goes out and checks Google’s data centers for a sites ranking. So to get an accurate reading of how well your SEO efforts are doing, I would keep an excel document recording the information given by this tool. Focus on a few keywords and track their progress. When using this tool always use “Check across Datacenter IP C-Block(Group A)” because that will include the most data centers from Google (different data centers means different results). Check out this tool and the rest of the website, it is very helpful.

Read the rest of the SEO Tips here:

• SEO Tips (Part 1)
• SEO Tips (Part 2)
• SEO Tips (Part 3)

We have arrived at part 3 of the SEO tips series. I have just a little time to write right now so I will keep this tip short and sweet. Many people ask “how do I get indexed in the first place?” Well there are 2 main ways I let Google and other search engines know that I have a new site (or new content) for them to come spider.

Blue Hat SEO Quick Index Tool
The first tool I use is from Blue Hat SEO. All you gotta do is enter your domain address and a day later your site will be indexed. This is the quickest tool I have seen to get your site indexed by search engines. The quick index tool can be found here.

Pingoat Pinging Service
The second tool I use is pingoat. This service pings dozens of sites telling them to come check you out, which eventually translates into Google coming to spider your site.

Both of these tools are very useful and can be used very often (or as often as you update content).

The Basics
This is the second installment of my SEO Tips series (you can find SEO Tips (Part 1) here). I think I may have jumped the gun with my last post by not going over the basics first, such as research. Research to me is by far the most important part of SEO.

Good Research = Good SEO
How can you have good search engine optimization without knowing which keywords to use. If you just guess which keywords people use to find your site, most of the time you will not be correct. There are a few factors to think about when doing research, such as 1) what people think of when they try to find your site 2) what keywords people are actually using to find your site 3) what keywords to target that have the right amount of competition. There are many different tools offered to discover this information, but I have been having much luck with only two. The first tool I like to use is the inventory tool by Yahoo, which can be found at inventory.overture.com. This tool allows you to see how many times a certain search term was searched for in the previous month. You don’t want to target a keyword that has 40,000 searches in a month, because most likely there will be too much competition for that word and therefore you will not win it.

The second keyword research tool I use is Google’s Keyword External Tool. This gives the amount of searches and advertiser competition for any keyword you enter. The best part about this tool is if you are not sure about what keyword to select, it gives you many you can try based on a common keyword you enter. I suggest playing around with both of these tools until you gain an understanding of how to use them.

Choosing Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is as important as anything else in SEO. You have to decide which words you think describe your site the best with regards to both Google’s spider, and your users. If you have a movie site, just using the keyword “movies” wont really work because there may be too much competition. If you have a movie site and one of the pages is horror movies, any keywords having to do with scary movies, horror movies, or something similar would work.

I think this may be enough information for now. Try out what you have learned here and just play around with the keyword selection tools, they are a great help.

I have been doing a whole lot of research on SEO for the past month or so. I still know nothing compared to many of the SEO experts out there but I am starting to see the big picture. I decided I would create a new segment on this blog called SEO Tips. Each post I will write about one or two new tips that I have learned.

What Is SEO?
Before going too far, let me explain what SEO is. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the practice of making your site easier to “read” by the search engines (mainly Google, Yahoo, and MSN). I will also be refering to Google in this post but all the tips apply to any search engine. What I mean by easier to read is when Google’s spider (the computer used to find your site) comes around to your site to index it (take note it exists), you want to make it as easy as possible for that spider to read every page in your website. The more pages Google sees and indexes of yours, the more chance someone will find it when they do a Google search. More searches equals more traffic, more traffic equals more money and bla bla bla you know the rest.

The First Tip
I could go on for a while talking about what exactly SEO is and what keywords are, but you are better off reading all about it at a site like SEOchat.com. Let’s just go ahead and start with the first tip. As you have probably noticed, I changed the title of my blog that appears in your browser’s window. Before it just said “Internet Business Daily,” but it now includes the keyword I have targeted that best describes my site: “make money online.” By doing this I am describing to Google (and my readers) what my site is about. When people search for make money online now they will find my site. Although it’s not exactly that easy, that is the basic principle of it.

For Next Time…
So you are going to want to find which keyword(s) best describe your site and use them in your header title. I will explain more about choosing keywords and how to place them on your site in coming parts of this segment, so look out for my next installment.