They’ve added a new feature to their ranking algorithm, and it basically says:

If users let Google know they don’t like your site, your ranking will suffer.

Google’s Amit Singhal explained it this way:

“… we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms.”

I don’t know what ‘some high-confidence situations’ are, but at this point it probably means it’s a minor change that will not have too much effect on the overall search results. But, I’m predicting that …

We are going to see a huge shift in how Google rankings are measured.

5 years from now we will have rankings that are LARGELY based on user votes.

A long time smart people have been claiming that it is vital to build high quality sites, because Google wants high quality. But actually that is NOT EXACTLY what Google wants.

It’s clearly Google’s goal to give users what they are looking for, what they like most. Pardon me, that’s not necessarily the same as high quality.

Anyway, Google will work hard to find ways to do this.

• In the past Google counted webmaster votes, using backlinks as a measure for site ranking.
• In the future Google will be counting user votes, be it blocking sites, or referencing them socially in Facebook, Twitter and the like.

=> In the long run the internet users will determine which sites are ranking high, and which sites go down.

It’s harder to figure out for Google, but it’s definitely coming at you!

SEOmoz has researched how URL mentions on Twitter and Facebook seem to influence a site’s ranking already:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

What do you think? Tell me in your comments;

1. Will my prediction come true?
2. Will site owners who play the social game well (despite having crappy sites) win over those who build excellent sites?
3. Or will great content finally be king?

I recommend that you read it word by word.

In case you don’t know yet: http://www.seobook.com is one of the premier sources on Search Engine Optimization.

In today’s post Peter has confronted the world’s leading SEO experts to answer this question:

What qualities are common in Aaron Wall, DaveN, Bob Massa, Jason Duke, SugarRae, et al, that new SEOs can adopt, to come closer to people like these in expertise. Where do most new SEOs go wrong when they set learning priorities?

• If SEO makes you feel overwhelmed, check out this SEO article.
• If you don’t know where to start and what to focus on, check out this SEO article.
• If you want to find out what the pros focus on with SEO, … you know what to do.

Here’s the link:

http://www.seobook.com/where-do-new-seos-go-wrong-when-they-set-learning-priorities

Here’s our second article on affiliate article marketing.

This one and the following 4 installments will explain in detail the 5 step process to promote affiliate products with articles.

1. Position your articles where they can be found

2. Write headlines that gain attention

3. Evoke interest in the article body

4. Call to action in the resource box

5. Get more visitors to visit your article

Using Keywords to Position Your Articles

In a nutshell, keywords are just words or phrases that people use to search for anything and everything online. Seeing as we’re getting the nomenclature out of the way, ‘keyword density’ is the amount of a certain keyword per 100 words.

Keywords are important – that can’t be stressed enough. Considering that search engines are still the primary way in which people look for anything on the internet, it means that people who are looking for things in whatever niche you’re in, are going to be doing so on search engines.

Thus, when talking about positioning your articles, it essentially means positioning them in the relevant searches, so that they’re more likely to be found by the right people.

What happens if this isn’t done? Well, say you had an article about blogging for money, but it didn’t contain any keywords that are being searched for a decent amount of times per month. In this sort of case, there would be no way that anyone would find your article, and so it would go pretty much unread and unattended.

Admittedly, for long articles there inadvertently ends up being a keyword used here or there, but for reliable results, you’re going to want at least a 1% keyword density (but not more than 3%).

First though, you’re going to have to find the keywords that you intend to use.

Keyword Research

Basic keyword research is really pretty easy, and there isn’t too much about it that even a beginner can’t come to grips with. To start off with, the keyword research tool of choice is Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Seeing as Google is the most popular search engine around, getting data from it seems to be a logical place to begin.

When conducting keyword research, there are three considerations in particular that play an important role:

1. Number of Searches for a specific keyword

Quite literally, this is just the number of searches per month. If a term has a high number of searches, it means lots of people are looking for it, which definitely makes it a better choice.

2. Competition for a specific keyword

Once you have a keyword that has a decent amount of searches, plug it into Google and search for it. When you get the results, take note of how many there are. For instance, if there are 11,800,000 results, then that means a lot of people are competing for that keyword.

On the other hand, if you end up with something like 1,800 results, then there are very few competing websites.

Needless to say, with less competition, you stand a much better chance of appearing on the first page of the search results, which is really what you should be aiming for. Once you’re there, you will no doubt see a dramatic increase in your views.

3. Profitability of your keyword

Not all traffic is as profitable, and sometimes, for certain keywords, the traffic that is obtained just refuses to be converted. While there are a lot of factors that can affect this, it isn’t too relevant as far as keyword research is concerned.

Instead, it is better to know just one simple test of the ‘profitability’ of a keyword.

When you perform a search for the keyword to scope out the competition, take notice as to whether or not any adverts appear. If they do, then that means someone out there feels that it is worth spending money on that keyword.

Admittedly, this isn’t a 100% accurate test, but it should suffice to give you a general idea.

By looking at these three areas of keyword research, you should end up with a list of keywords which you can use to position your articles well. Remember: The idea is to get profitable keywords that have a decent number of searches per month, and low competition.

Keyword Enriched Articles

With the keywords that you’ve acquired, you need to enrich your articles with them. Mind you, there is a difference between enriching and stuffing, and search engines are smart enough to recognize when someone is trying to fool them.

Insert keywords in such a way that they flow smoothly through the article, and follow the 1% to 3% keyword density rule closely. For each article, it is generally advisable to have one ‘short’ keyword of about 2 to 3 words, and two ‘long’ keywords of 4 or more words.

If you do all of this, your articles should be showing up for the keywords that you’re targeting, and so, all that remains is to consider the other aspects of article marketing.

In the next installment of the series we’ll talk about how to make people actually read your article.

The ‘long-tail’ is a term given to a keyword phrase that is longer than the normal keyword phrase that you may have in the past been targeting to gain organic traffic from the search engines.

Let me explain.

In the past it was common place to target highly trafficable keywords that were very popular in your niche in the hope that you would be able to gain a share of this huge amount of traffic.

For example, if you had built a site about internet marketing and search engine optimization you would have done your keyword research and discovered that the term “search engine optimization” was searched for over 450,000 times per month. So naturally you would have optimized your pages for this keyword phrase to try to get a listing on the first page of the search engines (SERPs) to capitalize on this traffic.

Then you would have focused on optimizing a webpage for the next highest keyword phrase – and then the next – and then the next. And so on.

Basically most people only ever focus their efforts on the top 20 search terms and forget about the rest as there just doesn’t seem to be enough reward in optimizing a webpage on a long-tail keyword phrase that only gets a handful of visitors each day.

For instance, a long-tail keyword phrase for your internet marketing site may be “search engine optimization keywords”, but as this term only gets about 390 searches a month you decide to forget about it. It’s just not worth the effort, particularly when you can get 450,000 visitors by optimizing for a more popular keyword like “search engine optimization”.

But let’s face it.

There are only 10 spots on the first page of any search engine, so the odds of you being able to gain a top spot for competitive keywords such as “search engine optimization” is remote at best. However this doesn’t deter most people as the lure of a share of 450,000 visitors is just too compelling.

The end result is that for most people this just doesn’t happen and as a result they never achieve the traffic they hope for. So they give up trying and never reach the heights that they expected.

But here’s the real twist…

Some of the marketers who do get lucky and get a high listing for one of their main keywords still don’t see the long-term rewards they had thought they would achieve with a top search engine listing for a popular keyword. And it’s all due to not focusing on the “long-tail”.

Let me give you an example to explain what I mean.

For one moment let’s assume you have built an internet marketing website and after a lot of effort and hard work you finally achieve the #1 spot for your top keyword. In fact, your top 20 keywords are sending you 15,000 visitors a day to your website from the search engines and you’re making a good income from monetizing this traffic.

You’re getting heaps of free traffic and the money is rolling in. What more could you ask for. Life is great!

The trouble is that in your excitement to optimize your site for the top keyword phrases in your niche, you forget about the long-tail keyword phrases. But hey, who cares. Your top keywords bring in 95% of your traffic, so you don’t need to worry about the smaller stuff. It’s just not worth the effort.

Then you wake up one morning and check your web stats.

Disaster!

Your traffic has dropped from 15,000 to a mere 500 overnight. You hurriedly check the position of your keywords and discover that Google has had a dreaded update and you’re no longer on the front page for your main keywords. In fact, you’ve gone from the first page to the 7th page.

All of a sudden instead of earning $10k per month, you’re looking at maybe $500 if you’re lucky. Basically your entire business has been destroyed overnight. And if you think this is an isolated case, think again. This scenario is repeated every time the search engines update their algorithms.

Now imagine that rather than just focusing entirely on the popular keywords, you decided to focus on the long-tail keyword phrases to drive traffic to your site. But rather than focus on just a few long-tail keywords, you focus on 200 such keywords. Combined these keywords can drive more traffic to your site than what your most competitive keywords can.

Yes it’s a lot more work – but remember, you want to build a long-term sustainable internet business, so it’s not going to be easy. The rewards will be worth it.

And here’s the real exciting part – you are getting traffic from a wider range of keywords. So if one of your top rankings keywords bites the dust, it won’t have a huge affect on your business as you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.

People who search using long-tail keywords are highly targeted potential customers. They have already done their preliminary searches and are now totally focused on exactly what they want and therefore they are more likely to convert to customers than someone who does a broader keyword search.

So while you may not get as many visitors to your site if you focus your efforts on long-tail keyword phrases, your visitors are more likely to convert into customers at a much higher rate – plus you have created a LONG-TERM business in that you are not at the mercy of the search engines and it is unlikely that you would be wiped out overnight.

So the next time you built a niche site, don’t forget to go long for the long term keyword phrase!

Reality check: Since July 25 2008 it’s official; there are more than 1 Trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) web pages competing against each other and competing with your tiny internet presence.

What does that do to your hopes of being #1? Still alive and kicking? Great!

Here’s some good news: Unlike what most people think it actually isn’t that hard to get a good search engine position. There are 3 simple things every web site owner can do to increase his visibility on the net…
to be continued, sign up for the news feed on the right hand side.

What I learned from talks with fellow entrepreneurs is that many business people who’ve had a business web site for years still have no clue on how to make it successful.

They don’t have much visitors; and the few who come to their web site don’t turn into customers. A visitor shows up, clicks, leaves, and is never seen again.

This is not what you want, right?

Successfully promoting your web site is neither hard to do nor is it a hidden secret nor is it expensive.

In the upcoming months I will show you dozens of strategies you can use to get targeted traffic to your business web site.

• What makes the difference between a successful web site promotion and a failure?
• What if you had a simple plan, a guiding principle, to promote your web site from zero to hero?

Having A Successful Website Does Not Happen By Accident.

Instead it is something that you can plan and then achieve easily step by step.

You’re guaranteed to turn your site into an internet marketing success if you commit to the 5 Pillars Of Web Site Promotion and do a few simple steps on a daily basis.

How To Build A Solid Foundation For Your Marketing Plan.

Just like building a house, building a successful web site requires a strong and solid foundation. Your success cannot be built on something ethereal, you want to build a house to last.

So before taking any promotional action you need to be clear about the overall goal or your web site.

Read again: do not take any action unless your 100% clear about your site’s goal and your targeted visitors.

Don’t take this lightly. It sounds so obvious and simple that most people rush over it and never really think about it.

But you should.

I’ve had dozens of consultations with business owners who ignored that advice. These are the people that say internet marketing doesn’t work.

And they are right.

If you put up random web sites without a goal and a plan you set yourself up for failure. But that’s true in any area in life, isn’t it? Taking action without a plan and a goal just doesn’t yield much.

Here’s your chance to get it right. Print this article out and then write down the answer to these questions:

1. Who exactly is your ideal visitor? Where do you find these people online? At first you might find it hard to be precise about that. You may be afraid to leave people out and reduce your chance. Actually your chances of success will increase if you narrow your target.
2. What do you want your visitors to do once they come to your site? What is the primary goal of your web site? Sure, you do not want to leave them for good. But what do you want? And how do you make them do what you want them to do?

The answers to that will be your guiding principle whenever you’re not sure what to do next and what to focus on.

It sounds more complicated than it is.

But you’ll never figure it out unless you write down your goals and start taking the appropriate actions.

Once you know your goals and your ideal visitor you can implement a step by step internet marketing plan.

The 5 pillars of web site promotion represent 5 topics you should use on a daily basis to make your site successful.

Taking little steps each day will be much more profitable than doing a huge and expensive marketing blast in one week and then do nothing for the next 12 months.

Continuity builds success.

That’s why you rather do 15 minutes a day. The little actions you take will build up like compounded interest in your bank account.

So What Are The ’5 Pillars Of Web Site Promotion’?

At first glance it might seem a lot – but if you take it one step at a time all will come easy and natural to you. Here you go:

The first pillar of web site promotion: Getting back links to your site. That’s really important. The more back links you can get to your site, the better. Ideally try to get links from sites that match your site in topic. So if you have an internet marketing site, you don’t want too have all your links coming from sites about golf or dog grooming.

Why?

1. Visitors from a related site are more likely to click through to you.
2. Search engines like Google will give more weight to that link if the site’s topic matches yours.

What else do we have for your ‘promotional consideration’?

The second pillar of web site promotion: Email Marketing. I hate to break it to you, but let’s face an ugly truth here: Unless you capture their email address 99 from 100 visitors leave your site for good.

They did not buy, and they will never come back.

The way to turn this around is email marketing. Get your visitors email and permission to email them with marketing messages.

Here are a few benefits of capturing your visitor’s email:

• You can send out promotions for your own products and services to increase sales.
• You can send out promotions for affiliate programs and earn commissions.
• You can point your your readers back to your site and thus create repeat visits.

Now if you manage to drive new visitors to your site for free, you’d have a killer marketing strategy funneling your free traffic into your email promotions. Getting free web site visitor’s is what the next pillar is about.

The third pillar of web site promotion: Search Engine Optimization. 85% of all visitors arrive at your site through a search engine. So they did a search, for example with Google. Your site came up at the search engine results page (SERP) and the visitor clicked through.

The more often your site is at the top of search engine results pages, the more free traffic you get.

That’s why you should optimize your site for the search engines. The process is called ‘search engine optimization’. In short it means that you optimize your site in a way that makes it relevant for specific search terms people might use. Let’s say your site is about ‘the 5 pillars of web site promotion’. When someone enters that term in a search, then you would want to see your site at the top of the search engine results.

About the 5pillars … ah, well, it’s not something people are likely to search for … I know that.

You can learn more about search engine optimization in this blog’s category ‘search marketing’. Now let’s see how to make humans and search engine robots fall in love with your site, it’s pillar #4:

The fourth pillar of web site promotion: The amount and attractiveness of content on your web site. Search engines as well as visitors love regularly updated and content rich web sites.

After all: why would someone come to your site twice if there’s noting new to discover. On the internet we’ve become information junkies.

• People browsing the net are looking for information.
• They are looking for sites that provide value.
• They are craving new content all the time.

That’s why it’s easy to put your competition to dust.

Most of them treat their web site like a business brochure that is rarely updated. Take advantage and post fresh and useful content. Your visitors and the search engines will love it, come back often and refer your site.

The fifth pillar of web site promotion: Promoting your web site with paid advertising. This is the fastest way to get targeted visitors to your site: placing ads on other web sites and offline in print magazines and news papers.

The crucial point of course is that it costs money to place an ad. Unless you already have a marketing budget you should start to set one up. Or- if you’re dead broke – your paid marketing will have to wait till you made some money. It is however an area not to be neglected.

There’s no other means of online marketing where you have that much control about who gets exposed to your promotion.

But since it’s costly: better make sure your web site converts visitors to buyers before running a campaign. When running an ad campaign keep track of cost and be sure to stop it if it generates a loss.

So those are the 5 pillars.

Remember our building analogy?

There’s a final piece missing to build your house – the roof of your successful web site promo.

Let’s Top Your Success – With A Roof

The final piece of your marketing plan is ‘Measure Your Success’!

You do not want to waste your time and effort and money on any activity that doesn’t pay off. So measure what works and what doesn’t. Then expand what works and discontinue what doesn’t.

How do you do it?

Well, first of all get yourself a software to track what visitors are doing on your site. The easiest way to go is Google analytics.

Technically it’s a tiny piece of text that will be incorporated in all your pages. Then the analytics software will track what happens on your site.

A site analytics tool will show you useful information like:

• how many visitors come to your site
• what pages do they look at
• how long do they stay
• where do they leave
• etc. etc.

So there you have it, the foundation, the 5 pillars and the roof.

That Finishes Our Picture…

Here You Have It, The Step By Step Plan For Successful Web Site Promotion.

1. Before you start promoting decide who should come to your site and what action you want your visitor to take.

2. Work on improving all 5 pillars for your site. You could for example invest 15 to 30 minutes each day on 1 of the pillars. If you follow through from Monday to Friday you’ll be amazed. You’ll see your traffic grow and people coming back to your site again and again. Example:

1. Monday: 30 minutes link building.
2. Tuesday: 30 minutes to improve your email marketing.
3. Wednesday: 30 minutes to SEO one page on one of your sites.
4. Thursday: 30 minutes to add fresh content to one of your sites.
5. Friday: 30 minutes to place an ad through PPC, E-zines, or print advertising.

3. While building your traffic and working on the 5 pillars, monitor what’s happening on your site. Put more time, energy and money in promotions that produce results. Stop promotions that do not produce results.

Remember: Continuity Builds Success! Follow through with such an easy plan on a day by day basis and you simply can’t fail.

You’re guaranteed to see your traffic jump through the roof.