29

Nov

Pagerank, backlinks, keyword density and Google domination.

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, google

I was doing some SEO research for a site I’m building for a friend of mine, who has a local business. This business is a low volume, high return business. (Think finance area)

So I sat down and talked to him about what keywords he wanted to target, and we came up with the two main phrases to go after.

Next step was I chucked those terms into Google, and had a look at the results that we got.

I then had a look at the four pieces of information from the competitors sites I needed to try to optimise his site to grab as high a ranking as possible:

  • PageRank (becoming less relevant by the day)
  • Yahoo external backlinks (including the quality of those links)
  • Keyword density for the terms he was going after.
  • General on page SEO

Surprisingly, the pages he’d be competing against were pretty ordinary in all these areas (the only problem I think we’ll have is that he has a new domain name, we can’t do much about this against some of the competitors with 2 - 4 year old domains, so we’ll do what we can with the other factors)

For search term one, there are approximately 900,000 results in Google.

The second term has 1.19 million results.

The interesting thing is the pagerank -v- backlinks stats. One site has a PR 2 with no backlinks, another has a PR 4 with no backlinks. That’s just bizarre.

Every single one of those pages has dreadful on page SEO, and most of the backlinks are garbage, from link directories and free-for-all pages.

I’m thinking that with five different domains across five different datacenters and private registrations, we could probably tie up close to the whole first page of google for both his search terms, which would be very lucrative indeed!

Muahahahaha, world domination will be ours, it’s just a matter of time!

8 Comments »
26

Nov

The content conundrum

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, adsense

I wrote a while ago about the ability to rank extremely well, extremely quickly for rubbish content by taking a hard-assed approach to on page SEO (and no off -age SEO at all).

I actually used this domain (PimpmyPageRank) to test a theory that I had: That you could rank for random content as long as your on page SEO and keyword densities are on the money.

Now I’m not sure whether the pages ranked so well so quicky was because they sat on this domain, which Google seems to be all over all the time, so I’ve set up an experiment using the same theory on a brand spanking new domain, time will tell what the results of that will be (after nearly a week, I haven’t even managed to get Google to come sniffing around yet).

Now it’s all well and good to rank for rubbish content, and I’ve had some (limited) success with Amazon affiliate ads on those pages, but what if you wanted to head down the PPC road?

Any PPC program worth its salt (I’m looking at you, Google) will de-rank your pages and quite possibly ban your account for doing what I’m doing here. I might even possibly lose my account for trying (although it would be no worse than some of the garbage I’ve seen with AdSense ads on it).

So what do I do?

I’ve proven that I can rank for product keywords which people are searching for (Google first page for six out of the ten product groups I tried), but my on page SEO was disastrous in the context of producing any readable content. (5 to 7% KW density? Try getting that into reasonable sounding copy!)

I will. Try, I mean.

The next experiment is this:

I produce three pages, targeting a specific (all the same)  product:

  1. One page with dynamically generated random text with my 5 - 7% KW density
  2. One page of static garbage text with the same keyword density
  3. One page of custom written content, trying as hard as I can to get my KW density as close as I can to the target range.

Let’s see which ranks best….

(I’m off to write some content :-) )

5 Comments »
26

Nov

Now ReviewMe loves me - oh the irony!

Posted by stuart as Reviewme

I joined ReviewMe about six months ago, and had never seen an offer.

I’ve written a lot recently about Google getting slap-happy with bloggers who sell links or editorial content, feeling like I could come off all high and mighty because I do neither.

Then the email arrived yesterday - a $50 review…..

Damnit, that’s like, five domains I could buy…..

So do I do it?

7 Comments »
25

Nov

Does your page load size suck? Mine does

Posted by stuart as web design, blogging, blog

Whilst looking at some blogs for my PimpMyPageRank Mobile Money List, I noticed something which both surprised and startled me (yes, I do startle easily!)

Some of the blogs I read have horrendously large page download size. I mean really horrendous!

The US FDA (WTF the FDA is interested in web page size, I’ll never know), has this to say about web pages:

Generally, no page should be larger than 150 kilobytes. Use images (icons, photographs, drawings, etc.) sparingly, and only when they provide useful information (not just for appearance). They can take up a great deal of memory and significantly slow down access.

I suspected that most of the blogs I read were far larger than that 150kb size, so I needed a data set to test my theory.

Mark’ s top 100 (plus another 150-odd) seemed like a good list, a lot of the blogs I read were on the list, and it gave me a good sized sample for some number crunching.

The results showed:

  • The average home page load size of the complete list is 431.7 kb
  • The Largest was News Notion, weighing in at a Sumo like 2,666 kb
  • The smallest was blogtalk, veritably floating away on a puff of wind at 53 kb
  • There were two blogs over 2Mb (0.8%)
  • There were 18 blogs over 1Mb (7.1%)
  • There were 70 blogs over 500kb (27.8%)
  • There were only 38 blogs under the FDA recommended 150kb (15.1%)

I understand that some of these pages were weighed down by heavy in-post images (News Notion has one in-post image weighing in at 1.3Mb!), but these are the results as they were taken at the time of writing.

So here’s the list, sorted in order of page load size (the number on the left is 45n5 Rank.)

(note: If your blog’s on the 45N5 list, but not on this list, it’s because the crawler got kicked off your site, so I had no way of (easily) getting hold of the info)

32 Comments »
24

Nov

Introducing the PimpmyPageRank Mobile Money list

Posted by stuart as mobile content

Along the same lines as the 45n5 moneylinks, I introduce to you the PimpmyPageRank Mobile money list.

It’s a regularly updated and sorted list of the latest posts from the blogs in the online money making sphere, delivered fast and light to your web enabled phone or PDA.

  • It’s light (pageload is just over 3 kb)
  • It’s fast (see above)
  • It’s cool. :-)

It’s at pimpmypagerank.com/mobilemoney

Want to add your blog to the list? There’s one important step you need to take:

If you’re using wordpress, head over and grab the very cool Wordpress Mobile Edition plugin (you’ll need to scroll down the page a bit to find the plugin). Installing and activating this plugin means that when someone accesses your site using a mobile device, they will be presented with a stripped down version of your page, with just the links and text. This decreases load time dramatically, and increases readability on mobile devices.

Once you’ve installed this plugin, drop me an email at mobilemoney[at]pimpmypagerank.com, and I’ll test your blog. If you haven’t installed the above plugin and your blog’s page load is greater than 100kb, unfortunately, I won’t be able to include your blog in the list. Installing the above mentioned plugin will solve this problem.

I’ve thrown a few of the top blogs from Mark’s list in so you can see how it works, don’t forget to submit your blog now!

Go check out the PimpmyPageRank mobile money list

Shout out to Will the Internet Marketing Fool for putting me on to the above plugin!

6 Comments »
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