Archive

For July, 2009

Jul 10

How Google analyzes the top keywords on your website

By adminComments Off

How does Google find the top keywords of your website?

All major search engines index web pages based on the individual words that they find on the page. If certain words and phrases appear together on the same page, search engines assign a topic that is related to these words to the page.

Google’s patent application indicates that Google might plan to tell you what they believe are the top keywords for your website and let you suggest changes to these phrases.

How can Google find the relation between words?

Google has billions of web pages in its index. If Google finds that many web pages contain both the word “Paris” and the word “Hilton” then Google might assume that these keywords are related. The other words on these pages could give Google a hint that this special word combination is about a woman.

Words that frequently appear very close to each other could get a tighter connection. Google has a lot of algorithms that allow them to calculate the relation between different words.

What does this mean for your website?

Google does not allow you to suggest your keywords through a form yet. That means that you must use other methods to tell Google for which keywords you want to be listed on Google’s result pages. That’s why search engine optimization is so important.

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Jul 09

How the bounce rate of your website can affect your Google rankings

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Does Google use the bounce rate of a web page to specify the position of that page in the search results? What does this mean for your website rankings and what can you do to get a better bounce rate?

What is the bounce rate?

There are two definitions: the bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who see just one page of your website or the percentage of visitors who stay on your site for a small amount of time (only a few seconds).

The bounce rate helps you to measure the quality of traffic that your website gets and it also helps you to find out where your web pages could be improved.

Google’s definition of the bounce rate

The Google Analytics documentation defines the bounce rate as follows:

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Jul 08

Are your AdWords results getting worse?

By adminComments Off

If you find that your per click prices are going through the roof while your conversions are going down you should check your AdWords strategy.

In addition to the keywords that you choose for your campaign, your landing pages are a very important factor. The landing pages that you use with your pay per click ads greatly influence both your conversions and the per click prices.

The following two strategies are often a quick fix for underperforming AdWords campaigns:

1. Optimize your landing pages for your visitors

Attracting customers to your website to make your site SEO friendly through Google AdWords is one thing. It is a completely different thing to persuade visitors to your website to fulfill the goal of your landing page, e.g. to buy your product.

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Jul 07

The art of writing a link exchange request that is not spam

By adminComments Off

Link exchange requests have a very bad reputation. The reason for that is that many people send mass link exchange requests that are nothing more than spam.

However, if you want to get links from authority sites, you have to send link exchange requests. The secret of successful requests is to write link exchange messages that aren’t spam.

Get the reader’s attention

If you want people to read your link exchange message, it should not sound like the dozens of other emails that the webmaster receives. Use the recipient’s real name throughout your message. If your message starts with “Dear webmaster” then it’s likely that it will be moved to the trash. Be personal. Write a personal message for each recipient.

Use a real email address with a real name as the sender address. Free email addresses and email addresses with numbers look spammy.

Get the reader’s interest

What’s in for me? You should answer that question as soon as possible in your email.

Do not list any features. Focus on benefits. First, nobody is really interested in the great features of your website. Tell the recipient how your website solves his problems or the problems of his readers.

Appeal to the ego of the recipient. Tell the recipient that you list only 10 websites in this special category and that he is in that top 10 list. It’s easier to convince people if you appeal to their ego.

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Jul 02

What Google could do if they were evil

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You probably know Google’s informal company motto “Don’t be evil”. Google is a very successful company that knows a lot about its advertisers and users. In addition, Google has a market share that would allow them do certain things.

What could Google do if they were evil? Note that the following is only hypothetical:

Google could favor its own products and websites

Google could prefer websites from its own services in the search results: websites that run Google ads, websites that use Google’s payment service, Blogger sites, Google Base, etc.

All websites that pay Google in some way could be SEO friendly and preferred in the search results while others are downranked.

Google could punish websites at discretion

If Google doesn’t like your website or if someone tells Google that you’re a bad boy then Google can ban your website from the search results without any reason given.

You can find a lot of articles on the web that discuss the problem that Google removed web sites from the index. The main problem with these removals is that Google usually doesn’t explain why a web site has been removed so that webmasters often are complete and utterly at Google’s mercy.

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