“What formula does Google use to determine where your website gets listed?” Wow, if we knew the answer to that we’d be rich. The problem with that question is that there is no definitive answer. There is no one formula that can be exploited to ensure your Google ranking is always number one!

With that said, there are some simple, basic strategies that need to be adhered to when putting your website up for public view. These all factor into the Google (and Yahoo, MSN, Bing, Ask.com, etc.) formulas, but how each is weighted varies and in some cases changes daily to ensure the content remains fresh and unexploited.

So, here’s our list of some basic determining factors for SEO ranking:

Tracking and statistics: First and foremost, make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics. These tools are invaluable when tracking the performance of your pages and your website in general. If you don’t have it, get it. Yahoo and Bing have similar setups, but Google Analytics is still the best.

Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. Sadly, there is no way to speed up this factor. If you are a new website with a new domain name, it’s going to take time to get this factor to go up. The reason this is important is that domain longevity helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.

  Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? In this instance, outsourcing is a bad idea! The country in which your site is hosted plays a big role in how it gets scored. Always use a reputable hosting company. If you are a US based business, host in the US, if you are a UK based site, host it in the UK. When it comes to hosting, don’t go cheap. Also, make darn sure you have a dedicated (non rolling) IP. Some hosting sites that use clouds or virtual dedicated can change IP’s. This is a sign of website instability, so always make sure your hosted server is dedicated and demand a static IP for your server only. Never use the cheapest hosting. Let me be blunt… if you can’t afford decent hosting, then don’t expect to yield good SEO results.

  Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server or shared server, which even the big name hosting sites like Start Logic and Go Daddy use, chances are your site shares the same IP as dozens (possibly hundreds) of other websites. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not porn or classified as spam.

Content: Content isn’t just an important ranking factor, it is THE most important (IMHO). Make sure you have your keyword phrases on all your important pages, then make sure it is spread out evenly throughout the page (the beginning, several times in the middle, and at the end). And don’t just write mindless words for the sake of filling a page. The content must be relevant! I’m not saying that search engine algorithms are able to detect BS, but your readers are! The goal of SEO is to get people to visit your site or link. Once they do, you want them to come back. If they visit your site and see it contains a bunch of junk, they’re not coming back. And guess what the major search engines also consider in their rankings? You got it, time on page and returning visitors. Always write your content for humans and NEVER write content for the sole purpose of SEO formula injection.

  URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is a trap that a lot of resellers fall into. They register the short version of their long URL thinking that bit.ly/Djs8ds is simpler to read and also hides the fact the user is being redirected to a reseller link… And that is correct. But, search engine algorithms don’t understand gibberish at the end of a URL. The tradeoff is that you can fool users into clicking on an obvious reseller link, but you will not score at all in regards to SEO.

Keywords: This is an SEO lesson in and of itself, but some basic information includes making sure your website is optimized using your keyword phrases. This means placing that text in any alt tags for images, meta page information, and existing content (laid out according to our Content rule above).

Bounce Rate: Again, this is something that is hard for you to control, but sticking to some basic guidelines ensures that your bounce rate is kept to a minimum. Make frequent changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things like video tutorials, newsletter subscriptions, and comments will help improve your bounce rate over time.

Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should not have to hunt, peck, and wonder about how to navigate your site. Make menus and links clear, concise, and visible. Every so often, make sure there are no broken links in your navigation chain! Broken links are a punishment in SEO rankings. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Clean and easy to read is the way to go.

Trust: How do you gain trust? Well, if you don’t have the benefit of a well aged domain name, you need to provide people (and search engines) with a reason to think your legitimate and here to stay. If you have a physical business address, list it. Search engines like to see that you are not just a web based business, but also a physical business. Phone numbers are important, too. Even if you Skype or GoToMeeting most of your customer interaction, an actual phone number helps users and search engines feel that this is your only business and that all resources are exercised to ensure your availability. At a bare minimum, at least provide a customer service or support email address. The goal is to make it easy for people to do business with you.

Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. Don’t think for a second that a hundred links to unrelated sites is better than 10 links to genre matching content. Consider each and every link.

Want to learn more about SEO strategies and tactics? We’re only a couple of months away from releasing our training section, but until then we have a little SEO primer called “Backlink Generation in Minutes.” You can download it for free using this link.

There are many extensive and exclusive factors that all search engines use when determining where your website ranks amongst the others. The bottom line is is that to truly conquer SEO, your site must be relevant, informative, user friendly, and trusted.

In putting together our training curriculum, we added a section talking about how Google has so many tools and add-ons to make your SEO life a lot easier. One of them is a buried little gem called the “Wonder Wheel.”

At left is a screen shot of where to find the elusive '”Wonder Wheel.” After you enter your search term and Google displays the search results, click on the “More Search Terms” link on the left side menu bar.

This will expand the menu at left and display additional options for your search and SEO activities.

“Wonder Wheel” is useful for determining the associative keywords for the search term entered. For example, our test search term “email scraper” shows a “Wonder Wheel” of items such as “email extractor” and “email harvester.”

The image at right shows what Google displays when you enter our search term like “eMail Scraper.”

Google does limit the number of spokes displayed to only give you the best options for keyword determination.

The neat thing about this tool is that you can actually crawl through the spokes of the wheel and expand them to get more keyword ideas.

If we hit the link that is for “Craigslist email scraper,” we see that the image now rubber-bands out and we can now see where that spoke takes us.

Now we are presented with a new set of strong keyword phrases that are determined based of the linked text (Craigslist email scraper).

The links and lists can seem to go on forever. It’s best to stick with your power search phrase (“email scraper” in our example) and work with the keywords shown in the first spokes.

Once you have these keywords, be sure to use them within your posts and pages, H1 and H2 tags, your site description and your site content. This is just another example of the type of information you will receive in our training curriculum.

We hope to have initial publishing done this week and will always be adding more and more products and training materials. Be sure to also look for our upcoming PodCasts! Happy marketing!

This is a quick post to highlight some of the things we’ve been teaching and telling people over the years regarding Internet marketing. When it comes to any search engine, you want your listing to be first, second… or TENTH! That’s right, the last spot on the first page.

It’s a hard spot to get since Google does not sell or market that spot in search results, but if you are lucky enough to be placed there, it could pay off!

A couple of weeks ago, our article on Google Maps vs Bing Maps was suddenly getting about 5 times the hits it normally gets. Not that it raised any bad flags, but it did make us curious as to why the sudden spike occurred. The reason was that the article in question was listed at the tenth (last) position on the page. It is our belief that more people click on that spot because it’s the last one they see as they pause for a moment before clicking to page 2. If your tenth spot description and link are good enough, people will notice it almost as much as if you were in the top 2.

A few days later we were elevated to the 9th spot, and as expected our hits to that page went down again, despite the higher ranking. So in the case of search engine placement, sometimes last can be best!

For the last couple of years I’ve been writing web applications and desktop software using mapping technologies. A couple of years ago when these projects started we had to make a choice between Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth (now called Bing Maps). At the time, Google had a much more restrictive licensing model than Microsoft. The websites and software we were developing required a subscription to plot and view the data, but free users could use the map in any way intended without requiring the user to log in or enter an email address. Google also had restrictive limits on the number of hits that your account could absorb. We went with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and it has worked very well for us over the years and Microsoft was very forthcoming and open about their licensing and how we intended to use the technology.

Skip ahead a couple of years and I have started to look at Google and Bing again. This time it is for a site that will feature new home information and mapping. Like I said, Bing has worked well for us over the last couple years providing aerial maps for 3 web sites and 1 desktop application, so we have no real reason to switch other than to ensure they are able to provide the services we need.

Need help getting started with Google Earth? Check out Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax: From Novice to Professional

I started by checking Google Map’s licensing strategy, which was the deal killer for us a couple of years ago. It seems they have relaxed a lot of the per day restrictions (or eliminated them altogether). They have the same daily limit on geocoding addresses (providing the lat / long for a given street address), but the imaging is not restricted by hits. This means that you can provide the maps for your website visitors or for your applications without worry.

But wait, there’s more. Both Microsoft and Google have restrictions against charging for using the maps. In other words, you can’t use Google or Bing on a website that charges simply for using the map. You can provide basic functionality of the maps for use on your site and charge for overlays, plots, or other data that you provide. As an example, I designed a site that allows users to view Bing Maps and use all the features of it as provided by Bing. However, the customer provides data for overlays, boundaries, and plots that is proprietary to them. For that data to be displayed on the map, there is a charge. After a few calls to Microsoft, the client was able to get a clear and concise answer regarding the rules and regulations regarding Bing Maps, and the custom overlay charge was fine by them… Again, as long as users could freely use the Bing Maps general functionality as provided by Microsoft without paying for anything.

The one negative Bing has going for it is the abysmal default pins. Granted, I never use them and create custom PNG’s for the maps, but Google makes such a nice, simple pin that it would make my time spent developing the site a little less as well as providing an already well recognized image on the screen. People see it and immediately think “Oh, there’s one of what I’m looking for” instead of “What’s that gelatinous blob trying to say?”

Both offer 3d views, or Bird’s Eye View as Bing called it. They are both reasonably accurate with the plotting of geocoded points, but examples of mistakes are documented and lamented all over the net on both sides.

My Ratings:

	Google Maps	Bing Maps
Data
Developer Resources
Documentation
Browser Support
Accuracy

Right now Google gets a little more exposure since Orbitz, Redfin and Trulia are all using the current version of the API on their websites. But Bing has made some serious inroads in the last year by providing more up to data data and a more relaxed licensing strategy.

Be sure and check out these amazing Google Earth references: