This story is as old as the web itself. You launch a new website or project. You set up the analytics and expect the hits to start rolling in. After a few days you begin obsessively checking up on it. Over and over. Only nothing is there. You begin to become disheartened and perhaps entertain the notion of tossing your laptop in the river. Sound familiar?

Don’t get excited

Don’t run doom and gloom scenarios in your mind. Don’t automatically assume your anayltics are broken. It must be some kind of a broken html code, right? No, not really.

This scenario plays itself out over and over again all over the web constantly. It doesn’t even have to be a new project, either. Webmasters whose sites need maintenance in the form of XML sitemaps, link building efforts, title tag duplication, or 404 redirection are also guilty of this. The changes are made correctly, then a week later nothing has changed statistically. The rankings sit in exactly the same place. You are left thinking “What did I do wrong?”

Sometimes things just take time. For instance, a major website I work for recently needed some fixing. They had a 404 redirection and toolbar PageRank drop, in addition to a misplaced setting in Google Webmaster Tools pointing to the wrong version of their site. Everything got fixed, but nothing changed statistically. After the fix, there was even a there was a drop in their homepage for their name. This started making the higher ups worried. When higher ups worry people tend to get fired. Someone needs to get in that board room and preach the virtues of patience.

Patience

That homepage drop? It was minimal. It lasted for 2-3 days and then things got back to normal. Things can take up to a week or more to reflect in Google Webmaster Tools. That’s just the nature of the beast. The Internet “feels” instantaneous but not all things actually are.

We live in a society(Internet especially) that thrives on present, immediate returns. Search marketers must make c-level executives happy with their ability to show immediate returns on campaigns. But like the returns on SEO, these campaign returns can take time.

Of course, all of the administrative changes in the world aren’t going to change rankings too much if the content isn’t there. Content is king, after all. It may even be more important than patience, but that’s a topic for another post.

Also, of note, There has also been a recent crack down on over optimized local search listings. Some accounts are suspended or rank poorly just because they are in effect trying too hard. Too many changes at once can raise a flag with the search engines. Thinks of it as a relationship. You don’t want to bring candy to every single date, do you? It could creep them out.

One Month Rule

So here is what I am proposing. Make your changes and leave it. Do something else for a month. Work on social media and link building if you have to. Come back after that month and then see what’s up. If your site is small, feel free to adjust down to just two weeks. I find the smaller the site, the shorter the time it takes for changes to reflect on your analytics.

Just have patience and wait for the statistical algorithms to do their job. It’ll take time but trust in this: It will work.

So remember the next time something seems to be not working in Webmaster Tools or SERPs:

* Double check the code if you have to, but don’t triple or quadruple check it. Also, your oven is off and you locked your front door.

* Remember to breathe. There is always a logical explanation behind everything. Google is just slow sometimes.

* When did you make your last change?

* If it’s less than two weeks, give it more time.

* For major changes, like site redesign and URL restructuring, give it a full month. A full month. Not 24 days.

That’s it. Have patience grasshopper and soon your stats will grow into big, beautiful sunflowers.

Keyword research is a long and storied process that that involves finding possible keyword phrases, and related terms, estimating the keyword difficulty and potential, and even researching competitors’ tactics as for keyword selection and promotion. This post is gonna analyze a small, yet important, aspect of this: Investigating the entire scope of possible keyword phrases extensions. You know, words that can be used together with the core search term.

Onelook is a perfect tool for just that. One interesting feature is it’s wildcard search, which offers numerous ways to play with. Onelook interprets a wildcard (an asterisk) as a substitute for any number of characters and words. This is in direct opposition to Google, which uses a wildcard as a placeholder for any sequence of words.

So how can this be useful for our brand of keyword research? Let’s say you want to research any possible phrases with the word “diabetes.” So, all you’d have to do is input [diabetes *] in Onelook search box to find all phrases in the database starting with “diabetes“. From there you can:

1. Change the vocabulary preferences and choose to search for words, phrases or both.
2. Look for available clusters while browsing through results.

Now, say you want to look up information on both words “diabetic” and “diabetes” – what you need to search for is [diabet*]

Or let’s say you want to get real thorough and research all of the phrases: Where words both precede and follow that search term. What do you do then? Simply use two asterisks: [* diabetes *]

So there you have it. Onelook is a handy little tool that has a variety of uses. Install the search plugin and go to town. Navigate to the page, click on search plugins and download the one labeled “Add OneLook Dictionary Search.” Have fun!

Want a practical approach to to reviewing and comparing tools that will help you analyze those wascally SERPs?  We all want proper analysis  of our search engine results, right? Well, then read on.

First of all, these tools all work as Firefox add-ons. Be careful, though. You don’t want to install too many or it will severely impede your browsing speed. There’s a reason they call it snail mail. So just try one at a time and you’ll thank us in the long run. Or, just read through the entire post and pick which one intrigues you the most to try first.

1. SEOquake

Insert massive amounts of data under each listing in Google SERPs, including but not limited to:

• Google pagerank, Google index, Google cache date;
• Yahoo! index, Yahoo! linkdomain, Yahoo! link;
• Bing index;
• Dmoz listing;
• Webarchive age;
• Alexa rank;
• Delicious bookmarks;
• Technorati index;
• Digg index;
• Domain IP;
• Link to Robots.txt, Sitemap and Page source;
• SEMrush info (traffic, traffic value, rank);
• Compete Rank,

And lots, lots more, including the ability to sort the results by any parameter.

2. SEO for FireFox

Note, for each listing you’ll see the following data listing:

And, here is what SEO for Firefox brings to the table:

• Google PR;
• Google Cache Date;
• Traffic Value (pre SEMrush);
• Age (Archive.org);
• Del.icio.us bookmarks;
• Diggs (as well as Digg’s Popular Stories);
• Stumbleupon popularity (doesn’t appear to work);
• Twitter search results;
• Yahoo! Links: as well as Yahoo! .edu links, Yahoo! .gov Links and Yahoo! page links);
• Technorati results;
• Alexa traffic;
• Compete.com rank and compete.com uniques;
• Google trends link;
• Number of pages cached;
• Dmoz mentions

Lots, lots more!  SEO for Firefox also allows you to customize the data sets to suit your fancy.

3. Search Cloudlet

This is a really useful tool. It’s great for identifying domains that achieve the lucrative top 100 Google listings benefits. It’s also great for other search engines as well. Install the add-on and run a Google search. The information displayed will allow you to:

1. See the SERPs tag cloud (of the words used in Google search results listings);
2. See the domains returned in Google SERPs (the bigger the font, the more times the domain was ranked within one SERPs);
3. See most powerful top level domains;

All in all, it’s a handy little tool.

4. SERPs Analyzer

This one works as a FireFox search plugin, which is lighter than a full-fledged add-on. It redirects the search to it’s own domain. This may not be the most reliable way to output information but it’s certainly the lightest. For each listing in SERPs it shows the following information:

• Number of clicks the listing generates per month (no idea how the data is obtained);
• PPC cost equivalent per month;
• Yahoo! links and linkdomain;
• Domain Quancast rank;
• Webarchive age

The cool thing about the tool is that it displays the number of unique domains, max. and average Google PR, as well as other interesting data:

Be careful though. Several bugs have been reported. For example, setting Google results per page in preferences didn’t work. It only managed to get more results by directly editing the query URL string (serp_results_per_page=100).

How does Google decide how much a particular link helps your rankings? That one question has plagued link builders since the dawn of  time 2002.

Before we get started on the list, let’s talk turkey. You may have noticed search engines have become more and more dependent on metrics about an entire domain, rather than just an individual page. It’s why you’ll see new pages or those with very few links ranking highly, simply because they’re on an important, trusted, well-linked-to domain. The Internet is changing, and in a way becoming more homogenized. But don’t worry, you can still make money with your site by understanding the nature of search engines and how they judge the value of a link.  Here are 17 examples:

#1 – Internal vs. External

Search engines value external opinions more than internal. This is a simple fact, and it makes sense. If you are in a band and you go around telling everyone how great you are, not many ears perk up, except in annoyance. However, if Spin Magazine begins telling people your band is great, that changes things quite a bit. Search engines work in the same way. Internal links (links that point from one page on your site to another) do carry some weight; links from external sites matter far more.

This doesn’t mean it’s not important to have a good internal link structure, or to do all that you can with your internal links (good anchor text, no unnecessary links, etc.), it just means that a site/page’s performance is highly dependant on how other sites on the web have cited it.

#2 – Anchor Text

An obvious one for those in the SEO business, anchor text is one of the biggest factors in the rankings equation overall.

This, of course, comes with a question. Is “exact match” anchor text more beneficial than simply including the target keywords all hully gully? In a word, yes. We’ve conducted many experiments, much to the dismay of our interns, and we’ve conclusively decided that anchor text that features an exact match is the winner, no contest. However, the engines won’t always bias in this fashion. It seems to me that, particularly for generic (non-branded) keyword phrases, this is the cause of a lot of manipulation and abuse in the SERPs.

#3 – PageRank

Whether they call it StaticRank (Microsoft’s metric), WebRank (Yahoo!’s), PageRank (Google’s) or mozRank (Linkscape’s), some form of an iterative, Markov-chain based link analysis algorithm is a part of all the engines’ ranking systems. So, it’s important. All of the services use the analogy that links are votes and that those pages which have more votes have more influence. Pretty simple, right? Well, sort of. Here is a quick PageRank primer:

1.Every single URL on the Internet is assigned a tiny, innate quantity of PageRank.

2.If there are “n” links on a page, each link passes that page’s PageRank divided by “n” (and thus, the more links, the lower the amount of PageRank each one flows.)

3.An iterative calculation that flows through the web’s entire link graph dozens of times is used to reach the calculations for each URL’s ranking score. The calculation is too complicated to replicate here, either that or it’s magic. It might be magic.

4.Representations like those shown in Google’s toolbar PageRank or SEOmoz’s mozRank on a 0-10 scale are logarithmic (thus, a PageRank/mozRank 4 has 8-10X the link importance than a PR/mR 3. Get it?)

#4 – TrustRank

The basics of TrustRank are described in this paper from Stanford – Combatting Webspam with TrustRank. There will be a quiz later.

If you are long since college age and got tired from just reading the word “Stamford,” then here is a quick primer. TrustRank, basically, says that “good” and “trustworthy” pages tend to be closely linked together. Think PayPal and eBay or something. It follows, then, that the spammy and dangerous stuff is located outside of this safe “center.” By calculating an iterative, PageRank-like metric that only flows juice from trusted seed sources, a metric like TrustRank can be used to predictively state whether a site/page is likely to be high quality vs. spam. So, the lesson? Don’t take candy from strangers. The candy might be laced with spam and phish.

#5 – Domain Authority

The phrase “domain authority” is thrown around all over the SEO world, but a concrete definition remains elusive. Most people use it to describe that wonderous combination of popularity, importance and trustworthiness that is calculated by search engines and based mostly on link data.

Search engines likely use scores about the “authority” of a domain in counting links, and thus, despite the fuzzy language, it’s worth mentioning as a data point. The domains you earn links from are, potentially, just as important (or possibly more important) than the individual metrics of the page passing the link. Our advice? Practice the term “domain authority” for your next SEO gathering but be prepared to hide behind the punch bowl if people get too curious.

#6 – Diversity of Sources

No single metric has more positive a correlation with high rankings than the number of linking root domains. This is also, incidentally, a very hard metric to manipulate for spam. So, that being said, it tends to indicate true, broad popularity and importance. How to rack up those linking root domains? Diversity. Empirical data suggests that a diversity of domains linking to your site/page has a strong positive effect on rankings. Getting a link from an entirely unique domain is more important than getting a new one from a previously linked domain. So get your name out there and start making those contacts. A few of them might turn into new links. Thank us later.

#7 – Uniqueness of Source + Target

Those crafty search engines have a number of ways to judge and predict ownership and relationships between websites. These can include (but are not limited to):

* A whole lot of shared, reciprocated links
* Domain registration data
* Shared hosting IP address or IP address C-blocks
* Public acquisition/relationship information
* Publicized marketing agreements that can be machine-read and interpreted

Anecdotal evidence that links shared between “networks” of websites obtain very little value from search engines. This is particularly referring to the classic SE strategy of “sitewide” links. So, again, diversify those links.

#8 – Location on the Page

Microsoft was the first engine to reveal public data about their plans to do “block-level” analysis (in an MS Research piece on VIPS – VIsion-based Page Segmentation). If you lack the patience to read that long form piece, or are simply out of ADD medication, then read on.

Simply put, internal links in the footer of web pages may not provide the same beneficial results that those same links will when placed into the top or header positions. This is based on of our own experimentation(Gotta keep that intern working) and much empirical data brought to us via Google and Yahoo! This seems to be based on an algrorithim that seeks to dismiss pervasive link advertisement by diminishing the valu that external links carry from the sidebar or footer of webpages. Links from the actual content of the piece, as always, remain the most sought after links.

#9 – Topical Relevance

The search engines have a myriad of tools at their disposal to determine if two pages or sites cover similar subject matter. Years ago, Google Labs unveiled an automatic classification tool that could predict, based on a URL, the category and sub-category for nearly any type of content. This worked for conents in a wide array of subject matters, from  medical news to real estate and back again. Engines may use these automated topical-classification systems to identify “neighborhoods” around particular topics.

However, there are arguments to be had on both sides of the field here. We are of the opinion that if you get a link from a topic-neutral site such as NYTimes.com or a specific blog on an unrelated subject, then they’ll still pass positive value. Perhaps the engines use these classification tools to predict spam, more than passing judgement. After all, it does look fishy(phishy?) if a site that’s never previously linked to anything in the pharmaceutical field, suddenly does so.

#10 – Content & Context Assessment

Sure, topical relevance can provide some useful information for engines about linking relationships. But, isn’t it possible that the content and context of a link may be even more useful to said engine? Of course it is! Content is king, after all. In content/context analysis, the engines attempt to discern, in a machine parse-able way, why a link exists on a page.

For instance, links positioned for editorial content create certain patterns. They tend to be embedded in the content, link to relevant sources, use accepted norms for HTML structure, word usage, phrasing, language, etc. Through a series of pattern-matching algorithims, it’s possible for search engines to analyze the editorial links and determine their value and liklihood they were added authentically.

#11 – Geographic Location

The geography of a link is, obviously, highly dependent on the purported location of the host. However, the engines(Specifically Google) have been amping up the sophistication in their quest to pinpoint the location-relevance of a root domain, subdomain or subfolder. Here are some of the things they look for:

*  The host IP address location
* The country-code TLD extension (.de, .co.uk, etc)
* The language of the content
* Registration with local search systems and/or regional directories
* Association with a physical address
* The geographic location of links to that site/section

If you earn links to a page or site that is targeted to a particular region, that does mean it should help you perform better in that region’s searches. However, if your profile is tied too heavily to one particular region, it may make it harder to perform in other regions. Keep that in mind as you set out to build links.

#12 – Use of Rel=”Nofollow”

Although in the SEO world it feels like a lifetime ago since nofollow appeared, it’s actually only been around since January of 2005, when Google announced it was adopting support for the new HTML tag.

To put it simply, rel=”nofollow” tells the engines not to ascribe any editorial endorsements or “votes” that would boost a page or site’s ranking metrics. It is an attempt to filter out some noise. Linkscape’s index notes that approximately 3% of all links on the web have the “nofollow” tag attached to them.

#13 – Link Type

Google recently announced that they’re not only crawling this third group, but passing link endorsement metrics through them (which has many upset about the reversal in policy about using Javascript as a way to delineate paid/advertising links).  The mega-engine has also, for years, treated the text in an image’s alt attribute similarly to how anchor text is handled in standard text links.

Not all links are created equal, however. We made our tired, forlorn intern run some more experiments and it was decided that straight, HTML links with standard anchor text pass the most value to engines, followed by image links with keyword-rich alt text. Coming in last, however, were Javascript links, which are not universally followed throughout the web. So, to all of you admins out there, for now it’s best to assume the engines just aren’t that good at passing value to the “quirkier” links. Keep that in mind as you design your sites and put an emphasis on straight HTML links.

#14 – Other Link Targets on the Source Page

When a page links out externally, both the quantity and targets of the other links that exist on that page may be taken into account by the engines when determining how much link value will be passed on.

As mentioned way up on topic number 3, PageRank, algorithims from all of the engines divide the amount of value passed by any given page by the number of links on that page. Additionally, the engines may als consider the quanity of external domains a page points to. They do this as a way to judge the quality and value of said endorsements. For example, if a page links to merely a few external resources on a particular topic, spread out all over the content, it will be perceived differently than a long list of links pointing to external sites. One take is not necessarily better than the other, but the engines may pass greater value through one or the other. However, this is subject to the rest of your page/site and the links contained therein.

Also, the engines are going to be looking at who else your linking pages endorse. If they go  for anything shady or spam-filled, the value of your link is going to go down. It’s kind of like being scene with your one friend who always clears the room at parties. Nice guy, but…

#15 – Domain, Page & Link-Specific Penalties

Nearly everyone in the SEO world can agree on one thing, search engines apply penalties to sites and pages. These range from the loss of the ability to pass value and endorsement all the way up to a full on ban from their main index. If a page or site has received the former punishment, then links from it provide no value for search rankings. Beware, though, engines occasionally show penalities publicly but this is not always the case.

#16 – Content/Embed Patterns

As content licensing & distribution, widgets, badges and distributed, embeddable links-in-content become more prevalent across the web, the engines have begun looking for ways to downplay these tactics. It’s not that Google et al. don’t want to give proper value to the pages or sites that employ these tactics, it’s just that they are a bit wary about over-counting or over-representing sites that simply do a good job of distributing their licensing deals.

It’s likely that content pattern detection and link pattern detection plays a role in how the engines evaluate link diversity and quality. If the engines see the same link with the same content on thousands and thousands of sites, this is sure to signal a decrease in endorsement. To say it yet again, diversity is key here. The engines place more stock in a variety of links from a variety of sources featuring a variety of content. It makes sense, after all.

#17 – Temporal / Historical Data

Timing and data about the appearance of links is the final point on this rather long list. As the trusty engines crawl along the web, they see patterns about how sites earn links. They use this data to fight spam, identify authoritative links and to pass endorsement on rising Internet stars.

Of course, what the engines do with these patterns of link attraction is the subject of much debate. One thing isn’t, however. The data IS being consumed. It is being analyzed and it is being used to help algorithims do a better job of showing the best results and reducing the abilities of spam.

This list had a lot of information, but it certainly was not a be-all end-all list. Please feel free to suggest your own additions in the comment box.

Able to leap tall search engines in a single bound! Popular SEO blog  SEOboy has compiled another list of their greatest hits. This list chronicles their most viewed, most appreciated articles. The articles span the SEO-verse and back again as they tackle subjects such as redirecting domains and  link building techniques. Check out the list here.

The image above was not seen by millions this Easter Sunday. For the fifth year in a row, the Google logo when unaltered during Easter. This is made especially odd when you consider all of the holidays/special interest days the web giant does celebrate via logo. Bing and Ask have gone Easter crazy, however. No word from Google as to what their reasoning is. More on this as it develops.

The kind folks over at SEOMozBlog have cobbled together an unexpectedly hefty tutorial on creating an online video strategy. The article dictates each step of the process in extreme detail,  from visualizing to editing and ultimately promoting. It’s more than worth ten minutes of your time. Head on over and take a look. Your urls will thank you.

Hitwise, an internet research company, has announced that as of 13th of March 2010, Facebook achieved 7.07% of all internet traffic to their homepage, compared to Google’s 7.03%.

But what does it all mean exactly? How accurate are these stats? Do they take things like toolbars and phone usage into account? Social media in SEO is an ever increasing part of successful SEO campaigns, but really could such monetization kill Google?

One thing that must be remembered: This is Google search we are talking about here. Google has been expanding their empire for quite some time and these stats do not take into account Gmail, Analytics or any of the other services the company provides. In short, they are a behemoth.

However, let’s not forget Google’s recent flop of an entry into the  social networking world, Buzz.  Buzz was hit hard with initial privacy issues and is seen as a general flop in terms of its rivals Facebook and Twitter – although of course it is in it’s early days still.

Let’s keep an eye on this in coming months. The future is social, to be sure. But who will be pulling the strings?

Finding good sources for great SEO content can be difficult. Enter Webrulon. We do the work so you don’t have to! Here are three great sites:

Search Cowboys – One of the most professional sites out there. This news resource is written by a team of highly talented writers who know their trade and aren’t afraid to have a sense of humor about it. Highly recommended for a place in your bookmark.

SEO by the sea – Not so sure of this website’s fish and water theme, however the content is so good it hardly matters. This site is big for breaking news and for being a link workhorse. You won’t find a better place online that helps you find you better places online.

Alltop/SEO – The SEO division of the popular Alltop mega-site is a veritable treasure trove of articles, videos and more. In this case, maybe, bigger is better.

An honorable mention, of course, goes to this blog. What? You think we’d let that slide?

Successful SEO campaigns can be like cooking for 250 people at once.  They all have different tastes and at any moment, anything can go wrong. Econsultancy knows this and has offered up their list of nine common mistakes webmasters make when trying to juggle an SEO campaign. It truly is an informative and entertaining article. Click here to read it.