I had interesting question about how to identify the best sub page for a specific keyword phrase to target for link building.

There are really two easy ways to do this, the first one is to enter into Google the site command followed by your website URL and the keyword phrase in quotes.

Here is how:
Site:www.mysite.com “this is the target keyword”

Google will respond by listing the best pages that match your query on your site. The first page listed most likely will be a sub-page not your home page. Either ways you have just found your best matching sub-page in to target for link building.

The second option to find the best suited page for further optimization and link building is to increase the number of pages Google displays by clicking on the Advanced Search options and increase Results Pages to 100.

If your site is already in the top 100 you should see two listings, 1 for your home page and one for a sub-page Google picks as the most relevant. This sub-page should match the page you will find by executing the Site search command in the previous step

You can further enhance the sub-page by optimizing the title, add heading tags and optimize the content by sprinkling a few variations of the keyword around. You can also add internal links to the sub-page from other related pages from within a suitable content.

SEOs are scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to game the new Google search algo reinvented as Google Caffeine. Google’s timing of releasing this new search engine algorithm may be a mere coincidence with the newly re-tooled Microsoft Bing, but I think it’s just that a coincidence. A major algorithm update like this takes months if not years to bring to the testing phase and knowing Google’s long beta testing cycles this change must have been in the works for over a year or more.

The main differences you notice from a user perspective is speed, it’s really blindingly fast. What Google’s Mat Cutts tells us that this is a complete rewrite of their indexing and file systems, but as SEOs we are more interested in the SERPs than what’s under the hood so we have added Google Caffeine to SEO Studio’s ranking reporter tool.

Please download SEO Studio and check out the differences with your keywords side by side Google’s old and new engine.

How can SEO firms guarantee top 10 rankings while others bulk at even the notion that the SEO client should get anything in return other than a statement of work and at the end of the month some fancy reporting about hours spent on link building, article submission and other seemingly important search engine optimization tasks. The truth as always is between the two different camps of SEO firms who either guarantee top 10 ranking or don’t.

So, why some SEO companies offer performance guarantee, while other SEO companies don’t?

Before start our investigation, we have to set some ground rules here of course to make sure we compare only reputable SEO companies with at least 3 plus years in business and a customer portfolio of at least 2-3 dozen clients a year. Oh, and of course the SEO companies we compare have all achieved decent rankings results for their clients and their clients would not hesitate in recommending them to their friend, business partners or family members.

Now that we got these important benchmark out of the way, let’s examine what is at the heart of the SEO guarantee and the sometimes very heated discussions surrounding it.

The issue is quite simply trust

The trust by the clients placed into the hands of the SEO companies to do the best they can to achieve the first page ranking results they were hired to deliver. So, it comes down to which company can sound more convincing on their website touting their SEO services with fancy graphics, customer case studies, testimonials, badges of affiliations with SEO organizations and being member of better business bureau. But does this really make a difference in how competent a SEO company is?

If the company can’t convey enough trust to the potential SEO client on their website, they might as well close the shop, but sadly even when a potential clients feel in their gut there is something inherently wrong with forking money over for services that don’t have a tangible outcome, they still sign on the dotted line. How sad, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

You have the right to demand to know what your hard earned dollars buy

So, here is where the guaranteed SEO services can truly make or break a deal from a reputable SEO company, but there is more to a SEO guarantee, than simply writing a few over used slogans on a webpage and hope visitors will listen.

These are the criterias you should use to hire an SEO firms who guarantees results in writing.

• Get references from as many previous SEO clients as you can. The SEO company should give you a list of previous clients’ contact information cheerfully and with lots of pride. After all they are going to be only as good as the last client they have dealt with. The most important questions to ask previous clients is, how long it took the SEO company to achieve the results and were they able to hold onto those rankings long term.
• No money up front. You should not pay a dime for any type of setup costs or other silly administration costs. It takes nothing more than 1 hour for seasoned SEO to come up with a thorough analysis of your site and to create a proposal for you. The cost of this should be not be coming out of your pocket, so never every pay for any type of site review or report up front.
• Specific ranking results for Google. Google is still the king of the online searches with over 60% of the total worldwide search market and you should not accept a guarantee that includes any mention of Yahoo or Bing (MSN,Live) in the contract. You should simply say you are only interested in Google natural results.
• Verify rankings independently. Always find out what type of ranking report generation tool the SEO company will use. The rankings have to be checked daily and a history of the rankings must be available to you at any time.
• What constitutes a SEO guarantee being fulfilled? In other words how many days of the month do the rankings have to in the top 10 or top 5 for the ranking guarantee to be fulfilled. Ask for a minimum of 15 days of each calendar month for the site to be in the top 10 or top 5.
• Don’t pay for all the SEO fees when the rankings are achieved in the first month. Once you agree on the total SEO fees, you should demand that you pay over a minimum of 6 months as long as the site remains on the first page of Google during that period. If the site drops from Google’s first page for more than 15 days in the previous calendar month you should not have to pay and roll the contract term forward another month.
• Ask them how much their maintenance plan will cost you, once they achieved the top rankings and the contract expired. Be careful if the SEO company wants to charge you the same rates they charged to get you on the first page of Google in the first place. The link building and optimization effort needed will be substantially costly and you should get a decent break on the SEO fees, if you choose to extend it.
• Transparency of what they plan to do to get you on the first page of Google. Ask very direct questions if it’s not spelled out already in their statement of work or contract, what methods will be used to get you in the top 10 on Google. If all you see in the contract is optimizing page content and some directory submissions, it’s most likely not going to get you what you want. You want to see in the contract specific references to one-way permanent link building, not rented, permanent links only. Ask them for a sample of links they have acquired for other SEO clients.

SEO can be extremely effective to increase leads, sales, whatever you objective may be, but too many times decision makers in businesses blindly accept SEO contract terms put in front of them simply because they don’t know the questions they should ask. It’s your duty to exercise due diligence and part of your research when choosing a SEO provider is to know what you get in return for your money, and what are your options if the promised results are not achieved.

With not much opening fan fair, Microsoft’s new attempt at building a reasonably popular search engine went live, it’s called BING.

Microsoft decided to scrap the Live.com search site, that had served search results from MSN and Live.com’s own site. Bing has a colorful background picture of a beautiful Greek island, a little weird for search engine or at least it’s very unconventional, but hey, the search relevancy is the most important factor and Bing may be just it when it comes to taking a chunk out of Google’s market share.

Very similarly to Google, there are tabs for Video, Image, News and Map search. Bing is making an entrance into the world of top 3 search engines at the starting gates sitting at the number 3 spot with about 8% percent market-share. It will be interesting to see how the users will find the new searcg engine compared to Live, but most importantly compared with Google which still commands 68% of the total worldwide search audience.

Performing a few quick searches with our main keywords we are not fairing so bad at all, SEO Software, Guaranteed SEO just to name a few are sitting on the first page.

Question: What does a woman faking an orgasm have in common with web masters buying fake Google PageRank text links?

Answer: They both get screwed at the end

The famous movie scene from When Harry met Sally with Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a dinner is etched in every man’s mind as stark reminder that if a woman wants to make a guy think he is the ultimate lover, she can easily do it. There is a new breed of cyberspace fakers out there that want you to believe you are getting a good deal by buying a high PageRank text link from their site. The problem is, it’s very easy to fake PageRank and you may be the next fool buying a fake PageRank link. Although Google came out strong against sites openly advertising and selling text links, the message is still not getting through. People continue buy paid text links as the word about Google link driven algorithm is reaching the masses.
Google knocked down the PageRank of many sites selling PR or selling paid blog post reviews in October 2007. The publishing sites selling paid reviews on Payperpost.com and Reviewme.com got hit especially hard with PageRank drops and in some cases a complete wipe out of their PageRank.

Buying Google PR

Web masters had been buying links with high Google PageRank since around 2002 to gain higher PR and also higher ranking. Although Google had changed their algorithms many times over the years to decrease the importance of the Google PageRank in their ranking score and give higher weight to other factors such as links from authority sites and inbound anchor text, the PR is still an important consideration for many website owners pursuing high rankings. If you take a look at the top ranking sites for even moderately competitive terms you will find the average Google PageRank of the top 10 sites is still around 4-5, which is pretty high. These days it’s becoming harder and harder to obtain paid links that are flying under the Google paid link detection radar and when this happens opportunity knocks on the doors of fly-by-night operators.

Faking Google PageRank

What makes the situation even worse is sites pretending to sell links on high PR sites are using nothing more than simple 301 redirects, which can be easily replicated by anybody. There are a few ways a fake Google PageRank can be achieved. All methods require server side scripting to detect if the page being requested is a human or robot. We can find out if the page requestor is human or robot by checking for the user agent specification in the request header of the request or the IP address where the request is originating from.

The code in PHP would look something like this to detect the Googlebot and than redirect it to a page with high PR page, in this example MSN.com.

<?php
if (strstr($_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’], “Googlebot”)) {
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);

// Insert the site whose PR you want to fake
header(”Location: http://www.msn.com/“);
exit;
}
else {
// Insert the URL of your real site here
header(”Location: http://www.myrealsite.com/“);
exit;
};
?>

How to detect fake PageRank

The simplest method to detect fake PR is to check the Google cached version of the page. You can do this by entering the URL into the Google search box and hitting enter. The search results should display the same URL as the one you have entered into the search box. If the PageRank is fake Google will return a different URL in the search results.

The Google cache command can also be used the same way. Enter cache:www.possiblefakeprsite.com into the Google search box and if the site’s PageRank is real you will see an identical version of the page displayed otherwise you may get a page not found message from Google or a completely different page altogether.

Fake Google PR example

There will always be people who are looking for opportunities to profit from other people’s lack of knowledge and experience and the SEO field is no exception. I have noticed recently several Google Adwords content ads and other sites promoting these scum bags selling fake PR text links. I have just found a new ad promising a PR6 link on iWebTool’s Page Rank Prediction page, how ironic is this. Well, it’s not really ironic at all, if you think about it a little bit. Where do you find the best audience for this type of services? Of course on sites that put together a few simple scripts to check PageRank or predict future PageRank.

Here is our innocent looking ad promising a PR 6 link for $19 a year. A deal really, if the PageRank was real.

The site behind the ad is http://www.spaceadvocate.com/. The site could be gone by the time you read this, so I have created a screen shot.

Here is the screen shot from the Google cache command cache:http://www.spaceadvocate.com/. As you can see Google knows nothing about this page. In other cases you may find a page that is indexed by Google, but it will be different from the original one.

Here is a Google search that may turn up a few more fake PageRank sellers. These are typical template based sites so it’s easy to find “foot prints” left behind by PageRank fakers. Consider yourself being warned, the PR fakers are out there.

Technorati : fake google pagerank, fake pr, faking pagerank, google, pagerank

Just got an email yesterday from Parked.com announcing a new no “keyword arbitrage” policy Yahoo is sowing down their throat which in short means if publishers of Yahoo based parking domains will no longer be able to send visitors to their parked domans from Google, MSN or other low quality traffic sources such as pop-up exit type of traffic.

Dear Parked.com customers,
We were notified today by Yahoo that all Yahoo based parking companies, including Parked.com, must begin enforcing the no arbitrage/no paid traffic general provision. As a reminder, Section 2 Subsection g. in the Parked.com Terms of Service states:

“All other types of traffic including bought traffic, traffic driven by PPC campaigns, traffic directed from hyperlinks are not permitted. If your traffic originates from any sources other than type-in and search engine traffic, you will not be entitled to payment as per this Agreement. Regular checks are carried out and we reserve the right to suspend any domain from our Service at any time, on our sole discretion, if we reasonably believe that you have violated this Agreement; for example, if we suspect that the traffic on your domain is bought, generated or redirected in any way that contravenes these terms and conditions.”

For more information please see http://www.parked.com/tos/.Accordingly, all arbitrage must stop effective 1pm PST on Thursday, February 14, 2008. Even though arbitrage will no longer be allowed, all accounts will still be paid.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact your account manager.
We thank you for your business and continued support.
Parked.com

The whole thing doesn’t surprise me, but the timing of the announcement by Yahoo is more than a coincidence. As Microsoft is twisting Yahoo’s arm in a battle to gain control of the company after Yahoo’s management had flatly rejected a buyout offer by Microsoft, Yahoo is trying to show its advertisers it’s serious about the quality of the visitor traffic it’s sending to their sites. Keyword arbitrage had been very good to many domainers, even those who got late into the game. The sentiment on Dnforum.com about the announcement varies a great deal from being called an outright attack on free trade to a more moderate view that what’s good for arbitragers may not be so good for Yahoo advertisers and it’s time for domainers to develop websites, instead of ripping Yahoo advertisers off.

I personally think Yahoo wanted to take this step for a long time now, but the voices of Yahoo advertisers screaming PPC fraud were drowned out by Yahoo shareholders applauding Yahoo’s relatively decent stock performance until about a year ago.

Technorati : Yahoo!, arbitrage, domain parking, ppc

SEO is one of many markets where getting some straight answers on how much a particular service is worth is hard to find. What is a reasonable fee SEOs should charge for getting your site to the top 10 results on Google for example? While most SEO companies prefer to charge monthly maintenance contract fees or large setup fees initially and a small monthly fee, in our opinion measurable results speak louder than well polished monthly status reports. Once you talk to a few reputable SEO companies and request a quote, you will see wildly different search engine optimization pricing and contract terms. Sometimes the total costs can vary by as much 50%-10,000%. How is an average website owner supposed to make sense of all the pricing options and SEO guarantees?

Well, let’s start with some fundamentals about how SEO company’s determine pricing for their SEO services

1. Most SEOs will spend some time analyzing your site and come with a keyword list of about 5 to 10 target phrases unless you already have a specific keyword list.
2. They will check your site’s age, ranking, Google PageRank and current link popularity.
3. They will take a look the competition and the search engine results landscape for the chosen keywords. They will get answers to things like how old the sites are in the top 10 results, how many back links they have, what’s the average Google PageRank of the top 10-20 sites and many other important metrics.
4. Next they will determine if the target keywords has low competition, moderate competition, or very high competition. They will use the keywords in quotes, enter the Google search commands for checking anchor text competition (allinanchor) and title tag competition (allintitle).

Based on where your site currently ranks in the search results can have a very important affect on the SEO pricing. Lifting a website to the first page results of Google from say number 500 is a lot tougher than moving it from the 50th position to the top 10.

As a webmaster paying for SEO services you only care about seeing your site in the top 10 and not so much about how your site gets there, but from a search engine optimization company’s perspective it’s very important to take into consideration all the above variables.

Still, there are some guidelines you should use in gauging whether or not your are over paying for SEO services. One very telling research method is running the Google Traffic Estimator Tool using your target keywords. We believe in letting the pay-per-click market determine how much you should pay for SEO services. Here is a quick example. Using the Google Traffic Estimator Tool take a look at the results for the keyword “golf shoes”. What you will notice is that this keyword can cost Google Adwords advertisers between $720 - $1,200 a day to be in the number 1 to 2 in the sponsored results. Let’s take the low end of the spectrum and multiply 30 days X $720 = $21,600 a month in advertising costs just for this one keyword. So how much a SEO should charge for getting a natural top 10 ranking on Google for this keyword? How about $259,200?

By doing some home work with the Google Traffic Estimator Tool and taking a look at the exact phrase competition for “golf shoes” on Google you would be a lot better equipped to sort out who can offer you the best SEO services and pricing.

Technorati : seo, seo services

People tend to forget that behind every visit to your site there is a human being and whether you like it or not they will form their own opinion of your website in just 10-15 seconds. I know I can spot a real gem when I see one on any subject matter. Since my work involves a lot of research of some type, finding information fast is crucial to what I do. Every site has a certain characteristics that tells you within the first few second if you are on the right place or just wasting your time. I don’t know how many times a day I hit the back button on my browser window to bail out of sites that offer nothing useful or it’s not the answer I am looking for.

Is it the fault of the search engines that they didn’t pull out of their billion page index the 10 best sites that match my query? I would like to blame Google for missed hits and irrelevant search results, but than again what am I thinking, Google is just a bunch of networked supper computers that are as the dumb as my kitchen table without the search logic that’s built into them.

So, despite the best search algorithms Google, Yahoo and MSN will miss the boat more often than not.

As SEOs we see our job as gently nudging the search engines in the directions of our clients sites for the keywords they want to be on the first page for. The real trick of SEO is to figure our which one of the 100 or so factors Google will give the most weight to, and concentrating our efforts on those.

Our guaranteed SEO relies on the past experiences to gauge which link popularity or on page SEO tweaks will give us the biggest bang for the buck. Since we only get paid if actually push our SEO clients’ site to the top 10 on Google we can’t waste our resources on techniques that only achieve marginal results.

From our experience so far this is what works for sites on Google that are on the second page of the SERPs or lower for moderately competitive keywords, that’s about 100,000 result or less for the exact keyword phrase (meaning keywords in quotes like this “seo software”).

Content Optimization:

1. Create unique title tags for each page and match title with the content’s target keyword phrases
2. Review and optimize the internal linking scheme and current anchor texts
3. Add a site map if it’s missing
4. Encourage the owner of the set up a blog
5. Update the existing content with some fresh new pages and link to them

Link Building:

1. Write at least 2-3 new articles and distribute them to the top 5 ezine sites. You should consider Ezinearticles.com, Articlecity.com and Articlealley.com
2. Add the site to DMOZ.org and the Yahoo directory if not already listed. The Yahoo listing is pricey at $299 per year, but well worth it.
3. Find 5-10 niche or regional directories that matches the site’s content and submit. Submission costs range from Free to $200 per listing.
4. Buy/Secure 20-40 new one-way permanent links from sites with a minimum of PR 3 that are least 50% related. Expect to pay $15-$25 for each link.
5. Buy/Secure 5 top quality permanent links from authority domains that are closely related to the target site. Expect to pay $300-$500 per link.

Of course keep in mind there are always exceptions and a great deal depends on the keywords’ competitiveness. If you have done any SEO, you should already know there is a big difference between lifting a site to the top from say number 100 on Google for a keyword phrase like “home loans” vs. “Florida term life insurance”.

My question to all you new webmasters is, why do you think you need to submit your new website to the search engines? Google, Yahoo and MSN and are all crawler based search engines, which means they find and index websites following links.

So please forget about signing up for services promising to get you listed on Google, Yahoo and MSN in 48 hours. What you need a simple link to your new site from a blog, a directory, a friend’s site or any web page that gets crawled regularly by the search engines.

Save some money and headaches and post a comment on this post with your new website URL and I guarantee your site gets indexed within a few days in all the top search engines.

This is free website review offered to websites with quality content. If your site is under construction or largely made up of affiliate links without any useful content, please don’t expect a favorable review.

We are pleased to announce the release of our mini beginner SEO guide called “Spoon-Fed SEO for GrownUps”. We decided to go with this tounge in cheek title as it emphasizes the complexities inherent in search engine marketing. Most people new to internet marketing have no idea what search engines are about or how they even earn a profit online.

After talking to many of our new SEO clients and SEO users there was a need for something that ties everything together nicely from A to Z in the SEO world. We have focused a bit on how to make good use of the SEO Studio tools to help webmasters speed up some mundane repetitive tasks in search engine optimization such as rank checking, back link analysis. Seasoned SEOs know 80% of all SEO efforts is connected with some type of external popularity building whether it’s link building through directory submissions, link buying, article distribution or viral marketing. This is where we feel new webmasters need the most help and we hope our SEO guide won’t disappoint you.

Learn SEO the easy way. Download or read online Spoon-Fed SEO for GrownUps