My online Manifesto

Traffic generation is of extreme importance to your online business, and affordable SEO services are equally important in securing that website traffic.

In order to help you achieve the type of traffic you need to make your online business a success, we shall look at each of these statements separately and discuss what options are available to enable you to attract the visitors that are essential to your online future. Although there are ways to attract traffic other than through search engine optimization, it is definitely to your benefit if you can secure traffic by means of the free advertising that a high listing in search engines such as Google and Yahoo can provide you with.

There are many ways in which you can make your website as search engine friendly as possible and improve its capacity for traffic generation. Did you notice the mistake I just made there? I mentioned websites in the same sentence as search engine. True search engines look at web pages, not web sites. More on that in a minute. In order to make it easier for me (and you) I am going to apply the name Google whenever I write about ’search engine’, since although Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Ask, etc are important, no one can deny that Google is the biggest search engine.

Not only that, but it was the first true search engine. Yahoo started life off as a web directory, and if your site was not in the Yahoo directory, it would not be listed in a search. Now, however, in addition to being a website directory, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are true web search engines, the same as Google. I will explain the difference later from my website that you can access from the link in my Resource Box.

For the moment, accept the fact that Google and the other true search engines crawl the whole World Wide Web for the web pages that are most relevant to the search term that your customers are using to find the information they are seeking. Did you notice what I just wrote there? ‘Web pages’? Not ‘web sites’ but web pages, as I mentioned earlier. Google and the rest list individual web pages in order of relevance to its interpretation of the words that your potential visitors use to find their information. That is very important to keep in mind.

How do they do that? How do the search engines decide what is relevant and what is not to a character string – that is all that your search term is. That is another story really, but it is connected with what is commonly termed ‘Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)’, a misnomer for a mathematical statistical analysis of the vocabulary on each of your web pages.

I say misnomer, because LSI is not an indexing technique, but an analysis method that uses character strings and known juxtaposition of characters, to determine what you are writing about through the use of contextual relevance of the whole passage of your text to the keyword, or theme, that you have highlighted by means of the search engine optimization techniques available to you. Nobody can make a web page LSI compliant, or ‘use’ LSI on a website.

It is akin to saying that you can use probability equations to write an article on fly fishing. It is a nonsense that even the best known internet gurus believe, unless they are lying to us and I sure that they would not do that. They must therefore be more ignorant than we believed them to be, which explains quite a lot all things considered. Which of the two options would they admit to I wonder.

You no longer need the oft-quoted 1% – 3% keyword density on your web page, but instead more vocabulary and content on your page that makes the topic of that page clear, without any doubt, to software that parses our page for its meaning in additional to human readers who can tell that at a glance. You have to use more vocabulary than just repeat the keyword or Google and the rest of the search engines will not list your page.

The most affordable SEO services will provide you with the small things that you do to your individual web pages to improve your listing position and traffic generation capability. Such services need not be expensive, although the sites you find online that offer them tend to charge high prices since they are targeting large companies rather than individuals with single small websites of a hundred pages or less. One technique that they all mention, however, is the use of meta tags. Many get it wrong!

The only important meta tags are the Title and Description tags. You should also point out to the spiders what your more important vocabulary is by use of H tags, bold text, italics and underlining. Google appreciates that, but while you might be rewarded for doing so, you will not be punished for not doing so. There is a massive difference between breaking the rules and failing to give a helping hand.

Your linking strategy is of critical importance, and you must have a good number of links back to your web page from other relevant web pages. Take note of the two important words I have used there: ‘pages’ and ‘relevant’. I could write 10 pages on Google PageRank without doing it justice, so won’t start now. Just believe me that you get a share of the Google PageRank of a page linking to yours (not of the home page of that site), and since most linking pages are designed only to hold URL links and consequently contain masses of other links on them, then your share is practically zilch.

Do not therefore give a website a link from your home page that reciprocates with one from deep inside the directory structure that provides you with absolutely no benefit. You cannot lose PageRank by providing a link, but why should you give more than you get. Come to an arrangement: you will provide a link from your PR 5 page if the other party reciprocates. Not if their link is from a PR 0 page.

There are many more ways in which you can legally attract search engines to your website and achieve high listings and to generate loads of traffic. There are also many illegal methods of doing so. It is the end result that counts, but before you can even begin to understand what the term ‘black hat’ means, you must first understand what SEO means!

Traffic generation is critical to your success, and if you can find affordable SEO services to help you to achieve that, then you are most of the way there. The effect that good search engine optimization has on the generation of traffic to selected pages within your website cannot be over-estimated and will likely determine your future over the next year.

Life is a constant change, they all say. Nothing in this world is permanent, except for change itself. Everything changes with time, and there is not one thing in this world that’s exempt from such a process. Search engines are included and, as trends come and go for the Internet, so do these engines’ rules and tactics.

Just recently, Google has introduced a critical update to its operation. Nicknamed “Jagger,” the update was done in 3 parts and practically turned the SEO world around. Jagger has made various changes to the algorithms and rules of how Google judges the relevancy and PageRank of a website.

SEO rules are in for a big revamp, and to survive in this world, sites must change with it.

Coping with Change Ensures Survival

Jagger has made changes to three key areas that are crucial in the calculation of a page’s rank. These areas include the lifetime of a website, the calculation of backlinks, and the content and structure of a website.

In order to ensure the present ranking of your website, it is important to understand how Jagger has changed the rules regarding these three areas. That way, as an SEO specialist, you could make the necessary changes and adjustments to your tactics so that you could preserve your current ranking through not just Jagger, but for future updates as well.

Knowing Your Site’s History and Backlinks

The first area concerns the length of time that you have been operating your website. When you are introducing a new website, you could expect difficulties and some obstacles in attaining page ranking in Google. You also have to make efforts in the beginning to optimize a website towards a keyword that is less competitive in order to garner more chances of beating the competition.

However, as time passes, you start building up the necessary links in order to gain relevancy. In this sense, a site becomes more and more relevant as its history builds up (providing that its pages are optimized to be actually relevant with certain search terms), and as your site’s relevance goes up, you gain in rank among Google’s search results.

Google’s PageRank algorithm judges backlinks using the factor of relevance in mind. It gives greater weight to those links that point to your site from a site that is related to you. This was done before to answer attempts at link farming (a black hat SEO technique) by spam sites, which involve the establishment of sites that are purely intended to point their own sites in order to gain PageRank. For example, if a web design firm posts a link pointing to your SEO company’s site, this link has more weight and importance to Google’s eyes.

With this latest update, Google has given more weight to relevant links that have been pointing to a certain site for a certain period of time. In other words, links that have a long history are given higher value under the latest update. Now, not only does Google count the number of links pointing to your site but it also means it is checking for how long that backlink has existed in calculating your PageRank.

As a direct effect of this update, the tactic of building up links by buying them are no longer as effective as it was before. Since Google values older links more than new ones, this means webmasters that resort to buying backlinks will have to wait (while paying money) for quite a while before these links gain any significant value to Google’s calculations.

organic seo specialists’ reliance on the keyword density requirement has been critically affected by the update. No longer does Google give weight to specific pages that are relevant to a single keyword. With the Jagger update, Google is now designed to look at a whole site’s structure and content for relevancy to a certain theme. This totally changes black hat SEO tactics to gain relevancy for various searches by constructing pages that are individually themed for different keywords.

This means that seo efforts should now be directed towards structuring a site around a certain theme, not just a single keyword. For example, if your website is about cars, your individual pages comprising your whole site should be centered on topics that are related to cars. With the Jagger update, you could see that general directories that use to appear on top rankings have diminished in numbers. Instead, directories for specific categories are gaining prominence among search engine result pages.

In the last several years Google has become a widely-recognized brand, even recently ranked as the top-known brand name in the world. Anyone who is hosting a website, advertising online, or doing business should understand how to utilize Google services well. In short, over half of all Internet searches use Google.

Google’s services can help searchers find your business in several different ways. Your site, like all the other public sites on the Web, is scanned often by automatic ’spider’ applications which make an examination for the links and content of each web page. Google’s index contains over ten billion pages; the company updates its indexes on a regular basis, a task that requires the use of almost half a million servers.

When users submit search terms at the site, Google will present a list of selected and ordered matches. The order in which they are presented is determined by several different factors. The factors of this search include the relevancy of the content on the page to the search terms, along with what Google calls the ‘PageRank’ of that particular page. Other factors probably play in as well, but these algorithms are secret.

PageRank is expressed as a number which is calculated during the process of indexing (0-10). Each web page that the spider examines will be assigned a PageRank number. Starting at zero, the number grows as the page receives links from other sites, either from the same host for from other externally-based sites. The Google policy here is that pages receive rank not from the amount of accesses they serve, but by the correlated relevancy of content and the amount of links that refer them. Google’s description: “Google interprets a link from page A to B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.” So, increased site traffic won’t improve your PageRank, but a better PageRank will probably result in increased traffic to your site.

Where Does Your Site Sit in Google’s World?

To find out your site’s PageRank, use Google’s Toolbar in your Web browser. If you don’t have it pre-installed, just search for it.

How Does a Site Increase Visitor Traffic?

There’s an entire new field to address this question: search engine optimizers. These SEO companies are great for expert advice. There are also some things you can do to increase the amount of unpaid traffic at your web site.

1) Website Redesign – Make your site focus more on the issues that people search on more frequently.

2) Place Articles – These articles can feature incoming links to your web site.

3) Localize – By adding sections by geographic location, your content can feature info related to a particular place, including community events. Google gives favor to a search that includes a city name in it.

By implementing these simple suggestions, you could see your unpaid web traffic triple in short time.

Do you want to get first page on Google? If you have a web page or blog, you likely already are first page for some searches. With a bit of SEO, you can gain first page on more searches. And its simple.

The first and most obvious step is think about what words or phrases you want to be first page on.

Once you have that list, determine how many people are searching for those terms. To check how popular a search is you will need a tool. I use Wordtracker (there is a free online version). The higher the number, the more popular the search. No point in trying to optimize for a word or phrase that is rarely searched. For example, I sell a time management book called “Time Leadership – using the secrets of leadership for time management”. So naturally I wanted to rank first page on “time leadership”. The problem is no one is searching for that. They do, however, search for time management.

There is also no point in trying to optimize for a word that is too popular because getting a high ranking there will be almost impossible.

Think about “long tail”

Think about how people will search. EG “Where do I find a good time management speaker” or “motivations speakers in Canada”. The longer the string, the less competition you will have for it so the easier you will get ranked.

So make the list of phrases you want to “own” and ones that are realistic to “own”.

Now it is simple. Just put these words and phrases in your titles, picture descriptions, videos and in your text. The titles are the most important. That is why my blog is called “CEO Blog – Time Leadership”. This gives me good google juice on all 4 words. So searching “Time management CEO” will get me first page. Or “time management blog” or “CEO leadership tips” etc.

Yes you want to repeat your words and phrases often in the text. This said – write naturally. Never let SEO be a substitute for good content.

So you do this and you still are not first page. That is because you do not have enough credibility with google. You need another free tool to check this. I use a free firefox plugin called searchstatus. It gives me both the pagerank and the Alexa rating of any web page. Higher pagerank numbers are better. High credibility is your ultimate goal as that is what gets you ranked first and Alexa tells you traffic  (a lower number is better)

How do you increase your pagerank?

It is all about quality inbound links.  You want people with a high credibility (pagerank 4+) to link to you – eg Wall St Journal would be great.  More is better and link rank is almost logarithmic so a pagerank of 6 is worth 10 times one of 5 etc.

This said, for you to get a link from an 8 rated site like pornstars.com would not increase your rank in the business genre.  Sites are ranked for relevance.

The best inbound links are contextual. So someone blogging and saying I heard time management guru Jim Estill speak and hot linking from “Time management guru” is great for me. Second best, hot link from “Jim Estill”. Third is just having a link on a blogroll without any context.

You get a higher rank if you update your content regularly.  That is why having a blog on your site is a good way to increase your ranking.

Moderate cross linking within your own material will also increase your rank and clarify for google what it is that you do.  So in my blog, I write “I was in Chicago doing an inspirational talk for…” and hotlink “inspirational talk” to my bio.

3 ways to get links to your site:

1 – Ask politely. You might not always get a link but it never hurts to ask.

2 –  Comment on other relevant blogs (and have your pagerank on so you ignore low pagerank and high alexa). Note that most comments in themselves do not constitute a link. But being out there gets people to look at you. You need people to look at your stuff for them to be inspired to link to it.

3 – Have good material. People link to quality. But of course they have to see it so promote your content:

Have your URL on all your print material, cards, letterhead, email sig file etc

Write guest articles and blogs in the right (high traffic) places (check the Alexa).

PR – get written about

Contribute to other sites. EG write reviews on Amazon, join the conversations.

And a word of warning.  Never play games (like buying links).

In the end it is about having good quality material.  And being out there so people look at your material.  People link to quality without you asking as long as they know about it.

High placement in a search engine is critical for the success of any online business. Pages appearing higher in the search engine results to queries relevant to a site’s business will get higher targeted traffic. To get this kind of competitive advantage Internet companies employ various SEO techniques in order to optimize certain factors used by search engines to rank results.

In the best case SEO specialists create relevant well-structured keyword rich pages, which not only please the eyes of a search engine crawler but also have value to the human visitor. Unfortunately it takes months for this strategic approach to produce feasible results, and many search engine optimizers use so-called “black-hat” SEO.

‘Black Hat’ SEO and Search Engine Spam

The oldest and simplest “black SEO” strategy is adding a variety of popular keywords into web pages to make them rank high for popular queries. This behavior is easily detected since generally such pages include unrelated keywords that lack topical focus. With the introduction of the term vector analysis search engine became immune to this sort of manipulation. However “black-hat’ SEO went one step further creating the so-called “doorway’ pages – tightly focused pages consisting of a bunch of keywords relevant to a single topic. In terms of keyword density such pages are able to rank high in search results but never seen by human visitors as they are redirected to the page intended to receive the traffic.

Another trend is the abusing the link popularity based ranking algorithms, such as PageRank with the help of dynamically-generated pages. Such pages receive the minimum guaranteed PageRank and the small endorsements from thousands of these pages are able to produce a sizeable PageRank for the target page. Search engines constantly improve their algorithms trying to minimize the effect of “black-hat”‘ SEO techniques, but SEOs also persistently respond with new more sophisticated and technically advanced tricks so that this process bears a resemblance to an arms race.

“Black-hat” SEO is responsible for the immense amount of search engine spam-pages and links created solely to mislead search engines and boost rankings for client web sites. To weed out the web spam search engines can use statistical methods that allow computing distributions for a variety of page properties. The outlier values in these distributions can be associated with web spam. The ability to identify web spam is extremely valuable to search engine not just because it allows excluding spam pages from their indices but also using them to train more sophisticated machine learning algorithms capable to battle web spam with higher precision.

Using Statistics to Detect Search Engine Spam

An example of an application of statistical methods to detect web spam is presented in the paper “Spam, Damn Spam and Statistics” by Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse and Marc Najork from Microsoft. They used two sets of pages downloaded from the Internet. The first set was crawled repeatedly from November 2002 to February 2003 and consisted from 150 million URLs. For each page the researches recorded HTTP status, time of download, document length, number of non-markup words, and a vector indicating the changes in page content between downloads. A sample of this set (751 pages) was inspected manually and 61 spam pages were discovered, or 8.1% of the set with a confidence interval of 1.95% at 95% confidence.

Another set was crawled between July and September 2002 and comprises 429 million pages and 38 million HTTP redirects. For this set the following properties were recorded: URL, URLs of outgoing links; for the HTTP redirects – the source and the target URL. 535 pages were manually inspected and 37 of them were identified as spam (6.9%).

The research concentrates on studying the following properties of web pages:
– URL properties, including length and percentage of non-alphabetical characters (dashes, digits, dots etc.).
– Host name resolutions.
– Linkage properties.
– Content properties.
– Content evolution properties.
– Clustering properties.

URL Properties

Search engine optimizers often use numerous automatically generated pages to massively distribute their low PageRank to a single target page. Since the pages are machine generated we can expect their URLs to look differently from those created by humans. The assumptions are that these URLs are longer and include more non-alphabetical characters such as dashes, slashes or digits. When searching for spam pages we should consider the host component only, not the entire URL down to the page name.

The manual inspection of the 100 longest hostnames had revealed that 80 of them belong to adult site and 11 refer to the financial and credit related sites. Therefore in order to produce a spam identification rule the length property has to be combined with the percentage of non-alphabetical characters. In the given set 0.173% of URLs are at least 45 characters long and contain at least 6 dots, 5 dashes or 10 digits-and the vast majority of these pages appear to be spam. By changing the threshold values we can change the number of pages flagged as spam and the number of false positives.

Host Name Resolutions

One can notice that Google, given a query q, tends to rank a page higher if the host component of the page’s URL contains keywords from q. To utilize this search engine optimizers stuff pages with URLs containing popular keywords and keyphrases and set up DNS servers to resolve these URLs to a single IP. Generally SEOs generate a large number of host names to rank for a wide variety of popular queries.

This behavior can also be relatively easy detected by observing the number of host name resolutions to a single IP. In our set 1,864,807 IP addresses are mapped to only one host name, and 599,632 IPs-to 2 host names. There are also some extreme cases with hundreds of thousands host names mapped to a single IP, and the record-breaking IP referred by 8,967,154 host names.

To flag pages as spam a threshold of 10,000 name resolutions was chosen. About 3.46% of the pages in the Set 2 are served from IP addresses referred by 10,000 and more host names and the manual inspection of this sample proved that with very few exceptions they were spam. Lower threshold (1,000 name resolutions or 7.08% pages in the set) produces an unacceptable amount of false positives.

Linkage Properties

The Web consisting of interlinked pages has a structure of a graph. Therefore in graph terminology the number of outgoing links of a page can be referred to as the out-degree, while the in-degree equals to the number link pointing to a page. By analyzing out- and in-degrees values it is also possible to detect spam pages which would represent the outliers in the corresponding distributions.

In our set for example there are 158,290 pages with out-degree 1301, while according to the overall trend only 1,700 such pages are expected. Overall 0.05% of pages in the Set 2 have out-degrees at least three times more than suggested by the Zipfian distribution, and according to the manual inspection of a cross section, almost all of them are spam.

Similarly the distribution for in-degrees is calculated. For example 369,457 pages have the in-degree of 1001, while according to the trend only 2,000 such pages are expected. Overall, 0.19% of pages in the Set 2 have in-degrees at least three times more common than the Zipfian distribution would suggest, and the majority of them are spam.

Content Properties

Despite the recent measures taken by search engines to diminish the effect of keyword stuffing, this technique is still used by some SEOs who generate pages filled with meaningless keywords to promote their AdSense pages. Quite often such pages are based on a single template and even have the same number of words which makes them especially easy to detect using statistical methods.

For Set 1 the number of non-markup words in each page was recorded, so we can draw the variance of word count in pages downloaded from a given host name. The variance is plotted on the x-axis and the word count is shown on the y-axis, both axes are drawn on a logarithmic scale. Points in the left side of the graph marked with blue represent cases where at list 10 pages from a given host have the same word count. There are 944 such hosts (0.21% of the pages in Set 1). A random sample of 200 these pages was examined manually: 35% were spam, 3.5% contained no text and 41.5% were soft errors (a page with a message indicating that the resource is not currently available, despite the HTTP status code 200 “OK”).

Content Evolution

The natural evolution of the content in the Web is slow. In a period of a week 65% of all pages will not change at all, while only 0.8% will change completely. In contrast many spam SEO web pages generated in response to an HTTP request independent of the requested URL will change completely of every download. Therefore by looking into extreme cases of content mutation we search engines are able to detect web spam.

The outliers represent IPs serving the pages that change completely every week. Set 1 contains 367 such servers with 1,409,353 pages (97.2%). The manual examination of a sample of 106 pages showed that 103 (97.2%) were spam, 2 were soft errors and 1 adult pages counted as a false positive.

Clustering Properties

Automatically generated spam pages tend to look very similar. In fact, as already said above, most of them are based on the same model and have only minor differences (like inserting varying keywords into a template). Pages with such properties can be detected by applying clustering analysis to our samples.

To form clusters of similar pages the ’shingling’ algorithm described by Broder et al. [2] will be used. Figure 7 shows the distribution of the cluster sizes on near duplicate pages in Set 1. The horizontal axis shows the size of the cluster (the number of pages in the near-equivalence class), and the vertical axis shows how many such clusters Set 1 contains.

The outliers can be put into two groups. The first group did not contain any spam pages, pages in this group are more related to the duplicated content issue. In the same time the second group is populated predominantly by spam documents. 15 of 20 largest clusters were spam containing 2,080,112 pages (1.38% of all pages in Set 1)

To Sum Up

The methods described above are the examples of a fairly simple statistical approach to spam detection. The real life algorithms are much more sophisticated and are based on machine learning technologies which allow search engine to detect and battle spam with a relatively high efficiency at an acceptable rate of false positives. Applying the spam detection techniques enables search engine to produce more relevant results and ensures a more fair competition based on the quality of web resources and not on technical tricks.

References:

1. Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse, Marc Najork. “Spam, Damn Spam, and Statistics: Using statistical analysis to locate spam web pages” (2004). Microsoft Research.

2. A. Broder, S. Glassman, M. Manasse, and G. Zweig. “Syntactic Clustering of the Web”. In 6th International World Wide Web Conference, April 1997.