SANTA MONICA, CA — I know that we all thought we were done with hearing about “making a list, and checking it twice,” but when considering either having or being a guest blogger, ’tis the season to make a list of steps and goals along the way. What should that list look like? From targeting a market, to joining a group that shares blogging opportunities, planning ahead of time will make it easier to decide what to post and where to spend your time maximizing link building, an important search engine optimization tactic.

1. Understand the Importance of an Inbound Link. Inbound links are one of the key components to quality SEO, because it tells Google that your website is trusted and important. More links make you an authority. To further understand the anatomy of a link, see the full explanation in a recent article by Andrew Pitre on HubSpot’s blog. And remember, not all links are created equal.

“If you were to get an inbound link from a domain with lots of its own inbound links, like the New York Times, for example, you would get more authority transferred to your domain than if you got a link from my friend Brian’s blog,” Pitre says.

2. Target Blogs With Keyword Research. If you’re looking for a guest blogger, please skip ahead to the next step.

For the writers: what do you want to write about? Think of words or phrases that you currently want to be found under in a Google search. Search for these keywords on Google and determine the list of websites that you wish to write for. To further expand your horizons, use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which will give a thorough list of the keywords from the previous month that relate. Another Adwords column also displays those keywords’ popularity for the last month, a very valuable tool in deciding which sites are worth your time.

Another option is signing up for a service like WordTracker.com, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google. WordTracker’s function is like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, in that it helps you find and evaluate keywords.

3. Join a (Free) Service Like Blogger Link Up. BloggerLinkUp.com is a website that connects blog writers with website owners who need blog content. Each week, a newsletter is sent out with lists of requested blog posts, and writers wanting to be a guest poster. The form is the same, whether you are a prospective guest blogger or a website in need of a guest blogger.

4. Make Yourself Uncomfortable With Your Guest Blog Efforts (Within Reason). What makes you uncomfortable about writing or hosting a guest blog post? Change can be scary, but we need to try every serious idea we have at least once, urges Cathy Stucker, the founder of BloggerLinkUp.com, in a recent post.

“The problem is that too often we don’t try a second or third time (or even a first!) with marketing activities which seem difficult,” Stucker says. “I was terrified the first time I gave a speech. But I got up and did it anyway. You can, too.”

So, forget your fears, and remember, the worst thing that can happen with new content is that, well, you don’t receive any at all. Go get it.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

Popularity: 3%

For anyone interested in doing business online, knowing how many individuals search for a specific keyword is crucial. If I’m selling kids shoes online and only 100 people search for it on Google, then most probably I’m not going to succeed – even if my site is ranked at the top. I’ll be lucky if 10 people out of those 100 buy my shoes.

To know how many people search for a specific keyword, there are many tools available. But the most trustworthy one is Google’s Adwords Keyword Selector Tool. Because it is pulling the data from its search engine.

In the SEO community, it is common knowledge that Google’s Adwords traffic estimation tool is at best inaccurate. But no one really knows how Google measures these numbers. According to Google, it is “averaging” each month’s search volume across its search engine platforms. But for a long time I’ve been suspicious that these numbers are not real. So, finally I decided to conduct a test.

I selected six websites that we have access to their Analytics data and are ranking within the top five positions on Google search results – world-wide – for somewhat competitive keywords. The tables below illustrates my findings.

The first table are the keywords in Exact format. Which means we’re only looking at Google’s traffic for these keywords when the exact phrase is searched for as well as the traffic for the same keyword:

The following table are for the same keywords but this time using the “Phrase” selection. In other words, the searcher could have used the same phrase in conjunction with other words:

As you see the number of people visiting the site is much less than the number of monthly search volume (Traffic Estimate) regardless of whether we searched for “Phrase” or “Exact” keywords.

It is less likely that less than 10% of those searching for any given search querry are going to visit the top ranking sites.

Therefore, my conclusion is that the Traffic Estimate is blown out of proportion. 

But by how much?

Looking at the numbers, we can say that these numbers are blown out of proportion by 3 times and up to 100 times depending on the search query.

Where is the success in SEO?

Another important factor is that we’re able to generate a few times more traffic to our clients’ sites than the total search volume for their main keyword(s). For example, doctorjennifer.com’s main keyword is Minneapolis Orthodontist. But this keyword only receives 58 searches each month (if that was accurate). On the other hand, the site is receiving over 1,000 hits through organic search results. The reason is that we are not just focusing on the MAIN keyword. We work on a pool of different keywords related to each site/business. Doctorjennifer.com for instance has over 100 keywords we’re targeting.

For those clients that care very much for having that top ranking placement on Google for their main keyword I have to say that that is not so important compared to being ranked for many of their keywords that may not be as popular.

In other words if our client is not ranking at the top for Minneapolis Orthodontist, they’re just losing a very small fraction of the search volume; however, there are 50 other keywords (Minneapolis Children Orthodontist, St. Paul Invisalign, Best Orthodontist in Eagan, etc.) that the client has a top five ranking. The site is going to get traffic and business from Google generated through secondary keywords.

We measure our success by the number of targeted visitors who find our clients’ sites using their keywords – main keywords as well as secondary keywords.

Popularity: 7%

Search engine optimization (SEO) was named that many years ago because “optimization” was pretty much the only thing that needed to be done. Today, optimization is only about 5-10% of the total SEO work. The rest lies with content development and popularity which we’ve discussed in part I and part III of these series.

Optimization means making a site “relevant” to specific search terms (keywords) so that Google or other search engines recognize these keywords and rank the site better for them. Thus, the term “relevancy” was derived from this notion.

Here I should note that most of the “black-hat” SEO concentrates on optimization. In a future post, we’ll discuss some of the no-no’s when it comes to Google SEO and  more specifically optimization for Google.

Our team’s focus is on Google optimization. Everything we do is approved and accepted by Google as explained by Matt Cutts through Google Webmaster Guidelines. And here is a glimpse of what our team considers best optimization practices that we conduct on a daily basis for our new client (not everything serves to better the ranks, some are simply for monitoring purposes):

1. Adding you website to our Google analytics and setting up the tracking code (to monitor traffic coming through your site).
2. Adding your site to our Google webmaster tools and completing the verification process (the reports through webmaster tools identify any optimization issues your site may have).
3. Creating a sitemap.xml file and submitting it to Google webmaster tools (and keeping this sitemap.xml file up to date).
4. Creating/updating the HTML sitemap page of the website.
5. Make sure the search engines are not blocked through no index Meta tag or robots.txt file or anything else that blocks search engines from accessing/indexing your website.
6. Exterminate any instances of duplicate content.
7. Remove any instances of black hat SEO (hidden text or link, <noembed> tags, link farming, Meta redirection, cloaking, doorway pages, long keyword-rich comment tags).
8. Redirecting the non-www URL to www version. For example, http://mastergoogle.com will be redirected to http://www.mastergoogle.com/.
9. Trailing slash redirection. In other words making the site pages consistent. For example all the pages should have the trailing slash at the end of the URL.
10. Creating keyword rich URL’s for all the pages.
11. One version URL for home page (Any references to index.php or default.aspx and any other versions of the home page URL should be redirected to the main URL: ie. http://www.mastergoogle.com/).
12. Building a blog for the site and hosting it on the site. Example: http://www.mastergoogle.com/blog/.
13. Creating and optimizing permalinks for blog posts.
14. Installing “SEO” plug-ins for the blog.
15. Installing a “Sitemap” plug-in for blog.
16. URL canonicalization for CMS website (Very important for eCommerce websites and blogs).
17. Adding your blog links to the footer links and/or top menus.
18. Adding latest blog post section to the home page (important for fresh content development – discussed in Part I).
19. Text optimization. Inserting the appropriate keywords in the right places.
20. Meta description and title tag optimization (unique Meta tags for each page is very important).
21. Image alt tag and co-text optimization (co-text is a notion we borrowed from linguistics to refer to any textual content surrounding an image or any specific keyword).
22. Domain renewal for 5 years or more.
23. Avoid excessive use of “Meta redirection” and use “301 redirection” instead.

Also note that Google web master accounts should be observed on a weekly basis to make sure there are no not-found pages.

Popularity: 6%

For about two months we’ve noticed a (Not Provided) item on Google Analytics traffic reports under “Traffic Sources/Google Organic” section. This is an article that has done a good job explaining it. The basic answer is that the keywords surfers used to find this particular site were not shown because the searchers were logged into their Google account when conducting the search.

Google wants to further protect their users’ privacy by encrypting their search results pages (through https://www.google.com).

In Nov. our site received 1,144 visitors from organic Google search which their search keywords were not shown (see below). This is 19.6% of our total Google organic search traffic.

Popularity: 11%