Weekly SEO news: 13 October 2009
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

This week, we're trying to find out how you can outrank your competitors on Google. You don't have to beat Google. You just have to be better than your competitors.

In the news: a click-fraud ring produced more than $3 million worth of fraudulent clicks in just two weeks, Google's Matt Cutts talks about the robots.txt file and more.

Two browser plugins for KeywordIndex are now available. They make it even easier to find good keywords for search engine optimization and paid search marketing.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO
1. Five steps: How to outrank your competitors on Google

To get high rankings on Google, it is not necessary to have everything that Google expects from a great website. You just have to be better than your competitors.

If you have a website with optimized web pages, it is usually the quality of the links that make the difference. The following tips will help you to get better rankings than your competitors:

Step 1: Find out who your competitors are

Search for five of your main keywords on Google and write down the URLs of the websites that rank best across these keywords. These websites are your main competitors on Google.

Step 2: Check the anchor texts of these websites

The next step is to find out how many of the links to your competitors contain your target keywords. To do this, enter the URL of a competitor in IBP's link manager (IBP > Link > Add sites > Find websites that link to your competitors).

IBP will find all web pages that link to your competitors and it will also show you the anchor texts that are used in the links. IBP enables you to sort the found websites by link text so that you can quickly see which link texts are used.

Required action: Your website should have more inbound links that contain your target keywords than the websites of your competitors.

Step 3: Check the PageRank spread of these websites

Although the official PageRank number that Google displays in its toolbar is a flawed metric, it can still help you to find out why some websites rank higher than others.

If you've used IBP to find the web pages that link to your competitors ((IBP > Link > Add sites > Find websites that link to your competitors) then you also have the Google PageRank of each site that links to your competitors.

Click the PR column header in IBP to sort the found websites by PageRank to find out how many links from high PageRank pages your competitors get.

Required action: If your competitors have more inbound links from web pages with a high PageRank than your website then you should try to get more high PR links. IBP can help you with that.

Step 4: Check the top level domains of the inbound links

If you want to get high rankings on Google.com.au then it might be important to have many inbound links from .com.au websites.

Required action: If you target local Google versions (Google.com.au, Google.co.uk, etc.) then your website should have more inbound links from websites that use the corresponding top level domain than your competitors.

Step 5: Check the content of the linking pages

Google prefer's websites that get links from related websites. If you sell shoes then a link from a fashion blog is much better than a link from a website about puppies.

Required action: Your website should have more inbound links from related websites than the websites of your competitors. IBP's link builder can help you to find web pages and blogs that are related to your site.

If you follow the five steps above, your website will get better rankings than the websites of your competitors. Another easy way to find out how exactly you have to change your web pages so that they can get top 10 rankings on Google is to analyze them with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Click fraudThe evolution of click fraud: massive Chinese operation DormRing1 uncovered

"Anchor Intelligence identified a click fraud ring being run out of China which involved 200,000 different IP addresses and racked up more than $3 million worth of fraudulent clicks across 2,000 advertisers in a two-week period. [...]

Click fraud occurs when someone sets up a website, signs up with an ad network, and then clicks on the ads to generate ad revenues with false clicks. DormRing1 operated the same way, except it easily involved more than 1,000 people who set up more than 10,000 Websites to spread out the fraud."



Google's Matt Cutts talks about the robots.txt file (video)

"[The video] answers a couple questions such as: Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url? How do I make that url disappear from Google?"



GoogleGoogle on search: size doesn't matter that much

"Google enjoys huge scale benefits besides the ability to sample, including pricing power. He analyzed the search spending for an agency that uses all three top search engines and found prices 30% lower on Yahoo than Google and 27% lower on Microsoft."



Yahoo: sponsored ads in filtered search results

"On our new search page, if a searcher types in a phrase such as 'buy pink floyd', he can further refine his search results by clicking on links on the left-hand side of the page, which include sites that users often find useful. If the user clicks on one of the suggested sites, he'll get a smaller set of results from that domain only. Now, if the user selects a site that is also a Sponsored Search advertiser, that advertiser’s ad should still be displayed in the new set of results."



 Twitter talking separately to Microsoft and Google about big data-mining deals

"Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines."



Search engine newslets

  • Google replaces Tele Atlas data in US with Google StreetView data.
  • Yahoo! Sponsored Search ads for BOSS.
  • Innovation: The psychology of Google Wave.
  • Another year: two years in ODP.
  • Rupert Murdoch says Google is stealing his content.
  • Google's search/analytics head departs.
  • Google begins fixing Usenet archive.

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3. Browser plugins for Keywordindex

Our free keyword suggestion tool has become very popular since its release three weeks ago. You can now access KeywordIndex through two new web browser plugins:

1. Access KeywordIndex.com from the search box of your web browser

The search plugin enables you to search KeywordIndex.com from the the search box of your web browser.

The search plugin works with Firefox, MS Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome browser. You can get it here.



2. Access KeywordIndex.com from Google's toolbar

The KeywordIndex plugin for your Google toolbar adds a small KeywordIndex "K" button next to the search box in Google's toolbar:

The plugin for Google's toolbar enables you to do two things:

  1. Enter a keyword in the search box in Google's toolbar and click the "K" button to get keyword suggestions and search numbers for that keyword.

  2. Mark any word on any given web page and click the "K" button in Google's toolbar to get keyword suggestions and search numbers for that keyword.

The KeywordIndex plugin for Google's toolbar works with Google's toolbar for Firefox and MS Internet Explorer. You can get it here.

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4. Success stories

"My client has position 2 on Google."

"Hi guys, just a quick note to say thank you for helping me get my client on to the first page of Google. His website www.tpsofficefurniture.co.uk now appears at rank number 2 - and we are looking to achieve a number one ranking by continuing our link building process.

I run an SEO training course and always recommend IBP over the other optimisation programmes as I find it much more user friendly and easy to understand. Thanks again."
Liam Lally, www.zaddleinternetmarketing.com

IBP


220,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

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