Google Webmaster Central Help

Best answer - Susan Moskwa (Google Employee) Go to this answer

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. 

Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48&hl=en

Google Webmaster Help

Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!

A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

Source: http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq–crawling–indexing—ranking#pagerank

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Online reputation management is today very important to maintain a good online reputation of you and your brand, and for keeping customer, clients, business partners and workers happy.

Basically, online reputation management, or ORM, is the practice of consistent research and analysis of one’s personal or professional, business or industry reputation as represented by the content across all types of online media (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_reputation_management).

How to get positive reviews

With Google now showing results from social networking sites like twitter real time, it becomes even more important to keep a strong check over online reputation management as comments are available in Google search results.

To find out your online reputation and where your brand stands, you just have to search your brand name in Google. Aim to provide top quality services to your clients or customers and keep the employees satisfied so that you receive more of positive reviews.

It is possible that your brand and company not only receive positive reviews but also negative reviews. If you have couple of pages with negative reviews about your business, give it immediate attention.

Tips to improve your online reputation

1. First, you have to set Google Alerts for your Company/Brand name to know what people are saying about you. Besides Google Alerts, there are other tools which you can use for online reputation management like. MonitorThis.com, Trackur & RapLeaf.com .
2. You can also use the help of RSS feeds for online reputation management.
3. Online reputation management is not limited to Google and traditional searches. There are many other online medium options you can use like Youtube searches, Blog search engines, News search engines etc.
4. Moreover, as search engines treat sub-domains as separate domain names, you can have a sub-domain for your company/brand to get more top rankings in search results.
5. Try using social media sites for online reputation management.
6. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and Myspace are excellent sites to get your company/brand to top position. Just make sure that you use your company name as username or ID for your profiles that you make your profiles public, and then keep on updating these accounts regularly.
7. Make it a point to link your site, blog or other profiles to these profiles so that search engines give them more weight and thus make the your company/brand appear on top of search results.
8. Press releases are also helpful for online reputation management. For better results, use your company name in the Title of the PRs and distribute them to sites using some good PR distribution service e.g. PRWeb, 1888PressRelease & PRLog etc.
9. Create a company profile on leading ezines and frequently publish a few articles about your company/brand in top article directories. As these directories are authoritative, any profile created on these sites help to get top rankings to your company/brand.
10. Pay per click ads also work fine if you bid against your own brand name. These ads are shown on top of search results and will also help move any bad review about your company/brand to a lower page ranking.

Always be nice to people

Negative reviews can come from unhappy customer or clients through forums and blog posts. Your competitor may also write negative reviews about your services or products on leading Review sites that appear in top search results. The best thing to do to counteract these negative reviews is to answer all these objections through your blog.

Besides using all these tips for creating a good online reputation, be careful in your online interactions and be nice to people. Thus there is no possibility of your getting bad reviews.

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When Twitter first came out, most people didn’t see it as a site that would be overly useful for any real business, as the “tweets” that are used are of necessity short and to the point. People were wrong, as it turns out. Twitter is among the most well received and widely used of the social network sites, permitting people (tweeple) to offer small updates about what you or your business are going and what’s keeping you busy.

Twitters can be used now from mobile phones or any computer in the world to offer an update to your users about your ideas, thoughts or company service.

Online companies as well as offline ones are finding it easier than ever to stay in touch with their customers and give them broad reaching updates about their efforts.

When you reach out to customers with your Twitter “tweets” they know what you’re accomplished or whats happening in your company then and there.

Companies who use Twitter range from landscaping, to online writers, to business people, to sports and entertainment businesses, all the way up to the United States government. That’s right, the White House and President Obama use Twitter to keep you informed about their movements, as well as magazines such as “Time”, who gives you a heads up on stories in the news.

Companies such the worlds largest e-commerce stores and corporations have Twitter accounts, as well as celebrities who are trying to get people interested in their lives, their music or their movies. The Twitter pages keep people coming back.

If the Twitter pages are working for them, imagine what they can do for your company. A simple tweet about a new package deal that you’re offer, or a service that you just developed can make a difference in how much it gets used. When seen by this many people and reviewed by all of those who read your tweets, it can make a vast improvement in your page traffic as well as getting people interested in who you are, what you do and how much you charge to do it.

Using Twitter and the other sites for social networking only makes good sense. They can improve your site or blog traffic noticeably, offering you more money to work with and more companies and individuals to serve.

Making your Twitter posts short, to the point, and interesting, informative above all will get you more loyal followers who will build the targeted traffic to your site to the point that your business will be literally booming. Using Twitter is well worth your time if you’re seeking out new ways to make a difference in the volume of business that you do and the number of people who associate you with that business.

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If you are starting a new business, or have released a new product, the best way to advertise about this quickly would be through press releases. A press release is basically some written matter that is announced like a piece of news.

Press releases are distributed with the help of television networks, magazines, newspapers, radio stations and more recently through online resources. This means that press releases can be used for providing both online and offline publicity.

Writing and Building a Brand Name with Press Releases

As people are always on the lookout for some interesting news, especially in the form of a story, they will read press releases. So when you create a press release for your service or product, ensure that it is created like a story and not like an advertisement.

You have to write a press release only if and when you have something news worthy to write about. This is because if you write too many bad press releases, you only end up hurting your repute and find people losing interest in reading the press releases.

Be sure about your main topic and objective and know your readers first. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes and write in a way which you want to read. Point out how you are serving the people and the industry. Write catchy yet keywords-centric headlines and get to the point quickly.

Benefits of Press releases

There are numerous benefits to using press releases like:

• They bring increased targeted traffic to your site. This is because the press release is written in such a way that the reader reading it will want more information about the product. On clicking on the link, they reach your website and may end up as a prospective customer.
• This proves that press releases are inexpensive means of getting free effective publicity. You needn’t spend much money for publishing any advertisements; all that has to be done is to write an effective press release and then publicize it. There are many free pressrelease submission website available.
• Press releases help you build a brand name and popularity for yourself in the minds of your target audience and people who read it. The more times the consumer sees your business name in the press release, the more likely they will remember your name when they or someone they know are in need of your product or services.
• You gain credibility with press releases as potential customers consider you to be an expert after reading it. They think that you are the person to approach when they are in need of the products you offer.
• You can get higher rankings, both in regular organic search results as well as search engine news, by writing Search Engine friendly press releases which send you targeted traffic till long time.
• Press releases provide valuable backlinks to your site from the sites which pick up your ranking and PR.

So you can see that press releases give a lot of publicity to business owners and are one thing that all businesses have to use to generate positive results for their business.

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Many people use article marketing as a favorable means of marketing. It generates increased targeted traffic to your website which generates a sale for the website. Follow these tips for a successful article marketing campaign:

1. Many people think that it is the number of articles that is important for successful article marketing. However, it is also important that you maintain quality content for attracting and retaining readers. Use the internet for information to make the articles interesting and have readers coming back for more.

2. It is better to maintain sweet and short articles. Readers don’t have the patience to sit for too long in front of the computer reading long articles. So keep articles short and to the point to retain readers’ attention.

3. Introduce variety in your articles. Think of different perspectives that can be used to reach your topics. With various articles, you will be able to target your niche and thus, attract a larger and more interested audience to your site.

4. Make sure your articles have interesting headings. It is the headline of your article that gives a reason as to whether or not a reader should look at your article. The headings should also be keyword centric and use main keyword there.

5. It is better to do some research on the best keywords to use in your articles before writing them. These keywords are the words that readers are most likely to use to find the information in your article. However don’t use too many keywords; too many of them make the article look like spam.

6. It is better to write organized articles with bullets and numbers where possible. This helps in getting your message and point across to readers, and also makes the articles more readable.

7. Make it a habit of proofreading your articles before publishing them. Bad writing and spelling and grammatical errors give you and your product or service a bad impression both in the eyes of readers and search engines bots.

   After proofreading, have friends and family go through the articles and listen to whatever comments they give. Sometimes a small but trivial improvement is sufficient to make a difference in the presentation of your article.

8. The best place to place your articles is your website to strengthen the site content and build trust in your visitors. However if you have no website, then you have to make use of the many article directories on the internet. Many people visit these directories; so by publishing your articles in them, with a link to your website, you are sure to see an increase in website traffic.

9. Include a resource box in your article describing and linking to your website.

10. Use the help of social media sites, forums and discussions boards by pasting enough of your article to interest readers to click on the link leading to your website.

11. Link articles of the same subject, to one another. If you have affiliates, let them use your articles for promoting your service or products.

Try these tips and you will soon see an increased traffic to your website and quite a few potential customers amongst these visitors.

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When thinking about the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Writing, one may think, in the first instance, of placing the keywords in their content to achieve a certain keyword density. However, the algorithms used by search engines have improved over time to a point where they, now, look for more than just the frequency or positioning of specific phrases. These days, the search engines look for clues as to the quality and relevancy of the content. Ideally, your content should be strong enough for other sites to link to. These links work as a vote for your contents.

Today, keyword density is not an important factor anymore. Instead, you want to craft a search engine friendly contents that incorporates keywords at important places, something called the keyword prominence. The writer of the content must work to achieve the highest possible standards in terms of quality and the keyword prominence to satisfy both people and search engines bot. The following tips should help writers achieve this goal.

1. Keep a Theme

Your website should maintain a consistent theme throughout all of the pages. Each page should be a reflection of or somehow related to that theme. For example, you might choose to write about insurance as your theme then have different sections of your site dedicated to each major type of insurance. Just make sure the main theme of the site is explained clearly on your home page.

2. Know the Keywords First

Before you do any type of writing, you should have a firm grasp of which keywords you are going to use. These keywords can be selected using free tools on the Internet that can help you pinpoint good choices.

3. Write Relevant Content

When you’re trying to grab the attention of the search engines, you need to make sure your content is not only laced with keywords but is also going to provide relevant valuable information. Just throwing a bunch of keywords together won’t do the trick. The content should be about the title and theme of your site – this is something the search engines look for.

4. Use Title Tags

When you add a new page to your web site, make sure to provide it with an original title tag. Don’t just reuse the same ones for every page. And try to include your keyword in that tag. Search engines look at these tags when they are ranking your site so don’t miss out on an opportunity to impress them. Remember that the title tag should be keyword centric yet catchy.

5. Pick Prominent Spots for Keywords

The idea is not to put keywords on as many places as possible into the content but to strategically sprinkle the words in places where they are most likely to be seen by potential visitors. For example, you can use them in your titles, headers, image captions or ‘alt’, linking text, bulleted text and more. By having your keywords show up like this, search engines are going to be more likely to give you a top ranking.

6. Put Keywords in Important Parts

Another good reason to start choosing keywords early is that ideally your keyword is going to show up in the domain name, in the names of your pages, and even in the taglines for your company. The nice thing about taking this step is that when people link to your site they are also more likely to include your keywords in their links because of their placement in these areas. And that’s going to help your rank, too.

7. Use Keyword Synonyms

Another trick to boost your SEO results is to incorporate keyword synonyms into your content. These are words or phrases that could easily take the place of your keyword phrase. Throwing a couple of these into your content is always going to be useful in boosting your ranks. It’s called stemming.

8. Add Meta Tags

Adding both description and keywords meta tags is a good idea, too. Meta Description is often shown up in the search engine results. It provides valuable information for visitors and increases click through rate (CTR). Still some search engines take keywords meta tag into consideration so it worth adding that. But do not sped much of your time in writing meta keyword tag.

9. Use Text not Images

An important rule to remember is that search engines don’t read content in image formats so stick to plain text if you want that content to influence your ranking. Even, when you use an image, do not forget to add alt and title tags to it.

10. Keep Content Original

One thing search engines frown on is duplicated content. If you’re trying to convince search engines that you have a lot of content just by repeating the same couple of pages, it’s not going to work. You’ll probably even end up lower. Make sure each page has fresh, informative content. Also, keep your pages updated, too. New content regularly is a big plus in the eyes of search engines.

11. Optimize the Whole Site

Some people only use optimization techniques on the home page but don’t stop there. Almost any of your major pages could appear in the search engine results and by optimizing them you’re increasing your chances of landing a high spot with different keywords.

12. Use Linking

An important part of SEO is the use of internal and external links. With internal linking, you are able to spread the visitors to your site over many pages instead of having one page keep all of the traffic for itself. Plus, these links help guide readers to appropriate information on the site. External links show that your site is providing more resources for visitors which search engines also like.

13. Have the Right Number of Words

While 200 to 1,000 words may seem like a big range, that’s the word count you want to shoot for on every one of your web pages. Most people tend to shoot for the average – 500 words – when it comes to articles and a little lower than that for other pages.

14. Choose Relevant Keywords

Make sure that your choice of keywords is relevant to what you’re hoping to do with the site. If you’re going to be selling a product, avoid any keywords that might have a negative connotation towards your product. Just using words that have high search volume isn’t enough. Those words need to be connected to your site’s theme and purpose. Consider adding a few “long tail” words which are longer phrases that also include descriptive terms.

15. Create a Landing Page

The landing page’s purpose is to immediately provide visitors with a clear, attention-grabbing overview of your site. These are great for optimizing because they can help drive traffic to the rest of your web site easily.

16. Check Statistics

Your site’s analytics, provided by the hosting service, may provide clues as to what needs to be done on your site. Analyze those statistics and see what you can learn from them. Then make adjustment in your keywords and apply what you’ve learned to the site.

17. Submit Content to Link Back

Creating articles and other social media that will drive people back to your web site is a good idea. Just make sure to submit them to trustworthy sites.

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You can earn good money by writing copy online, which has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of copywriters. The increased competition means that for your work to stand out, it needs to be of the highest possible quality.

If your ambition is to just be a good copywriter, keep in mind that the Internet is full of them. But don’t give up, because you can learn to become an exceptional writer if you follow a few simple steps.

The first thing you should do is seek out and read the advice from the top copywriters. You might think you are good enough to go it alone, and maybe you are, but you’ll get there faster if you listen to the tips that the pros offer. They’ve learned a great deal during their careers and if they are willing to share their wisdom, you should listen.

You need to keep practicing your craft. It doesn’t matter how easy you find it to write, practice will make you even better. Never think that there is no more room for improvement. The best musicians still practice, and so should you.

Everyone makes mistakes – it’s inevitable. But not everyone knows when they’ve gone wrong, or learns from it. Take the time to consider how you might have done something better and try to implement what you’ve learned into your next piece. You want to get better with every piece of copy that you write.

You can never do too much research into a subject. If you want to write a great article that your readers will believe in, you need to be credible, and for that you need to do your research. Even an expert on a subject can learn something new.

Finally, you need to be creative, and to hone that creativity so that every article is new and fresh. That might seem to be an impossible task, but experiment with different writing styles or find a new angle on the topic. Creativity is the key to incredible copywriting.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science and art of making websites be found on top of the major search engines for the relevant keywords. Achieving high rankings on the top search engine is the best advertising tool on the Web today. The reason is simple: Millions of searches are performed everyday. Thousands of web pages that organically appear closer to the top of those search results essentially get free advertising. It has been called the cheapest and the most effective marketing tool available.
SEO can bring loads of targeted traffic to the site, thereby enabling a stronger customer base, which is an essential component for brand building. It is definitely an investment for the future as it benefits the company for a long time. For insurmountable success and irresistible change in the way your business operates just hire an SEO specialist.

What is an SEO specialist?

An SEO Specialist or Search Engine Optimization Specialist is the one with deep understanding and knowledge about the search engines who has the ability and skills to bring up the sites in the top positions for the targeted keywords by applying various white-hat or ethical methods. An SEO specialist is also termed as an Internet Marketing Specialist, E-marketer, Web-marketer, SEO Consultant, SEO Guru, SEO Wizard, SEO Start or as an SEO Expert.

Who can be a Qualified SEO Specialist?

A qualified SEO specialist must have his website top ranked for the competitive keywords. He must be knowledgeable about both the black hat (unethical/ bad) and white hat (ethical/ good) methods of SEO, but still use only white or organic methods. He must be a true professional, not just work on assumptions or just the very basic knowledge. He must have updated and up-to-date knowledge and must prove his work experience. He definitely should have many years of experience and must be capable to achieve the desired results by bringing the targeted traffic and top ranking for the targeted keywords in variety of industries.

Overall Fee and Timeline for a Successful SEO Project

The fee structure and the timeline vary with different jobs depending upon the keywords competition, site age, SEO Specialist’s experience and other factors. One cannot expect the results overnight and it takes time to show up in the search engines. So with all this in mind the SEO specialist estimates and determines a feasible and affordable fee according to the timeline. The most imperative point to remember, though, is the need for SEO services for the success in a business operation.

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