Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

Many of us have used services like Copyscape to see if anyone has plagiarized our content. Some of us also use it to see if the content we plagiarized is unique enough after all the manual or automatic modifications we made to it.

Regardless the reasons I use Copyscape, I didn’t really care much for the service when they decreased the free searches from 20 to 10. I can burn through 10 searches in 10 minutes. I don’t want to spend the meager $5.00 for an extra 100 searches as a Premium Member so I take advantage of TinyURL for an additional 10 searches for the month.

TinyURL allows me to convert http://www.10minutes.org to http://tinyurl.com/yv9y9m. This isn’t what TinyURL was created for mind you; it was originally created to convert LONG URL’s to shorter URL’s for e-mailing links and what not. However the practice works rather well so I keep at it.

Most of you already take advantage of this back door so it isn’t anything new. The reason I am writing this blog post is because I discovered another site today that converts URL’s into shorter URL’s in the same way that TinyURL does. The new discovery is TubeURL.

Enjoy the find and feel free to post other sites just like this. A collaboration of resources that we all have will only make some of our jobs much easier.

JJ

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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I know it has been about two weeks since I’ve last posted. With my wife and I expecting our first child and my desire to not be glued to the computer for more than 12 - 13 hours a day, you’ll probably find that my posts will be done once a week with an occasional burst of energy that may result in more than one a week.

So today I am writing because I read an article from Axandra on Tuesday morning titled, “How long does it take until a new site ranks in Google, Yahoo and MSN?“. Being someone who is always looking for the facts; I decided to give this article a once over.

The reason I am writing this blog post is to add on a very LARGE disclaimer that I feel wasn’t covered enough when they wrote:

“If you target very competitive keywords, then it will take much longer until your website is listed in the top 10 rankings.”

The article talks about a test that was used to determine how long it takes to rank for a keyword across G.Y.M. (Google, Yahoo & MSN). The keyword phrase they were targeting for this test was, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” which according to Overture is searched across the Yahoo network a total of 1,574 times in a month. While the data may be network specific and outdated (January) it is still an OK metric for this article.

We each have our own targeted keywords. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” was used in this test and in my opinion isn’t a very competitive keyword term. Competitive is defined by how many other websites or Internet marketers are actively targeting the term which is usually decided by some sort of search metric like Overture. The more people targeting the term the harder your job is going to be. On the other side of the coin though, the fewer people targeting the term the easier your job is going to be.

If this test was targeted around a more competitive keyword term like “Sweet Child of Mine” you’ll find that the test results would probably be quite a bit different since the search volume reports this keyword phrase getting 4,302 searches a month. The term is receiving almost three times the amount of traffic and this may result in more people targeting this phrase.

One other example might be, “The Sweet Escape” which is another song name like the other two. Its search volume was 49,352 times which means it is a lot harder to rank for this term and would most definitely take a lot more work and longer than 10 weeks like the article from Axandra reports.

The LARGE disclaimer is simple enough… There really isn’t any specific time frame that is magical with keywords you may be targeting for your website(s). It might take you just a few weeks, a few months or maybe a year or longer but regardless how long it takes; if you keep working at it then eventually it should happen for you.

• Uniqueness: 10.0
• Overall Rating: 10.0
• Usefulness: 10.0

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1. You purchase a link to enhance your chances of ranking.
2. You show visitors one thing and Google another.
3. You fail to submit to relevant directories like the Open Directory (DMOZ)
   or Yahoo! Directory.
4. You purhase a link at Yahoo! (See Violation #1.)

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Note / Update: This is just a fun post that took me five minutes to write. It is an observation on how Google is tightening its reigns on paid directories and at the same time still encouraging buying a link from Yahoo!.

• Uniqueness: 1.0
• Overall Rating: 1.0
• Usefulness: 1.0

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In every industry you will find right and wrong as well as people who have opinions of others within the same industry or even other industries simply because we are opinionated about what everyone else does or says that is different from what we would do.

Today a discussion was created on a social network I frequent often called Sphinn. The discussion was pretty much a direct opinionated assault on a well known SEOer that is also a speaker at many conferences.

I actually agree with the opinion of the poster but I’m not about to make my opinions of others known to the world by out right expressing my opinions of another person.

You never know when someone is going to be a friend or a foe over the years. It is also equally impossible to know who you’ll end up making as an enemy that might be supporting the person you don’t like.

With Social Networking comes the responsibility of reputation management and without a reputation no one will be around to criticize what you have to say.

While I may not always agree with this well known SEOer, I’ll give them mad credit for sticking to their usual response to attacks like this which is not responding at all. However I have no doubt that the following this person has will be more then willing to stand up for her.

• Uniqueness: 1.0
• Overall Rating: 1.0
• Usefulness: 1.0

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One of the better parts of Google Webmaster Tools is the ability to see all websites that link to you. In bound links are important to a website’s rankings because they help search engines determine what your site might be about and what other sites recommend what you have to say or offer. All the content writing advice in the world couldn’t replace the value of some high quality links.

Today I looked at a websites back links for the first time. The website had 188 in bound links and the disturbing part is that about 130 of them were from the SAME domain. The worse part is that all but maybe two or three are relevant to this persons industry or area.

To this date I know of no other way of getting these links removed other than contacting that website owner. Sometimes that yields poor results at best because some sites are simply abandoned or e-mails get changed. I know these links don’t hurt my client because she doesn’t link back to them but I sure would like it if I could get these removed anyways.

I think a search engine would be highly successful if it made website owners validate that they want link juice from different websites. This could help solve or alleviate a few problems that currently exist within the major search engines:

1. Google Bowling - I’m inclined to believe that this can be done with all of the search engines but that is up for debate. Requiring in bound link validation by webmasters would mean they could also decline links.
2. Link Rot - Applying something like link validation would mean that search engine optimizers would also be more involved in their linking efforts which could possibly reduce link rotting.
3. Bulk Link Purchasing - We will always have webmasters who are easy targets and will purchase thousands of in bound links. However adding an extra step to the process would help reduce the amount of interest there is for services like this.

Some negative factors I can see without too much thought put into the negative side is that companies would have to put out more money to manage link validation and the time spent looking for links would increase simply because quality would be more of a focus. Is that a bad thing though? It is predicted that search budgets will see double-digit growth. Some of that money might as well be utilized to help build a cleaner more efficient Search Index.

• Uniqueness: 1.0
• Overall Rating: 1.0
• Usefulness: 1.0

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This is an old practice that is still done today by people who don’t know what they are doing or it is done because it is within the budget set aside for the search engine optimizer working on your website. It may also be that many old school Internet marketers are stuck in their old school ways and it is time for you to trade in the old for the new.

Top level link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to your home page and nowhere else

Doesn’t it make sense that if your home page is that popular and has a ton of in bound links that so will the other pages of your site? Do you think Google doesn’t have the ability to see who is and isn’t linking to you and to where on your site? Didn’t I take the statistics in my last post directly from Google?

This practice still works today but it is not the most rewarding practice because most of the value that search engines give you will be for this single page and that value is distributed on down through the other pages of your site which means by the time it gets a few levels deeper into your site you are passing very little to no value.

Read tomorrows post on Deep Link Building to understand the benefits of building links to internal pages of your website.

• Uniqueness: 1.0
• Overall Rating: 1.0
• Usefulness: 1.0

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Looking at two different sites I own or manage I can see a pretty significant difference between the two. One is this marketing blog while the other is a client website that I’ve been working with for well under a year now.

Notice that my 10 minute marketing blog has links to several internal pages instead of just the home page. However this client’s website has all of their links going straight to their websites home page.

One thing I’ve always been bad at is remembering terminology. There may be another name for these practices but for the sake of this blog I’ll say that when you only obtain links to your home page then you are practicing top level link building. When you are building links to other pages of your site you are practicing deep linking.

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Yesterday began a multi part series of blog posts with observations made about Google. Today I want to provide some fun facts that I can provide proof of actually happening as of the date of this blog post.

Within Google Webmaster Tools when I was looking at my top search queries I noticed that I was ranking for the phrase, “adultfriendfinder im”.

On September 23 2007 I wrote a post titled, “Variable Marketing Strategies” and I mentioned Adult Friend Finder within that post. I didn’t provide a link to that site or combine those words.

This tells me a few things:

#1. Google can create compounded words and can split compounded words. If you are targeting the term ‘Sunshine’ you may end up achieving your goal but you may also end up doing well for ‘Sun Shine’ as well. Other examples would be ‘Rainbow’, ‘Drywall’, and ‘Birthday’.

#2. Content is as equally important to the search engines as linking is. I say this because I am ranking #16 for the search term ‘adultfriendfinder im’ and I didn’t do anything special other than mentioning both words in passing.

#3. Google can strip punctuation. The description Google decided to use for my position within the SERP’s for this term is:

“Anyone that knows me will know that I’m not one to encourage or promote the … to a website is unfortunately a dating type site called adult friend finder. …”

Notice that I didn’t actually use ‘im’; I used ‘I’m’.

#4. A keyword phrase doesn’t have to be found within the content together. Looking at the post itself or the description that Google pulled, do you see anywhere where I used the exact phrase of, “adultfriendfinder im” or “adult friend finder im”?

I really didn’t combine the two sets of words together in my post. They are all found at different locations of the post.

#5. Before today I’ve never used ‘adultfriendfinder im’ or ‘adult friend finder im’ on my blog. I’ve now used them both at least twice within this single blog post and my guess is that I’ll move higher in Google’s SERP’s for my current #16.

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