Home Based Business

1. Is Google Seeing your site?

Well, is G seeing your home based business opportunity site?

Is G indexing your site?

How would you know?

I would say if Google doesn’t know you exist, then how is anyone else going to find you? The answer is simple – they won’t. No traffic equals no sales. There are of course a number of ways to get your site noticed. Two key ways are adding good quality content to your website and adding good quality content all over the internet linking back.

2. How relevant is Page Rank?

With all the changes going on all the time, people are still consumed with page rank. Now don’t misunderstand what I am saying. Page rank still has some weight, but overall, it’s not a big deal in the scope of things. For example, I see sites higher up on page 1 than higher page ranked sites. Why? Good question so keep reading.

Google has de-valued page rank and another indicator is they removed it from the back of their analytics information as well. Too many people were gaming the system. It got so bad online that people would not link to other sites for fear they would loose some link love from G-man. That was never G’s overall plan and it really back fired against them in my opinion.

Now before you go off on a tangent and start cursing me, I will also acknowledge that a back link from a page 5 site, I would generally agree that it would have more weight than a page rank 1 site, but not always. I believe part of the reason is that page rank 5 site has been around for a couple of years and probably has lots of back links.

3. How related are your keywords to your website?

Oftentimes, you will see people having a lot of unrelated content on their site. Now if that’s your goal, that’s fine if you want to be a blogger. But, if you want to rank in the SERP’s, then you need to have your site focused on the keywords you are trying to get page 1 on. For example, if your site is about home based business ideas, then you want to find sites that are about home based business to get the best type of link pointing back to your site. Although it’s interesting to see that when you get a link from a real authority site, it doesn’t seem to matter. for instance, if you submitted a comment at a .edu or .gov site, I would bet it’s going to a quality back link. Even if its totally unrelated because Google give a lot of weight to sites like that.

By the way, don’t go and spam all the .edu sites because they will just end up deleting or closing the comments. When you comment at different sites, if you do at all, submit a quality comment that adds value to the discussion. If you like to do comment marketing, then find sites with do follow links, post a relevant comment and move on.

4. What you need to know about Paid Links

One thing that Google reminds us of is they hate paid links or do they? I have to question whether this is really accurate for a couple of reasons. Any major article directory like Ezine Articles and Go Articles have a paid membership and for a fee with Go Articles you can be on their high page rank location. so has G de-indexed them? Not at all. So I have to wonder if it’s more related to who you are online versus just being an obvious link paid farm. Ezine article also has a paid membership, which in essence could be argued as a paid link farm, but I am sure that Google will not be de-indexing that site anytime soon with over 15 million unique visitors per month and making G a ton of cash.

Just be careful about any obvious paid link farms and work on getting more quality unique content out to various directories. It is true, content

5. Outbound Links

How many do you have pointing elsewhere on a single page? It’s all about balance in my opinion. I do believe that to rank well, Google likes to see outbound links to other websites because it looks and feels more natural. Remember, the more links you have going out, the less link juice for all the links on that page. Rule of thumb – keep it to 10 or less links pointing to another site per page. Normally, I won’t have more than 5 actually.

6. Inbound Links – The Important Part

The most important part to really ranking well in the SERP’s. Its all about the quality of backlinks pointing to your site. Everything is gravy in my opinion. Try to make sure you get a keyword anchored text link pointing back because that has the most power for link juice.

7. Link Placement does matter

Since the updates from Google, its important to use text links within the body of your articles. The footers and side columns don’t get much link love from G anymore. Yes, it still counts, but not much because people could game the system to easily. In other words, G wants to level the playing field as much as possible and provide the best possible results back to their customers.

I still have links on the side columns for simplicity and functionality, but realize I am not getting too much link love from it.

8. To Follow or Not to Follow

Recently, I became really aware of this issue called do follow and no follow links. But first, you might be wondering what the heck I am referring to. When Google spiders or indexes your site, articles etc, they follow links that you have included in the article. However, some article directories for example include within their programming, an attribute called no follow. That means, when G finds your links on that particular site with ‘no follow’ attribute, they won’t pass any link juice back to your site.

Here’s a real life example when I used to post to a quality article directory called Bloglines because they had a page rank of 9 on their sites. I didn’t realize that when I posted my articles, the links are no follow. So basically I was doing Bloglines a big favor by posting good content, but not getting any SEO benefit in return.

9. Does Domain Age Matter?

Yes it does. Part of the reason is that Google places trust on a website that has aged for awhile. Spam sites are not usually sticking around for a few years from what I have seen and read. I recommend you buy and register your keyword focused domain for at least 2 years, preferably for 5 plus years is better.

When buying a domain, although not really expanded upon, try to ensure that your keywords are in the domain name. Google does count that as part of the overall strategy when ranking sites. Just like ensuring you include the keyword phrase in the title and randomly in your article. If you are going after make money, then your domain should include the phrase make money. I have always done and recommend this when buying domains, although this website is probably the exception.

Oh give me a little slack, I didn’t know anything about SEO 5 years ago, so I picked a nice sounding name. But this site does have age and the G-man will count it and has some good solid back links.

So basically you just want to ensure you are doing the right activities. Those that have the best quality inbound links win the ranking game. It’s really that simple on how to look at the SEO game. Write unique content, hyper link your targeted keywords within the article. Rinse and keep repeating till you hit the top of page 1.

Regards,