Top 10 Google SEO Ranking Factors.

People don’t really understand that there are many different factors that fall into place when determining where a website ranks in the Google search engine results. Some things to keep in mind when you are wondering why your site doesn’t rank well. It is not always just the obvious reasons that are holding it back. 

Over the past years by reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google SEO Starter Guide, many other industry blogs and by actually doing professional SEO and internet marketing since the late 1990’s, I have gathered data and come to a boiled down short list of the most important Google search engine ranking factors.

Here is the list of my top 10 of important Google SEO ranking factors to consider:

1. Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. If you just bought your domain a few weeks or even months ago you have a long road ahead of you. The reality is the age of your website helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.

2. Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? Find out through your hosting company what continent or country your site is hosted in. This can often times play a large role in search rankings. Always use a reputable hosting company. If your company is US based then use a hosting company in the United States. Also, I always recommend a dedicated IP when you can. There are virtual dedicated and cloud hosting solutions that are more affordable. Never use the cheapest hosting. The reality is, if you cannot afford hosting you should re-consider the business…I know this is harsh but very true.

3. Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server, which sites like Godaddy usually are have been known to house hundreds of websites on one server. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not classified as spam.

4. URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is part of the onsite search engine optimization process as well.

5. Content: Content is very important. To start make sure you have text on all your important pages, then make sure it is good text consisting of your targeted keywords spread throughout naturally. Simply put, ALWAYS write your content for humans, your website visitors first and NEVER write content for the solo purpose to achieve Google search engine rankings. Chances are the content will not be user focused or provide value to your visitors.

6. Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should have easy made pathways connecting to your other pages from every page of your website. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Essentially make sure the site is clean, easy to use and interlinked to help the user experience.

7. Trust: Do you at least have a mailing address listed on your website? You should if you don’t. Google likes to see trust factors on websites so anything you can add that could help build trust for your audience will benefit your rankings. I always recommend having a phone number on each page of your website. Make it easy for people to do business with you, it all starts with establishing trust and that starts with contact information on your website.

8. Keywords: Make sure your website is optimized using your keywords. This means any alt tags for images, meta page information and existing content at the very least of things. Remember to naturally optimize your website based on the content of each page of your website.

9. Bounce Rate: Although bounce rate might not seem important if Google sees that nobody hangs out on your website for more than a few seconds before they leave this could be a ranking problem over time. Make changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things, like video, newsletter sign up, call to actions, etc will help improve your bounce rate over time. Make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics.

10. Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. If you sell animals toys but you are linking to a site that sells shoes that is not very relevant and over time could really impact your rankings. Bottom line is if it makes sense to link to another site, then do so, but remember you could be sending your visitors away from your site.

11. Inbound Links: I know this was a list of my top 10, but I felt I had to mention inbound links. The key here (speaking as a white hat SEO person), don’t buy or exchange links. Market and promote your business online to build visitors to your website over time. If you do, then the relevant links will follow!

**Note: As the Google (and yes there are 2 other major search engines!) algorithm changes there are always new ranking factors that come into play, such as the page load time and many others. I am sure when I re-do this list a year from now, there may be another one or two additional factors.

There are many extensive factors that Google uses when determining website rankings. Very important to get these factors correct otherwise you could find yourself just spinning your wheels. The bottom line is it is all about relevancy and earning your visitors (and yes Google’s) search engine trust over time.

5 Important Rules for Affiliate Marketing Success

Making money with affiliate marketing can be a great solution for people who do not want to deal with the hassles of setting up their own website, yet still want to be able to generate income on the internet.

Creating your own affiliate marketing business does not need to be as hard as you think, and one of the most important parts of being successful with this type of business is to pick the right product that you can form a partnership with and begin promoting.

This type of affiliate marketing business model means that you are referring customers and sales to another company in exchange for a certain commission. This can be very convenient if you do not have the extra time to commit to customer service and other essential tasks for maintaining your own business.

Below you will find five rules that you can use to begin to see success with your affiliate marketing efforts. Following these rules can help you make sure you get the maximum return on the time and money you spend.

1. Find Out The Commission Percentage

Is this a digital product that can offer a higher affiliate commission such as 50% or higher? Or are you focusing on a physical product or e-commerce store that only pays its affiliates 10% of the total price. Depending on what you are promoting, you can sometimes make much more money from a company that sells physical products but offers a smaller percentage commission, since the overall price volume will be much higher.

2. Pick The Ideal Price Point

There may be many similar companies and products that you can choose to become affiliated with, but there will likely be some price differences with each one. Pick how high your price should be based on the supply and demand of your target market. Is this a product that provides a solution to an urgent problem? If so, then you might be able to pick a product with a higher price.

3. Only Promote One Affiliate Product At A Time

An important factor that determines your success for any business is how long you can focus and concentrate on the tasks that build your business and increase your revenue. Therefore, if you are placing your attention on trying to promote a dozen different products at the same time, then you are spreading your attention too thin and decreasing your odds of success. Pick one single good product, and stick with it until you see results.

4. Is There An Established Market For Your Product?

Some beginner affiliate marketers will make the mistake of picking their affiliate product based on their own hobbies and interests, only to find out that there is no demand for it. It is important that people are actively searching for what you are providing, even if you want to focus on a narrowly defined market segment. Make sure that there is enough demand for what you are offering that people will be willing to make a purchase.

5. Does This Product Make You Want To Buy?

What is a good way to find out how effective the sales tactics are by the product or company you are promoting? See whether or not this seems like something that you are actually willing to purchase. Depending on the nature of the product that you are affiliated with, it may even be something that you should purchase yourself before promoting it in order to find out what it is all about.

By following these five principles you should be able to maximize the amount of money that you can earn from your online affiliate marketing. Remember to keep realistic earnings expectations about your affiliate commissions, and do not be discouraged if you do not succeed at making money right away.

What was SEO and what is New in SEO.

SEO has been around more or less as long as there have been search engines. Although it seems like some blogger or another is heralding the impending death of SEO every few months or so, SEO has yet to fade into oblivion. The very core of SEO is to change; to make adjustments to one's site to adapt to the search engines' algorithms, the changes in consumers' online behavior, the expanding online world and so forth. SEO isn't about to die anytime soon, but it is constantly evolving to meet the needs and challenges of the times.

This is a look at SEO as it was in 2004 and how it has morphed to fit the modern world of 2011.

SEO: IT or Marketing Department? 

Back in 2004, many marketing departments looked at SEO as a technology and not as a marketing tool. It was all about coding and web development and was often lumped in with other IT "stuff." The singular goal of SEO was to get a site to rank number one in the search engines for a given keyword. Period. Now, SEO is tied in with every aspect of marketing online. SEO can be used to build a brand and online reputation, help create a community of targeted consumers, and more. Rank is no longer the principle focus, albeit still a very important result. Nowadays, SEO is squarely about marketing.

Linking Best Practices

Links were and continue to be the bread and butter of SEO. However, the way companies go about building inbound links has dramatically changed over time. In 2004, I was working for a large SEM firm. We had a full-time employee that was hired solely to develop link exchanges for our clients. Since then, link exchanges, paid links, spammy anchor text, cloaking, and the like have all been soundly labeled "black hat" by the search engines. Directory submissions were wildly popular in the early days of SEO, and while there are a few good ones left that can provide a quality link, they aren't usually valuable for much else.

Nowadays, link building is synonymous with trust building. If you were to compare a very spammy, black hat site to a quality site, you would find that the spammy site (even if it has more links) is usually linked to/from other low quality sites. A website that is seen as an authority figure will have a much more diverse and valuable link portfolio, even if it is smaller. In 2004, quantity could trump quality. That is no longer the case for 2011. 

Search Engines

Remember when AOL was King of the Internet? Now we all giggle at anyone who still actively uses the former giant. What about InfoSeek or AskJeeves? Do you still search using AltaVista? In the early days, the Internet was littered with various search engines, each with unique pros and cons. In 2004, Google was just one of many. Now, we use Google as a verb when we want someone to conduct a search. The general consensus of many SEO professionals is that when we optimize a company's site, we are going after the Google SERP. Bing has been slowly chipping away at Google's share of the search market, but for the most part Google is still the dominant player.

SEO Tools

Back in 2004, conducting keyword research was the single worst part of SEO. You couldn't trust any data on search volume to be accurate, so in the end we pretty much had to guess. I remember sitting down with a thesaurus to come up with keyword variations! Good keyword research tools didn't exist. Can you imagine optimizing each page of a 1,000 page website with no data to guide you? Luckily, today we have the Google Keyword research tool to make that task much easier and help streamline the process.

Google Analytics, a tool every responsible website owner should use, was only fully implemented in 2006! Before then, site owners had to purchase analytics software or use a generic hit counter (which didn't tell you anything much other than number of visitors) to monitor their site's analytics. Nowadays, we don't make any changes, big or small, to a website without first consulting our Google Analytics information. The information found there helps shape and adapt our SEO campaigns for the better, and we can make decisions knowing they will point us in the right direction.

Social Media and Sharing

Social media didn't really exist in 2004. Facebook, the 800 pound gorilla of social networking sites, was barely operational in early 2004. We certainly didn't have Twitter and LinkedIn. While smaller social networking sites did exist, social media as we know it really exploded in recent years. Back in 2004, if you wanted to connect with someone online, you sent them an e-mail or an IM message. Now we message, Tweet, post, share, Like, bookmark, and much more. Content gets passed from person to person at astonishing speeds. We can build relationships with people worldwide all thanks to social networking.

SEO has even begun to envelop social media. The search engines have started incorporating data from social networking sites into their algorithms to help organize search results. Suddenly, the information your friends used to share on Facebook or Twitter amongst yourselves is impacting the general search results.

Mobile

The first smartphone, a BlackBerry, was released in 2003. The concept that you could be connected to your e-mail wherever you went and without a computer was revolutionary. Suddenly the Internet was mobile. The subsequent iPhone releases and Android phones furthered our online connectivity, and now smartphones are dominating the cell phone market. Local search has become an increasingly important part of SEO, all because of mobile phones and tablets. Google Maps didn't even exist in 2004, yet now we can search for an address and get directions on our GPS enabled mobile devices.

Consumers and companies alike want to be able to connect with each other on the go. Since we don't ever have to disconnect from our online lives, mobile marketing has developed to allow companies to target consumers no matter where they are or what they are doing.

How to Simplify the Whole SEO Process - SEO Strategy

If you're a full-time online marketer and webmaster, you may get the feeling (in my case a stubborn opinion) that because SEO has become such a big industry, it has to be "complicated up" rather than "dumbed down" for the receiving audience. In other words, it is in the best interest of SEO firms and services to make SEO seem like a much more complex process than it actually is in practice. 

This applies doubly true for when it comes to ranking high in Google. Many SEO firms go into all kinds of "linking structures", "site metrics", "keyword correlations", "on page factors"... in explaining how to achieve those top Google spots for lucrative keywords. Granted, the Google Algorithm has over 200 ranking signals or factors which they use to rank pages. And, this mathematical formula is constantly being redefined or altered by major changes, such as the recent Panda Update, which left many webmasters reeling. But...

While Google's ranking algorithm and system might be the most complex creature on the planet, ranking high in Google is a very simple process. So simple anyone can do it and achieve first page listings in Google. It's not rocket science and it's not complex by any stretch of the imagination. However, it does take some work on the part of the webmaster to actively promote his or her site. In other words, if you just create a perfect site and place it on the web and do nothing else - chances are extremely high you won't get those top rankings in Google, at least not for the highly competitive lucrative keyword phrases.

This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) enters the picture and takes over. You must get certain factors/ signals right if you want your site to truly compete in major search engine keyword battles. But most of these things or factors are not difficult or hard to understand, you just need to have them in place if you want top listings in the search engines.

Here are some things you can do to simplify the whole SEO process:

1. Try to create a short domain with your targeted keyword in the domain name. Go with a dot com domaín if you can get it and if you have to use a multi-worded domain, try to get your keyword at the beginning. 

2. Create an "easy to navigate" unique content rich site which is optimized for the search engines, but directed solidly at solving your visitor's needs. If you're on a budget, one of the easiest ways to do this is to use the free Wordpress software/platform to create a keyword optimized site. Make sure this site is totally intertwined with all the latest social networking programs such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Make sure you have profiles/accounts in all of these platforms to complement your main site.

3. Link to main interior pages from your home or index page. These interior pages should have your targeted keywords in the "Title", "URL", "Meta Tags", "H1 Headings", "First Paragraph", "Last Paragraph" and use keyword variations throughout the content. Place a few in bold print and italics. Don't be afraid to create large pages and link out to other authority sites in your niche. Don't worry about keyword density unless it goes over 4%. This should not happen if you write naturally for your visitor and not for the search engines.

4. Build quality one-way links by creating articles, press releases, blog posts, videos, viral reports... and submit these to the major places on the web such as free article directories (my favorites are still ezinearticles, goarticles, buzzle, ideamarketers, isnare and article alley). The real trick here is to consistently produce fresh content which steadily builds your backlinks month after month, year after year, decade after decade!

5. Do whatever you can do to enrich your visitor's experience. Add valuable free content, free ebooks or ecourses and/or provide a comprehensive guide(s) to your visitors. Connect all this free content to your autoresponder opt-ín list or newsletter and build repeat targéted traffic to your site. In addition, make it extremely easy for these visitors to bookmark/follow your content in all the social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google +1, and so on.

6. Rinse and Repeat. One of the little known tactics about achieving top rankings in the search engines, especially Google, is to create not one site but two or more sites in your niche market. (If you're on a budget or time is short, try creating two pages on your domain related to the same targeted keyword.) Instead of trying to rank for one site in Google, create two complementary sites on the same related keywords and you will find it much easier to get to the top spots. Interlink these sites and you can even promote them together. Just make sure they each have unique content for the visitor.

Over the years, I have come to believe strongly that achieving high rankings is not some complex process but just a matter of persistence. Consistently promoting your content by building quality backlinks will get you to the top and keep you there. But the whole trick is persistence, keeping at it, day after day... building those links back to your content. I also believe it is the number of backlinks which is the key and this has been proven to me many times over the years. Many SEO experts will now argue that links have taken a back seat to other factors such as site authority and structure, but I am not convinced this has happened. At least not yet, but data from the 160+ million Google Chrome users and the new Google +1 Button, may eventually lower the importance of backlinks and PageRank.

However, at the present time, if I stop promoting a page or competitive keyword, it usually drops from the first page of Google. To get it back on the first page, all I have to do is promote it with a few articles, blog posts, press releases, videos, etc. and it jumps back into the top spots, even Post Panda.

For years, I had a webpage for "list building" in Google on the first page, then I stopped promoting it with keyword related articles, posts, and content. It dropped to the third page of Google. Changing none of the ranking factors mentioned above, I was quickly able to get that page and ranking back to the #5 spot by simply creating some current backlinks to the content. I mention all this because many times SEO firms and experts will try to complicate things with convoluted explanations and complex processes while in actual fact, achieving high rankings can be simplified down to nothing more than persistence and adding a few quality backlinks.