Weekly SEO news: 7 September 2010
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

The authority of a website influences its position in the search results on Google and other search engines. If you want to see your website on Google's first result page, you have to make sure that search engines trust your site.

There is a new online backlink tool that can help you to analyze the backlinks of your competitors.

In the news: A leaked Google AdWords document reveals how much big brands are spending on Google, Google's John Muller talks about getting listed on Google, Google might offer embedded links and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. How to become a trusted website to increase your search engine rankings

The authority of a website influences its position in the search results on Google and other search engines. If you want to see your website on Google's first result page, you have to make sure that search engines trust your site.

Trusted

There are several things that you can do to show search engines that your website is trustworthy:

1. Get links from seed sites or from websites that are linked from seed sites

Seed sites are websites that are manually marked as trustworthy by the search engine owners. For example, if Apple.com has been chosen as a seed website by Google then a link from Apple.com will have a positive effect on the TrustRank of your website.

Of course, it is very difficult to get a link from a trusted seed site. Fortunately, the websites that are linked from the seed sites also have a positive effect on the linked sites.

If Apple.com links to website site2.com, website site2.com links to website site3.com and website site3.com links to your website then your website will still get a good TrustRank.

2. Get links from related websites

Does your website get links from related websites and does it link to other related websites?

Is your website a lonely island with no links from and to other websites or is it integrated in a network that deals with a special topic? The better your website is integrated in a network of topical sites (by different owners), the more likely it is that your website is a good resource for that topic.

3. Don't link to spam websites

Avoid links to websites of dubious quality. If a website is a known spammer, do not link to the site at all.

If you link to such a website, you show search engines that you support them and that your own website should not be trusted too much.

5. Try to get links from social networks

The more often your website is mentioned on social media websites, the more likely it is that your website is a trustworthy high quality website. The more votes your bookmarks on social media sites get, the better.

6. Offer more than just a few websites

A website that consists of only one page won't be considered an authority website. Search engines want to show good websites with good content in the search results.

If your website has many pages that contain great content about a certain topic then it is much easier to get a good TrustRank.

If search engines trust your website, it is much easier to get high rankings. If you want to find out if your website has all the elements that are needed to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines, analyze your website with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.

Analyze your website

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

GoogleWhat big brands are spending on Google

"In two months, BP went from spending very little on search advertising -- about $57,000 a month -- to becoming one of Google's top advertisers, dropping nearly $3.6 million in the month of June alone [...]

Expedia, which spent at least $5.9 million in June, Amazon, which spent at least $5.8 million, and eBay, which spent at least $4.2 million. [...]

Google's top advertisers that month, AT&T Mobile, spent more than $8 million on AdWords in June."



Discussion: does your CTR drop due to Google Maps in the results?

"Directories and maps may have reduced traffic by as much as 20% in the No1 position. [...] If you're talking about a local search query term - one that triggers the Map - then I've seen more like 35% to 60% loss. Local Search is less and less about organic ranking these days. [...]

The effect varies, depending on the search term. The new SERPs page layout that Google introduced a few months ago gives various menu options for refining a search, and these seem to vary according to the search term."



John Mueller Discussion: spending $65,000 does not mean that Google likes your website

Google's John Mueller answers a person who spent several thousand dollars to rebuilt the website after a Google penalty:

"One thing that is very important to us - especially with sites that focus on affiliate sales - is that there is a significant amount of unique and compelling content on your site. I really like the idea of being able to mark items as 'want' and 'have' + adding ratings, but at the moment, it seems that there is not so much of that happening on your site. [...]

What I'm missing on those pages (and what I assume our algorithms are missing) is unique and compelling content. You have a lovely site, but it really helps to have more than a great design, to have unique and compelling content that users will want to refer their friends to. [...]

For our algorithms, this makes it hard for us to judge your site based on what makes your site special -- because it's hard to find that."



Would Google offer embedded search links to site owners?

"There are a number of advertising services on the Web that offer contextual search link services, which identify terms on a site and embed links within them pointing to advertisers' pages.

A Google patent granted earlier this week describes a way that web site publishers could identify parts of their pages that they would allow links on from Google, which would point to Google search results pages."



Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising

"Figure out some goals and work back. Don’t think 'social media' as in the tools. Think 'social media marketing' as in the discipline. Research your market, find out who’s using what platform and build your value exchange around it.

Make sure there are social elements in all your marketing endeavors. Have everything built for discovery and sharing. Measure as much as you can and use the data to inform decisions in other part of the business."



Search engine newslets

  • Google experimenting with 20 search results per page?
  • AOL: how to build a great query.
  • Google: Shopping means more to UK plc than culture.
  • Eight tips for understanding [Chinese search engine] Baidu SEO.
  • Microsoft cloaking MSNbot?

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3. Success stories

A new backlink analysis tool

SEOprofiler is a new backlink analysis tool that informs you about the backlinks to your website:

SEOprofiler

SEOprofiler also lets you discover the backlink secrets of your competitors. Enter a domain name in the search box on SEOprofiler to get an instant analysis.

  • Get up to 30,000 backlinks for every competitor domain.
  • Analyze up to 5,000,000 backlinks per month.
  • Links are continually added and updated every hour.

Enter your domain name or the domain names of your competitors in the search box on SEOprofiler to get an instant analysis.



"Within 60 days we were on the 1st page of Google."

"I was at my wits end the first of this year, 2010, I was putting on as much content as I could to help with rankings and just could not get off page 4 with Google, then I ran across your software online.

Always leery of something new I did a little research on IBP and it looked good. In Feb-March we started using the software to make sure our pages were good with Google and I started linking like your information said, well within 60 days we were on the 1st page of Google and now you can see we have jumped some huge companies in my industry to take over the # 2 spot with Google.

The proof is in the pudding, # 2 and climbing, I expect to take number 1 with hard work and your software."
Chuck Magee, www.mississippi-landsource.com



Tell us how IBP helped your business and 250,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

Click here to tell us your story.



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4. Previous articles

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