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Someone using Google’s Universal Search will find that a query brings back results that encompass not only web pages, but also videos, blogs, images, news articles, and other media available online. While Google already had in place options for searching each of these areas individually, many searchers did not notice those options or did not know how to use them, a phenomenon that became known as “invisible tabs.”

With Universal Search, there’s no need to select a separate menu item - the search will return results that encompass many different types of media. For example, a search for “breakdancing” might bring up not only web pages about breakdancing, but also blog posts about it, videos showing technique, and news articles about it. It would not, however, give you the reason why you were wearing parachute pants and trapped in the eighties.

However, Universal Search hasn’t been rolled out fully yet. Currently, certain terms will give Universal results, while other searches will remain the same as before. This is a classic Google move - roll something out gradually, see how it plays in the public eye, and then decide what to do from there. Basically, Universal Search as it exists right now is very likely to change, depending on user feedback.

And if the limited queries that now return Universal Search results do not garner positive responses, it’s likely that Google will revert to its previous, webpage predominated results. They obviously don’t want to lose market share, and they already learned a valuable lesson not long ago when they released a new algorithm that was poorly received and which was subsequently dialed back.

What are the Benefits of Universal Search?

Universal Search brings several benefits to searchers. A searcher no longer has to specify the media he or she is looking for - one keyphrase search will cover everything. And the results from a search will be more comprehensive in many instances, giving a well-rounded picture to the searcher that may include better information than would previously have been found in a search of just one type of media.

What are the Drawbacks of Universal Search?

The problem with Universal Search is that it can muddy the results, and it can also introduce irrelevant results that a searcher cannot use. A search for “Paris Hilton” (ever heard of her?) will bring up news, videos, and other information about the heiress. But it will also bring up a map of the city of Paris showing locations of Hilton hotels, something most searchers that typed that exact phrase probably did not have in mind. Plus, 28% of Internet users are still using slow dialup connections, according to RVA Market Research. Many of these people are likely not interested in videos or other results that require much bandwidth, and such users may turn away from Universal Search entirely - there are, after all, other search engines. No, really - there are.

In addition, there is no way to turn off Universal Search; as it exists right now, it is part of the standard “Web” search, eliminating the ability to simply search web pages and introducing a new wrinkle in search engine optimization efforts. Now, a website is competing not only with other websites, but also with all the other media that will be included in the results that an average searcher sees. And Universal Search makes it difficult for Google itself to determine the relevance between different types of media, since the factors that determine a web page’s relevance are much different than those that would determine a video’s relevance, for example.

What Can You Do Now to Make Sure Your Site Is Ready to be Found in a Universal Search?

Clearly, Universal Search will change how an SEO campaign is run if it catches on. But this is a real if - users’ search habits are hard to change overnight, even if you are Google and you essentially define what searching is and how it works. If it does catch on, you’ll need to analyze the industry you are in and figure out which types of media might be most important for you. For example, if you are a real estate firm, images of the buildings and homes you are selling might become a very important part of your site, and so you will want to focus on adding alt tags to each image so that not only does your site show up for certain keyphrases, but your images do as well. If you are a business services firm, you instead might want to focus on news items produced by your company - press releases and white papers - and make sure that those are available to search engine spiders and optimized for critical phrases.

If you are working with an outside search engine optimization company already, now is the time to ask what they plan to do in regard to Universal Search. Your search engine optimization company should at least have an awareness of the magnitude of this new way to search on Google and should be able to present you with some sort of plan of attack, even if they plan to wait to embark upon the plan until they know for sure that Universal Search is going to catch on. If you are looking into hiring an outside search engine optimization company to launch a new campaign, the same holds true - ask your contacts at the firm how they are planning to handle Universal Search. They should at least be familiar with the concept and have a general outline to present to you.

Conclusion

If you thought that it was just Google that was working on what it calls Universal Search, think again. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, as well as several minor search engines such as A9, are all working on their own versions of a universal search that will display different media types. These versions are currently still in the testing phase, but they could be rolled out at any time. What all this means for you and your search engine optimization company is that the face of SEO will be changing dramatically over the next several months - or it won’t. Only time will tell.

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Nearly three-fourths of companies that outsource their pay-per-click search marketing to agencies are dissatisfied with their results, and only 21 percent are completely satisfied, according to a Jupiter Research published late last year.

What causes this dissatisfaction, especially for B2B marketers? There are five factors at work:

• Most agencies specialize in consumer search marketing and their services are inappropriate for your unique needs as a B2B company.

• The agency business model skews in favor of the largest spenders and under-serves the majority of B2B advertisers.

• Agencies will never understand your customers and your business as well as you, especially B2B firms that sell more complicated products and services.

• The need to coordinate with outsiders implies latency and information loss, meaning you lose the flexibility and agility to react quickly.

• Outsourcing means losing control over a critical portion of your demand generation strategy to outsiders who may have different incentives than you.

The main value provided by agencies is expertise with SEM, and as I’ll explain, you can bring much of that expertise in-house by using the right kind of pay per click management software. A technology solution can create the best of both worlds: the control and business knowledge of doing it yourself, combined with the SEM best practices and techniques of an expert.

Before diving into this “inconvenient truth”, it helps to understand the common arguments used by agencies to convince B2B marketers to outsource their PPC campaigns.

Why Companies Outsource PPC Campaigns
The first argument falls into the broad category of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). It takes on various forms, but comes down to this basic point:

“Search is really, really hard – you should leave it to the experts.”

Tactics like this are meant to instill fear that if you don’t outsource, you will fail miserably with search. The head of one agency likes to say that “There are only two kinds of marketers at the top of the auction based search results: Brilliant Marketers and Total Lunatics.” Since most people don’t think of themselves as brilliant search experts, the implication is that if you don’t hire his services then you must be a total lunatic.

A more subtle form of this argument says that the world of PPC is changing so fast that you could never keep up yourself. No matter what form it takes, this argument is self-serving to the agencies. Although it might have been true a few years ago, today the in-house B2B search marketer has access to easy-to-use PPC management software. These tools help to level the playing field by automating the techniques and best practices used by the agencies.

While the first reason B2B companies outsource their PPC marketing has to do with knowledge and expertise, the second reason has to do with time. The core of this argument is:
“I’m too busy to manage search. It’s easier to pay an agency to take care of it for me.”

I have no doubt that most B2B marketers feel beleaguered for time, and that dealing with PPC can feel like yet another burden. The allure of being able to pay an agency to have one less thing your plate is appealing. This can be a valid reason to hire an agency, although the appeal fades once you realize you should be highly involved on an ongoing basis to get the best results from an agency. The agency doesn’t understand your business like you do, so they can’t react to competitive changes or deal with new business initiatives as well as you can. The only things they can do without you are tweak bids, use tools to suggest new keywords, and generate reports – all tasks that automated software can do better and cheaper than a consultant can.

Why Companies Shouldn’t Outsource PPC Campaigns

1. Most agencies don’t specialize in B2B search marketing. B2B search is different from B2C search, meaning it requires different techniques and optimization methods. B2B keywords tend to be lower-volume than B2C keywords, but the value of a B2B lead is much higher. Also, B2B transactions have a more complex sales cycle, involving multiple decision makers – each using search in different ways, with different motivations, and at different times during the sales cycle.

An agency that works mostly with consumer companies may not have the proper expertise to deal with the specialized needs of B2B.

2. Agency business models are focused on the largest spenders. Agencies are, by their nature, service businesses that are only profitable if companies spend $10,000 per month or more on search. (These minimums keep going up every year.) That leaves the majority of B2B companies out in the cold. Be wary of agencies that promise to provide reasonable service at levels below $10,000, since at those levels an agency can profitably give you only a few hours a month. It is much more profitable to focus on the largest accounts, leaving the smaller accounts to run mostly as-is. (Of course they still earn their fees every month, regardless of how much time they spend on your campaigns.)

3. You know your business better than the agency. One of the most important skills for PPC success is picking the right keywords that your prospects actually use when they search – something you know best. Also, when determining rankings, Google and now Yahoo! care as much about the relevance of your content as they do about your bid (aka “what you say is as important as what you pay”). This means a good understanding of your business and your industry is at least as important as being a search “expert”. Over time, the balance of power between business knowledge and SEM knowledge will shift even further towards business as Google continues to find ways to reward relevant content and discount search agency tricks.

4. In-house improves flexibility and the agility to react quickly. I recently met with one B2B marketer who was paying his agency a whopping 40% of his overall PPC budget, yet they were still bidding on words that were not converting to leads. All the back-and-forth emails and phone calls required to coordinate changes created latency and information loss. This meant it took weeks to get a new campaign launched. In contrast, his competitor who kept search in-house could launch new campaigns in under one day. It’s no wonder the competitor had better PPC results.

5. Agency incentives are not aligned with your goals. When you outsource PPC, you give up control over how your money gets spent. Whatever your agency promises, their first incentive is to grow their own business – meaning they will usually tell you that search is performing great. This is the fox guarding the henhouse! It is up to you to put their information in the context of your overall demand generation strategy and to make the critical decisions about whether your marginal dollar is best spent on search or another demand generation activity.

When to Bring Search In-House With Technology

There are a few basic skills required to succeed with SEM: pick the right keywords, optimize bids to achieve desired business outcomes, create great landing pages that drive conversions, and use testing and measurement to continuously improve your process. Each of these requires business expertise and SEM expertise. Only you can provide the business expertise. SEM expertise can be found in an agency, and for some companies that will always be the right choice. For example, I have no problem with outsourcing your SEO campaign. Also, if you don’t use search today and outsourcing gets you started, or if don’t have enough time to spend on search, then using an agency is certainly better than doing nothing. (This is especially true if your agency takes advantage of technology to automate the tasks that software does best!)

However, I believe that your best results will come from having your PPC campaigns managed by the true experts – you. The same techniques and best practices used by agencies can and should be automated with technology. Choosing B2B search marketing software allows you to optimize your PPC campaigns like an expert, without the loss of control, latency, and overhead associated with an outside agency. And that’s an inconvenient truth for the agencies.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of affordable, easy-to use-marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon’s blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land. 

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The idea of being mere passengers on a ship meant to sail to the farthest points does not appeal to people who like to put their destiny into their own hands. They have the desire of maneuvering the ships themselves, of being able to be the ones to take it anywhere they want to. Being aboard a ship on its way to a particularly great destination is something each and every one of them dreams of, and the knowledge that they have the capacity to steer it themselves is what makes them actually want to.

Perhaps this is the reason why more and more people are succumbing to one of the most popular businesses around – affiliate marketing. It is because in this business, there are no bosses to order the employees around. There are no deadlines to meet and no clutter of work do to. One only needs to be equipped with the tools needed to succeed in a business such as this, and he is bound to get what his heart ultimately desires.

Just what are the things needed to be able to succeed in affiliate marketing? What must one have within himself to be able to do well in this industry? There is a lot of competition involved in affiliate marketing, and to be able to rise above the norm, one must be equipped with just the right stuff necessary to propel him forward. There are five things one must ultimately possess if he wants to achieve the glory he is yearning for in this business, and these five things are a must for him to possess to be able to stand out among the rest.

The very first quality one must possess if he wants to try his hand in affiliate marketing is the willingness to learn and be trained. Treading through unfamiliar territory is scary stuff if one is not properly equipped, and he might get lost amidst a jungle of the unknown. Learning the tricks of the trade is also an important aspect of the game, and one’s willingness to know it all will give him far better advantages in the business than he could ever imagine.

The second quality one must possess is the willingness to invest time and effort even if direct results do not seem at all apparent. Although several months may pass without good news, it is important for one who has his foot in the industry to hold on and wait. It is this quality which would save him from giving up after investing a lot of himself in the business.

The third quality one must possess is self-determination. If one wants to conquer the affiliate marketing world, he must have the ability to push himself ahead. Never having to say die is a quality each and every affiliate marketer should possess, and the ability to motivate oneself into scaling greater heights is an ability which would actually take an affiliate marketer there.

The fourth quality one must possess is discipline. If one knows how to teach himself to work everyday with all the energy he can muster, then he is close to achieving what he has set his heart to having in the first place.

The fifth and last quality one must possess is optimism. Negative attitudes and hearsays should not discourage an affiliate marketer from pursuing what he has to in order to make life better for himself and for everyone concerned. Neither should anyone influence his attitude toward the business, because once in it, it is a must for him to be the captain of his ship and the master of his soul.

The ingredients to success in a business such as affiliate marketing are diverse and manifold, but the most important thing one needs to be able to make it big lies in himself alone. It is he who has the capacity to do everything to be able to realize his prospects, and the desire which fuels his heart in doing so is the gasoline which should keep the engine going.

Affiliate marketing is all about putting one’s fate into his own hands. The right attitude is the key to being able to steer one’s ship into that part of the ocean where a certain kind of serenity can be found, one that permeates the atmosphere as the ship sails calmly on.

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With the rise of technology and Internet-dependence, duplication of content has indeed proliferated. Students have almost unlimited access to many online resources that they could easily print and claim as their own. Marketing campaigns that use duplicate content articles to optimize search engine results. Even blog authors may or may not be aware that some of their posts are actually duplicate content. Some people brush it off like it’s not even a big deal — until they get caught, that is.

The Problem with Duplicate Content

There’s no doubt that plagiarism is the easiest way to generate content. But why would you even present unoriginal material to your readers when they could easily find it elsewhere? If you really reflect on it, quick-and-easy content isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A website or blog, for example, won’t rank as well because the material has already been published. You can’t expect search engines, like Google, to simply let it go. In fact, Google expresses a strong opposition toward duplicate content. Google filters out websites with duplicate content by using the Supplemental Index of its database. The GoogleBot crawls websites and looks for similar strings and content among the pages. It then eliminates websites with duplicate content by getting only a fraction from this collection. Let’s say that your website bears duplicate content with a thousand other webpages. The GoogleBot will only pick a small number of these websites to include in its searches while the rest will be delegated to the Supplemental Index. Your site can be pushed way below the pack and might not even appear in the first 10 pages of search results.

A site delegated to the bottom of the pack is frustrating but having your site taken down by the owner of your copied content is unfortunate and, to some extent, humiliating. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed by the US Congress in October 1998 and got its approval by President Clinton in just weeks. This law generally states that original rights owners are able to file DMCA forms with website hosts to get plagiarized content removed from their servers. Simply put, this means that if you copied your content from someone else’s site, he or she can file a complaint that you violated the DMCA. In turn, your website can be taken down from its server and all your hard work flow down the drain.

The Solution to Avoid Duplicate Content

As it is, it is imperative that your site must have original content. But how can you be sure when there are probably millions of webmasters or Web publishers out there thinking about writing an article similar to what you are doing? The solution is quite simple: use an article checker . In fact, there are several advantages using an article checker can give you:

1. An article checker helps you write original content.

By using an article checker, you avoid committing plagiarism. When you key in a particular keyword for your research, search engines only give you those that rank above the rest. What if there is one website in the last 20 pages or so of the search results that bear striking similarities or even duplicate strings with your article? An article checker crawls Web pages and shows you how many pages bear the same strings. It “checks” your content against other published materials online and, most often than not, even your own sources. After analyzing your material, it displays a percentage result stating how similar — or original — your work is compared to others.

2. An article checker lets you protect your website content.

What if you labored day and night to produce original Web content wholly convinced that these carefully optimized articles can boost your page rank? You publish these articles and see a marked increase in your rankings. You’re happy — then overtime, your website does not even appear in the top 50 results. What happened? Someone or some people might be having a field day doing a mishmash of your articles, rewording some parts, then passing them off as their own. If you suspect as much, use an article checker. Since an article checker functions just like a duplicate content checker, it will track websites with contents that are the same as yours. When you find them, then it’s high time you file your own DMCA complaint.

3. An article checker boosts your page rank.

There is a simple formula to come out on top of search engines’ results: original and quality optimized content. An article checker can give you this as an indirect result of its two functions as enumerated in the previous sections. With your original content and without your plagiarizing competitors, your website is ready to take its spot at the top.

About the Author:
Fritz Dorado is a consultant with Webmasterlabor.com. She highly recommends using the article checker and duplicate content checker for better website content. 

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As is fairly common, I recently received an email from someone seeking to crosslink our two sites. It is always a wee bit of a surprise when these messages arrive, though, given my article How not to build traffic: respond to email solicitations of Link Exchanges . You’d think they’d at least reference the points made in that article in their email!

Okay, I said in my response, tell me how you would propose we accomplish this. Well, his second message with the details of the proposed exchange - to build traffic on both our sites and increase our mutual page ranks, of course - quite startled me…

Thanks for the reply. We would like to host some pages on programimi.com. For Example: www.programimi.com/partypoker.html, www.programimi/pokergames.html etc. These pages will be linked from your Homepage for navigation. Kindly let me know if this is acceptable to you and also your expectations for each page. Hope to hear from you soon.

It’s a nice enough email and sounds reasonable upon first glance, but if you think about what’s being proposed here, this is a kind of link exchange that you should always avoid: they’re asking to have a page of links and ‘context’ (the all-important link context that Google wants to see) on your site in exchange, presumably, for a single text link back to your site from their own. If you’re desperate and really did want to pursue this sort of proposal, I would at least suggest that you charge the other party a significant advertising fee for a set of links rather than just one. I mean, really, does this kind of “swap” sound equitable to you?

I didn’t think so.

Just as important as the value of links is the ownership of content. Whether you’re building a site with the intent of having some Google goodness or whether you’re creating a site that has lots of good information and just incidentally has advertising, you should always retain tight control over your content because if a page is part of your domain, you own it. People who come to your site from a search engine (and 80% of Web site traffic - or more - is a result of searches and clicking directly onto a subsidiary page) have no way of knowing who created a specific page, so it’s all lumped into content with your name on it.

And in that context, no, I’d much rather not have pages on this site talking about poker and other gambling games anyway, even if there was a nice payment involved.

What would you do in this situation?

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Here’s an email message that I received today, quite similar to email messages I receive at least a half-dozen times each day:

I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in ProgramimiCOM because it looks like it’s relevant to a site for which I am seeking links.

Not too bad, so far. But read on…

The site offers a comprehensive selection of over 6,000 technology products at academic prices including computer hardware, software, and books. With a Page Rank of 5, the site has an excellent reputation in the industry. It has a very professional look and feel.I’ll keep the web address confidential and will send it to you only if you give me permission to do so. Just let me know if it’s OK, and I’ll send you the web address for your review. If you approve of the site, then the intention is to exchange links.

Looking forward to your reply.

Sincerely,
Ritchie Hilario - Sr. Link Builder

P.S. If for any reason you don’t want me to contact you again, email me with the words “NO EMAIL” as the subject of your message.

Link Builder
Apartado Postal #18
Tijuana, B.C. 22432

Can you see what’s wrong with this message? If “Ritchie Hilario” is genuinely interested in cross-linking, she’s going about it all wrong. First off, using Google to search for Ritchie’s name reveals no results at all, suggesting that it’s a fake name. Strike one.Secondly, a spammy opt-out “NO EMAIL” postscript is a sure sign that this isn’t someone sitting at their keyboard, finding my Web site, and then genuinely requesting a link but rather someone using a mostly automated application that blasts out thousands of these sort of link exchange requests. Strike two.

Thirdly, did you notice the “legal mailing address” at the bottom of the email? It’s there because of the toothless CAN-SPAM law and as much as I’d like to think that the border town of Tijuana has a thriving Internet business community, it’s pretty darn clear that it’s either a completely bogus address, or at least a post office box that’s routinely emptied directly into a trash can. Strike three.

But even more, Google search results and page ranking are influenced much more by them trying to capture algorithmically why a site is linking to another site. I’ve talked about this extensively on the site, including The Right Way to Link to Pages On Your Site , Three Ways to Adversely Impact your Google Pagerank , and How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank .

With this perspective in mind, it’s clearly not a winning strategy to blindly trade links with sites you don’t even know about, don’t endorse, and wouldn’t otherwise link to without the reciprocal link. One way I try to capture this concept myself is to ask: would you link to the site because it’s helpful, valuable, and informative for your readers, audience or customer base? If the answer is “no”, then you really need to think carefully about whether it makes sense to link to them, regardless of if they offer a link back to your site or not.

And if you do decide to cross link, to accept a link exchange offer, realize that it might actually be a fly-by-night search engine optimization “consultant” (I use the phrase loosely in this context) who will promptly try to sell you on how they can use similarly dubious tactics to help you improve your ranking for only $xxx!

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Here’s a topic that should be obvious, but isn’t: how should you best code links on your site from page to page? Should you use something like “page two” or “continued…” or “more” with the page filenames as the links? Should you use absolute links that always begin with a leading / (as in “/reviews.html”), should you always use relative links (as in “../reviews.html”) or should you use fully qualified links (as in “http://www.example.com/reviews.html”)?

The answer to this question might surprise you! First off, innuendo and rumor aside, Google and other search engines do not care about how your links are coded. I have read on some SEO sites that people suggest that Google “spiders” your site faster if you have absolute or even fully-qualified URLs, but as far as I can ascertain, that’s just not true. So this facet of the question boils down to what’s the easiest for you to maintain on your site? A link that allows you to move all the pages around as you might need to reorganize things, or a link that forces you to always live with a specific domain name and directory name? My druthers is unquestionably to use relative links as much as possible, and to always use absolute (though not fully-qualified) links on 404 error pages and other content that kind of floats around on your site.

The only area where full, absolute URLs are a necessity are weblog entries, because your Weblog entries should be generating an RSS feed (learn more about RSS feeds at this RSS info page ) which is then read by subscribers in their own applications, so relative links almost always fail. This means that it’s a bit more tricky to add links to, say, this entry since this Web site — ProgramimiCOM — is built around the Wordpress weblog content management system, but the trade-off of having clickable links in the RSS feed makes it worthwhile.

Let’s get back to the main question, then: How should you structure the links between pages on your site?

Well, I used to have links like “home” and similar, but upon reflection realized that they were empty links because the words that are used to link to a site are important and “home” is almost as bad as “welcome” in terms of being completely useless. Instead, all of your interpage links should, as much as possible, reinforce the key words and key phrases that you want to have identify your site (also see Understanding Keyword Density for more about keywords). Instead of a link like:

<a href=”index.html”>home</a>

therefore, you’ll find that you get more value out of simply replacing that link with a link that has the name of the site, the key concept, or similar:

<a href=”index.html’>Programing Tutorials</a>

If you really want some extra credit, think about your filenames too: “index.html” is generic and meaningless, yet your could easily configure your site to have a linked file called “web-design.html” and link to that instead:

<a href=”web-design.html”>free web design tutorials</a>

Now you’re really rocking.Whether you want to think about filenames or not, it’s certainly useful to think about the words that you use to establish the links between your pages. A few minor changes can have a significant impact on your findability and isn’t that worth the effort, after all?

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Most of the time here at ProgramimiCOM we talk about proactive things you can do to improve your search engine findability, your site’s relevance for a specific key word or key phrase. For example, keyword density and page titles have both been explored in depth in previous entries.

Instead, this time I thought it would be useful to talk about a couple of things that you really shouldn’t be doing, things that will actually lower your Google pagerank and, quite likely, your relevance score for the other top search engines too.

The first thing to realize is that too much of a good thing isn’t good. Who said “all things in moderation, including moderation itself”? Anyway, they could have been a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, quite frankly!

Don’t Use More Than One Title Tag

Here’s a trick that would be mildly amusing if it wasn’t so darn idiotic: lazy SEO people figure “if titles are important for keywords, then having a bunch of titles will let me load a ton of keywords without anyone being the wiser!”. Sadly, though, they’re wrong.How would this look? The HTML source of a page might look like this:

<title>affilate marketing,affiliate marketing programs, affiliate programs, affiliate payout, affiliate links</title>
<title>advertising,advertising banners,google,google adsense,seo,search engine optimization</title>
<title>pay per click, PPC, pay for performance, PPC advertising, ctr, click-thru rate</title>
<title>Joe’s House of Search Engine Optimization</title>

The idea here is that your Web browser only shows the last title tag so you as a visitor are oblivious to this trick, but the Web site developer thinks they’ve figured out a loophole in “the system” and have stuffed an additional 25 keywords. But Google knows this trick and will penalize you.

Don’t Hide Keyword Lists

Another common trick that people use to trick the system is to have keywords where the text is the same color as the background. On a page with a white background this would look like:

<font color=”white”>pay per click,affiliate program,google adsense</font>

Or, if they’re a bit more savvy, they might have this as a CSS style specification with an H1 header:

<h1 style=’color:#fff’>pay per click,affiliate program,google adsense</h1>

Again, the idea is that as someone viewing this site, you wouldn’t be aware of the keywords in this H1 tag because you wouldn’t see the H1 at all: it’d be the same color as the background and would vanish. But Google would see it and rank these keywords even more highly on the page.Right? Wrong. Google’s algorithms are pretty savvy and particularly overt tricks like this are easily picked up and penalized.

Don’t Create Link Farms

A third way that you can end up penalized is a bit more sutble: if you have pages that have lots and lots and lots of links pointing to other sites, you could have that page categorized as a so-called “link farm”, thereby deprecating any value that a link from your site / page could offer someone else (or another of your sites, for that matter).In the SEO world, the common belief is that you should never have more than 100 outbound links on a page, and 60-75 is a really good number.

The workaround for this is easy: simply take your links page and break it into more pages. If you have 10 pages with 50 links each, the people to whom you’re linking are more likely to get a benefit from your link than if you have 2 pages of 250 links. By the same token, having someone link to you from a link farm page is useless and uninteresting. It certainly won’t improve your pagerank (see How does Google Figure out What Pages are More Relevant? Pagerank . for more about pagerank).

There are lots of other ways people try to circumvent the Google pagerank system, among other search engines, and there are lots of SEO specialists (really, I should say “specialists”) who just use some shareware app to figure out sneaky and short-term fixes to help your relevance and page rank. And you should avoid all of them, because if your site is blacklisted then you’ll likely have to change your domain name and/or IP address to even get back into the Google engine at all. It’s not a pretty sight (or pretty site!) and the risk is far too high for any short-term reward on Google.

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A core question for anyone on the Web, and certainly a question you should be asking if you’re trying to monetize your Web site, is how the heck does Google figure out what sites are more relevant to a given search than others?

To get the answer, let’s go back in time a little bit and look at the research papers from a Stanford University project called “BackRub”. You should certainly recognize the authors…

The BackRub project, of course, was done by two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, and subsequently evolved into Google, the search site and company we all love and from which we all wish we had IPO stock.

Reading the early research reports is surprisingly informative, particularly The Anatomy of a Search Engine, in which Brin and Page explain that the fundamental idea behind Google is that for any given word or phrase, matching Web sites can be ranked for relevance by using something that they called pagerank.

Here’s what they have to say about this topic:

“The citation (link) graph of the web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing web search engines. We have created maps .. [that] allow rapid calculation of a web page’s “PageRank”, an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results.”

Much more interesting than that, however, is the remarkably simple formula that they use to calculate pagerank in this first generation of Google, which is based almost completely on how many pages point to it.Simple, but remarkably elegant: the more links that point to a given page, the more relevant that page must be. Further, take into account the words used to link to a site, and add the title tag of the page itself and you begin to have a pretty decent idea of the theoretical relevance and value of a given site.

If you like mathematical formulas, you’ll like this too:

We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one.

Impressive, eh?Of course, the modern Google pagerank algorithm has over 100 different variables that it takes into account, but the basic concept is still quite true: the more links you have pointing to you, the better your pagerank, and the better your pagerank, the more relevant your site will be for specific searches, and, finally, the more relevant, the higher you’ll show in the search results and the more traffic you’ll garner from Google searches!

There are a number of different ways to get more inbound links, as they’re called, to help boost your pagerank, but an even easier place for you to start if you’re eager to improve your own pagerank is to read the article entitled The hidden importance of your page TITLE .

Another good strategy: subscribe to my XML Feed with an RSS reader (learn more about RSS ), and you’ll have my articles come to your computer without any further effort!

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Here’s a search engine optimization concept that most people don’t think about: make sure you have keywords and key phrases in your TITLE tag. You know what the TITLE tag is, it’s the tag that gives you the name of the page on the Window frame in your browser, and it’s remarkable how few sites pay any attention to what’s in that critical search engine optimization (SEO) field.

Let’s take a quick tour of some big sites and have a look, shall we? HBO.com has a title tag of “HBO Online”. ESPN.com has “ESPN.com” as their title. No kidding. NYTimes.com is better, with “The New York Times > Breaking News, World News & Multimedia”, Microsoft has “Microsoft Corporation”, though, and, finally, BMW.com has “BMW International Website”.

What’s wrong with these? The problem is that each and every word in a TITLE tag is considered quite important by search engines (e.g, Google) when they figure out what your page is about and how relevant a given topic is on the page. Keyword density is definitely important in this regard, but one of the easiest ways to become more relevant to a given search result is to ensure that the keywords or key phrases you want to match are in the TITLE tag.

The downside is that sometimes the TITLES look a bit weird - as is demonstrated on this very site - but the upside is that if you want to have a site that Google thinks is an excellent match for, say, “acupuncture information”, then having a TITLE like “Acupuncture Information for Everyone” will yield a definite improvement.

If nothing else, please, do me a favor and don’t use “Welcome to”, “Home Page”, “Website” or any other empty words in your TITLE. After all, with all due respect to BMW, I think it’s pretty obvious that if I’m looking at their information on the Web with a Web browser that it’s a Website. So why bother saying so in the TITLE?

Frankly, for BMW, I think I’d suggest that they have a TITLE more like “BMW:Luxury Automobiles and Sports Cars from Germany for over 80 Years” which is still readable and friendly, but now it includes other keywords that can help with searches, making it a more relevant match for “luxury cars”, “luxury automobiles”, “sports cars”, “German cars”, etc. See how that works? Simple, but surprisingly effective.

So take five minutes and think about your TITLE tag. Is it doing the job you want? And keep in mind that Google and other search engines look at pages, not sites, so you need to ensure that the TITLE on every page of your site is helping your relevance with search engines.

This is still just search engine optimization (SEO) 101, but it’s important.

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