SEO Guide

Finally, I was able to finish transferring all my search engine optimization articles from a webmaster resource site to my own SEO website.

SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a set of techniques that can be applied for your website or blog to increase its ranking on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other major search engines. Of the three mentioned, Google would probably be the most important, as 70-80% of the market relies on Google.

The SEO Guide
Here on my new website, you can learn about SEO for free. You can download two full ebooks about SEO at no cost to you. My site is called the e SEO Guide, and it will put you on the right track for learning how to increase the amount of traffic in your blog and maximize your blog's earning potential!

CUIL Slays Google

CUIL, the Google Slayer
CUIL, a new search engine, launches on July 27, 2008. It is said to have the potential of becoming the Google Slayer, boasting its 120 billion indexed pages. Google only has 40 billion. But that's not the whole story.

Size, does it matter?
Google responds that they know over a trillion web pages, however, they know better than to index all of those. Google filters through these pages and indexes only quality pages. It throws away garbage content such as SPAM, search engine scraped content, as well as duplicate content.

Quality and relevancy is more important
Instead of size, quality is important. This is measured by the relevancy of search results to your query. When you're searching for something, does the search engine deliver what you're looking for in the least amount of clicks and the least amount of time? Danny Sullivan does a simple test on CUIL's relvancy and describes it on this article.

Results in three columns
The way CUIL displays its results in columns can be quite annoying if you're used to the top to bottom style of displaying search results. It feels like looking for info on the news paper. I don't know where to start, and where to proceed next. Which is more relevant among these results? Obviously the first one on the top most and the left most, but then what?

Images with search results
CUIL displays its results with images. This means it takes more time and bandwidth to load the page for each search query. In some cases, the images displayed are not related to the search query.

CUIL and the Search Market
CUIL has the potential to compete with Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AllTheWeb, or other search search engines, but as of now, it'll have to have more unique and useful features than the size of their index before they can topple down search engine giant, Google.

Next Stop: Aaron Wall's SEO Book (2006)

After reading SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen and SEO Fast Start 2007 by Dan Thies, I am now proceeding with my third book, Aaron Wall's SEO Book. I'm also looking forward to StomperNET videos and tutorials. There's still a lot to learn about SEO, so I'll be doing my best to get as much as I can from these gurus.

By the way, check out my SEO thread on Arcosweb, a new SEO webmaster resources website. I'm writing an SEO Course there and sharing what I know about SEO in as simple terms as I can, in hopes that any one new to SEO would find the concepts easy to grasp.

Page Rank and Alexa Rank

Google's PageRank and Alexa Rank help to determine the stats for a certain page or website. The higher your Page Rank and Alexa Rank, the better! PageRank is one of the factors in ranking high for search engine results. It's not everything though. For example, a lower PageRank site may rank better for certain keywords than higher PageRank sites because the lower PageRank site is more relevant to that keyword. However, if all other factors are equal, PageRank will help to pull up your site to higher search engine results.

Download Google Toolbar and see your PageRank now!
Download Alexa Toolbar to see your Alexa Rank now!

How to increase your PageRank: get links! Getting links from high PageRank pages will give a better boost to your website.

Earning Money with High PageRank and Alexa Rank. Advertising sites such as Project Wonderful, and Get-Paid-To-Blog sites such as SocialSpark, PayPerPost, and Blogsvertise look at PageRank and Alexa Rank to determine how much they pay you and which projects you can accept.

Some Things to Know About PageRank and Alexa

PageRank is not everything in terms of SEO. PageRank is not everything in terms of ranking high for your keywords, however, it IS a factor. In an interview with Google's Matt Cutts, he mentioned that it IS one of the important factors. PageRank helps to determine the trust factor.

Alexa Rank is skewed towards webmaster related sites. For example, after doing SEO on my site, my Alexa Rank jumped! However, you should be aware that Alexa gathers their data from people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed, so your sample population may be more from webmasters rather than your average person. Thus, Alexa Rank is skewed towards webmaster sites, however, it still is able to reflect, to a good extent, the statistics of your site.

The importance of PageRank and Alexa. In conclusion, although PageRank and Alexa Rank are not everything, they still play a major role and they add up for a "trust" factor for people looking at your site. Advertisers would be more inclined to put up ads on your site if it has higher PageRank and Alexa, and you can charge more.

Get Google Toolbar to see your PageRank!
Get Alexa Toolbar (Sparky) to see your Alexa Rank!

Matt Cutts Interview

I was listening to an interview with Google's Matt Cutts. Also, lately I've been going through some SEO books. I hope to improve myself as an SEO specialist by allotting some time at the start of each day to keep myself in touch with SEO principles and techniques.

The Matt Cutts interview lasted around an hour and a half, and I learned a lot from it. Many of my thoughts regarding SEO were confirmed, and some did not quite fit. For one, PageRank really is important. But I still believe that anyone doing SEO should not chase after PageRank alone, as it is only one of the HUNDREDS of factors to determine search engine placement. Relevance of links and content is also important.

The power of linkbuilding and anchor text is also affirmed. It doesn't depend only on the quantity of links, but also on the quality of links (based on PageRank, contextual relevance, position on the page, and several other factors). Google has developed complex algorithms to filter out the SPAM links, links that aren't really of any importance and are just there to improve link popularity for certain sites.

RankAlert.Net | Backlink Watch Tool

To check your backlinks, a useful tool can be found at RankAlert.Net. The quantity AND quality of your backlinks or inlinks have a great impact on your search engine rankings for your keywords. The quality of your backlinks is determined mainly by the following factors: PageRank of the page on where the link to your site is on, whether or not the page is relevant to your site, and the anchor text or the text on the link to your site (that is, use your keywords on the link to your site).

There are several other tools as well such a real PageRank checker, DataCenter Watch, Link Validator, and a lot more.

All these features are for free, all you have to do is sign up for a free account.

Hope this helps!

Article Marketer | Gaining Backlinks

On this site you'll find a useful tool for posting articles on the web and for gaining backlinks

http://www.articlemarketer.com/