Google PageRank, Local Rank and Hilltop Algorithms

When estimating websites, crawler-based search engines usually consider many factors they can find on your pages and about your pages. Most important for Google are PageRank and links. Let's look closer at the algorithms applied by Google for ranking Web pages.

Google PageRank

Google PageRank (further referred to as PR) is a system for ranking Web pages used by the Google search engine. It was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University. PageRank ("PageRank" written together is a trademark that belongs to Google) is the heart of Google's algorithm and makes it the most complex of all the search engines.

PageRank uses the Internet's link structure as an indication of each Web page's relevancy value. Sites considered high quality by Google receive a higher Page Rank and – as a consequence – a higher ranking in Google results (the interdependence between PageRank and site rankings in the search results is discussed later in this lesson). Further, since Google is currently the world's most popular search engine, the ranking a site receives in its search results has a significant impact on the volume of visitor traffic for that site.

You can view an approximation of the PageRank value currently assigned to each of your pages by Google if you download and install Google's toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer (alternatives also exist for other popular browsers). The Google toolbar will display the PageRank based on a 0 to 10 scale, however a page's true PageRank has many contributing factors and is known only to Google.

For each of your pages PageRank may be different, and the PageRanks of all the pages of your site participate in the calculation of PageRank for your domain.

For each of your pages, the PR value is almost completely dependent upon links pointing to your site, reduced, to some degree, by the total number of links to other sites on the linking page. Thus, a link to your site will have the highest amount of impact on your PR if the page linking to yours has a high PR itself and the total number of links on that page is low, ideally, just the one link to your site.

The actual formula (well, an approximate one, according to Google's official papers) for PR is as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

where pages T1...Tn all point to page A. The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. Google usually sets d to 0.85. C(T) is defined as the number of links going out of page T.

Thus, a site with a high PR but a large number of outbound links can nullify its own impact on your PR. To increase your PageRank, get as many links to your site from pages with a high PR and a low number of total links. Alternatively, obtain as many links pointing to your site as you can, no matter what their PageRank is, as long as they are ranked. It depends on each specific case which variant will get the best out of the PR formula.

Those of you interested in the mathematical aspect will see that the formula is cyclic: the PR of each page depends on the PR of the pages pointing to it. But we won't know what PR those pages have until the pages pointing to them have their PR calculated and so on. Google resolves this by implementing an iterative algorithm which starts without knowing the real PR for each page and assuming it to be 1. Then the algorithm runs as many times as needed and on each run it gets closer to the estimate of the final value.

Each time the calculation runs, the value of PageRank for each page participating in the calculation changes. When these changes become insignificant or stop after a certain number of iterations, the algorithm assumes it now has the final Page Rank values for each page.

Real Page Ranks range from 0.15 (for pages that have no inbound links at all) up to a very large number. The actual value changes every time Google does re-indexing and adds new pages to its database. Most experts agree on the point that the interdependence of toolbar PR and real PR are based on the logarithmic scale. Here's what it means if we assume that the base for the algorithm is, for instance, 10:

Toolbar PageRank (log base 10)	Real PageRank
0	0 .15 – 10
1	100 – 1,000
2	1,000 – 10 , 000
3	10,000 – 100,000
4	100,000 – 1,000,000
5	1,000,000 – 10,000,000
6	10,000,000 – 100,000,000
7	100,000,000 – 1,000,000,000
8	1,000,000,000 – 10,000,000,000
9	10,000,000,000 – 100,000,000,000
10	100,000,000,000 – 1,000,000,000,000

Although there is no evidence that the logarithm is based on 10, the main point is that it becomes harder and harder to move up the toolbar, because the gaps to overcome become larger and larger with each step. This means that for new websites, "toolbar" PR values between 1 and 3 may be relatively easy to acquire, but getting to 4 requires considerably more effort and then pushing up to 5 is even harder still.

As you may have figured out from the formula above, every page has at least a PR of 0.15 even if it doesn’t have any inbound links pointing to it. But this may only be in theory – there are rumors that Google applies a post-spidering phase whereby any pages that have no incoming links at all are completely deleted from the index.

Local Rank

Local Rank is an algorithm similar to PR which is written by Krishna Bharat of the HillTop project. Google applied for a patent in 2001 and received it in early 2003. To sum it up, this algorithm re-ranks the results returned for a certain user's query by looking at the inter-connectivity between the results. This means that after a search is done, the PR algorithm is run among the result pages only, and the pages that have the most links from other pages in that set will rank highest.

Essentially, it's a way of making sure that links are relevant and ranking sites accordingly. Please note that this algorithm does not count links from your own site – or, to be more exact, links from the same IP address.

Assuming that it is used by Google, make sure that you first get links pointing to you from other pages that rank well (or rank at all) for the keyword that you are targeting. Directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ would be a good place to start – they tend to rank well for a wide range of keywords. Also, keep in mind that this is about pages, not sites. The links need to be from the pages that rank well – not other pages on sites that rank well.

Hilltop

Hilltop is a patented algorithm that was created in 1999 by Krishna Bharath and George A. Mihaila of the University of Toronto. The algorithm is used to find topic relevant documents to the particular keyword topic. Hilltop operates on a special index of " expert documents".

Basically, it looks at the relationship between the "Expert" and "Authority" pages. An "Expert" is a page that links to lots of other relevant documents. An "Authority" is a page that has links pointing to it from the "Expert" pages. Here they mean pages about a specific topic and having links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic. Pages are defined as non-affiliated if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations. So, if your website has backlinks from many of the best expert pages it will be an "Authority".

In theory, Google finds "Expert" pages and then the pages that they link to would rank well. Pages on sites like Yahoo!, DMOZ, college sites and library sites can be considered experts.

Google acquired the algorithm in February 2003.

Site Structure and PageRank

PageRank can be transmitted from page to page via links across different pages of your site as well as across all the sites in the Web. Knowing this, it’s possible to organize your link system in such a way that your content-rich pages receive and retain the highest PageRank.

The pages of your site receive PageRank from outside through inbound links. If you've got many inbound links to different pages of your site, it means PageRank enters your site at many points.

Such "PageRank entry points" can pass PageRank further on to other pages of your site.

The idea that you should keep in mind is that the amount of PageRank that a page of your site is able to give to another page depends on how many links the first (linking) page itself contains. This page only has a certain amount of Page Rank, which is going to be distributed over several other pages that this page links to.

The best way to obtain a good PR on all of your pages is to have a well thought-out linking structure for your site.

What this means is that every page on your site should have multiple links from your other pages coming into it. Since PR is passed on from page to page - the higher the PR that a page has, the more it has to pass on. Pages with a low number of links on them will pass relatively more PR per link. However, on your own site, you want all of your pages to benefit - usually. Also, PR is passed back and forth between all of your pages - this means that your home page gets an additional boost because, generally, every page on your site links to your home page.

Let's look at the prototypes of site linking schemes that may be beneficial in terms of PR distribution.

1. Simple hierarchy.



The boxes denote separate pages and the figures in them denote the PR value calculated with the help of a simple algorithm that takes into consideration only these pages. With a site structure like this, it's pretty easy to get a high PR for your home page; however this is an ideal situation which is difficult to recreate in real life: you will want to get more cross-linking then just links from all your pages to the home page.

2. Linking to external pages that return backlinks



This just means creating a link directory page on your site and benefit a bit from link exchange with the external pages. Link exchanges are dealt with in the next lesson.

3. Site with inbound and outbound links



This is very similar to the first scheme, however, here there is an external site (Site A) passing its PR to your home page which then distributes it to child pages. You can see that both a homepage's PR and that of the child pages have significantly increased. It doesn't matter how many pages you have in your site, your average PR will always be 1.0 at best. But a hierarchical layout can strongly concentrate votes and, therefore the PR, into the home page.

So here are some main conclusions you should keep in mind when optimizing the link structure of your site for better PR distribution.

• If a particular page is very important – use a hierarchical structure with the important page at the "top".
• When a group of pages may contain outward links – increase the number of internal links to retain as much PR as possible.
• When a group of pages do not contain outward links – the number of internal links in the site has no effect on the site's average PR. You might as well use a link structure that gives the user the best navigational experience.

How your PageRank influences your rankings

While the exact algorithm of each search engine is a closely guarded secret, search engine analysts believe that search engine results (ranking) are some form of a multiplier factor of Page relevance (which is determined from your multiple of "on-page" and "off-page" factors) and PageRank. Simply put, the formula would look something like –

Ranking = [Page Relevance] * [PageRank]

The PR logic makes sense since the algorithm seems invulnerable to spammers. The search results of Google search have demonstrated high relevance and this is one of the main reasons for their resounding success. Most other major search engines have adopted this logic in their own algorithms in some form or other, varying the importance they assign to this value in ranking sites in their search engine result pages.

What you should remember from this lesson:

1. PageRank was developed by Google to estimate the absolute (keyword-independent) importance of every page in its index. When Google pulls out the results in response to a Web surfer's query, it does something similar to multiplying the relevance of each page by the PR value. So, PageRank is really worth fighting for.
2. PageRank depends on how many pages out there link to yours (the more, the better) and how many other links these pages contain (the less, the better).
3. You may try to optimize the link structure of your site for better PageRank distribution. Most simply, you should create a site map, get many cross-links between your pages and organize a hierarchy link structure with the most important pages on the top.

HTML Elements (Page Areas) That Matter

Since spiders see your page as HTML code instead of what is directly visible through a browser, optimizers must gain a solid understanding of the structure of a typical HTML document.
This lesson will guide you through some HTML basics and then show which elements are critical for optimization and why.
First, we recommend that your HTML documents comply with the XHTML standard. XHTML is the strictest standard of HTML (hypertext markup language). By following this standard you ensure that your pages are easily readable for search engine spiders. You can learn more about XHTML at the official resource of the World Wide Web consortium:
http://www.w3.org/
Every HTML document that complies with the standards has two principal sections: the HEAD area and the BODY area. To illustrate this we can open the source code of any HTML page found on the Web. Open it in your browser, right-click on the page and select "view page source" or "view source".

The HEAD section is everything you see between the <head> and </head> tags. The content of this section is invisible when viewing the page in a browser. As you can see, one of the elements it includes is the title tag (between the <title> and </title> markup). This is what is shown in the caption bar of the internet browser when this page is displayed in a browser. The title will also represent your page in the search engine results. As such, the title tag is a very important element.
The head section also includes various META tags. In the w3.org example we see the META keywords tag and the META description tag:

<meta name="keywords" content="…">

<meta name="description" content="…">

After the <head> tag is closed, the <body> tag opens. Everything that's within the body tag (i.e. between the <body> and </body> markup) is visible on the page when viewed in the browser.
In the body text of the w3c.org example, we see the <h1> and <h2> tags. These are called HTML headings and range from the 1st (h1) to the 6th (h6) level; initially, they were meant to mark logical styles for different levels of heading importance: "h1" being the most important heading and "h6" being the least important. Usually browsers display the tags from the largest to smallest. The <h1> tag displayed with the largest font size, and on down respectively until <h6> which displays the smallest font size. The search engines treat the heading tags the same way.
The links tag is another important body element, and is delimited by <a> and </a> markup.
The image tag <img> is responsible for displaying an appropriate image whenever a browser sees it in the source code.
Schematically, an HTML document in an optimizer's eyes (as well as in the search engine's eyes) looks like this:
<head>
<title>My title goes here</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3">
<meta name="description" content="site description">
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is the first level heading which is important to search engines</h1>
<h2>this is a kind of subheading which is also important</h2>
This is a simple text in the body of the page. This content must include a minimum of 100 words, with keyword density around 3% to 7%, maximum keyword prominence towards the beginning, middle and end of the page, and maximum keyword proximity.
<b>This text will show in bold</b>
<a href="http://www.somesite.com" title="some widget site">Link to some widget site</a>
<img src="http://mysite.com/image.jpg" alt="and this is my image" />
</body>
Let's go through all the HTML elements and get some in-depth insight into how we can optimize each of them.

The title tag

The Title tag of your Web page is probably the most important HTML tag. Not only will search engines consider it when estimating your pages' relevancy towards certain keywords, but also when your title tag finally shows up in the SERP (search engine result pages). A lot depends on how attractive the title is to Web surfers and whether they are compelled to click on your link.
All search engines consider the keywords in this tag and generally give those keywords a great deal of importance in their ranking system. It is as important as your visible text copy and the links pointing to your page.
Always use your primary keywords in the title tag at least once. Try to place them at the start of the tag, i.e. make their prominence 100%. The minimum keyword prominence for the title is 60%.
Don't use several title tags on one page. Make sure the title is the first tag in the head section and that there are no tags before it. Avoid listing the same keyword multiple times in the tag, some engines may penalize for this. Avoid using the same title throughout your site. Try using a unique title tag for each Web page and use key phrases that are thematically relevant to that page. You can use variant forms of a keyword when possible or applicable.
For instance, if you use "Designer" in your Title tag, a search on "design" will give you a match on most engines. However, words like "companies" will not always yield a match on "company" since "company" is not an exact substring of "companies".
Longer titles are generally better than shorter ones. However the recommended word count for a title is only 5 to 9 words, and character length up to 80 symbols. Make your title interesting and appealing to searchers to convince them that they should click on it.
Moreover, you can put your company’s name in the title tag, even place it at the very begining of the tag. If your company is a well-known brand it’s essential for you to do it, if not – then it’s an excellent opportunity to promote it. What is more important is that you shouldn’t stop with just your company name but definitely add one or two descriptive phrases to the tag. Those who already know your company will query for it specifically in the engines and those who don’t – will find you while seeking the products or services you sell based on the descriptive phrases.
One more point to remember is that you should be very specific if you are working in a certain area. Your keywords should reflect the geographical region where you are primarily seeking clients. For example, if a customer looks for some goods (let’s say slippers) first they will begin with typing simply “slippers” and after the engine returns an enormous list from all over the world, the customer will narrow the query by adding some geographical names (e.g. Utah slippers). That’s your chance to be in the Top 10 of the new results for that area. 
While creating the title you can use the following approaches:

<Title>My Company Inc. Utah Slippers</Title>
<Title>My Company Inc. – Utah Footwear</Title>
<Title>My Company Inc. – Utah Slippers – Footwear in Utah</Title>

In the last example the geographical name is used twice in different variations and it is crucial not to put the same words right next to each other as that might be considered as spam by SEs. Don’t use ALL CAPS,  SEs are not case sensitive now and it won’t help, instead it will look rather crude. Initial capitals are well suited for the title tag.
The title should reveal the main idea of the visible text and thus reflect your business in the best possible way.
Here are 10 tips for title tags given by John Alexander, a prominent search engine expert:

1. "When working with your keyword phrase, get it positioned up front so that as you build a sentence it still reads well.
2. Try working with your one important keyword phrase up front and another secondary phrase to the rear of the title.
3. Try writing your title to make a thought provoking statement.
4. Try writing your title so that it asks a "thought provoking" question.
5. Try writing a title so that it reveals a hidden truth or misconception.
6. While in creative mode, keep your mind on what it is that your target audience really wants.
7. Build honest titles that are related to your site content.
8. Do NOT resort to keyword stuffing or stacking the title full of multiple phrases that do not convey an intelligent message.
9. Do not include a lot of capitals or special characters in your title.
10. Do not get hung up on title length. The easiest rule is to simply keep your title under 59 characters (for Lycos sake) and honestly, you can build really excellent titles in this space."

The META tags

There are two META tags that still appear to be of use by the search spiders: META keywords and META description. These tags are very unlikely to impact rankings; they can only play a weighty role in the site's click-through rate from the SERPs so it's worth optimizing them for your keywords as well.
If you use any other META tags, place them after these two.

The META Keywords

Syntax:
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, …" />
Its initial purpose was to give search engine robots an idea of what the page is about to help with rankings. Unfortunately, as soon as this became evident, so many spammers started abusing it that spiders now have discounted the importance of this tag by at least half of its original ranking value. Most experts say this tag has no weight from the SEO perspective and does not influence your rankings.
If you still want to exploit this tag, use your main keyword phrase, a secondary keyword phrase, and a few synonyms of your keyword phrase in your keyword META tag. Make sure to focus the words in your keyword tag on that one page only, not on every single keyword that could possibly be associated with your entire website. Focus your tags on that page only.
Remember if you use many of the same words in your different keyword phrases, it could look as if you're spamming the engine, so be careful.

The META Description

Syntax:
<meta name="description" content="a short description of your site" />
The contents of the META description tag is what most search engines and directories will show under your title in the search result list. If you have not provided any META description tag to your Web page, the search engines try to make one for you, often using the first few words of your Web page or a text selection where the keyword phrases searched by the users appear. If the Search Engine makes up a description by picking up text from your page, the generated description may not do you Web page justice.
The Meta description tag needs to be kept brief yet informative. A description of about 25-30 words should be fine. Keywords and key phrases should be included in the Meta description tag, though care should be taken not to repeat them too often. Like the title tag, the META description tag should be customized for each page depending on the content theme and target keywords of this page.
Remember that even though Google doesn't consider the META description tag when determining relevancy, it often uses the contents of this tag in the snippet description of your page in the search results. So, make your description captivating and designed to attract traffic. The Meta description tag should be appealing to users, tempting them to click on the link to your site and visit your Web estate. Using the Meta description tag can help you increase the click-through rate of your page, which in its turn increases the traffic you can get from any ranking position.
Below is a nice example of an informative description optimized for "weather forecast software":
"The only weather forecast software that brings long-range weather forecasts, daily horoscopes, biorhythm calculator, Web cams, and weather maps to your desktop."

The body text

The main textual content that is visible to your visitors is placed within the body tag. It still matters for some search engines when it comes to your page analysis and ranking.
Remember the importance of keyword prominence and place your keyword phrase early in the body text of the page. This may also become a means to communicate your message to prospects; some search engines retrieve the first few lines of your Web page and use them as the description of your site in the search results. So, put a number of important keywords in the first few lines in the visible part of your body text. Try to tailor the text in the beginning so that it can be used as a description of your site.
Spread your keyword phrases throughout the body of the page in natural sounding paragraphs; try to keep separate words of your key phrases close together for proximity sake. Put a secondary key phrase in the middle and at the end of your body text. Have some of your keywords in bold (for this purpose, it's better to use the "<b>" tag instead of styles of logical <strong> formatting. However, you can still apply the necessary styles to this text by the following trick: <b style="font-weight:bold">).
Remember your content minimum for a page is 125 words but it's better to reach far beyond this limit.

HTML headings h1 – h6

The headings themselves are a good means of visually organizing your content. Besides that, search engines consider the headings and sub-headings of your page, (especially those in bold), to be important. Take advantage of this by using H1, H2 and H3 tags instead of graphical headings, especially towards the top of your page.
Use heading tags to break up your page copy and make it easier to read and absorb for your visitors. Include your most important search keywords and phrases within the heading text. It follows that using your target keywords and phrases within these headings means that search engines will give them more relevancy weight. Thus, you should always try to use your target keywords within the headings and sub-headings to break up the text on your page.
Page Heading incorporating most important keyword phrase 
Sub-Heading 1 incorporating most important keyword phrase
Paragraph of text incorporating other target keyword phrases 
Sub-Heading 2 incorporating next most important keyword phrase
Paragraph of text incorporating other target keyword phrases
And so on…
The problem about headings is that each type of browser has its own way of displaying them and thus may not match your design ideas. You may apply the following workaround with the help of the style attribute:

<h1 style="font-size:10px;color:#00FFFF;font-weight:bold">This is the formatted heading</h1>

Or with the class attribute, provided the class is defined somewhere in a style sheet.
The search engine will see a first level heading here, but the browser will show human visitors the text formatted as you need instead of standard level one heading.
What should be avoided is trying to repeat the first level tag more than one time. In other words, you shouldn't have more than one <h1> tag on your page to indicate that your main topic is streamlined around a single definite concept.
As for the tags of other levels, it is up to you to use multiple <h2>, <h3> tags etc. on a page in order to structure information in a proper way. Just do your best not to overuse them, and keep to the quality content guidelines.

Link text

Keyword usage is important in the visible text (also called anchor text) of links pointing outside your domain (also called outbound links) as well as links to the internal pages. When you give your users a reference to other documents relative to your theme, the words you use to refer to those documents are considered descriptive for your page's profile.
A usual link would look like this:
Click here for <a href="http://www.somesite.com/keyword-phrase.html" title="this text will appear when user mouse-overs the link">Visible link text</a>
Note: When you link to your own pages, rename these pages so that the URLs contain keywords separated with a hyphen – instead of running the keywords together. By breaking the words up in some way, you let the engines see them as individual words in a phrase. If the words are not broken up, the spiders will see the words as a single term.
Don't flood your links with keywords; usually it's enough to have up to three links per page containing your targeted terms, desirably the first three links.

ALT attributes of images

Alt tags consist of alternative wording for images that is displayed in browsers that can't display images, did not download the image for some reason, or is spoken by talking browsers for the blind. Search Engines use the text in the alt tags to substitute the anchor link text if the image is a hyperlink. This makes these attributes ideal for optimization.
Example:

<img src="images/logo.gif" alt="Graphic of a weather forecast software" width="415" height ="100" / >

As a rule, if you insert your keyword phrase in your ALT text (as long as you are also describing the graphic), you'll have a boost in relevancy with many of the engines. Google often picks up the first ALT text on the page and uses it as the description in the search results, so pay special attention to the ALT text in your first graphic.
To avoid spamming, never remove the actual graphic description from the ALT attributes when you're populating them with your key phrase, and do not plant your key phrase into more than the first three ALT image attributes on the page and then perhaps the last one as well.

What you should remember for this lesson:

1. The areas of a standard HTML document which matter most for the search engine spiders are: the TITLE tag, the HTML headings, the link text and the ALT attributes of images.
2. With most of these, observe four parameters: prominence, density, proximity and frequency when populating them with your keywords. This is most important with the body text. To improve keyword significance in the body text, use your keywords in bold once or twice.
3. While working with your keywords, keep away from any kind of keyword stuffing. After finishing, ensure that the copy still reads naturally.

Country-Specific Domain Names and SEO

A client asked a question today: “Should I use a Country-Specific Domain Name (TLD) If I Am Targeting [That] Market?”
The short answer is Yes.
There are several benefits from doing this, and having a site aimed at each country you are targeting. But there are also some “traps” to watch out for if you do plan to do this.
Let me start with the benefits:
Increase Your Search Engine Rankings Where It Counts (Benefit #1)

This is the most simple, fundamental benefit of having separate web-sites for each country you are targeting - you get a big rankings boost.
Because most of my clients are Australian businesses who target an Australian audience, I work a lot with Australian (.com.au) domain names.
And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that it’s clearly easier to rank better in Australian users’ Google Search results if you have an Australian .com.au domain name.
Have a look at this (click on images to see rankings):

Check it out - 9 out of the top 10 results are Australian web-sites.
Here’s what people in the U.K. see when they do the same search:

(Here 5 out of the top 10 results in the Search Engine Rankings are British web-sites.)
And for comparison, here’s the same page in the International version of Google:

Here you see a different set of results again - this time, more American and International web-sites, with 8 of the top 10 sites being owned by American companies.
So we very clearly see there’s a very clear positive correlation here between having a site targeted to a particular country, and search engine rankings.
Increase your Click Through Rates (Benefit #2)
If SEO isn’t your style, and you’re more looking at Adwords results, consider what a country-specific domain name does to your credibility in that market.
If you have a .com.au domain name as the display URL in your Google Adwords account, and you’re targeting an American or British audience, in the half second it takes for someone to review your ad and decide to click, the seed of doubt enters their mind and they decide your site is “probably not relevant”.
On the other hand, if you were targeting an Australian audience, and your display URL showed a .com.au domain name, you would immediately GAIN credibility.
Increase your Conversion Rates by Tailoring Content to Each Market (Benefit #3)
Finally, one of the great things about having separate web-sites for each country you are targeting is that you can tailor the content to suit your market.
For example, the American market is less offended by heavy-selling, hyped-up advertising copy - whereas Australian, New Zealand and British consumers are generally more conservative in the marketing messages they respond to.
This presents businesspeople who own several different country targeted web-sites a unique opportunity to optimise their content in the same way that some successful direct mail marketers will segment and target their lists.
WARNING: Duplicate Content
But… There’s one BIG issue to consider if you’re planning to set up a second version of your web-site under a country-specific URL.
Duplicate Content on Multiple Domains Case Study #1

Recently, a client’s web-site was ranking poorly in search engines.
Found they were running the same site on both the .com and .com.au domain names - and every page (on one of the two sites) had received a duplicate content penalty. That meant roughly half the pages on each site were working.
The client was targeting an Australian audience, but they wanted to avoid some domain squatter or competitor owning the .com version of their domain name - so they registered both.
…And they couldn’t bear to not use the .com version of their domain (and let it sit there, going to waste), so they set their site up so that it would run on both the .com and .com.au domains.
It all seemed pretty logical to the web developer who set up their web-site… but little did they know it would end up causing big problems for their client.
When Google found their web-site(s), they quickly found all of the content was identical on the two domains and had to decide which version of the domain was the “legitimate” owner of the content, and which should be penalised for copyright infringement.
Google ended up deciding some of the content legitimately belonged to one web-site, and some belonged to the other - and it penalised both web-sites.
Ouch!
It only took a tiny bit of Search Engine Optimisation work to fix this.
We 301 (permanent) redirected all pages from one version of the site into the other (so that they kept the links that they had on both domains), changed some settings in their Google Webmaster Tools accounts (to fix a second issue to do with domain canonization) and did some minor on-page SEO tweaks.
Ever since, their rankings have been improving, and their positioning in search engines has never been better!
The Lesson: The lesson here is simply - if all of your customers are in one country, don’t run two web-sites.
(Oh, and speaking to an SEO guy can pay off - even if you’re *logically* doing the right thing. )

Duplicate Content on Multiple Domains Case Study #2

This one’s a doozie… and it happened just prior to the last Google Algorithm update.
Another potential client - a corporate marketing firm - came to me asking to help them improve their search engine rankings.
Their web-site was part of a network of partner companies, each providing the same service in different regions. His site was targeting Australia.
I looked into the job and found that one of the major issues they faced was duplicated content… the same content was repeated over the multiple web-sites.
I’m not just talking about content which described their packaged services and business philisophy - they also had duplicated links pages which served to cross-promote the various partner companies.
But the client didn’t want to change these duplicate pages.
“I can’t do that. Part of the agreement with the international partners says we will all display these pages. They help us to get links to our sites, and mean we can cross-promote each other. And we haven’t been penalised so far…”
Famous last words…
A few weeks later when Google’s Algorithm was updated, all of the partner sites dropped significantly - all pages lost page rank, and the sites no longer featured on the first page of Google for any significant keywords.
They’re now “reassessing their options”.
The lesson: Don’t copy and paste content. Even if there is a short term benefit, it’s poison for search engine rankings.

Final Tip: Google Webmaster Tools
Australia (and many other countries) have tight restrictions on who can own their country-specific domain names. In Australia, there are a whole host of restrictions - and in general, you need a registered business entity in order to own the domain name you want to register.
But, if you don’t want to go to the effort of setting up structures in other countries, or if you already have a perfectly good .com domain name which you want to target to a specific country, the alternative is to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account for that domain and tell Google which country you are targeting.
Set up, or log-into your Google Webmaster Tools account, and make sure your site has been verified. Once you have done that…

1. Click on Tools;
2. Then Set Geographic Target;
3. Then Associate a geographic location with this site, and finally;
4. Select the Country or Region you want to target

Google does use some of its own tricks to work out which country or region a web-site is targeting, (you would have seen several British .com web-sites ranking well in search engines in the examples above,) but this helps to make sure they get it right.
This is as good as a country-specific domain name for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.

Stage 1: Search Engine Marketing

Search Marketing has become a buzzword that is now heard all over the place many times a day. Here we provide an exact definition of what it refers to, and how it relates to both Web Search and Web Marketing.
Search Marketing is also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and as such we will refer to is as SEM throughout this course. The definitions that follow are the basics; if you are an expert / advanced Search Marketer, you can skip these terms; otherwise we recommend that you read and understand them.
Search Marketing is a part of business marketing efforts that is aimed at increasing traffic (the number of visitors) to the website from the search engines. Additionally, it addresses conversion (the percent of visitors who become buyers). The first is achieved by increasing search engine visibility, i.e. the position of your site in search engine results for certain keywords that people type in the search box to obtain these results.
For instance, if someone wants to find and buy a digital camera, they will go to a search engine such as Google and type "digital camera" in the search box. Google will list, in this case, 138 million results (these are the real figures extracted while creating this course). If you sell digital cameras or offer any related services, your site may be listed among these 138,000,000 results. Here, everything depends on how deep you are. If you are on the first or second page of the search results, it's more likely that such visibility will bring many visitors and customers from Google. If you are the 300th result, it's unlikely that anyone at all will come to you from Google.
Together with the power and size of your banner / ad network, your affiliations and partnerships, SE visibility comprises a broader concept - Web visibility (aka online visibility).
Generally, there are two main methods of carrying out SEM: a) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) b) using pay-per-click and paid inclusion listing models. They are briefly depicted in the following lessons.
Although paid inclusion and pay-per-click advertising methods seem like the fastest methods to search engine marketing, website owners prefer to adopt a more time consuming search engine optimization method to obtain better marketing of their website on search engines.
Organic rankings are results that you get for free. That is, you create Web copy and publish it, then after a certain period of time a search engine robot finds it (either by itself or as a result of your submission). Finally, the robot reads your content and puts your site into its index. Now your site will be found by this search engine when people query for some words contained within your pages. Obtained this way, your positions in the result list are called your "organic search engine rankings".
Paid listings are different: pay a search engine and it guarantees the inclusion of your site in the index. Moreover, many search engines offer advanced pay-for-performance programs, such as showing your site / ad in the search results for keywords of your choice. These are the so-called "sponsored" results. Most commonly, you will have to pay a specified rate for each visitor that comes to your site from this search engine that clicks on these ads.
Mastering both methods and their proper combination can provide maximum search engine visibility. Because things keep changing, search engine marketers need to devote a good deal of time staying on top of the SEO industry and its trends.
The aim of SEM is not only to find a proper balance between organic and paid listings, but also to achieve maximum conversion of visitors into loyal customers. Nowadays SEM relies on the statement that it's not the traffic itself that matters, but how targeted and convertible it is. The way your traffic converts also matters a lot –  even more than your site rank on a search engine. You can rank worse than a competitor and yet the percentage of your visitors that turn into buyers can be high enough to actually outperform a competitor several times over.
The following are the main goals of Search Engine Marketing:

1. Improve Web visibility and get as much traffic as possible.
2. Improve traffic quality: get high rankings for exactly those keywords that bring visitors with the best conversion rate.
3. Decrease expenditures by switching off advertising for underperforming keywords.

Methods used by Search Marketing

The main methods used for achieving the goals of Search marketing are Search Engine Optimization (for organic listings), Bid Management (for paid listings) and Web Analytics (for both types of listings).
Search Engine Optimization (further referred to in this course as SEO) is about changing the HTML code of your pages and the structure of your site in such a way that when an SE robot reads the site, it can understand that the pages have valuable content related to your keywords, and then rank them high. SEO also tells about ways to increase your link popularity - the number of links from other high-ranked pages to your site. This is important because most search engines consider your link popularity a vital ranking factor.
Bid Management is about controlling bids, i.e. the amount of money you spend maintaining your visibility in the sponsored listings. Usually you try to detect the best converting keywords and keyword groups, in order to increase bids on them; as well as decrease or take off bids on keywords that don't break even. Attention also should be paid to leveraging your paid and organic listings, so to spend less on paid advertising campaigns when you get enough traffic from natural results, and invest in paid advertising when an algorithm changes or strong competitors force you out from the top positions in the organic listings.
Web Analytics (further referred to as WA) is about getting, analyzing and using the information about your visitors, their details, their behavior on your site, the ways they have found your site, the efficiency of referrers and advertising, conversion rates, and, together with all that, eCommerce information.

So here's what you should remember from this lesson:

1. Search Marketing, or Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the aggregate of efforts aiming at increasing your search engine visibility.
2. SEM deals with your organic and paid listings on the search engines.
3. SEM includes and uses the techniques of Search Engine Optimization, Bid Management and Web Analytics.

What You Should Know before Getting Started with Online Marketing

The good news is that Internet marketing has rapidly grown and offers a broad array of opportunities for small and large businesses. From the previous introduction we became familiar with the Internet marketing science structure and the particular steps to follow to develop an online business.
At this point, before delving more deeply into the subject, let's define some main terms. Online marketing deals with websites and Web pages, search engines, email and the Internet as the base of the World Wide Web. All of these areas are used to advertise and sell goods and services.
Referencing the original Wikipedia encyclopedia project definitions of our basic terms, they are as follows:
The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet.
The hypertext documents, or Web pages, reside on Web servers - special computers that receive requests for Web pages and can "serve" them to the requesting side.
Each Web server, or host, has its unique global address used to find it over the Internet. This address is called an "IP address". A typical IP address looks like four numbers separated by dots. For example, 63.146.123.0 is the address of the server where google.com is situated.
Each server can hold one or many websites. A website (or Web site) is a collection of Web pages, typically bound to a particular domain name or subdomain on the World Wide Web on the Internet. A website is identified uniquely by its domain name, e.g. www.webceo.com.
Domain names are translated into IP addresses by the global DNS - domain name system. That is, when you type www.webceo.com in your browser, the latter first sends a DNS request, and receives the IP address of the server where www.webceo.com is hosted. The browser then connects to that server directly and asks for Web CEO's home page.
Each website is composed of many Web pages. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML, that is always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the website's server to display in the user's Web browser.
So when a new business is born on the Internet, or when an established brick and mortar enterprise goes online, it starts by creating a website. This is done by purchasing a domain name from an organization accredited to sell domain names, e.g. godaddy.com or register.com. Also, some hosting space must be purchased, so that there's some server ready to store the website. Then, several Web pages are created and linked to each other to make up this website. Finally, the website is linked to the domain name so that everyone can type this domain name in a browser and view these pages.
With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. A client program called a "user agent" retrieves information resources, such as Web pages and other computer files, from Web servers using their URLs.
Most commonly, the user agent is a kind of Web browser: Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Opera, Netscape, or the program that you use to view this lesson. It retrieves content from remote Web servers and displays it on your computer. You can then follow hyperlinks in each Web page to other World Wide Web resources, whose location (including their domain name) is embedded in the hyperlinks. The act of following hyperlinks from one website to another is referred to as "browsing" or sometimes as "surfing" the Web.
To find a Web page, you can always type its address in the address field of your browser. But what if you don't know the exact address, or want to find all Web pages from different websites on a particular topic?
This is when you use a search engine or directory for the search. There are 3 top search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN (Windows Live Search). These search engines are most preferred by Web surfers and every site owner strives to get included in their databases. If people can find your website through search engines, this search engine creates an invaluable source of traffic for you, which translates into income if you sell goods or services.
Actually, search engines are very numerous and differ according to how they work. We have a specific section for "Understanding Search Engines" which includes seven lessons to guide and familiarize you with their core principles.
There is one final point we'll look at, and that is the use of email for your online marketing activity. The topic is email marketing and using this form of communication to send goods and service offers to clients.
Electronic mail (abbreviated "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems.
Email predates the Internet; existing email systems were a crucial tool in creating the Internet. Email was quickly extended and became additional and highly useful tool for the online marketers.
Email Marketing and other forms of Internet Marketing are depicted in this course to select and master your niche for a future online business.

Introduction into Internet Marketing

Starting from the early 1990s Internet marketing made an amazing development from simple text-based websites that offered product information into highly evolved and complete online businesses promoting and selling their services on the Internet.
Nowadays, the Internet marketing industry has become a complicated and branchy science involving a great deal of theoretical knowledge in combination with applied techniques. As a science, it ranges from browser-side and server-side programming and coding on one end to marketing and economics on the other.
Internet marketing means the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. It includes Banner and Text Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Interactive Advertising, Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Marketing (including Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising).
Our first stage of the Internet Marketing course will start with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a specific area of an online marketers' business. Mainly, its purpose is to increase targeted traffic from search engines via organic search engine ranking, paid listing and advertising. Here you'll be shown the main principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link building, and paid advertising campaigns.
Actually, every successful search engine optimizer should be aware of top search engine demands and consider them while creating website and improving on-page and off-page factors for Web pages. There are numerous important factors influencing search engine ranking of a Web page. The SEO division of the course provides profound and consecutive lessons depicting each step of your optimization work. Search Engine Advertising is the last topic of the SEM Stage.
There are certain methods that go beyond SEM that can help improve your site online visibility. These include, for instance, creating and spreading a banner / ad network and / or paid link partnerships, as well as social media, email marketing and building affiliate relationships with other websites.
The Social Media Marketing stage is devoted to the numerous social media channels on the Web. Blogs and micro-blogging services, social networks, social news sites, media sharing sites, wikis, etc., offer a valuable opportunity to moderate and share content. Social media channels are a perfect place to interact with existing or potential consumers; a good viral marketing campaign within the online community creates buzz around your brand and may result in new inbound links to your site appearing on the Web.
Email marketing is an independent branch which has to be dealt with separately and does not have much in common with SEM. Email marketing is a subject of our next stage and there we will provide insight into the main direct mail campaign steps and guidelines.
Banner networks relate to SEM as long as they touch upon your link popularity (which is a component of SEM).
In the following stage you'll study the Affiliate Marketing division of Internet Marketing. It is a popular method for promoting web businesses when with few marketing dollars marketers can establish a presence and earn a profit recruiting affiliates. Such partner networks can grow with your company business projects and add its profit to your marketing budget.
The most vital stage of the whole course is Web Analytics. Its role can be hardly underestimated as Web Analytics is an essential measure for continually improving web business performance, advertising campaigns, organic search engine results, ranking positions and others. Generally, Web Analytics deals with the traffic already generated at the previous stages. Its primary goal is to improve traffic quality and enhance conversion.
Although it is possible (and advisable) to understand every theoretical aspect of Internet marketing, in practice you may do much better by specialization in a specific area or technique and simply start your Internet Marketing business. Our last stage provides a proper and clear scheme about how to estimate your potential, find a niche, manage projects and promote your services as online marketer, SEO consultant, etc.