tha action has moved

Posted on August 30, 2008
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Most of whats going on is now on www.LiveBlueprints.com/seotalk/ Between the day to day of the membership and running my own eCommrece sites, I just don’t have time to keep up two blogs…

oh if there was only more hours in a day

OK – It’s True – I’m Opening Again…

Posted on April 23, 2008
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You’d have to be just about dead not to have heard the hoopla by now. Honestly it’s just part of the launch process that I find interesting – even amusing. But here’s the straight scoop:

Had a lot of fun and got a lot of success stories started with our first launch.
Added the Business blueprint over the last few months which covers a whole number of non SEO subjects from how to set up an opt-in box to basics on copywriting.
Turned the program into an even more tightly focused bootcamp with plenty of course extensions.

I’m looking forward to doing it again with a highly motivated, willing to work hard folks. If this is you, come on over to Live Blueprints and check it out.

Here’s to your success!

Nancy

Social Media – Heaven or Hype?

Posted on April 10, 2008
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Honestly social media is a bit of both. Heaven and hype. And if you’ve not been over to http://www.liveblueprints.com/seotalk/seo-proof-not-promises/ to view the fuller picture on social media please do so.

What does bother me is the push many gurus put on the next new thing when often many tactics that have been around for awhile actually work better. That’s the hype.

And I’ll confess, I don’t see the point of many of these social media content sites. My feeling is why make improvements on rented property? There’s no point in it when you can cheaply own your own site and rank it over and over again for the same long tail terms the social media content sites rank on. And you never get surprised by your own sites suddenly placing ‘no follow’ tags on all your outbound links like Hubpages did recently.

So start with the above and stay tuned for more on this subject from me.

Here’s to your success!

Nancy

You can do this – SEO is simpler than you think

Posted on February 22, 2008
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See more at LiveBlueprints.com >>>

More on How to Rank on The Search Engines

Posted on February 12, 2008
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After my last post I received the following from Paul:

“I’ve used the service you mentioned, Directory Maximizer, and I’d give it a thumbs up from my end as well. They did a fairly good job and the results worked well since I’ve used the service regularly as they keep adding new directories.

Although having said that, directory links alone won’t suffice. You also need to work on getting links from relevant sites. Directory links will only support your other links, in my opinion”

I agree 100%, Paul.

Here are the problems of relying totally on directories:

As a general rule, directories permit links only to the root url (your home page). Google looks for deep links and directory link building does nothing to help that. There are a few directories that permit links to interior pages and when you find them you should send a link to an interior page but realize this will be rare.
Directories are losing a lot of their page rank. Particularly with their interior pages where your links are most likely to reside.
Directories do not provide enough focused, on topic content to make your links count highly.

So with directories being less effective than they used to be, what do you do?

A lot of gurus are proclaiming that using social media sites are the way to go. If you’ve not heard this latest buzz term you soon will. Social media sites are simply sites that permit varying levels of social interaction. Some are content sites (like Squidoo and Hubpages) and others are bookmarking sites (like Digg or Del.icio.us) and of course let’s not forget the top three most popular sites, Utube, Facebook and MySpace.

Now there are a few sites that are worth an investment of time but most of it won’t help you in the long term. Why? Because social media sites, highly proclaimed by the gurus out there as being able to rank in minutes on Google’s first page are only ranking for very long tail terms that will rarely get any traffic. Beyond that, their ’stickiness’ factor (how long do they stay on Google) is limited. And finally, these links don’t send folks directly to your site, it sends them to the host site and you have to hope that you can direct traffic to your site.

I’ll be releasing a video shortly on the truth behind social media. But in the meantime, don’t dispair. You see there is plenty you can do right now to rank well in the SERPs. Last year Yanik Silver asked me to present at his exclusive Underground III seminar and after a lot of arm twising on our part, we’ve gotten Yanik to agree to let us release the video taped presentation I gave then. Here’s the fun part – it all still works.

You can view the UG3 video at www.liveblueprints.com. We’ve parsed the video into 5 roughly 10 minute segements so you can watch it at your leisure and go back to the parts you want to review easily. And we’ve even added a fun, very short video on why dropshipping makes more sense than inventorying if you are considering setting up an ecommerce site.

Enjoy!

Nancy

P.S., If you want to sign up in the opt-in box, we’ll be sure to let you know about our latest video releases. Of course I’ll post here as well.

How to Get Links to Rank High

Posted on February 5, 2008
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Got a request from Bob this week:

Hi I’m 19 and I’ve been making websites for two years. But the MAJOR problem is that they all can’t get traffic. What’s stopping me from making money is the obstacle of acquiring traffic. What do you recommend I do to get tons of links to rank high? I have SEO Elite as well but the webmasters most of them don’t want to give me a link. So therefore, it’s very hard to rank high. I have read about your success and I really think you are the right person for me to talk to. I have talked to many others and they all have said that I should ask webmasters to see if they want to link to my site but that simply doesn’t work well. Could you recommend where I should get links from? (Also where would I get links for adult related sites as well?) Thanks, Bob

Well Bob, you are right that step one is getting traffic and in my opinion there is no better source of traffic than ranking well on Google. Ranking on Google does take links and getting good links in some ways has never been harder. Here’s what you are up against:

I like SEO Elite but frankly I don’t bother using it to try to find links. As you’ve discovered that is a tremendous waste of time – website owners don’t want to do much reciprocal linking anymore. There’s a reason for this as Google has publicly stated that it will penalize sites that do ‘excessive’ (that’s their term and they don’t define it) reciprocal link trades. Beyond that, Google has effectively stripped page rank from most sites’ link directories. Stripped of page rank, these directories are not worth the effort.
There are tons of free directories that you can submit to. This can be time consuming and what I do is use a trusted inexpensive service (I like Directory Maximizer) to get it done on a schedule I prepare. But free directory submissions alone won’t be enough. For one thing free directories are also under pressure from Google in sustaining and building page rank. For another, they just don’t have the authority to transmit to your site.
There are a few higher authority directories, some of which cost money to submit to, that can help your site rank. We list our favorites at here on LiveBlueprints.com along with all our favorite tools and resources. Look at the bottom of the page for the high authority sites we like.

One more thing, Bob. You don’t need TONS of links to rank well on Google. You need the right ones.

Now those of you who know me know that I often find what others consider ‘conventional wisdom’ to be worthless. Here’s just another instance. You will often find counsel that says you should reverse engineer the top 3 sites and mimic their links to get high rankings. That’s another waste of time. What you need to consider is that the top ranking sites tend to be there because they’ve been around for awhile. That gives them an edge in building sites that are bigger, older and generally more authoritative than yours. And their past linking practices may not be the most effective ones now with Google. So what do you do?

You should be watching the SERPs (search engine results pages) for movement on page one. When you see sites that move onto page 1 that are newer sites, take a look at their linking structure. Why? Because it’s fresh. It’s more respresentive of what Google is looking for now.

Bob, I’d love it if you could send me one or two of your sites and I’ll take a cursory view. And I’ll be back in a few days with more on this subject. Stay tuned…

Nancy

Is the Supplemental Index Really Dead?

Posted on January 23, 2008
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Back on December 17 a Google representative announced the end of the Supplemental Index. Well at least that’s how I think it was supposed to read. You can read the post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog here.

I’m pulling some of the more salient parts of the post below:

“We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in…”

“…the “supplemental result” tag itself—which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect—was eliminatated a few months ago.”

“Now we’re coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we’re now searching the whole index for every query.”

What are we to make of the concept that pages banished to the SI were ‘otherwise good documents’? What does that mean anyway? The documents in the SI were good documents except for what flaw? Lack of quality content? Lack of original content?

But let’s let that all fall away for now. It doesn’t matter. But here’s what does…

They are not saying that the SI no longer exists, they say merely that the algorithm will consider documents from both indicies.

But consider this – when a document goes SI, it almost always gets it’s page rank stripped. And despite the fact that other factors are part of Googles ranking formula, page rank still comprises a very important part of the algorithm.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some insights about how this may or may not be affecting you. We’ll conduct some tests about how well pages do from both sides of the index and show you the results.

Nancy

After a Too Long Absence…

Posted on January 13, 2008
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I’m back here at GiantSlayer.net after an admittedly too long absence. What I hadn’t counted on was the drain on my time that supporting our wonderful community at LiveBlueprints.com would take. For those of you who don’t know about LiveBlueprints, I’m not going to plug it here but it’s our community that started out giving people a blueprint to follow to get page 1 rankings on Google. After we launched we got a lot of folks who wanted general information for beginners so we created a beginners blueprint we gave all our paid SEO members access to for free. That has grown and developed so much that we have re-named it the Business Blueprint. And our final forray was to launch our Ecommerce Blueprint that has our Super Cart hosting (enhanced x-cart) and our first enrollees are now seeing the difference having the right cart, found on the search engines can make in their efforts to grow their own ecommerce business.

So the long story short is we ended up launching 3x the content and support we had planned on late summer 2007. As that started to settle in we moved into the Christmas season where we make a substantial amount of our full year monies on our ecommerce sites and that was another business element taking up my time.

I apologize for not being here for the last several months but can now feel comfortable commiting here a minimum of 1x – 2x a week going forward. I have plenty to share so stay tuned.

We are also going to beef up the free content section at LiveBlueprints and I’ll be letting folks here know when new content is up. For now you may want to watch my discussion at Yanik Silver’s seminar last year about why SEO’ing for Long Tail is a waste of time. Find it here: http://liveblueprints.com/file.php/2/NancyUGIIIpart1/NancyUGIIIpart1.html

Nancy

Questions about my comments on links from directories…

Posted on August 25, 2007
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I’m getting a few questions about my recent discussion about directories. Paul asks:

How does Google know if a link to your site is a paid link? I remember you saying Google is preventing page rank from being distributed to a site if it’s paid. Wouldn’t that make links from directories like Yahoo, which is paid, a bad choice? Just want your thoughts on this matter.

Good question! Google says it has identified many sites that are selling links. It may have pieced together entire link broker site networks – I’ve heard rumors about that but nothing confirmed. What it can do is identify sites that clearly say they have a ’sponsored’ links section or ‘advertisers’ text links section. It has also been asking the public to turn in sites that are advertising paid links.

What Google is looking for are sites that are selling links that typically are not directories and that people buying links from these sites are doing so solely for the purpose of building page rank and, thus, manipulating the search engine rankings. Let me give you a clear example. The site www.ketv.com (oddly a TV news site in my own home town) is selling text links on its PR6 site. You can see them in the lower left hand column on the home page. I’m using this site as my example because Matt Cutts (Google public spokesman) has publicly referred to it as a site that Google knows is selling paid text links and has neutralized any page rank transfer from those links.

Contrast those links to Yahoo Directory which is a paid directory that was formed with the purpose of listing legitimate companies. There is a reason for this directory that was not designed just to add page rank to a site. Google has publicly said that there is a valid business reason to have a listing on Yahoo’s Directory that goes beyond simple manipulation of page rank so they have said a link from Yahoo Directory is OK.

Is this arbitrary on Google’s part? Maybe. Probably. But it’s their call. We just need to understand their thinking and act accordingly. If you were going to buy a link you would want to find a site that integrated the link into it’s content and ideally was of similar content (theme) to your site and that would be nearly impossible for Google to find. I don’t think Google is too concerned about much of this activity going on as they know how difficult it would be to find many sites like that.

Here’s another question that I’ve gotten from more than one person:

Why doesn’t your directory list include DMOZ?

DMOZ.org (a.k.a. Open Directory Project) has been a prestigious directory to get into for many years. It’s free so it’s probably worth a few minutes to submit but I find that directory so full of subjectivity on which sites they let in that I’m not too fond of it. As an example, TheGolfCollection.com is not deemed worthy of making the directory despite it’s top search engine listings and popularity among vistors in making purchases. We have unique products our competitors do not offer. We have alot of products. We have a professional looking site. But we cannot get it in. I have submitted other sites that I am embarassed to identify that made it in no problem.

From an SEO perspective, the big attraction is that DMOZ was the source that Google used to populate its Google Directory. So getting into DMOZ meant that you got a Google Directory listing which was important. However, I have been hearing rumors that Google may not be getting updates for the Google Directory from DMOZ although when you get to Google Directory the ‘Submit a Site’ link takes you to DMOZ. I have seen individual cases where the two directories are out of sync and have been so for months on end so at this point I cannot conclusively tell you what the actual case is on this issue.

At the end of the day my list was compiled from Google backlinks that I compile from a large portfolio of sites. I’m not seeing DMOZ getting listed. That is not to say that getting a link from DMOZ doesn’t count but as TheGolfCollection.com proves, you sure don’t need a link from DMOZ to take and hold #1 listings on Google.

Keep the questions coming!

Nancy

Product Sourcing

Posted on August 19, 2007
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Dropship vs. Inventory

Recently we have received a flood of questions about how to go about sourcing products or finding wholsale suppliers.

First of all, If you are new to the hard-goods e-commerce business you need to make a decision Inventory or Dropship. Starting out it’s not much of a decision; do yourself a favor and Dropship before committing your cash and time in inventory.

While it’s true, the margins are slimmer in a dropship situation, what you give up in margin you more than make up in having lower startup costs, and you don’t face the risk of having inventory you cannot move…

A good Dropshipper handles order fulfillment for you and uses your packing slip, so when the package arrives it appears as though the shipment came from “your warehouse” or at the very least as though you have made a special arrangement to ship “factory direct”.

Be sure to do a little research before using any drop shipper. Check against the Better Business database, check their prices against retail prices on the Internet (Don’t be scammed by companies claiming to be dropshipper, but really selling retail), and search the Internet for any forum entries, or past law-suits.

TheWholesaleForums.co.uk won’t
necessarily tell you if a dropshipper or wholesaler is reliable, but they have
no problem jumping on vendors who
aren’t, and despite the URL extension, have plenty of US retailers that are
members.
Worldwide Brands is
a reliable one-stop shop for finding Dropship sources. When we started it
was the first source we used to find Dropshippers.
Worldwide brands has since expanded to include wholesalers, and liquidators. While the $299 membership fee isn’t cheap, it is a lifetime membership. While some dropshippers are better than others, to date we have never been scammed by a dropshipper we have found in their database. Click
here for a preview of Worldwide Brands
If you have already selected your market, look for a retail association for
your particular line of products. Often retail assocations will have lists
of suppliers, and if nothing else, you can get advice and tips from retailers
in the same line as you are. Always invaluable!

I hope that gives you a starting point. Once you’re up, running, and have a few decent positions in the search engines; product sourcing becomes a whole lot easier. You’ll find the suppliers will seek you out

Send Me Free SEO Tools!

tha action has moved

OK – It’s True – I’m Opening Again…

Social Media – Heaven or Hype?

You can do this – SEO is simpler than you think

More on How to Rank on The Search Engines

How to Get Links to Rank High

Is the Supplemental Index Really Dead?

After a Too Long Absence…

Questions about my comments on links from directories…

Product Sourcing

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