So it’s official now, the Google Page Rank has been updated. However, the controversies are far from settled over issues like:

• Is Page Rank important in any way?
• Has Page Rank algorithm been modified?

SO, IS PAGE RANK IMPORTANT IN ANY WAY?

This debate has been going on for years now, and neither side is willing to budge. There is the first group that says Page Rank is useless and it doesn’t prove anything. Then there’s another group that says Page Rank is a major ranking algorithm. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The Page Rank you see in the Google toolbar is like a picture of the real Page Rank taken once every 3 months (approximately, it is not a fixed date). The Real Page Rank is updated constantly by Google and it is like a measurement of your site’s importance. It is actually a link analysis of your website, and that’s what, in my opinion, makes it pretty important.

So for instance if you have a webpage, its PR will depend on the Page Rank that its inbound links will bring. Each inbound link will bring you a PR equal to the PR of the page that links to you divided by the number of outbound links that particular page has. I hope it isn’t very confusing, but let’s assume you get a backlink from a page that has a PR of 1. If that particular page has 9 more other outbound links, this means that you will get approximately 0.1 amount of Page Rank. Besides all this, there is also the damping factor, which is set at 0.85. So the PR of a page has the formula:

PR = 0.15 + 0.85*n

Where “n” is the sum of all the Page Rank amounts brought by inbound links as explained above. So, each new page starts with a PR of 0.15.

SO WHAT’S DIFFERENT NOW?

Well, to be perfectly honest, this is unclear yet. However, what we can rely upon are facts and those are:

• Yahoo got from a PR of 10 to a PR of 9;
• Youtube got from a PR of 8 to a PR of 3 !
• Even different regional Google homepages got from a PR of 8 to a PR of 7 like google.se (Sweden) or google.ro (Romania).

However, the conspiracy theories regarding the demise of copyblogger.com didn’t come true in the end, as the PR of 4 was just an intermediary phase prior to the update, and Copyblogger now has a PR of 7 (after having a PR of 6). This is also what happened to reputable sites like ezinearticles.com which had NO PR yesterday.

THE ALL FAMOUS CLICHÉ: PR DOESN’T MATTER, TRAFFIC DOES

This phrase, taken in absolute value, is true. However, it’s like owning a street shop and saying: “I don’t care how my front windows look like, all I care about is customers walking into the store.” – when it’s obvious that how your front windows look affects how many potential customers walk into your store. Same with PR, since it’s still obvious that Page Rank is still a solid ranking algorithm. After all, Page Rank is the most important link relationship algorithm and this is what set Google apart from all the other search engines. This is an important factor in its success. Why would years of research and lots of money spent in the process be simply thrown down the drain?

Keyword research is a pretty hot topic for beginning or advanced Internet Marketers alike. After all, if you want search engine traffic, you need to rank well for the specific terms of your industry. However, far too many people rely heavily on keyword research tools. And by heavily I mean exclusively. It’s not that it’s bad to consult the different keyword research services. It’s just that they can sometimes be misleading.

And this is where keyword research common sense comes into play. What this basically means is the fact that if you want to start a new website, the best thing to do before consulting the keyword services is make up your own list of keywords. Of course, this implies that you have at least some intermediate notions about your niche, but that’s the best way to succeed online, right?

Ok, let’s think about a niche, for example soccer – I picked this one because I know something about it, and unless you want to build a thin MFA website, you should know something about your topic also. It is a big niche, and I would advise to start a site on a more specific one, but this is just for the sake of example. Now we can go to the drawing board, and we will do that before consulting the keyword services in any way!

Now think about the work “soccer”, and start writing every keyword that you think YOU would type in the search engines related to the topic. Big chances are that many of the other soccer passionates are looking for approximately the same keywords. I will tell you why that’s important in a second, but not before I present you with another approach.

Write down the word soccer, and also think about the first three verbs and nouns that come into your mind. Also, write down commercial keywords, like “buy”, “cheap”, “free”. If I think about it for a few seconds, the first three soccer related verbs that come into my mind are: play, watch, learn. As for nouns, they are: match, equipment, teams. So we have: “play soccer”, “watch soccer”, “learn soccer”, “soccer match”, “soccer equipment”, “soccer teams”. Now, all you need to do is extrapolate from that. For instance, you have “soccer equipment”. Where do you go from there? “Soccer shoes”, “Soccer balls”, etc. Of course, if you have any other root words that pop up into your mind while doing so, write them down. Like “soccer field” or anything else. If you think about them in relation to your niche, chances are that other people think about them too.

Keep doing this until you have a pretty consistent keyword list. Don’t forget to include the plurals, where the case requires. Then, you can go to your favorite keyword service. You will notice that many of the keywords you thought about in your list are there. However, some of them will not be there but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are not searched for. This is where the keyword research common sense comes in. If you take it into consideration, you might attract traffic from the most unusual sources.

From my experience, this is an important factor. I’ve optimized sites for keywords that supposedly got thousands of hits each month. For instance, I got a 4500 hits/month keyword (according to a keyword research service) to number one on Google. All I got from it were a few hits in a few months (not in one month, in a few months). Then, working on the same site, I came up with another keyword. I checked it on the same service, but it didn’t have records of the respective keyword. But it only seemed like common sense to me, so I got it to top 10. Imagine my surprise when the respective keyword got an average of 10 hits/day, and it wasn’t even on the top spot on Google, it was just top 10. So even though working with Overture, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery is important, don’t forget about the common sense keywords. You might just be surprised!

If you’ve read some SEO books, been on some forums, or just chatted with some friends, you have all heard of the term “keyword research”. It is the foundation of your new site, from where you will start building it brick by brick, article by article. However, if you’ve noticed in the same books, forums or in the minds of your friends, there’s one big dilemma: which of the 4 services mentioned in the title of this post should you use? Almost no one will definitely tell you “Hey, you should go with this one, or with that one”. Nope. As anything else in Internet Marketing, it is not really that simple.

Ok, then. We’ll take them one at a time. We will start with the all time favorite, Overture. Even though, realistically thinking, it is not the best of them. I still am amazed of how many people use Overture figures as a reference. It’s not that it’s good for nothing, but it has the most problems.

• it can’t differentiate plural from singular. So if you are trying to see how many hits the keyword “iphones” gets, you will be amazed to find out that you can’t. Instead, the hits from this keyword are added to the hits of its singular brother;

• the numbers you get back from Overture are dramatically skewed. In fact, whenever I see the Overture numbers, I am actually thinking that a real number would be something in the range of 10-25% of what Overture shows. This is because Overture takes into consideration the hits made by bots or computer software that checks for rankings. Now imagine how much of this activity is being conducted!

• The Overture database is not updated very often. At the time of this writing, it is October 21^st 2007. The figures you get from the Overture database date back from January 1^st 2007. So, if you wanted to apply some Boom Marketing techniques, you can say goodbye to the Overture database. For instance, if you could have foreseen the Halo 3 rush and you wanted to build a website that would be top 10 for related queries by the time of its launch (September 25^th), Overture would not have been the best choice for your keyword research. In fact, it would have been the worst;

• Overture will most likely show results biased by Yahoo’s PPC interests.

Having said that, there are also 2 good points I see in Overture, and they are:

• They show pretty good relative relationships between keywords (because the actual figures are, as I said, dramatically altered);

• They base their results on a major search engine, which is Yahoo.

Let’s go to Wordtracker now. This is a paid tool, but you can use their free version if you want to save some money. It’s just that you will have to do more work yourself – but that always happens when you want to cut down the budget, right? When compared to Overture, Wordtracker is simply better. It gathers its data from 2 search engines, Dogpile and Metacrawler. Combined, they have a 0.65 – 0.70% share of the search engine market. That doesn’t sound like much, but that does not necessarily mean that Wordtracker’s results are in any way worse than the other services. The benefits of using Wordtracker include:

• you get a clear differentiation between the singular and plural versions of a keyword;
• the results are not in any way geared towards the PPC market;
• you get more realistic figures than Overture’s.

The only major disadvantage of using Wordtracker is the fact that it only gathers data from the above mentioned search engines. However, it also tries to repair this by approximating the number of searches taking into account the market share of the respective 2 engines. Of course, that would imply that the behavioral patterns of people looking for information on the search engines are the same, which is of course a utopia. Still, there is no perfect keyword research tool. Not by a longshot.

So we got to Keyword Discovery. This is also a paid service, and it gathers its data from 180 different search engines. From my perspective, what Keyword Discovery does differently – and maybe in a better fashion overall – is mine out the long tailed keywords. As opposed to Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery does not estimate the total number of searches a keyword would get, it shows it as the keyword was recorded in their database.

As for Google’s keyword research tool, I think it is more similar to Overture, if you simply think about the fact that it has a strong PPC influence. This is best used if you plan a Google Adwords campaign, and this is also the reason behind its existence. Another useful feature is for people who look for Adsense revenue. They can easily see which keywords are more expensive and what should they optimize their page for – in order to target more expensive keywords and a bigger CPC implicitly. However, you must remember one thing: no keyword tool is perfect, far from it. If I had to choose between the four on a new website and I could only pick one, that would be Wordtracker for me. However, keyword list building is very time consuming. You also need to think about keyword research common sense, which will be covered in my next post.

I recently came across a pretty good free report, called “Teaching Sells”, which you can find here. It was written by Brian Clark, but I found the report via Aaron Wall’s SeoBook site. You can download the report and read it, it is pretty good. But that’s not the point.

The most important messages of the report (from my perspective), are the following:

• the fact that you shouldn’t rely on Google for traffic;
• the fact that you should SELL your content, and not give it for free;
• the fact that you should always have the big picture and mind and think about the future.

While I don’t necessarily completely disagree with neither one of those key points (as a matter of fact I strongly support the 3rd one), I want to raise another issue here: when having the average Online Marketer in mind, whom is he/she supposed to listen to? Now I’ve tried and tested several systems, I know some of them work and some don’t. However, this is because of years of trial and error. But then again, the average Joe hears from a big shot SEO expert that he could and should try building some Adsense websites. Some of them say “Hey, Google is your best friend. Catch some long tails, and success will surely come”. Then, there are people like in the above-mentioned case, who state that Google is a dictator – which I don’t necessarily disapprove of, I was just giving an example.

I think this is a pretty big problem. People who look for online success are usually very susceptible to believing almost everything they hear. That’s because being successful online is still perceived as a dream, and the Internet is the land of dreams consequently. But when they buy an ebook and they learn something, only to buy the next one and learn something else, that’s a problem. Because even though some people do make money from Adsense and rely on Google for traffic and some people make do money through selling content, they all suggest theirs is the only way. However, from all the ebooks I’ve read and all the pieces of software I’ve used, there’s only one that had a big impact on me at the time of its reading. That’s the only high quality Internet Marketing product that could ever compete with standard Marketing books written by classics the likes of Philip Kotler - you know, the ones that get printed :). But more on that sometime in the future.

As you probably know, SEO is an acronym from Search Engine Optimization, and it’s one of the best jobs to have!

It is a relatively new profession (given the fact that it is 10 years old – or somewhere along those lines). It appeared sometime in the mid 90s, when the first search engines saw the light of day. Talk about cause – effect, right? Well, even though it is a new profession, it is here to stay. This is because, simply put, the Internet is the future in even more ways than it is the present now. As more and more information gets poured into it, there is always going to exist the need of someone – or something – to organize it. And that’s where the search engines come in.

Now that we’ve established that, it is easy to assume that SEO specialists will be needed for a long time from now on. Even if the search engines don’t particularly dig this profession (but that’s another story), the effect will not disappear until the cause does. So, as long as there will be search engines, there will be SEO specialists. It doesn’t really matter how the algorithms change, this is not relevant. Being a good SEO also means being flexible and informing yourself constantly. This is how you will always know what the major algorithms shifts are and you will take action accordingly.

Because flexibility is one of the main “keywords” when it comes to a good SEO specialist, his/her work extends beyond those lines too. Onpage and offpage optimization are essentials when working for a website. But that’s not always enough. We can also say that SEO is a form of Marketing, mainly because its most important purpose is to increase a website’s volume of traffic and its quality. For instance, nowadays, being a good SEO also involves being able to conduct a profitable PPC campaign. This is because online advertising is becoming a huge industry, with no visible end yet… But that’s a really long post, and we’ll save that for later.

First of all, I would like to welcome you to SeoReef.com . My name is Paul Timmons and I am a SEO expert, content writer, Internet Marketer, even programmer (although what I do best and I like the most is SEO). The other “abilities” came from various online necessities. I earn my living online so I did have time to learn all these.

Who is this blog for? Well, to put it simply, it is for everyone who wants to join and make a constructive contribution. Whether you want to learn SEO, exchange ideas with other enthusiasts, ask questions, learn about Internet Marketing and much more, this is the place for you.

You may or may not be employed full time working online. We all know that the myth of working at home in your livingroom is no longer a myth. However, I intend to make this a hype free environment. You will probably learn how to make a living online, but first of all you need to realize that you will have to work very hard for that. But we’ll save that for later.

As for now, since this is my first post and there’s no one to read it yet J, I will be expecting you here sharing your knowledge with the other visitors. So I guess I’ll see you all inside, my future visitors!