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.

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

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

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

Trendmetrix is please to offer an independent review of shared hosting, VPS (virtual private hosting)  and email hosting providers. Choosing a reliable web hosting company is not only an important consideration from your customer's satisfaction standpoint, but it can also affect your search engine optimization efforts. Think of a scenario where your website is down for more than a few hours, what happens if in this time frame a search engine bot visits your website? Not good, obviously. If this happens a few times in a row, Google will throw your website into its supplemental index which means your website has almost no chance of coming up in top of the search results.

Choosing web site hosting providers has always been a challenging issue for all webmasters. It’s very hard to come by truly unbiased performance reports taking into consideration a variety of factors such as costs, uptime, web site speed and technical support response time.

Web hosting services can be broken into these main categories:

Web hosting providers are like a dime a dozen and finding the true gems require an independent web host review service. Realmetrics put together the finest and most detailed hosting company review on the planet. They have done all the hard work for us and their reports are truly one of a kind.

For most general or small ecommerce web sites shared hosting offers the best value for money. Most web hosting companies reviewed by Realmetrics offers relatively affordable web hosting packages starting at around $4 dollars per month. We invite you to check out these independent hosting company reviews to ensure you not only pay the lowest price possible, but also get unmatched reliability, speed, and customer service.

Our SEO blog reader’s questions just keep on pouring in regarding domain redirection. In this post we are going to answer some of the questions about the domain forwarding services offered by hosting companies and other DNS services providers.

We have already discussed in Domain Forwarding 301 redirect - Part II how to accomplish permanent domain redirection using apache server .htaccess files or IIS web server configuration to forward your domains without the loss of Google Page Rank or link popularity.

Although these methods will work well for most tech savy website owners with liberal access to their web severs. We also realize, not all hosting companies allow access to web site’s .htaccess configuration files, and it’s unlikely they will ever let web site owners change configuration on IIS servers directly unless they have purchased a dedicated web server hosting plan. The other issue is of course the level of technical knowledge web site owners have when it comes to changing advanced configuration options on web servers and the risks associated with tweaking web site configuration files.
Luckily there are some very easy solutions for forwarding your existing domains that doesn’t require a technical genius.

(Read on …)

In order to accomplish a successful domain redirection while letting the search engines know the status of the redirect starts with a source and a destination domain.
All the configuration changes outlined below must be completed on the source domain for your redirect to work properly. There is no special configuration needed on the destination domain.

There are several options available for domain redirection. Depending on the technical implementation they fall into two main categories, server based and client based redirection. Since individual search engines handle web page based script execution and meta refresh differently, we can only recommend web server based domain redirect implementations.
Some of the better known web page script based redirects include Javascript, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and cold fusion, unfortunately none of these methods can guarantee a successful transfer of link popularity to a new domain, therefore you should not use them.
For example, Javascript and meta refresh redirection methods send a 200 OK status instead of the 301 permanently moved status code to the search engine crawlers which will prevent the transfer of link popularity weight to the new domain. Unless the redirection scripts can be executed on the server side, you are running the risk of damaging your websites link reputation and ranking on the search engines.
So, once again our recommendation is to use web server based redirects whenever possible.

(Read on …)

Domain name changes can occur for a number of reasons. Some of these reasons could include the change of company owners, a campaign to improve brand recognition etc. Whatever the reason is for the domain name change, there is a number of issues you should consider before jumping head first into changing domains. The most important factor to consider is how a domain name change will affect search engine ranking and existing link popularity. Sadly, many website owners simply create a new domain name and copy the existing content to the new website and loose their search engine ranking in the process along with considerable link popularity. The older the domain, the higher the stakes are in adversely affecting your website’s search engine ranking in the domain transfer process. Fortunately there is a better and safer way to handle domain name changes. The search engines can actually help us accomplish this without the loss of ranking or link popularity in most cases.

In search engine optimization terms there are two main types of redirects exist

The first one is a temporary redirect which returns a web server 302 status code to the search engines. Using this method we essentially tell the search engine we have moved to a new domain, but we may return in the future. The second one is a permanent redirection with a 301 status code returned to the search engines. As the name implies we are telling the search engines we are no longer storing any content on the old domain and the search engine should forward all the external inbound links to the new domain.
In both of these cases when a user types the old domain name in the browser, a request is sent to fetch a page from the old domain, but instead the new domain page will be displayed. The difference between the two types of redirects can only be seen by examining the web server’s header information for the status codes returned to the web browser.

(Read on …)