• Just two  or three positions at top of Google or somewhere on Google’s first page – since Google typically serves up 10 search results per page, two or three positions represent only a 20% or 30% “share of the page,” which is a far cry from dominating Google (in my view)
• Obscure search terms that have very little search volume and very little value to anyone even if he/she did dominate Google for them – this wouldn’t be so bad if they at least acknowledged the fact that the search terms for which they’re dominating Google were practically worthless
• Search terms are enclosed in quotes (e.g., “dominating Google”) – quotes around a search term direct Google to refine search results to only display  pages that include a match to the phrase that was searched for, which always results in far fewer search results being displayed and, therefore, makes it much easier to dominate Google (a search for the phrase dominating Google without quotes returns 1.32 million search results while a search for the phrase “dominating Google” with quotes returns 20,300 search results)

This kind of misrepresentation generally leads to two results:

• First , aspiring Internet marketing entrepreneurs and established small and medium business owners empty their wallets so they, too, can dominate Google just like they were told they could
• Second, those same Internet marketing entrepreneurs and small and medium business owners stop believing that it’s possible to dominate Google after it does not happen

This is unfortunate for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that people lose out on the very real opportunity to not only achieve multiple positions at or near the top of Google, but also to literally dominate the first page by taking over 50% or more of Google’ first page of search results.

The example that follows is one of many that provides proof-positive that dominating Google is not only achievable, but it is also realistic within a short timeframe.

Dominating Google for a Worthwhile Search Term

Skills for Growth is a workforce planning and development initiative run by the State Government of Victoria (in Australia), open to all qualified small and medium businesses in Victoria. And even though the government has been promoting the program and has a website where business owners can gather more information and register, there are still people who go to Google every day looking for information specifically about Skills for Growth.

I’ve chosen this one from a number of different examples I could have used for a couple of reasons:

• There is no commercial value to me because I’m not part of any business that can benefit from the program – so I’m not giving anything away of any value to me
• There is no commercial value to any client of mine because no client of mine is currently involved in the program – so I’m not giving away anything of any value to a client (which, of course, I wouldn’t do under any circumstances)

And while the search term skills for growth does not have a particularly high monthly search volume – about 3,600 global broad-match (no quotes) searches every month – people who are looking for information about the Skills for Growth program are potentially very valuable to the businesses that are on the panel of suppliers – due to the fact that the suppliers are “fighting it out” with one another for a slice of a $52 million pie (that’s the total funding behind the program).

This means that, if you happened to be one of those suppliers, dominating Google for the term skills for growth could potentially be very valuable to your business.

Video Evidence That’s it’s Possible to Dominate Google

The screencast below was recorded on October 6, 2010 – approximately one month after I wrote a basic overview of the Skills for Growth program and published it to one of my websites. I followed this up by converting the content into some different formats – PDF, PPT, and video – and publishing them to different Web properties shortly thereafter.

Click on the link to see a high-definition version of the “Dominating Google” screencast

As you can see in the screencast, in the month since I first created and published content about Skills for Growth, my content is dominating the first page of Google’s search results for a search term with 3,600 broad-match global monthly searches –  currently holding:

• First position
• Second position
• Third position
• Fifth position
• Sixth position
• Seventh position
• Ninth position
• Eleventh position (although Google typically only displays ten results on the first page, it’s increasingly common to see additional search results on the first page when Google serves up “universal” content, such as videos, news, images, and so forth)

Strategies for Getting to the Top of Google and for Dominating Google

My strategies for getting to the top of Google and for dominating Google are, of course, completely confidential. And while some of the savvier Internet marketing minds might be able to divine some of the elements of my strategies, there’s no way to unravel the full “mystery” of how to dominate Google.

My time and expertise are, however, available.

So if you are interested in getting some of your website’s content to the top of Google – or if you’re interested in aiming even higher and dominating Google – click on the link to get in touch with me to see if – and how – I can help you.

If the content had been published to com.au TLDs, then there is little doubt that it would hold a similarly dominant position in Google Australia’s search results.

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And yet in spite of the obvious importance of SEO, the realtiy is that the vast majority of websites have never been exposed to even a bare-minimum level of SEO effort, meaning that they are potentially forfeiting top rankings – and the traffic that top rankings virtually guarantee – to their competitors

Why do so few people bother with SEO when it is so essential to a website’s success? Here are three possible reasons:

• Search engines employ extremely complex ranking algorithms

A ranking algorithm is basically a mathematical formula that comprises many different variables that evaluates and ranks web pages in order of relevance to a keyword query. Google’s algorithm is reputed to comprise around 200 different variables, which means, in a sense, that every time you create a website you’ve got to do about 200 things “right” (or at least “more right” than all of the other websites that are competing against you for the same keywords).

As if it’s not bad enough having to do about 200 things right every time you create a website, search engines do not tell you what those 200 things are. In fact, not only are their ranking algorithms locked up tighter than Fort Knox, there is speculation that they release misinformation about their ranking algorithms in an effort to throw off people who try to manipulate the system to achieve better rankings.

• Search engine ranking algorithms are constantly changing

Even if you knew what all of Google’s 200+ ranking factors were and if you were able to do all of them “right” every time you built a website, you’d still be behind the eight-ball because search engines are constantly trying to improve the experience for the end user so they are constantly tweaking their algorithms. In fact, it’s been reported that Google plans to introduce about 550 or so improvements to its ranking algorithm in 2010.

In spite of some seemingly significant hurdles, SEO is eminently “doable” if you follow two simple pieces of advice:

First, take care of the basics.

Find out where your website stands today vis-a-vis your top-ranking competitors for your target keywords. Hire a SEO consultant or, if you really want to be in control of your website’s destiny, invest a few hundred dollars in some SEO software. And then take action to close the obvious gaps.

Second, forget about chasing search engine ranking algorithms.

Think about end-users. That’s what the search engine algorithms are designed to do, so don’t you think you should too?

By taking care of the basics and focusing on the end user, SEO “happens” naturally; so, too, will better visibility in the natural search results.

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• Maximizing its relevance to its target keywords
• Boosting its authority for the content on its pages
• Increasing its usability for the people who find it
• Improving its accessibility to the search engine spiders that crawl it
• Eliminating technical factors that impair its performance

In other words, SEO focuses on making a website better for users – relevance, authority, and usability are all about end-user satisfaction – and, at the same time, making a website better for search engines. And the people behind the search engines will tell you to focus on things in that order.

That is a lot easier said than done, however.

Complexity of Search Engine Ranking Algorithms

Search engines employ extremely complex algorithms that are meant to reflect both “user friendliness” – relevance, authority, and usability – and “search engine friendliness” – accessibility and technical factors – in order to rank the tens of thousands or millions of pages in their indexes that represent a fit to a searcher’s keyword query.

Google’s ranking algorithm is reputed to be made up of more than 200 different variables, each one of which is meant to address either user-friendliness or search engine friendliness (or, in some cases, both).

And the people behind the search engines are notoriously secretive about the variables that make up their ranking algorithms.

So not only do you have about 200 “boxes to tick” for every website you set out to optimize, you’re forced to make a lot of guesses about those boxes before you can relax.

And if you think you can ever really relax when it comes to your SEO efforts, think again. In their never-ending – and admirable -efforts to achieve greater “user friendliness” and “search engine friendliness,” the people behind the search engines are constantly tweaking their ranking algorithms. Google, in fact, is said to be planning about 550 improvements to its ranking algorithm in 2010.

At the end of the day, SEO requires a lot of extremely specialized knowledge, time, and attention – on an ongoing basis. But because a SEO effort can give a website’s rankings a dramatic boost in the search results – and there is a significant connection between search engine ranking and search referral traffic – it is well worth doing whatever it takes to develop the knowledge and to be able to invest the time and attention.

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AOL’s Controversial Data Release on Search Engine Ranking and Click Distribution

While search engines are fiercely protective of much of the data that are available to them – including anything that shows any connection between search engine ranking and click “distribution” (clicks on search engine results by their ranking) – there was one notable exception back in 2006 when the research arm of AOL released search log data on about 650,000 subscribers who carried out nearly 20 million search queries over the course of a three month period (it’s worth noting that AOL’s search engine was then – and is still now – powered by Google).

The data in the table to the right shows percentage of click distribution by search engine ranking for the first five pages of search results (click the image to enlarge).

AOL SERP Clickthrough Rates

As you can see, the top search engine ranking received 42.30% of the click distribution, while the second and third search engine rankings followed with 11.92% and 8.44%, respectively.

The top three search engine rankings combined for more than 60% of the total click distribution, while the top five search engine rankings – combined – received more than 70% of the total click through distribution.

All search engine results ranking on the first page – combined – received nearly 90% of the total click distribution, leaving about 4.5% for the second page and a little less than 6% for all of the remaining tens of thousands or millions of web pages vying for the same keyword.

Cornell University’s Eye-Tracking Analysis

Researchers at Cornell University have also made their contribution to the body of evidence on the search engine ranking-click distribution connection.

They employed eye-tracking analysis to explore the both click and attention distribution. While we won’t go into the science of eye-tracking or the mechanics of the study, suffice to say that search engine results ranking on the first page receive about 87.5% of the total click distribution – with the first result receiving more than 56% of the click distribution (image source: SEO Searcher).

Cornell_click distribution SERP

The researchers at Cornell also developed some interesting theory about why the top search results received such a grossly disproportionate share of the click distribution. Check out the Power of Defaults to read more.

The Bottom Line on Search Engine Ranking

No matter what source of data you rely upon – AOL, Cornell University, or even your own gut feel – the bottom line is that top search engine rankings outperform all other search engine rankings combined –  by a wide, wide margin.

And when you consider that the average monthly search volume for thousands of keywords and phrases is in the millions, the impact of a top search engine ranking can be staggering.

Make sure that you don’t leave your search engine rankings to chance. Give your website a boost by committing to a backlink-building effort.

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By Chris Crum

The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

“At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from WordPress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” says Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

via How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter | WebProNews.

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Reputation is key. Who follows you determines reputation. If your followers have a lot of followers, that gives more authority to your tweets.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, [Google Fellow] Amit Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But Singhal also told Technology Review it’s not a popularity contest. They also have to weed out the noise. Hashtags make that task difficult. And sorting through trending topics when so many people are Tweeting is a challenge, too.

Singhal pointed out that Twitter the only source of real-time information for Google. Sources such as blogs and news are also relevant and being weaved into the real-time search experience.

Takeaways:

1. Cultivate your following on Twitter.
2. Don’t overdo the hashtag.
3. Be comprehensive in your real-time efforts. Don’t just focus on Twitter.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on January 15, 2010 1:14 PM

via Ranking Tweets: Google Says Reputation Analogous to Links – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

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She shares useful insights into Google’s ranking factors as well as best practices for news search optimization, which should help news providers and news release distributors attain a higher ranking in news search results; and also, possibly, grab some real estate amongst Google’s general/universal search results.

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Statistics from early 2009 claimed that iPhone users accounted for some two-thirds of all mobile browsers. Now, while that particular statistic has been questioned and debated, there is little doubt about the effect of the iPhone on mobile browsing. The advent of the Google Android phone will only make mobile web surfing more mainstream than it already is. When it comes to optimizing your web content for Google Mobile Search, there are a number of things you can do.

Some people say that you should make a mobile version of your regular website, while other say that you should optimize your existing site for mobile browsing. But whether it’s your normal site optimized for mobile, or a new mobile version of your site, there are steps that anyone wanting to rank high in mobile search results should do.

Step one is to make sure that your website is mobile compliant. This means that your pages are formatted for people browsing the web with their phones. Mobile browsing implies a lack of time to complete a search. Perhaps instead of mobile “browsing,” the term should be something more like mobile “hunting.” But since mobile users are also short on screen space, the pages should be designed to cater to this reality. Do you know what your site looks like on a mobile web platform? If not, do a mobile search to see. You’ll notice that a lot of your site’s goodies are unavailable. But this makes some choices all the more obvious.

• The most important information on your site should be at the top.
• Your site needs to be easily navigable from a mobile platform.
• Font sizes need to be usable
• Your page should look attractive on a mobile phone browser screen.

If these things don’t check out, then you need to make some changes to get your site ready for what many experts see as the coming tsunami of mobile searching.

Why should you go to the trouble? The current industries seeing the most growth in mobile searches are business, entertainment, and travel. According to the Mobile Optimization Association, mobile searchers tend to be young, high income professionals with promising careers, or, to put it more bluntly, people with more disposable income than usual.

Web pages for mobile browsing are created in XHTML or WML. They must be W3C compliant. W3C stands for “World Wide Web Consortium” and sets guidelines about how a web page should be structured. They publish best practice design principles for webmasters. Without going into the nuts and bolts of getting your site to be W3C compliant, you should know that there is a W3C Code Validator at http://validator.w3.org/ that anyone can use to ensure that your site renders on all the major browsers and platforms in a similar manner.

Before deciding exactly how to optimize your site for mobile, there are a few things to know about the people who use mobile browsers. First of all, they tend to use the same search engine on their mobile device as they use on their PC. Even though there are 234 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., only 10% use mobile search (which is still 23 million people). Adoption rates of mobile browsing are much higher in Europe. Finally, mobile searchers are goal-oriented: they want to get the info and get out. They don’t tend to browse or surf.

A few general practices for optimizing your site are:

• Keep your content brief
• Use brief, custom titles
• For mobile stats, check out MMetrics.com
• Mobile sites need to be as simple as possible to ensure compatibility among all mobile browser software.

There are two main opinions when it comes to optimizing your site for Google Mobile: 1) Optimize your existing site; and 2) Create a new mobile-only site. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, which we’ll go into next.

Optimization of an Existing Site

If you want to optimize your existing site, make sure that in mobile search your pages are independent of device. Search results on mobile devices use a different data set than web browsers do.

Use external CSS style sheets because they limit how much code has to be downloaded and are helpful in scaling up or down for different screen sizes. You can have a separate style sheet for hand held devices.

Use text links rather than images. Images may not download at all and will increase page loading times. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for optimizing an existing site for mobile search.

• Put navigation buttons below content. People don’t like having to scroll down every time a page loads.
• Don’t use flash or frames on your pages. They’ll either be unsupported by mobile browsers, or they’ll slow everything down.
• Avoid pop-ups
• Advertise your site as mobile compatible and get links from directories and mobile sites
• Put the prefix tel: before a phone number in a link so that the mobile device can call it with one click
• Put your business into your Google Local index so it will automatically be listed in Google Voice Local Search.
• Since most users don’t scroll on mobile browsers, ranking in the top three results is a very big deal, so do what you can to optimize your site in the result listings
• Google allows you to submit a separate XML sitemap for mobile. It’s a good idea.
• Optimize for mobile ASAP to get into the results early on. One report says that a search for “McDonalds” on Google mobile has a mobile-friendly page from the BBC as the top result.

Creating a Mobile-Only Site

The argument for doing this is that mobile users are goal oriented rather than simply browsing. Some sites have taken to using a subdomain approach rather than using a separate domain like .mobi. That would give your mobile site a name like mobile.yourdomainname.com. It allows you to retain the “brand” of the top level domain rather than having to rebuild branding for a new domain name. Here are some tips for optimizing a mobile-only version of your site.

• Information should be three clicks or less from the home page.
• Organize navigation logically for mobile users: place likely popular buttons first, using text links. Put navigation buttons underneath content to keep users from having to scroll each time they click a new page.
• Make word links short to keep them from taking up too much valuable screen space.
• Have a sitemap for your mobile-only page.
• Use optimized heading tags, just like with your standard web pages.
• Test and validate your mobile site using simulators like Skweezer and validators like .Mobi Validator or W3C Mobile Web Validator.
• Have a link-building campaign specifically for your mobile-only website.
• Have social book marking and tagging functions on your mobile site.
• Use the tel: prefix in phone number links so users can call the phone number in one click.

via Optimization for Google Mobile Search.

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