RankPay the Real Deal? Our Review…

Is RankPay the Real Deal? That’s the real question. For those of you that aren’t familiar with RankPay head over and take a look at their website, they offer SEO services but unlike any other SEO company out there. RankPay is the only truly performance based SEO company that has no start up costs, which is amazing.

After taking a look at their website and doing some keyword research I was able to identify a few keywords that I wanted to try out. I really wasn’t expecting much at first, their proposal was just TOO good to be true, or so I thought. After signing up I was called to verify my submission, and discuss the keywords I wanted to optimize for. After 20 minutes of me picking their brains, I was much relieved, this wasn’t some fly by night shop. RankPay knows Search Engine Optimization, that much I can tell you. They blew me away with their knowledge and they were able to make some suggestions that I hadn’t even thought of.

Here we are three months later, and I can’t even believe the rankings that I have achieved. It’s remarkable how far they have gotten my site, in a matter of months. I wasn’t going after easy keywords by any means and they were able to not only capture me top rankings (TOP 3 for 2 keywords) but have been able to maintain those rankings as well. RankPay’s SEO services are top notch and I highly recommend them to anyone that I come in contact with. Is RankPay a scam? NO WAY! This is the single best SEO company I have ever worked with, plain and simple.

Sitemap and Tags SEO

Sitemaps and tags are a fantastic way to help shift link weight throughout your site. Especially when you are dealing with a website that has already created strong pagerank and authoritative pages. Today we will analyze and discuss some ways to correctly utilize these various sections to correctly manipulate your websites link juice.

For those that don’t know what tags are (where have you been), tags are a way to implement an categorial organization of information. It’s a way to create a common theme for posts and pages to your site, as well as a way to add additional pages to your sites size.

Sitemaps are another way to consolidate vast sites with imense depth into an easy, managable approach. As stated we will discuss how you can use both tags and sitemaps to filter pagerank and add additional depth to your website.

Keeping the link juice maintained and filtered efficiently throughout a website can be a timely task, although the benefit is astronomical. It’s great finding websites that have correctly set up the structure of their links to hold it within and distribute it efficiently among pages. It’s like a big Pagerank orgy that does fantastic in search engines. Things like using the “no-follow” tag and using javascript for links, think easy human interaction although ‘uncrawlable’ links, which means easy search engine manipulation. These are only small ways to capture the true power of link juice manipulation, and we need to add other methods to our arsenal.

By manipulating the outbound links, and maintaining the juice of the incoming links you can help the pagerank distribution process. Sitemaps are a fantastic way to help flow the power throughout specific pages and catagories that you deem important while keeping your sites user interface efficient for your human viewers. Your sitemap structure can be in XML format, or if you’d like create a simple HTML hierarchy structure with a proper sitemap structure I prefer the XML sitemap structure.

Make sure to set your extra sitemap pages that you strategically place on your site with the META tag to no-index, follow. This is so that your sitemap pages (which were placed efficiently) don’t outrank the pages that you want people to actually view! By setting up this structure within the META tag you can efficiently flow the juices of the links, although make sure to have your content index instead of these sitemaps.

The obvious benefit of situating yourself with proper sitemaps, META tags, and sitemap placements is that by flowing the link power efficiently you can control which pages rank well, and which pages you don’t want to rank well. Once you get the link power flowing correctly pages will begin to rank well, have enough well ranking websites and you can called an authority page by the search engines.

This simple process can be applied to your TAG pages as well, just apply the same principle. If you want to even have more control over the process you can specifically mark certain TAGS with the nofollow attribute. Setting up the TAG pages with a no-index, as well as a no follow on specific tags can allow you to take the distribution even further.

[tags]sitemap seo, tags seo, sitemap search engine optimization, tags search engine optimization[/tags]

The Steps of SEO Part 2

We discussed yesterday the importance of a LSI and relevant structured website that has tons of content. Now its time to take a look at other fundamental foundations to a successful SEO campaign.

Website Trust

Remember that search engines are created to make the lives of humans easier on the internet. Therefore, like humans, trust needs to be established before search engines will deem a website credible. This wasn’t always the case but as been for the past year or so. Establishing website trust can be found in the following variables.

Age of Domain

A websites age is a tremendous part of the Google algorithm. Why? So that websites can’t just pop out of nowhere and get first place positions on keywords. I think that this is good and bad, good because under initial impressions that seems like a great idea. Bad because anyone can purchase an aged domain and cheat off of the system. What’s the point of me telling you this? If/When possible use an aged domain, purchase one when needed! That is of course unless you don’t mind achieving results for months to come and longer for those more competitive keyword phrases. With the Age of the Domain comes the significance of Link Age.

Link Age

Link age is simply another variable within a websites trust rank credibility. As incoming links count as votes, older and more aged ones count as a great credibility to your website. Running with the idea of human interaction with a search engine in mind, understand that once trust rank is established via the search engines you will begin to notice the benefits. These benefits consist of faster indexing, think minutes/hours instead of days or weeks. This will be great because you can begin to see instant results for keywords you are trying to target, rather then weeks or months.

Established Authority/Trust Rank Now What?

So now you have established authority and trust rank with the search engines, how can you get the most out of that? Now its time to begin to interlink different portions of your website to help filter the pagerank successfully. Assuming that you have established your website with the correct structure, now its time to interlink portions of your site that are relevant to each other and where PageRank is needed. For whatever reason you may have a page or article that you want to have more exposure on the search engines. Assuming that you have a similar and relevant document somewhere on your site it’s time to do an internal link within the actual article. Let’s assume you wrote an article a long time ago on fly fishing, this article has been doing well for search engine results for a given keyword and has some great pagerank. Now lets assume your an affiliate for a sports fishing pole company and they just released a fantastic new product. You decided to create a review page for a new line of fishing poles with an affiliate link to their website, since its a new page on your site you want it to begin popping for that given keyword. Go back to the old article and edit it with a link to the sports fishing pole review page that you just created WITHIN the article. This way you accomplish having a relevant incoming link from an already authoritative portion of your website. A win/win situation within the SEO world.

Choosing the Right Keywords

It’s absolutely imperative to do some keyword research for the articles and pages of your website. Targeting keywords that are obscure and extremely long tailed is pointless! So make sure that you have established keywords that not only you can rank for, but that have traffic.

Remember that not all keywords are created equal, what might ‘sound’ good in your head might not actually be good. So make sure that your keywords that you are trying to target are not extremely long tailed and are actually searched with enough traffic to make it worth while.

A websites main goal should be to understand the true reason why someone would want to visit your site. This could be an answer to a problem that they may be having, or by creating a problem/solution based keywords to align with the content that you have created around those keywords.

Evidence of Trust Rank Increase

Determining when you have gained enough trust rank is essential to planning other portions of your SEO campaign. Make sure you are watching your SERP rankings to determine when that trust rank has finally been established. This typically occurs when your website has been hovering around the 30 or so mark and suddenly jumps to positions 5-12 for many different keywords.

Another example is when you rank for a few positions for a given keyword. This shows that your domain has enough credibility and that the keywords on your pages may begin ranking. Also you will begin to notice that articles that you wrote with one or maybe two keywords in mind are suddenly ranking for 15 or 20 separate keywords. The search engines have now deemed your site a success and have begun to index your sites and rank your sites for additional keywords.

Attempting to gauge when a website will earn trust is dependent on many factors, although the main factors are as follows. The structure of your site, the age of the links, the age of the article page, how frequently you update your website and your off page inbound link structure.

[tags]trust rank, website trust, keyword trust rank, ranking well in search engine[/tags]

Steps of SEO – Part 1

Search Engine Optimization may be a confusing and overwhelming subject for many webmasters. Others simply LOVE the idea of SEO and determining how search engines establish their results and how to stay one step ahead of the game. Although SEO’s needs a foundation to start on, hence what I call the steps of SEO.

Step 1: Identifying A Main Topic

This is really the most crucial part of a successful SEO campaign. You must determine a main ‘general’ topic for your website. This way you can set up a latent semantic system on your website. What I mean by that is this, let’s pretend that your ‘general’ website topic is fishing. Your main page will be a landing page about fishing with separate pages for the topics of bass fishing, deep sea fishing, and fly fishing. Within that you can have an even more broken down structure. This way when one page begins to rank well for a given keyword, the pagerank and its success can be passed among your architecture layout.

Step 2: Content is King

This idea isn’t revolutionary by any means within the SEO community. Except that it is absolutely crucial if you want to be a dominating figure in search engines. By creating a website that contains well written and thought out content you can begin to become an authoritative figure within the search engines eyes. By applying this within the LSI structure I described above, Google will love you. If you analyze websites that rank well within search engines they typically have two similar variables. First they have an aged domain, and second they have thousands of pages of articles and documents.

For some reason websites begin to ‘pop’ on rankings when they achieve the 200-300 page mark. Keep in mind that these are quality and content driven pages. Not spammy or duplicated content pages! So get out there and get started writing (and or purchasing) content for your website.

Step 3: Identifying your Link Building/Site Architecture

As I’ve described in the previous steps, content and a site architecture is key to a websites success. By setting up your website with a hierarchy in mind you can target hundreds of topics while each subject remaining relevant. A ‘silo’d’ structure would look something like this.

1. Fishing

• Deep Sea Fishing
  • Locations
    • Puerto Vallarta
  • Techniques
    • Educational Material

Logical right? That’s the point, to make it easier for the user to navigate as well as set up a well thought out website. This not only benefits the reader but it will benefit your rankings within the search engines. By establishing a system for pagerank to flow within your site you will allow for the ‘authority’ to flow within your articles/content. This means that they will begin to rank well, once a single page on your site ranks well.

This idea reinforces the topical relevance that is so important in today’s SEO campaigns. By separating subjects, and linking to other subjects within your site when available you are allowing yourself to achieve optimal results. The ultimate goal is to start with this foundation in mind! Don’t make it an afterthought (when possible), build your site with LSI and inter-linking in mind. With time you will begin to rank well, and successfully for keywords you had not even thought of.

[tags]foundation of seo, seo foundation, steps of seo, search engine optimization steps[/tags]

The Anchor Text Algorithm Change

I’ve already discussed this a little bit in a previous post, although I’d like to bring it up again due to the significance of this change. After looking at some concrete data and watching the fluctuations of SERP results for many clients we have come to the conclusion that there was an algorithm change in the strength of the anchor text. Typically there were three portions of the relevance algorithm that had a significant impact, first was the anchor text label that was the incoming link, second was the amount of information surrounding the link and its relevance to the subject, and third how long the site(age) of the incoming link.

After analyzing the information, it seems that Google specifically added another layer to their ever changing algorithm in which a website can no longer rank for a keyword that may not be relevant and or important. This may sound confusing but remember my post on the Google bomb that occurred back in the day for ‘failure’ and the link to G.W. Bush’s Presidential Profile page on Whitehouse.gov? Now Google has changed the relevance within the anchor text and its score that it associates with sites.

Simply put it’s another piece of the puzzle, although we have determined that relevance is now calculated differently and you need to fulfill the relevance checklist in order to rank well. Having a website and having some content just won’t do it anymore, you need to make sure that the links incoming are relevant and that your website has the necessary relevant content to ensure that you get the attention of the Google crawl bot. It’s always been important to attempt to receive incoming links from authoritative websites that have a good ‘reputation’. Now I feel that there has been more emphasis placed on it.

It seems that since the implementation of these new changes the idea of a Google bomb has been diffused, anchor texts from any site don’t hold the same weight and that grouped links (think blogrolls) have been quarantined until Google further examines them. Google is transforming into the beast we were all afraid of it seems. Personalized results, new measuring metrics and relevance of incoming links are the new elements in the Google model.

Search Engine Optimization is about adapting, without adapting correctly you will fall behind your competitors. Don’t rely on old information in an ever changing game, you will lose if you don’t stay up to date. It’s necessary to constantly research, identify changes, and complete the necessary changes to stay on top. Here are some ideas on how to stay ahead of the game.

Relevant Links

As I’ve always stated, its not just about the link that your receive but about where it has come from and how Google deems that website. Don’t just go out and blast your website to directories, or literally anywhere you can get your link on. With the transformation of Google’s algorithm towards relevancy and personal results it will be necessary to have links that have topical relevance.

Increase Relevance by Creating It

As stated in a previous post, use press releases. Press releases allow you to create the relevancy needed as well as a backlink for a ‘reputable’ source. I’m not talking about free press release sites, but those that you pay for. We’ve had some truly great results by this method for our customers. Host a contest or give away an ebook. By creating these sort of freebies and giveaways people will create links to your site telling about it. Use that to your advantage.

Onsite Topic Relevancy

This is really a huge step, make sure that your pages are on topic and relevant to your incoming links anchor text. Don’t jump all over the place on your pages, stick to a concrete subject so that relevancy can be easily identified by the search engines. Remember by staying on target and on topic search engines will easily identify the subject and the relevant and important keywords.

SEO Is About Patience

As much as we all hate it, SEO is about patience. There is really no way around it except for the fact that changes don’t occur instantly. Let the search engines do their thing and don’t freak out about drops in rankings. Unless of course you have noticed a drop for a long time! But changes occur quite frequently in the algorithms and as a result rankings will fluctuate. Remember that another ‘authoritive website’ may have removed your link, or for whatever reason is now a 404 page. One action can set off a chain of events with SEO and its not always possible to determine the cause of the fluctuation. So remember that patience is required to identify the problems and correct them.

[tags]algorithm google, google anchor text, anchor text relevance, anchor text change[/tags]

Press Release SEO Strategy

I work at a SEO company based out of San Diego, we gather a tremendous amount of data from our clients about what works in the world of SEO and what doesn’t. Recently we tried a new technique with one of our most competitive keywords and had some pretty outstanding results. Bouncing around from spots 2 – 4 for the competitive keyword we were wondering what we could do to move up and capture the number one spot. We figured to give a try to the good ol’ Press Release strategy one more time. We decided to try it out in paid Press Release directories and followed a very precise strategy in those press releases. We wanted to make sure that our story was newsworthy as well as to make the press releases as SEO friendly as possible. Here is what we did:

Consider Your Keywords

Remember that we are dealing with a press release here and not just some random article directory. Some keywords that you may be trying to target simply will not work for this type of SEO activity. So when you are considering your keywords make sure that they are press release friendly, as well as a highly searched keyword term. Remember I’m talking about PAID inclusion to PR websites, sure you could try this with free ones but we have some really great results from simply PAID inclusion sites. Thus you want to make sure you dot your I’s and cross your T’s before submitting a paid release.  Do a little background check on your targeted keywords and make sure the search volume exists for it before you go through with this method.

Choosing Your Title

Remember that we took this from a search engine optimization approach and not one for public recognition or brand building awareness. We wanted to have the most emphasis and ‘boost’ in our SERPs so we made the title short and sweet with all the emphasis on our given keyword that we are trying to optimize for. I suggest the same approach for all SEO purposes, the chances that someone will pick up your press release and contact you for media purposes is practically no existent. Make sure to target your keyword in your title

The Body

Again let’s get as much SEO juice out of this press release as possible, so we are going to need to sprinkle our keyword around several times throughout the body. Remember we are not keyword stuffing as it won’t benefit anyone and your release probably wouldn’t be published. Check with your potential press release directory for setting up your press release. Each directory has different rules for creating a release so make sure to follow them closely so that your release isn’t denied. If possible add a link with your keyword going to your page, this will add additional benefit to your keyword and will help with SEO purposes. Remember though that your body needs to flow and sound legitimate. People do end up reading them sometimes, so make sure not to ruin your reputation by putting out some chopped together release. You can mix both keyword inclusion and readability!

Distributing Your Press Release

There are hundreds of press release directories that you can submit your release to. Remember that there are services on the internet where you simply give them your press release and they will submit to so many directories. I personally suggest not to overdo it with those types of services and to submit your own press releases, with different variations to bypass any duplicate penalties.

What to look for in a directory? First start with pagerank of the domain URL. A good press release directory will have a pagerank of 5 or more and will generally be around $50 for inclusion. We tried the free directories with one competitive keyword and it didn’t result in much SERP change. Although when we included our press release for a different domain and as competitive keyword we jumped to the top! You get what you pay for I guess? So analyze each directory before submitting your release

Check the Rankings

After a few weeks be analyzing your results from that given submission. You will notice a small increase of visitors from the press release. Are those converting? Most importantly how are your SERPs for your given keyword that you were trying to target? Things like this are important to view and consider before you submit to additional directories!

[tags]press release submission, press release seo, press release search engine optimization, press release SEO help, press release for SEO[/tags]