How to Analyze Competing Websites

Posted on February 12, 2012 by alex

To be able to give an accurate time frame of when your clients website should start producing results by rising in the SERP’s. The first thing you start with is your clients website. Even though the website has not been correctly nutured search engine optimization wise it has one thing that is beneficial and that is an origination date with Google. I took over a website in June 2010 that had fallen to nowhere in Google’s first 30 pages. Even though it had been poorly maintained the website had been around since 2001. That is significant since longevity a significant factor in search engine algorithms. I told my client that it would take at least six months before we would see results on the on site and off site optimization; on site and off site optimization will be discussed in another blog article. Since the website had been around since 2001 once Google crawled the site it bounced back to the top of their SERP’s for over 17 keyword phrases.

Now that you have your origination date go and get the same of all your competition. This can be found on Better-Whois. Then you go to Google and run their page rank. I discuss the top of Page Rank in another blog and you should take some time to read it. The website above had a page rank of 1 when I took it over and it currently has a 2. This took a significant amount of work to achieve this but it is a good way to make a determination of how much work it took. Sorry I am not going to give you the specifics on how but I will say it took a significant amount of work with backlinks. It does indicate the level of competition since all it took was to get back in with an optimized website with a page rank of one and has been around for around 10 years. Sounds easy but it is not always that way since if your website has a page rank of one and the competition is at a three it would be unrealistic to say you can compete inside of at least 18 months. That is of course the competition is not working on their page rank.

I use Seomoz for much of my analysis of websites since they have some fantastic tools. One is a plugin to Firefox which will give you their moz rank their inbound links with the anchor text and a moz value of that link. The inbound links and their values will give you an idea of how much work they are doing to increase page rank. You especially want to look at these links to see if they are from related websites, if the links are nofollows, and if the links come from commenting on blogs; commenting on blogs, such as Hubspot, will generate links to your website but your comments need to be of high quality and not in an excessive amount.

Other factors you need to look at is their pages meta tags. To accurately find all the pages in their website I recommend you get an xml site map. I use an on line site map generator that will give you up to 500 pages for free. If your competitors have more that 500 they also have a pay service but since I deal mostly with small websites that are after search results less than 10 million web pages the free version will work just fine.

Unfortunately how to analyze competing websites will take more explanation so stay tuned for Fridays post.

Alex Gilmore

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Where is Google going and Why?

Posted on February 10, 2012 by alex

The reason why Google was able to surpass Yahoo, Web Crawler, Lycos, and Alta Vista was due to it’s way it allows you to search. The fore runners of search engines were created by techs and so the searching was done based on how the techs wanted it to work. So they tried to condition you on how to search. Since this applied to less than a 1/100 % of the population it was easy to run them out of the market and that is what Google did.

Googles montra is relevance. This meant what is relevant to you so the came up with an algorithm that would provide you relevant results based on how you searched. And Google has a team that is constantly adjusting that algorithm in pursuit of relevance. The other purpose of the team is to determine how to serve you better by watching you search habits. For instance if you go to Google and search “Widgets” and the first site is www.widgets.com so you click on it and view the site. If you do this a number of times, how many I do not know, and click on it again to go back to the site Google will eventually assume that you have searched and went there so in pursuit of relevance they will not longer put the website in the SERPs. They have adjusted to you plus you have given them insight on searching habits. With this understanding where do you think Google is going?

Now let us add to the equation that more than 90% of consumers research a product or service on the internet before making their purchase. Then more than 60% go back to the internet to find a local business to satisfy the desire to purchase where they are going becomes obvious. It is local and regional results. That is why when you go to Google and search “Lawyer” you will not only get national results but you will see local firms show up in the SERPs. They would love to take their search engine to this format now but cannot due to the fact they would allienate their source of income the major players. Additionally they would lose in the PPC customers since the majority are small business owners since this is the only way to level the playing field with the top websites. So inessence they are moving toward local and regional results.

Small business owners can capitalize on this now by deploying targeted microsites. These type of websites are targeting one or at the most two keyword phrases such as: “Widgets New Orleans” as an example. I personally believe that the internet is ready for a new search engine and unfortunately Bing missed it by a mile.

Alex Gilmore

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Why Search Engine Optimization is Cheaper Than Pay Per Click

Posted on February 7, 2012 by alex

I just read the blog “Three Reason to Stop Buying Leads and Start Generating Your Own” by Pamela Seiple of HubSpot. Google knows that people using their search engine prefer to click on results in the organic section, where your website resides due to Search Engine Optimization SEO, to products, services, or just doing research. That is why they have created a way for website designers to put their PPC ads in the content of a web page. Just for this reason alone it is better to spend money on SEO rather than PPC.

In addition to what Pamela brings out in her blog I would like to add a fourth reason “Time”. If you have ever ran a PPC campaign it can take hours upon hours to get started and even more to keep it going. The reason for this is consumers adjust their searching based on the information they attain. Since PPC is based on how much you bid for your price it is not based on relevance. When a consumer searches on Google the search engine remembers you and what you click on to view. So if you search the same thing over and over again and clicking on the link to a specific website eventually the website will no longer appear in your Search Engine Page Results, or SERPs, because Google wants to give you relevant results. They do this by remembering your IP address and the serial number of your computer.

As I said in the comments of Pamela’s blog Google favors the first mover unless they do something stupid like building a new website without consulting a SEO professional to oversee the redesign; see my blog “How to waste money on Search Engine Optimization”. Every adjustment to a website must be done with consideration to the pages page rank and this is where a SEO professional is indispensible. They will evaluate your site as to where it was, where it is now, and where you want it to be. Even though a pro has not been at the helm at least there is still something to build on. Consider this you hire a web designer to remake the website. Every web designer has their way of setting up the structure so they do not like fixing others problem. This is when they give the pages new names according to how they like it to be. I can best describe this as throwing the baby out with the dirty bath water.

Alex Gilmore

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Consumer Characteristics in an Economic Downturn

Posted on February 5, 2012 by alex

Tradeoffs are a principle discussed in Economics. In a nut shell everybody makes tradeoffs. When the price of gasoline went to almost four dollars a gallon. This caused, what is termed in economics, what is called welfare tradeoffs. People started taking mass transit. Others cut back on the amount of fuel they used like staying home and watching a movie rather than going to the cinema. Using this logic we can deduce that this would be the same for fiberglass pools. On the contrare consumers also start looking for bargains. In my experience, in the luxury item category, consumers are looking for the best buy for their money. This is where a product differentiation strategy is extremely important and knowing full well the strategic marketing advantages your product has as compared to the other products in the market. Let me know what you are experiencing in your area.

Alex Gilmore

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Google and their pursuit of Relevance

Posted on February 2, 2012 by alex

When Google was started on the Stanford University by Sergey Brin and Larry Page they took a novel approach as to how a search engine worked. All the other organic search engines before Google were created by Geeks and therefore you had to think like a Geek to find anything. Sergey and Larry made their search engine, even though they are Geeks, work for how you and I would search. This is the beginning of relevance. This has been their strategy from the beginning and it is the same with their algorithm team today.

The internet is constantly changing and evolving. Instead of consumers adapting to search engines the later are now reacting to you and your searching habits. Five years ago I notice a move by Google in response to consumers searching habits. To accommodate for sthe paradigm shift they have been tracking everything you do associated with their search engine. This is not done with cookies but with your IP address and your computers serial number. Every time you make a search and click on one of the results they remember it and it goes into the database of you. This information include websites that you have gone to from there SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), topics that you search for, websites you have visited from their SERPs and then what pages you visited in the site you went to. To illustrate search your favorite topic and click from the SERPs several times and eventually Google will remove the site you have gone to from the results. The reason for this is they have seen you go to that web page several times but you continue to search the same thing so why give you in the results something that you have already seen and went to. Additionally if you and several others across the US search the exact same keyword phrase in Google all of you will get different results which are all due to relevance.

On the other hand this has serious implications for web designers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals. Google does the exact same thing to a website, that is indexed with them, to determine their relevance , or page rank, score. They watch what type of consumer comes to your website and where they go into to it. This can be very difficult for Google to do if your site is not registered with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. Google Analytics allow you to put tracking codes in your website so they can get statistic on the site and give you statistics back. Additionally this allows them to use this information to give the searcher more relevant results. Additionally Google Webmaster Tools allows you to do other things such as giving an xml sitemap. This code, that you put into your website, from here does essentially the same thing as Google Analytics.

If you are an SEO professional this has huge implications. For your website to show up in their SERPs these tracking devices are very important to have in your website. The simple reason for this is you want your site to be very easy when it comes to Google tracking it in order to show up high in their results. So all this tracking by Google helps them to create a relevance score for the website which goes into their algorithm and aides the search engine to give you relevant results based on your searching habits.

Alex Gilmore

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Pitfalls of Changing Your Hosting and WordPress Blogging

Posted on January 31, 2012 by alex

Two weeks ago I had this brilliant idea to move my hosting to a server that handled WordPress better and that is a Linux Server. Following all the instructions of backing up my blog and database meticulously I proceeded. However when I went to reinstall it on my new server I set up the sql database and then proceeded. It is all in good if I was moving it to another Windows server  but no I was changing. So as a result I am rebuilding my blog. So my advice to you is set your blog up on the correct server first and leave it there. My blogging is resuming.

Alex Gilmore

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