Google Page Rank - Help with stats please

06 Apr 07 3:30 am

Many thanks Sean.
I'm a bit pushed today.
I'll be back after Easter

alrob

sean06 wrote:By googling your keywords, you'll find out how many other sites have these keywords in them. Is this the only thing to look for? No.

Have a look over the top 10 results. You want to look for page rank and the number of backlinks they all have. Page rank is easy. If they're all PR6 and 7, then it's a tough thing to rank for.

As for backlinks, I use the tool at www.marketleap.com although it's acting a bit weird lately, it should be back to normal soon. Once you start building links, you'll understand the amount of effort that goes into building some.

I'm not sure if I've answered your questions, so if I haven't just let me know :)

10 Apr 07 7:20 pm

Hello my fellow iMac user :)

How do I know if folk are seeing the page and how many ?

Well, one thing I would suggest is get a Google Analytics account by going to http://www.google.com/analytics/

After sign-up, simply copy paste the lines of Google Analytics javascript code into your Wordpress template file, or use a WordPress Google Analytics plug-in like the one at http://www.semiologic.com/software/google-analytics/

Now, Google Analytics is based on Javascript, which means that you won't get stats from around 10% of your visitors who might be on older browsers or have javascript turned off. But it's still very informative. You'll know exactly how many people visit your site every day, what keywords they've entered to find your site, which search engine they came from, which pages they visited, how long they stayed, etc etc.

If you want to assess the demand for a specific keyword you can go to inventory.overture.com and see how many searches are done in a month for that keyword in the Yahoo network. That will give you an idea. Traffic Travis also has the same feature (I know it's for Windows, but you can install Parallels Desktop on your Mac, especially since most Internet Marketing software is for Windows).

A final note about keywords. I used to have a music download site that never ranked for ANY keyword that I targeted. However, it did rank for some obscure long-tail phrases. So in the end, a site that took me 1 day to put-up with about 10 pages ended up generating about $10 a day in sales for months, all because of long-tail key phrases found within the site's content.

So, keyword tools are there just to give you an idea about the market you're in. But it's the content that matters and does all the work bringing you traffic :)

15 Apr 07 10:39 pm

Hi Alrob,

It's great that your site is sitting at number 1 in Google for certain keywords, but what you really have to look at is how many people are searching on those keywords. It's pretty easy to rank #1 for a keyword like "hugghtiful aushths" because as far as I know, nobody else on the internet will have put those letters together in that particular way. No competition = very easy to rank. Where it gets difficult is where you try to focus your site around keywords where lots of people are searching. Chances are, other people will have noticed that lots of people are searching, and they'll be focussing their sites on these words too.

To me, your keyword "directions for home business newbies" is what we call a "long tail" keyword. It's long, it's slightly obscure, there probably aren't very many people searching for it, but for this reason it's relatively easy to rank well for it.

If you tried to rank well for search terms/keywords like "home business", you'd have a much harder time. You'd need to create a very good site with a lot of relevant content, and this is where your LSI comes in. You'd also probably need a good number of links to your site from other good, relevant websites as well.

This doesn't mean that this term you're ranking well on is worthless! As others have mentioned, going for a number of long-tail search terms is a very good way to start building your business. Once you're doing well on these terms, it becomes easier to rank for the more mainstream terms.

Looking at your site, I'm not really sure what you're going for. You've got articles on home business, but also on dyslexia. Perhaps you could give us an idea of what you're wanting to do? For instance, are you wanting to create a site on the topic of how to make money online? How to work from home? How are you wishing to monetize it -- affiliate programs, Adsense?

I would also recommend (once you've figured this out) getting your own domain name and setting up your wordpress blog there. It's a bit more work, but it gives you greater credibility and flexibility.

Key points: Figure out what market you're going into and what products you're able to promote to make money. Then research your keywords... find out what people are searching for, and decide which words you're going to tackle. After that you'll work on creating content that targets these words, and then you'll work on making your site rise through the search engine results pages.

One point to note, it looks to me like you're thinking of going into the "work from home" "make money online" market. There will be a video in this month's update where I interview Ewen Chia and we talk a bit about the make money online market. Have a look at that before you decide to tackle this monster!

I hope that gives you a little direction!

All the best,
Mark