Busby SEO Test

The SEO (search engine optimizing) business has emerged as a major player in the Internet business marketplace. Webmasters and website owners always arrive to a stage where they wonder why their business fail in making money, despite catchy domain name, excellent design and amazing Flash animation in the home page. The first one to blame is the webmaster, which is always at hand because he only has to deal with servers, hosting features, market analysis, programming languages, HTML design, art, copywriting, customer support and related tasks.When the webmaster realizes the need for visibility and SE free traffic, usually looks for the SEO guys. Selecting a SEO company is not easy, because their methods are secret, and their results difficult to compare. It is common to detect SEOs that are not available because they are busy selling their own stuff and enjoying the results, and SEOs ready to sell services in order to collect some money while learning how to do the job.

Most of the SEOs charge a fixed fee, which can depend on the number of pages, number of keywords, languages in case of bilingual sites, and maybe words, in extensive websites. Internal links are another pricing factor, because linking usually goes together with complexity.

If we need to make a SEO quote we also assess the current SEO status, because is easier to work with a new site, where any result will be welcome, than optimizing an established website, with decent PageRank, many incoming links and a structure that needs to be respected to avoid loss of existing traffic. It is also likely that someone had started doing SEO work, and the obvious steps are already taken, forcing us to concentrate on subtle, controversial or hard-to-implement changes. We made a first attempt to an online SEO cost calculator based on number of pages and keywords, but we still use a lot of guessing and risking for our budgets.

The client very often wants us SEO to work on a SE-positioning-results basis. So, if we do not get results, we do not collect any payment. Inexperienced site owners are an easy prey. I can offer them a first screen in Google under “Joe`s Average Butcher store”, and get away with it. However, when clients demand a first screen under “sex site” or “mp3 CD” we are in some trouble.

Measuring the difficulty and/or merit of a given positioning status can be useful for:

- charging SEO customers on a results basis - establishing the value of a SEO technique, tool or company - appraising domains or developed websites - choosing keywords before starting a SEO campaign, in order to pick up reachable targets (not to easy, not to difficult)

The existing competition for a keyword has two meanings in this context. One is the probable difficulty of ranking, because it is likely that good SEOs have entered that market. The other is the possible value for the client once we manage to rank at the top, since a lot of searchers will probably mean a lot of traffic as a prize for any good ranking.

Contrasting with the strategic value of SE Positioning, there is no published index or method for measuring SE positioning results. We did not find any such measure, while searching for these and related terms:

measure SE positioning “SE positioning measure” “SE positioning results” “SE positioning index”

So, if someone created some wise SEO Rate or Index, he did not know enough SEO to make it appear in Google… Bad sign.

(I might be including relevant keywords in this article for indexation sake… sorry for that ;))

SEO companies do not share a standard, and when they need to compete, they run positioning contests with a fixed, arbitrary keyword. So, if you search under mangeur de cigogne (stork eater) you will be surprised to see 153,000 results, mostly arising from a well known SEO contest. The real world SEO contest is the word SEO, which is the top prize for most SEO companies, and has 28 million Google SERPs. Getting to the 20th post of those is much harder than being on top of the 10 million that search for optimized page, as we are. Or getting first out of the 2 million that search in Spanish for promocion de sitios (site promotion), which was comparably a piece of cake.

As you see, I am using the number of Google indexed pages as a measure of popularity. If you are 1st among one million that is good. But, is it better to be 2nd among 2,000,000? How about 10th among 20,000,000?

What we all know is that being 20th among 100,000 beats being 50th among 1000 million, just because nobody ever cares to search for a 50th positioned website.

So, we first suggested:

Keyword SEPI - Search Engine Positioning Index = Total page number / log (Position + 1)

(We add 1 to prevent dividing by zero)

The Google Positioning Index for my page positioned 1st under Google First Place would be:

19,000,000 / log 2 = 63,116,663

This is a usable index, but it is still incomplete.

It happens that being first under improve womanhood (240,000 results) seems to be quite easy for experienced SEOs, while improve manhood (500,000 results) seems almost impossible. Why? Because the first 100 results under Womanhood are there by pure chance, while the first 100 under Manhood are there because savvy SEOs trying to sell Viagra made a hard-to-beat effort to be there.

For a quality estimation of positioning difficulty we need to analyze the first 10 sites in the SERP, look for PageRank, backlinks and optimization status, among other factors.

To detect if a keyword is very competitive and searched for we have several methods. We can count the number of AdWords, which reflect the interest of webmasters for that keyword. Also, when SEOs fail positioning a site in the organic (free) SE results, they pay a PPC campaign such as Adwords. We also use the Overture Keyword Selection Tool, which provides statistics on monthly searches.

However, the market variables are a different story. If our client wants to be first among “stork eater” we will have a very hard job getting him there, although there is not commercial value on that keyword whatsoever.

So, I arbitrary chose PageRank in the first 10 sites of a SERP as a measure of competitor expertise. Squared, because of its great relevance.

Thus, Total Results and Top PageRanks are used to calculate our new index. These factors influencing positioning difficulty were chosen because they are relatively easy to calculate. However, I wish I knew all what it takes to be always first in SERP. Of course, that is a valuable commercial secret.

A good Search Engine Positioning Index should be:

- Reproducible - Consistent - Non-manipulable - Easy to calculate - Accepted - Non-proprietary - Free (or cheap)

Then, I propose:

Keyword SEPI = Total page number * Top PageRanks (to the square) = 10,000 * log (Position + 1)

Keyword SEPI is: Keyword Search Engine Positioning Index

Total page number is the result shown by Google or Yahoo after the search. We do not use quotation marks unless specified. To distinguish keyword phrases we use boldface. We use Google.com or Yahoo.com, not the regional sites, unless specified.

Top PageRanks is the PageRank average for the 1st ten results of a search. We use the Google toolbar or an online PageRank detector.

To analyze multi-keyword results, such as those coming from a campaign, a tool or a SEO company, we consider the sumatory of the partial SEPIs.

The SE positioning index (SEPI) does not have a correlation with the potential economic value of a site. One can obtain excellent rankings under keywords that receive little attention from searchers, getting little traffic. By multiplying SEPI for the number of monthly searches for a certain keyword, we obtain an approximation to the site commercial value.

Anyone who is serious about building wealth on the Internet MUST or be a winner on current SEO contest like Busby SEO Test must master the search engines. Therefore, learning how the search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search, is key to anyone optimizing their website for search engine indexing.The most common methods the search engines use to index a site is by using content scanning robots called “Web Crawlers” or “Spiders”.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A “spider” is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, reads the site’s Meta tags, and also follows the site’s outbound links. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine, although there is a metatag within many websites’ header that contains instructions for the crawlers to return in a specified number of days.

A spider creates a file almost like a book; it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day!

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

These algorithms are largely a mystery; a deep secret known only to the search engine staff. Huge amounts of money are paid to SEO (search engine optimization) experts (as well as some who claim to be experts) to optimize pages for the highest possible search engine rankings. Top rankings on engines like Google mean market domination for the well optimized site, and that top rank is highly contested, as you can guess!

As webmaster know, search engine optimization / SEO is a tedious job and process for a long term goal. Creating or optimizing site to rank high is a challenge. Different and thousands of questions left unanswered like how can one maintain the rank on search engines. As for thoughts on seo do’s and dont’s here are some points to consider.

DO’s on SEO

1.Natural Link Buil-Up. Creating links on natural way means having links to your site on a long term not in a thousand link on a snap or a blink in of an eye.

2. Creating a search engine friendly url or links. This clearly indicates good points where search engine bots can easily crawl your site without those long url or session id attached to the page being optimized.

3. Quality backlinks or related backlinks. Meaning if your site is about food, webmaster should have links pointing to their site that is related or close to related on food topic.

4. Avoid linking to sites you think and considered to be spam sites.

5. On links pointing to your site. Be sure that your site is on the page where links are enough and cannot be more than 100 site on one page. Read the rest of this entry »

What is Link Bait ? Link Bait is the latest Buzz in SEO which requires some piece of code that others can put on their webpage’s and you will get benefited by getting back links from their sites. Let’s take few examples, the following site provides piece of code which other websites can paste on their web pages for showing Google PR on the page itself.see check page rank section on prchecker.info for more details In return to this other web sites will give this site back links. Another example, sometimes you must be thinking about what will be the future page rank of your webpage or website, considering this the following site has made a tool or a piece of coding which collects Google Page Rank information from up to 35 Google Data Centers. The following site gives you the coding that can be pasted on webpage’s easily.

Other possible ways for doing Link Bait - You can also make a theme, plug-in or piece of software and many other things too like write a valuable resource, write an interesting article, run a contest, write something controversial, give something helpful for free, become an expert in niche and write something valuable. You can also try to create a piece of code which must be unique and useful. Although it might take some time to develop such tool but believe me it can take your ranking to a new high. Make something that other can put on their webpage’s, make something that others can take benefits from and in return you too. Link Bait is like a long term investment. There are various ways to create your back links but do something that you don’t have to put repeated efforts on it as we do in typical SEO things like directory submission. Making such a good tool is time taking no doubt but it’s so sound and established that after creating this you will find enormous back links linking to your website to become the winner of Busby SEO Test contest.

There are varied industry opinions around SEO contests like current contest by Busby : Busby SEO Test, some feel they are a dime a dozen and others feel it is part of the evolution of the web. So in the dawn of web 2.0 - are search marketing contests hot or not?I think it depends on who’s putting on the contest and what they are measuring. As a search marketer myself, I am not so keen on the search marketing contests that weigh ranking alone.

No good can come from this type of contest. A ranking contest only invites entrants to utilize one of many search engine spamming techniques. True search marketers believe there is a lot more to successful SEO then ranking alone.

Search marketing contests have been going on since 2002. I have never been interested in entering until a search marketing contest from Marketing Pilgrim caught me eye.

This is not your ordinary search marketing contest, the emphasis is on “writing” not necessarily “ranking”. Contest entrants compose a 400-1000 word article on any aspect related to search. Once the article is published on Marketing Pilgrim’s Blog you have 4 weeks to raise awareness and drive “unique visitors” to your article.

The winner is awarded 10,000 worth of prizes, most of which is educational in nature;Subscriptions to SEO tools, search marketing conference passes, and one on one time with some of today’s nationally known search marketing experts. Search marketing contests like this are definitely HOT.

I decide to enter this years Spring search marketing contest. My article topic is: “So You Wanna Be a Search Marketer”

My reason for entering was simple; the scholarship is a great opportunity. The prizes allow you to refine your search marketing skills, something that I spend a lot of time and money on.

So for all of you who think such contests are a waste of time and not professional you’re truly missing out on a wonderful opportunity.