I see privacy issues written all over this.. Google will be collecting all your search queries and internet activity in order to “personalize” your results. Not that Google doesn’t already have VERY HUGE privacy issues as it is. The more changes I see Google doing the worse they appear in my eyes. Personal data is literally leaking all over the place and if Google wanted to, they could basically track every single user on the internet, I mean lots of sites out there use Google analytics, lots of people use gmail, youtube, and blogger.

Now they’ve got this “personalized search” crap, along with the Google Chrome OS (I won’t ever touch this OS, EVER. ), and they’ve launched Google DNS.

Are they doing this just so they can dominate all online advertising everywhere? They’re banning AdWords advertisers left and right for no particular reason, (Advertisers that were advertising legitimate products/services) and making sweeping changes to the SERPS.

Ever try and contact Google? They’re basically all BOTS you can’t contact them, I really start to wonder if there are even any HUMANS at Google.

So in conclusion, I don’t trust Google and neither should you.

So what good is it when there’s already a bunch of stuff there? I sense the entire thing is just link bait. I’m not going to link to any of these sites in their “White Knight” SEO plans. I can, however give you a plain text link that you can copy into your navigation bar.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090902-172215

This one is actually a better description of what’s going on.

http://www.workathometruth.com/blog/2009/09/03/white-knight-seo-rides-in-on-a-broken-horses/

Just another stupid thing some SEOs are doing..

Seems like SEO’s will have to have to develop some different strategies, but as far as I can tell it’s not THAT much of a difference. Some may lose rank when this search engine is deployed, and some may gain rank. For some, it may not even make a difference.

Seems interesting, anyway. I’m not all that worried about the change myself, I checked and a lot of my sites seem to be ranking in the new engine, some even better than in the current version of Google.

As far as I know I haven’t done anything with this site that would cause it to be slapped. Perhaps Google just doesn’t like me

Side Note: Anyway, I haven’t been posting lately mostly because I’m busy working on other things, but I’ll try and keep posting every once in awhile. Soon I’ll be launching a blog specifically about affiliate marketing, and I’ll most likely post much more frequently on there. I’m reserving this site for pure technology related things, and I haven’t been doing much interesting with tech lately.

So, what does MS do? It does all that stuff and more automatically. The keyword research module obviously investigates keywords, but it displays the number of searches in a much better way. It shows per day and the number of clicks you might expect if you were ranked #1 for that keyword. There’s actually so much more there as well, like OCI (worth of the keyword) and broad versus exact. In the SEO competition module it even color codes how bad the competition is with green, yellow, and red. There’s no need to EVER analyze the competition further down than the front page because searchers rarely go past the first page. The SEO competition module also analyzes the backlinks, showing anchor text and PR. Then you can go on to find content for that keyword that you can either republish or use as a source for your content. Then there’s a promotion module to help find places to create backlinks for your site. If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a module to track your rankings on various sites.

This simplifies almost everything for me, I don’t have to do anything manually saving me tons of time and effort, getting the same task done in a fraction of the time. Is this tool a magic bullet to instantly getting good rankings and finding great keywords? No, you have to be able to understand the data presented to you, but if you’ve been doing SEO for any amount of time you should be familiar with most if not all of the data presented to you.

Is it worth it? Well, it depends. If you do a lot of SEO then yes I would say it’s worth every penny. If you only do a little here and there maybe you can just do keyword research the manual way. I only paid $97 for it since I got it while it was on sale. To be perfectly honest, I would’ve paid full price if I couldn’t get it at a discount. The more I use this tool, the more I love it. Guess what else? They’re not even finished with it yet and if you buy now you get updates for free. Publish content, monetization, and the adwords module have yet to be added.

There’s not much else I can say about this tool, if you’re serious about SEO this will save you a ton of time.

Rank Tracker

Just because people want to get traffic to their website, they’re most definitely criminals. I mean, legitimate people don’t want anyone to actually read what they write These guys using permalinks on their blog and optimizing for keywords in their post are all criminals. Oh yes and building links with the keyword in the anchor text is also criminal activity

This really doesn’t surprise me coming from Google. In a way, I see where they’re coming from, there is a lot of garbage at the top of the search engine results for some keywords and buried down deep is really great content that barely anyone finds. Highly popular websites or websites that exercise SEO rank at the top, that’s just the way it is. Doesn’t mean they have the best content, just means they have the best SEO.

So yea, if you want to get your content read by people you HAVE to exercise SEO. That’s just the way it is. I sort of wonder what would happen if no one bothered with SEO, what sites would get to the top? Most likely just the popular sites, ones with a large following since they would (and do) get plenty of backlinks for every post they write.

Personally, I exercise a very limited amount of SEO on this site since I’m not worried about traffic. I’m just sort of letting this one go naturally. The Google algorithm is probably the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered though, with pagerank, google dancing, keywords, backlinks, the “google sandbox”, etc. It’s all in good fun though

Side Note: You may have noticed I’ve thrown out nofollow linking, I’m just going to keep links in plain text for right now or dofollow when I feel that page is worthy or needs to receive a link. I am thinking about removing website URL from the comments as well, but I’m not sure yet.

So in a sense all those links are consuming PR without passing it on! This is really not good for blogs. You might as well make everything dofollow because it won’t make a difference. I can see some blogs disabling the use of posting your site url in the comments, or just making all comments dofollow. I’m not going to change anything personally since I don’t get a ton of comments

Oh yea, and I wouldn’t bother with PR sculpting anymore, with these changes I don’t see how it would make a difference. PR sculpting is basically making some links on your page to other pages on your site nofollow and thus making the links to other pages stronger to make them rank higher, if you didn’t know already.

This is one of my sites where I am far from an SEO nazi. I am on some of my other sites though On a side note, any of you check out bing.com? MSN’s new search engine? It’s pretty neat. I sort of liked the name Kumo better, but that’s their decision

References

http://searchenginewatch.com/3633972

I’m really just trying to test where I rank on this site to get a feel for what I can target in my newer posts, so yea this is the second experiment. Hopefully it will be more successful. Web site traffic optimization isn’t really that difficult though. Of course backlinks to a post with the keyword will also cause something to rank higher, just playing around

Tools

EverProfits Toolbar unfortunately, it only runs on Internet Explorer at this point.

SearchStatus plugin for FireFox

RankChecker plugin for FireFox

Here we go…

Find a niche that has a high amount of searches but does NOT have a ton of competition. This is key, we are looking for something that is not saturated. You can analyze the competition easily with the EverProfits Toolbar It’s really useful for analyzing competition quickly, not just on the pure amount of sites for a keyword, but also analyzing PageRank and backlinks on the fly. SearchStatus is nice for analyzing specific websites with the keyword or niche you’re looking to target. Stuff like “Make Money” “Weight Loss” and others are obviously not going to be good targets. There’s something beyond that though, they’re called micro niches. If you wanted to target “Weight Loss” you could do it with a high search keyword or niche that is more specific.

Well, how do we find these niches/keywords? We could use the Google Adwords tool, Keyword Elite, Market Samurai or one of the other keyword research tools. I wouldn’t recommend using Keyword Elite for this kind of thing though since it doesn’t really show search volume. Market Samurai or the Adwords tool would be more suitable. Also, do a lot of research on these niches. You want to be able to continuously blog about this niche, and if there’s not a lot of information or you just aren’t familiar with the niche you’ll fail straight off. Do not limit yourself to one site, because one or two will be a bust, no doubt.

Domains

You want your keyword in your domain for sure. Google seems to love it when the keyword is straight in the domain. Of course, when choosing a domain you still want it to be short, at about 2 or 3 words. Just try and get the best keyword you can for your micro niche. The domain IS important. Please do a lot of research before committing to a domain

Next…

Don’t go off topic. Stick to your niche completely, don’t go off topic. Optimize SEO around your niche. Get backlinks from similar sites, do everything I mentioned in my previous article: http://technologyinsanity.com/seo/get-more-traffic-seo-tutorial-guide/. If you keep it up for a year or 6 months even, you should really start to see traffic coming in, depending on how well you executed your niche, and built backlinks. You can check your rank periodically with RankChecker.

Finally

It should be pretty obvious why this site isn’t a high traffic site. I’m not really doing anything in terms of research, targeting, sticking to a niche, etc. This is just a personal blog, I’m not really looking to monetize it to be honest. This guide was just put together from various books I’ve read on SEO and Adwords in the past. Like I said, I have not tried it since it takes quite some time and work to gain respect from the various search engines. I prefer Adwords and Google Sniping for marketing, which is somewhat similar to this, but I would expect you to target a niche that you could blog about. Google sniping is actually a bit different. This could actually provide a more long term marketing website. I’m fairly certain this is the formula that top websites use, but not 100%, and I’m sure something similar to this has already been published. Have fun with it though.

These methods should all be white hat as far as I know

PermaLinks

First thing you want to do when setting up a WordPress blog is setup permalinks. Google and other search engines will like to see keywords in your url. They may also really hate the look of ?p= because it is a dynamic link, this may hurt your rankings in itself.

Link Building

If you want to get right down to it, back links are king. The more back links you have, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your rank in the search engines. You need lots and lots of back links from other sites. Some easy ways to get back links would be through Entrecard, they have “top dropper” days where you will get listed and pick up back links. Also, if you want a quick way to get indexed by Google and the other search engines, you’re going to want to use Entrecard. If you’re not a blog, you might want to try something like ProjectWonderful to start your site off. Advertising is a necessary evil to starting a site. Once people know your site exists, more links will come rolling in by themselves if you write good posts.

Social Networking

Submitting some of your articles to Digg or StumbleUpon is a good idea for a little while, because your dugg articles will show up in the search engines.  However, you will get banned if you submit too many of your own articles.

You notice all that crap at the bottom of my site? Those are other blog networks that hold my RSS feed and list my articles there for people to find. Some also keep track of my traffic to a degree. MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and Technorati  are some examples. Even listing your site on Twitter can help. I have just recently started with Twitter to see how it goes.

Some other places you might want to list your articles would be MySpace and FaceBook if you have those accounts, let your friends know you have a blog. I use some WordPress plugins to automatically post there.

RSS Submissions

You should submit your RSS feed wherever you can, because it will list your articles more places, meaning more people are likely to find them and read your articles.

Keywords

Keywords are highly important. I don’t pay much attention to them myself, but if you really want to rank well you need to research keywords. The wording on your site can mean the difference of 50 unique/day and 0 people find your article through search engines. If you pick a term that is far too competitive for your site, you will not rank. I have only just begun to try and play with keywords in my articles. The point is, try to pick less competitive keywords when you write a post by using different wording.

Some useful SEO WordPress Plugins

All-in-one-seo - This plugin helps to automatically handle some SEO functions like title and description of the page.

Sociable – This plugin automatically puts Digg/Stumble/Etc links under each post.

TweetSuite – Puts the Tweet link under each post.

WordBook – Automatically posts your posts on the blog to FaceBook.

Google-XML-Sitemaps – Automatically creates site maps for Google and other search engines.

WordPress Related Posts – Shows related posts based on tags on each post. Helpful for getting people to read more than one article

Conclusion

That is about how far I have gotten with my SEO. I’m still working on it day by day, trying my best to optimize the site. Hopefully someone will find this information useful. Feel free to contribute more SEO and Traffic tips in the comments.