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Google’s Keyword Tool seems like a potentially magical thing - after all, what better source of keyword ideas than the search giant through which 60+ percent of all queries are processed?  But it may be best if you don’t entirely bet your site’s success on the tool’s abilities.

Earlier today, Barry Schwartz asked his readers a simple question: “Do You Trust Google’s Keyword Tool?”  Exactly 169 people have responded so far, so the results are (although we won’t get into the exact mathematics of the statistical significance) quite noteworthy.

And as for how they responded, 22 percent of people said that, yes, they do trust Google’s Keyword Tool.  Which isn’t exactly overwhelming.  On the other hand, just 11 percent of folks said they didn’t trust the tool.

A full 64 percent of people landed somewhere in the middle with the response “Not Fully.”  Whether that sounds like a vote of confidence or not may depend on whether you tend to see glasses as half full or half empty.

So use the Keyword Tool as a go-to idea generator, perhaps . . . just don’t accept every term it spits out simply because the Google logo is visible on the same page.

A repair company in the U.S. is turning its head to the skies and taking direction from Mother Nature as to where, and when, it should place its search ads.

Bad weather is good news for American Residential Services (ARS). The firm specializes in the repair of air-conditioning, heating units and plumbing systems across the U.S., often called out to towns that have experienced disasters on a major scale.

When ARS turned to TMP Directional Marketing for help with their search marketing strategy, the agency turned they eyes skywards - literally. By analyzing keywords, they made the connection between increases in keyword use and incidents of meteorological mayhem such as torrential flooding, ice storms, and heat waves.

“As we were ramping up the campaign and doing keyword expansions, we started to notice that often times if there was unseasonably cold weather in certain areas or flooding, there was an increase in traffic,” said Liz Serafin, senior director for SEM at TMP Directional Marketing, via ClickZ. “And in certain markets, depending on the duration of the triggers, they were running out of budget faster. So we took a step back and tried to get a little more strategic.”

Using Google alerts and a team of coordinators who kept tabs on meteorological sites such as Weather.com, the TMP Directional Marketing was able to divert ARS’ budget to areas that were far more likely to see an increase in need for their repair services.

Without the need for increased spending or exceeding cost per lead expectations, ARS increased leads nationally by 57%.

“For ARS, local search is growing significantly because you have the flexibility to define your audience, to define your geography and to move very quickly in the interactive environment — whether that is paid search, natural search or Internet Yellow Pages,” said Elizabeth Young, executive director of marketing and customer satisfaction at ARS.

Some years ago, it was enough to get many inbound links to get high rankings on Google. It didn’t matter from where these links came as long as there were many links that pointed to your website.

As Google and other search engines continually improve the way they rank web pages, getting the right links is crucial if you want to be listed on the first search result page.

Unnatural links can be bad for your Google rankings

Google is able to detect unnatural linking patterns. That is why the following type of links don’t work:

Link farms and automated linking systems

Some online services promise hundreds of links in a short time with no work involved. All you have to do is to put some code on your website or to join a system that will help you to get links from other sites quickly and easily.

These automated linking systems don’t work and Google can detect them. Actually, Google thinks that you’re spamming if you participate in such a system and they might penalize your website by lowering its position in the search results.

Paid links

Google’s anti-spam guru Matt Cutts has made clear that Google considers paid links spam. If you don’t want to lose your rankings on Google, you should be very careful when buying links.

Natural links have a positive effect on your Google rankings

Natural links are links that make sense to your website visitors. For example, if you have a website about Linux, a totally unrelated link to a car parts website would look strange.

100 percent natural

The links that point to your website should be from related websites and from sources that would “naturally” link to you, i.e. Internet directories, social bookmarking services, blogs, etc. The more related websites link to your site, the higher your website will rank on Google’s result pages.

How to get the best links to your website

There are a few things that you can do to get as many good links as possible to your website.

1. Create a linkworthy website

If your website is only a collection of affiliate links then you cannot expect that other webmasters will link to your site. Create a website with good content. You might also consider creating web pages whose sole purpose is to get inbound links. This could be “How to” articles, top 10 lists or even a controversial statement.

The more interesting your web pages are, the easier it is to get links from other websites.

2. Contact related websites and blogs

Contact related websites and point them to the interesting content on your site. Do you have an article on your website that solves a specific problem?

Contact websites that also deal with that topic or bloggers who have written about that topic and tell them about your article. Chances are that these websites will link to your site. Our link builder can help you to find and contact related websites and blogs.

3. Submit your website to related Internet directories

Internet directories are an easy way to get inbound links. However, only submit your website to Internet directories that are relevant to your website and only submit your website to the right category.

A link from the right directory and the right category to your website can have a positive impact on your Google rankings. The semi-automatic submitter can help you to submit your website to relevant directories.

4. Make it easy to add your website to social bookmark services

Add a bookmark link to your website so that it is easy for your website visitors to bookmark your site.

5. Get links to different pages of your website and vary your link texts

Most links go to the home page of a website. It usually helps to get direct links to the web page that you want to promote on search engines. The websites that link to your website should use different but related texts to link to your site. If all web pages use exactly the same text to link to your site, this will look unnatural.

Getting the right kind of backlinks is very important if you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines.

What are open redirects?

Many websites use links that redirect their website visitors to another page. Some redirects are left open to any arbitrary destination. These redirects can be abused by spammers to trick web surfers and search engines into following links that seem to be pointing to your website although they redirect to a spammy website.

That means that people who think that they visit your website will be redirected to highly questionable web pages that might contain adult content, viruses, malware or phishing attempts.

Which redirects on your website could be abused?

Spammers are very inventive. According to Google, they have managed to use the redirect spam on a wide range of websites, including the websites of large well-known companies and the websites of small local government agencies.

For example, the following redirection types can be abused:

1. Scripts that redirect users to a file on the server can be abused by spammers. The links on your website could look like this:

http://www.example.com/download.php?url=http://www…
http:///www.example.com/get/pdf/?http://www…

2. Site search result pages with automatic redirect options. If the result pages of your internal site search feature contain an URL variable that sends your website visitors to other pages, spammers might be able to exploit them:

http://www.example.com/search?q=keyword&page=1&url=…

3. Affiliate tracking links. Affiliate tracking links often allow people to direct website visitors to other pages. Spammers might enter their own URLs in the tracking links. Example:

http://www.example.com/track.php?affid=123&url=…

4. Proxy pages. Proxy sites send people through to other websites and they can be abused by spammers:

http://myproxy.example.com/?url…

5. Interstitial pages. Some websites show an interstitial page when users leave a website to let users know that the information found on the link is not under their control. These URLs usually look like this:

http://www.example.com/redirect/http://www…
http://www.example.com/out?http://www…
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?http://www…

How to find out if your website is abused

Even if you find none of the URLs above on your website, your site still may have open redirects. Do the following to check if your website is abused by spammers:

1. Make a site search on Google

Go to Google.com and search for “site:yourdomain.com”. Replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name. If you see web pages that have nothing to do with your website then it’s likely that someone exploits a security hole on your website.

2. Check your web server logs for URL parameters like “=http:” or “=//”. If your redirection URLs get a lot of traffic, this could also be caused by spammers.

3. If you get user complaints about content or malware that you know cannot be found on your website then your website users might have seen your URL before they were redirected to the malware site.

What you can do to protect your website

It’s not easy to to make sure that your redirects aren’t exploited. The reason for that is that an open redirect is not a bug or a security flaw. There are some things that you can do to protect your website:

1. Check the referrer. Your redirect scripts should only work if they area accessed from another web page of your website. The redirect script should not work if the user accesses the script directly or from a search engine.

2. If possible, make sure that the script can only redirect to web pages and files that are on your own websites. You could use a whitelist of allowed destination domains.

3. Use the robots.txt file of your website to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your website. That will make your website less attractive for hackers.

4. Add a signature or a checksum to your redirect links so that only you can use the script.

source: axandra.com

Many people who start a website think that it is possible to get high rankings on Google within a few days. Unfortunately, this is not possible. Competition on the Internet is fierce and there are several factors that influence how long it takes until Google lists your website.

How old is your website?

If you have a brand new website then you have to wait. You can submit your website to Google but Google will only index your website if other websites link to your site.

In addition, you have to prove that your website is not spammy. Google has several filters for new websites and you have to earn Google’s trust before your website can get lasting high rankings. A new website can get good rankings for less competitive keywords but it usually takes about 6 months to gain the minimum level of trust that is necessary to get high rankings.

How optimized was your website before?

If you have an old and established website that was blocking search engine robots due to a broken robots.txt file or a bad website navigation then it can be relatively easy to show up in search engines.

If you remove the factors that keep search engine robots from your web pages then search engines will list your website relatively quickly. Of course, this doesn’t work if you have a new site.

How many inbound links does your website have?

If you have an old website that has very few links then it will take longer to get high rankings on Google. If your website has many inbound links, then Google will pick up the optimized pages on your website much quicker. The more quality links your website has, the quicker your optimized web pages will show up in Google’s results.

Which keywords do you target?

This is a very important factor! The more competitive your keyword is, the longer you will have to wait to get high rankings and the more links and optimized pages you need. Start with multiple word keywords that are related to your business and then proceed to the more competitive keywords when your website has good content and inbound links.

Who are your competitors?

If the website that are ranked in the top 10 results for your keyword all have thousands of inbound links and more than thousand pages then it’s not likely that your website will be able to get in the top 10 results if it has 10 inbound links and 20 pages. You can either wait for along time until you get top 10 rankings for that keywords (i.e. when you have a similar amount of pages and inbound links) or you can start with other keywords.

How many days, weeks or months does it take exactly?

Provided that your website has good inbound links and optimized web pages, you can get high rankings on Google within a few months if you have a brand new site and choose a very specific keyword that consists of several words. Old and established sites usually need some weeks for such a keyword.

If you target industry keywords, which usually consist of two or more words, brand new sites usually need six months to a year to get high rankings. An established site might get the same result within 3 months.

Highly competitive one word keywords usually require thousands of good inbound links. A brand new website can need several years to get high rankings for such a competitive keyword and even established sites can sometimes need more than a year.

Google uses a so-called robot to surf the Internet. This robot is a simple software program that parses all web pages that it finds on the Internet and then stores the information it finds in Google’s database. When you search on Google, you’re actually searching the database that has been collected by that robot.

If you want to get high rankings on Google, you must make sure that Google’s robot finds the right information on your website and that the robot writes the right information about your website in Google’s database.

1. Feed the robot: optimize more than one web page

It’s not enough to optimize your home page. You must optimize each page of your website individually. Optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords so that Google’s robot sees that your website is relevant to the topic. The more pages you optimize the better.

It takes some time to optimize your pages individually for Google but the results are worth the effort. There are no shortcuts to high rankings on Google. If someone promises you a quick solution, be very skeptical.

2. Indulge the robot: optimize the structure of your web page elements

Google’s robot does not see web pages as you can see them in your browser. Google’s robot sees the plain HTML code and it has to get all information from that code.

For that reason, you have to make sure that the HTML code of your pages contains everything in the right places so that Google’s robot can write the right information to Google’s database.

A single web page has many elements that can be read by Google’s robot: The title tag, meta tags, headline tags, links, keywords in the body text, etc. These elements must come in the right order and they must contain your keyword in the right density if you want to get high rankings on Google for that keyword.

3. Guide the robot: optimize the structure of your whole website

In addition to the structure of your web pages, the structure of your whole website influences the rankings of your web pages on Google as well.

A very important aspect is the structure of your website navigation and the internal links. Your website should have easy to follow text links to every page on your website that you want search engines to see.

If your website has a poor design or if it does not link to all pages of your site, then Google’s robot will skip these pages. If you design your website in Flash or if you put most of your web page content in images then Google’s robot won’t be able to read most of your content.

If you make it as easy as possible for Google’s robot to index your web pages then you will get the best possible rankings. Optimizing your web pages takes some work but it will help you to get high rankings on Google, more customers and more sales.

Check out Web Links Directory for an extra backlink!