Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

And the race is on. Who can get the most PR 7 backlinks in the least amount of time and still have a site indexed by Google when the smoke clears? A little melodramatic? Maybe, but it does make a point. The fight over backlinks is one of the biggest SEO fights in the game. Everybody seems to think it’s the holy grail of search engine optimization. But is it? And are all backlinks the same? Most think they’re not. And while that’s technically true, they aren’t the be all and end all that some would think. This article explains.

Okay, let’s be honest. A PR 7 backlink is going to be worth a heck of a lot more to your web site’s climb up the SERPs than a PR 0 backlink. But how much different are they really? Well, for starters, in case you’ve been out to tea somewhere, Google has recently downplayed the importance of PR and even took it out of one of its tools. They’re not saying it doesn’t count anymore. They’re just saying that it’s not the big thing that people think it is. And personally, I couldn’t be happier. But that’s another story.

Truth is, I’ve got some sites that have PR 5 and 6 backlinks that are nowhere to be found near page 1 of Google’s search engine while I have sites with PR 1 and 2 backlinks that are on page 1. Why? What’s the reason? Well, the simple explanation is that there is a lot more to ranking with Google, or any search engine for that matter, than just backlinks. If that were the case, people would just beg, borrow and steal to get them. But even more important is the content on the site itself and even more important than that is the relevancy of the keywords to what people are searching for. Add to that mix the amount of time that the site has been online and…

Well, you get the picture. Ranking is a heck of a lot more than backlinks. Otherwise, it would be very easy to get your site up to the top of the charts. No, don’t ask me how because it’s irrelevant. The thinking behind the importance of other sites linking to you is over-inflated. So in that respect, one backlink is really no different from another. I hear all the SEO experts right now screaming “heresy!”

I’ve been at this way too long to get sucked in by the hype. Sure, try to get authority sites to link to you.

Just don’t get caught up in the hype that this is ALL you have to do.

It’s NOT.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html.

Well, the hysteria is starting again. Google does something and the world is coming to an end. What am I talking about? This time it’s personalized search. If you don’t know exactly what that is, this article is going to briefly explain what it is and then give a rational explanation as to whether or not it’s something that you should be concerned with if you’re an SEO expert. Keep reading to find out the real truth about this topic.

Okay, so just what is personalized search? Well, this is another one of Google’s brain child ideas. In their infinite wisdom, they decided that they were going to show search results, not based on the SEO that a person does on their site, but on a searcher’s past history. In other words, if a person likes site A, they’re going to show site A at the top of the results when doing a search for those related keywords. The question is, is this something that SEO experts should be worried about? The answer is NO.

Why no? Well, I’m going to try to explain this as simple as I can so that anybody can understand it. Best way to do that is with a hypothetical example.

John Doe wakes up one morning with a hemorrhoid. He’s never had one of these things before and he’s in an absolute tizzy over it. He doesn’t want to get surgery because he’s heard it’s like having your lip pulled up over your forehead, so he goes to Google looking for a natural cure. So he types in “natural hemorrhoid cure.” Remember now, this is the FIRST time he’s ever searched for such a thing. So let me ask you a question.

What is HIS personalized search for THIS keyword phrase? Does he even have one? No, of course not. So what site is going to pop up at the number one position? You got it…the site that did its job to get itself to the top of the SERPs through good old SEO.

Now, you might be saying, “Yeah, but the next time he does a search, that site will come up number one for him again.” Yeah, it will. But if the cure he tried didn’t work, do you REALLY think he’s going to go back to it again? Not even I’m that stupid. He’s going to look to the NEXT site.

Personalized search, in fact, is one of the most worthless things in the world for everybody and has very little real effect on anything. If somebody DOES have a favorite site for whatever it is, they’re not going to search for it again. They’re going to bookmark it and go directly to it.

So do yourself a favor. Don’t worry about personalized search. Work on doing proper SEO for your site and you’ll be just fine.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html

SEO is an amazing animal. There are more things involved with search engine optimization than you can shake a stick at. In this article, I’m going to focus on one piece of it…tag pages. It may not seem like a big deal, but by optimizing this aspect, you can get more people to your site. And after all, isn’t that ultimately what you want? Anyway, I think you will find this simple aspect of SEO quite helpful.

Okay, so just what are tag pages? Well, I specifically use this tactic for Squidoo lenses and Hub Pages. These are pages that are already listed in Google that will add links to our OWN lenses and hub pages. I know you’re probably wondering how. Don’t worry…I’m getting there.

First, you need to understand what a tag is. A tag is really similar to a keyword except it is slightly different. The best way to explain what a tag is, is with an example. Let’s say you had a page on your site that was all about dogs. Tags would refer to specific breeds of dogs such as “poodles”, “boxers”, “terriers” and so on. If you had a page on cats, tags might be “Manx”, “Persian”, “Burmese” and so on. Okay, got it? Tags are the specific as related to the general.

If you have a Hub Page or Squidoo Lens, and say you have a page on dogs or cats, what you would want to do is find other Hub Pages or Squidoo Lenses that had the same tags as your page. If you then add these tags to your own page, this will give us links from pages that are already ranked. This is a very easy way to build backlinks without too much hassle.

The key to making this work for you is to use as many tags as you possibly can. If you have a dog or cat page, you know that there are a lot of breeds. You can add up to 40 tags for a Squidoo Lens and up to 10 tags for a Hub Page. So take advantage of that. There are close to 40 different breeds of cats alone.

These tag pages will not only send you traffic internally between the Squidoo and Hub Pages system but will also help to get you ranked very high with Google…especially if the pages you’re linked to are ranked high. It’s essentially piggy backing off of somebody else’s success.

Like I said, it’s a simple tactic, but if used effectively, it can bring you a ton of traffic…both internally within the Squidoo or Hub Pages system or from the pure ranking that you’ll get at Google.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to discover exactly how to use tag pages and how to easily find tag pages related to YOUR lens or page? Read my review of Think Links at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html and shoot your site right up to the top pf the SERPs.

Let’s face it, SEO is a complicated mess. Anybody who says otherwise is seriously kidding themselves. With all the variables involved, can you believe that title and description probably cause more arguments than just about anything else? It’s true. Everybody has their two cents on which is more important. Well, this marketer is going to give you his two cents on the subject. Take it for what it’s worth to you.

There is no question that the title of your site is important. After all, if you’re fortunate enough to get listed (not always a given) that is going to be the first thing that people see. So granted, you need a title that clearly defines what people are going to see there. So for example, let’s say you have a site that is on Internet Marketing Tips. You’re going to want THAT to be your title. That way, if people see it in the SERPs, they’ll know that going there HOPEFULLY will give them tips on THAT subject.

However, because there are so many sites with the same darn titles (go do a search if you think I’m kidding) what happens is that searchers develop a blindness to them. Think about it. If you did a search for Internet Marketing Tips and the first 20 results in the SERPs all had the same title, what do you think would happen? You’d probably just glaze over all of them OR…and this is where the description comes in…you’d look to see who had the BEST description.

Okay, but what IS the best description? That is something that is impossible to qualify for any site no matter what the niche is. The reason is because now we’re really getting into the area of copywriting. Simply changing your description and waiting for the SERPs to index your page with the new one can literally mean the difference between 1,000 visitors a month and 10,000 visitors a month.

But now I’m going to throw another monkey wrench into the fire, which is why you can’t say for certain that description is more important than title. See, Google, in all their infinite wisdom, does not always print your description tag as is. They will sometimes print a description based on certain content from your page that they feel is most relevant to the prospect. If you think I’m kidding, go check out a few web pages and see how they’re listed. It’s almost laughable.

Therefore, since there is no fool proof way to insure that your description is going to appear the way YOU want it, I can’t give that meta tag a clear win over title.

So for those of you who pick one over the other, the truth is, it’s a crap shoot between the two. But at least the title, you have complete control over. So while it may not help much, should there be 20 pages with the same title, it is at least one variable that you don’t have to worry about being messed with by the SERPs.

Yeah, and you thought SEO was simple.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html

If I hear one more question about whether or not a niche is saturated, I swear I am going to blow a gasket. In spite of what Google will have you believe with their search results, competition isn’t nearly what most people think it is. And REAL competition, for the most part, is scarce. I’m going to explain why in this article, though this is really more of a visual concept.

I want you to follow along with these instructions as I give them to you. I want you to go to Google and type in, in quotes, “make money online” just to start off with. I want you to make a note of how many sites come up. It’s something like 12 million, right? Okay, I want you to go to the top of the page and set the search results preferences to 100 per page and then redo the search.

Go down to the bottom of the page and click on the last number for the number of pages in the search. It will probably be nine or ten. You will notice, when you get to the next page in the search, that at the bottom of the page it says that only the most relevant sites have been included. Now go back up to the top of the page and look at how many sites have been returned. It’s something like 900. Now redo the search WITH the omitted sites included. Again, click on the last page and you’ll still see that it’s no more than 900 sites that come up.

What happened to the other 12 million sites?

In short, they aren’t important enough to include probably because they are either undeveloped domains or spam blogs with those keywords plastered all over them and no real content. Whatever the reason, the sites aren’t relevant enough to be included. So in essence, that’s your REAL competition…900 sites. But why? What’s the underlying reason?

It’s simple. Most people are too lazy to put the required work into a site to make it relevant to list. So what you have left is essentially the few marketers who care enough about what they’re doing to put up a site that at least has a shot at getting some traffic.

Most of these sites, if you look at page one, aside from the very top sites, have a low PR and almost no backlinks. This should make it a piece of cake to rank on page one.

So the next time you think there is too much competition for a keyword, do a search and dig down to the core of it. You’ll probably discover that there isn’t that much competition at all.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html

SEO can be time consuming at best and a nightmare at worst. So if you’re going to save some time and save yourself some gray hairs at the same time, there are some plugins that you probably should be using. This article is going to go over some of my favorites and why I think they’re important to have. You may or may not agree, but I think you’ll at least find this info useful.

At the top of my list is the Firefox browser. If you don’t have it, download it and use it. Why? Quite simply because you won’t find another browser with more useful plugins for SEO. Aside from that, you don’t have nearly the number of security issues that you will have using Internet Explorer, regardless of what version you’re using. Okay, do yourself a big favor…get Firefox and use it.

SEOQuake is the number one plugin that you should be using with Firefox. It has a number of useful features. However, we’re going to use it primarily to get PR from the sites you’re looking up. This is the fastest way I know of to get page rank. You want to use SEOQuake sparingly because Google, for whatever reason, has a problem with people using this hours on end. So limit its use to just when you need it.

Another important plugin is NoDoFollow. The reason this is such a great plugin is because it shows you every single link whether or not it’s do follow or no follow. This is very important if you’re looking to make blog comments in order to get backlinks to your site. The last thing you want to be doing is making comments on blogs that are no follow. It’s simply a waste of your time.

You’re also going to want to get the Selection Links plugin. What this does is it allows you to drag your mouse over multiple links in a search query and have each of those links open in a separate tab in your Firefox browser. This is great for when you want to do research on multiple sites and don’t want to have to
click on each link individually.

There are many more plugins that you can get but these are the ones that are going to make your life a little bit easier when doing SEO. As I said, this can be a time consuming process and the last thing you want to do is waste time on tasks that can be done at the click of a mouse button.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html

Let’s just get right down to brass tacks. Can you quantify a page rank? In other words, can you go to the SERPs, look at the first 10 sites on page one, and quantify exactly why each site is in the position it’s in? Some folks say yes. I say no. And I’m going to explain why, in no uncertain terms, in this article. I think you will find this very interesting.

I was doing some searching the other day, just for the heck of it. Every now and then I like to see what’s out there. Anyway, I did a search for some off the beaten track niche and took a look at the site that came up number one in the SERPs. It was number one on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and just about every search engine I looked at.

I took a very good, hard, long look at this site. I checked PR. I checked backlinks. I looked at the content of the site. I looked to see how long it was around. I looked to see what keywords it was ranking for and which ones were contained in the domain name, if any. What I found was so astonishing that my jaw dropped to the floor after doing my analysis. Here are some of the low points.

The site had 9 backlinks. The site had a PR of 0. The site had one keyword in its domain name that was fairly relevant, even though it was also ranking for other keywords NOT in its domain name. The site had only one page of content that was so-so to say the least. I will say this much. The on page SEO was excellent. Every outbound link had proper anchor text. The site was only a few months old.

What was surprising about this number one ranking was that the site behind it had more backlinks, more pages, a higher PR and more content. The only thing it didn’t have was a good domain name. It had no keywords in it. Could it be that a domain name carried that much weight?

But then I did other searches in other niches and found that sites with poorly chosen domain names were outranking other sites with good domain names. Digging deeper, I discovered one or two things about the top site that beat out the sites behind it…but they were always different.

Okay, here’s my point and I hope, if nothing else, you get this. There is absolutely NO way to quantify a search engine listing. Some will totally baffle you. Think of the keyword “click here” and how if you look it up, you will find Adobe is the top site…one that doesn’t have the words click here anywhere on the site itself. I won’t go into the reasons for this here but suffice it to say, it’s because of what OTHER sites do and NOTHING to do with what Adobe does.

There are way too many variables to SEO to be able to quantify what will make a site rank well or not. So your best course of action is to concentrate on ALL areas of SEO…on page AND off page. By doing everything possible to improve the ranking of your site, you will GIVE that site the best chance of succeeding.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html

There is nothing more frustrating, when it comes to SEO, than slaving over your site in an attempt to get it up the ranks of the search engines, only to find that your competition for those keywords is King Kong. This has nothing to do with how many competing sites, which is something marketers concern themselves too much with, but how strong the top sites are. This article is going to give you some guidelines in dealing with this problem.

Okay, so what ARE you looking for? If you’re going to go up against the big guns for a keyword phrase, how big is too big? Well, everybody has their own idea about this. There is no right or wrong. I can only tell you what I have found to be true from my own experience in taking on the big guns. Naturally, your mileage will vary so test these numbers for yourself.

First thing I look at, even though Google says it’s not as big an issue as it was, is page rank. I am still seeing, whether this is a coincidence or not, that the top sites USUALLY have very high PRs. Naturally, this will vary from niche to niche and keyword to keyword. However, I have found that if a top site for a keyword has lower than a PR 4, I have a decent chance of knocking it off its pedestal. Don’t get me wrong. It will take some doing, but it is possible.

Next thing I look at is backlinks. This is a little harder to gauge depending on how quickly you are able to generate them to your own site. Now, backlinks really cover a broad range of numbers. The other day I was researching a site in a very competitive niche that had over 4 million backlinks. I certainly wouldn’t want to go up against that baby unless I had some big guns behind me.

Okay, so what IS a workable number for backlinks? I have found that if I tackle sites that have fewer than 50,000 backlinks, I stand a pretty good chance of knocking them off. However, you can’t just look at the top site. See, most search engine users who are not marketers will leave their browsers at the default and get about 10 sites per page. Most people won’t go beyond page two, if that. However, that means that if you can even just beat out site number 10, you can get on page one.

Think that’s not big? Trust me…it is. You don’t have to be the top site to get hits.

What you need, once you get on page one, is a killer description for your site. And that is handled through proper SEO of your description tag. Most web site owners don’t really understand SEO and their site descriptions are horrible. By making sure that YOURS is on the money, you WILL get your share of visitors.

Anyway, there you have it. How to scope out your competition and figure out if they’re worth tackling or not.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html

Whether you know it or not, SEO can be a time consuming process, especially if you involve yourself in all aspects of the process itself. So the question I am going to put forth in this article is a simple one. When doing SEO for your site, should you do it yourself or should you outsource the work? Well, the answer I’m going to give you just might surprise you. Keep on reading to find out just how I feel about this subject.

I will be the first to admit that I am no SEO expert…not by a long shot. However, I do know all the basics and can get a site up the SERPs pretty quickly, if not in record time. I do know that to do everything you need to do to properly SEO your site, it is a lot of work and very time consuming. Let me give you one example of what I’m talking about. Let’s tackle social bookmarking.

For starters, most people go about doing this all wrong. See, your typical marketer will go to a social bookmarking site, like Digg, and only bookmark his own sites. This is not the way to get the most juice out of your efforts. You need to actually become a part of the community, which means filling in ALL your details and actually bookmarking other things of interest that are NOT your own site. In fact, you should bookmark more things that AREN’T your own site than your site itself. THAT is how to properly use social bookmarking.

Unfortunately, this is VERY time consuming as you can imagine, especially since you should be doing this for a minimum of 25 sites. I recommend between 50 and 100. Think about how much time this takes. It’s almost mind numbing. So you would therefore think that I would immediately recommend that you outsource things like this. Well, that’s where you’d be WRONG…at least not to start. But why? Why am I suggesting that you do this yourself?

By doing this yourself, you actually learn the process and understand it. That way, if down the road you decide to outsource, you can tell the person exactly what you want done and how. Sometimes by leaving things in the hands of an the person you hire, you can end up getting banned from these sites because they end up doing nothing but spamming the bookmarking sites. That’s why, something like this, you want to be hands on…at least at the start.

Each aspect of SEO needs to be taken on a case by case basis. Some things are simple enough that they can be outsourced with very little chance of a screw up. But even those items should be done by you at first so that you understand how they work. This way, if the person you outsource to fouls things up, you’ll know.

Anyway, there you have it. Outsourcing is not a cut and dried proposition for SEO. But in any case, I do recommend that you learn to do it yourself FIRST.

It will save you a lot of grief down the road.

To YOUR Success

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html

Everybody is an expert. It’s true. For proof, just look around the Internet at all the proclamations that people are making about all sorts of things. It happens in all areas, especially in SEO. I never saw so many SEO experts with pages that can’t rank for beans in my life. And these same people are spouting off about how you have to do this and you shouldn’t do that and on and on. Well, don’t believe everything you hear because a lot of it is based on faulty information. This article is going to explain.

Best way to get my point across is with an example of how faulty info can make its way to the mainstream way of thinking. This is why I always test everything out for myself.

John Doe puts up his new site. He does nothing more than basic SEO. By that I mean, he has some anchor text on his pages, proper meta tags and enough content so that the site doesn’t look like a ghost town. A few days later, without doing any backlinking or anything else, John Doe’s site is number one at Google. John Doe then gets on his favorite SEO forum and proclaims that basic SEO is all you need to get your site to the top of the search engines.

What John Doe failed to tell anybody is that his site is in a niche so obscure, targeting keywords that are so obscure, that when you actually do a search using those keywords, you find that there are only 10 sites on the Internet that even have them on their pages. Of course he’s number one. The other sites probably know nothing about SEO at all. He’s gotten away with just the basics because every other site has done absolutely nothing.

Okay, I understand that this is an extreme example, but I used it to illustrate a point. When people start making proclamations about how this thing or that thing works and is the be all and end all of SEO, you need to take that proclamation with a grain of salt. Because more often than not, the person giving you that info has left out a vital piece of the puzzle. It could be any one of a number of things, including not telling you something that they DID do that REALLY made all the difference in the world.

Point is, SEO is not just one thing. It’s not even a combination of certain things. What works or doesn’t work for YOUR site will depend on a number of factors, not the least of which is how much competition is out there and what THAT competition is doing with THEIR sites. See, one million competing sites of people who don’t know SEO from a hole in the ground is not the same as one million competing sites put together by marketing professionals. And the only way to find out which is which is to study your competition.

Ultimately, the strategy that works for YOU will need to be tested. There is no one size fits all when it comes to search engine optimization.

Anybody who tells you differently is not telling you the whole story.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Is your site sinking like a dead weight in the SERPs? Want to get your site to the TOP of the SERPs? Pick up Kurt Melvin’s Think Links. You can read my complete review of the product at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/internet-marketing/review-of-think-links-for-seo.html