SERP University SEO Blog

The Search Engine Optimization Roller Coaster

You win some and lose some I guess. The results from the latest MSN Index are in.  You can look at the complete results from Search Engine Commando  by clicking HERE.  You may find the complete results interesting and you also get to see what a real Search Engine Commando Report looks like.  So here are the results from today's re-index:

sales lead generation                         26  No Change
mortgage lead                                     Not in top 30   No Change
insurance sales lead                           3  No Change
health insurance sales lead               1  No Change
life insurance sales lead                     5  Down 3 Positions

And the heavyweight key word phrases:

health insurance lead                       15 No Change
life insurance lead                            44 Down 21 Positions
mortgage insurance lead                34 Up 2

Several factors to consider with this latest re-index.  One, in normal, every day life you should optimize for 2 keyword phrases per page to get the maximum impact.  To make a point, I am optimizing for at least 8 keyword phrases which is NOT recommended. The second thing is Inktomi still weights the META tags heavily in a rather outdated fashion.  I had my META Keywords listed in this fashion: "life insurance sales lead, health insurance sales lead, sales lead generation" etc right on through the list.  My concern was the repetition of certain words (sales lead) in the META Keywords. I do think GOOGLE would consider this as borderline spam.  With this update, I changed the META keywords in this fashion "health insurance sales lead, life, generation" etc and made sure I repeated each individual key word only once.  I am not pleased with the results and I am going to change the META Keywords back to the complete phrases and see what the impact is.

One last observation and I will close my search engine optimization blog for the evening.  I just have one page indexed in Google so far. In MSN, I have a total  of 11 Top 10 keyword phrase listings. Even so, Google is producing almost eqaul traffic to MSN.  As soon as Google updates and indexes more of my pages, It will easily surpass MSN.  Google is where you have to have the good listings to be successful. They are driving a huge percentage of ALL search engine traffic!

A Little Free Promotion; Viral Marketing is Dead?

I have been doing some research on blogs, RSS Syndication and XML Feeds.  It is being hailed as the next generation of world wide news delivery and while I am always just a bit skeptical of the "next biggest thing" , the ease of implementation of this powerful tool and the growing acceptance makes me think it may actually be a huge factor in just a very short time.

Even the more traditional avenue of Press Releases has now been ported over to the Internet. I have been using a free Press Release Service for sometime now with decent results. PRWeb  stays in business by donations and I have donated $10 per release to them in the past. If you donate you get access to how many times the release has been viewed, how many times it has been picked up by the news feed, how may times it was printed and how many times it was forwarded to someone else. The ability of PRWeb to feed your Press Release to the wire services is fairly new and I am glad they are staying up with the newest technology.

Here are some figures from past press releases. I released one in December and to date, it has been viewed 3550 times and been picked up on 106 news feeds. The Release I did this past Friday is doing quite a bit better. In 72 hours it has been viewed 950 times and been picked up by 70 news feeds ---all for $10. My web logs indicate several visitors to 7/24 Leads from this latest Release.  Another advantage is these Press Releases are indexed by Google in about 7 days time which is an added plus with a new website like this one.

Do you know what viral marketing is?

You might want to read this article if you don't, Viral Marketing Article.

"Viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others' resources"

Viral marketing is attractive because you plant the seed and then it propagates using someone else's resources. I am not talking about a computer vir*s! Viral marketing is when you come up with such a neat idea that when people see it, they feel compelled to send it to their friends, and their friends send it to their friends and so on and so on. So think about this, you have the same internet access as IBM or General Motors and success in Viral Marketing depends solely on a great idea or concept.  It seems to me a combination of RSS Syndicated Feeds, a blog and press releases would add powerful tools to a viral marketing campaign.

07/26/03

It is a Seabiscuit kind of day.

I have been watching the trailers for Seabiscuit and it looks like it has all the ingredients that American movie goers love.  Seabiscuit is a Classic Cinderella Story -- a tale of people and horses who were underdogs and had no business enjoying any success at all.  The reason I put this in here?  It parallels what I am trying to do here. Self-Educated, miniscule budget, totally presumptuous in even THINKING I can drive a website to the top of the Search Engines?  Yep, That about sums it up. And it is not like I am trying to hide anything.  Here it is on the internet for all to see!  Before we get to today's MSN results, here is a link to someone else doing the same thing. As a note, the 4 keyword phrases I am ranking for right  in the list below now account for 10,000 searches per month.

sales lead generation                         26  up from a 50
mortgage lead                                     Not in top 30   No Change
insurance sales lead                           3  No Change
health insurance sales lead               1  No Change
life insurance sales lead                     2  No Change

Search Engine Optimization can get confusing and complicated. Let me give you a specific example. On MSN, I rank 15 for "health insurance lead"; for "health insurance leads" I rank 30. Add an "S" and it drops by half. Apply the same thing to "life insurance lead"; Add the "S" and I drop from 23 to 44. One of the things I suspect is MSN, being an older search engine with outdated technology, makes this distinction due to its lower level of sophistication. It is gong to be an interesting project to see if Google makes the same distinction.

Ok, on to the heavyweight keyword phrases that we optimized for on this update:

health insurance lead                       15 up from 24. I am on the FIRST  page now for this keyword phrase!

life insurance lead                            23 up from 45
mortgage insurance lead                34 Down from 29

These 3 keyword phrases account for 15,000 searches per month with health insurance lead being the heavyweight at 7,000 searches per month.

So now I guess the decision is do I re-vamp the page to try and move "health insurance lead" up in the listings perhaps at the expense of the number one listings I already have?  You will have to check back on my SEO Blog to find that one out.

Closing Shot:  I released a Press Release on the 25th that is generating some interest-- here is the Link.  I made it intentionally sensational to see if I could get some viral marketing going....and it was almost free!. In 24 hours it has been viewed 762 times and been picked up by 45 news feeds. I will discuss this at length tomorrow.

 As promised, I am going to talk about RSS Syndicated Feeds. While I am still new to this it looks to me like RSS and XML may replace traditional news services.  Not to mention this whole Blog thing that is going on. This is a Blog that you are reading.  A Blog is just a diary but with RSS Syndication, when you update it, it automatically is dispersed to thousands and thousands of destinations.  Here is a LINK to the article I used to set everything up. Like I said, I am no techie or anything, but the power of RSS Syndication is mind-blowing.  You owe it to your self to check it out.

It was taking me about an hour to check the MSN Search Engine to determine what my rankings were.  I was getting pretty darned tired of it.  I knew there were some web position software out there that would do it for you so I did some checking around today. There are three that look like they get the most attention:

All of you know what a cheapskate I am, right?  Well, here is the deal on all three of these position software packages.  Web Position Gold is severely castrated and will only run for a certain number of days in demo mode. Agent Web Ranking would NOT run on my computer (P4, 2.4ghz,512mb ram, XP Pro) as hard as I tried.  Search Engine Commando is shareware and is limited to some degree but it does NOT expire.  The limitations are you can only track ONE URL which is fine with me right now and you it is limited to just 5 of the search engines in the Shareware version. Luckily, one of them is MSN so I am in business!  Here is the link to check it out:

A word of caution about some  of the "features" found in these search engine optimization software packages. It seems like some of them will automatically submit your pages to the minor search engines -- which I don't agree with-- and some of them will even write the html for an "optimized" page. I wouldn't touch that one with a 10 foot pole!!!  Use 'em to check your Search Engine Positioning and let it go at that.

I got a nice note from one of my first clients today and she said I could use it on the web site.  From Katherine in Houston, TX USA:

Made my day.  Tomorrow should bring another MSN update and I want to talk about PDF files and Google.

I was going to write something today about my new RSS Syndication Feed to promote this SEO Blog but I think I will save it for tomorrow.

Well, Better late than never. The Slurp bot from Inktomi showed up on schedule and the index page is updated yet again  In the previous update, I had gone with some flashy, catchy ad copy for the title and description. Inktomi is great in that respect. They list EXACTLY what you put in the <title> and <description> tags.  Google, on the other hand, searches the content on each page and will try to match their results to your search query.  This IS better and that is why Google is number one - they deliver relevant content. However, you do have to sorta read between the lines.  Google's results come in snippets and partial phrases and you do have to read the search results to find what you want.

Back to Inktomi and MSN. When I did the flashy entry for the previous update, I could not weight the entries with all the keywords I wanted. It just didn't sound right.  On this current index, I tried to strike a happy medium and make the copy eye catching WITH some good keyword phrases in there.  Looks like it worked. Here are the results:

sales lead generation                         50  down from a 48
mortgage lead                                     Not in top 30   No Change
insurance sales lead                           3  No Change
health insurance sales lead               1  No Change
life insurance sales lead                     2  No Change

Ok, Andy, what is the deal?  These results are identical except for one DECREASE!!!

The deal is I have been watching some super competitive search terms that have been off the radar.  I have almost 1000 words on my home page by design. While that exceeds the recommendation of 250 words or so it sure does give the search engines some content to work with. Out of contention for me is a ranking of 60 or lower. On MSN, they display 15 results per page so that would mean you are not in the first 4 pages.

My off the radar terms are super competitive and I was concerned about getting decent rankings. You have to remember a one page website - that is basically what I am to Inktomi - has an impossible task of competing with sites with 100's of pages.

On my current list of keyword phrases, Overture reports this search volume for June 2003:

insurance sales lead                           2947
health insurance sales lead             1994  
life insurance sales lead                   1903

Now considering I have Top 3 rankings for all three, that ain't too bad but consider these figures:

health insurance lead                       6933
life insurance lead                            4510
mortgage insurance lead                 2303

Wouldn't it be nice to add some heavyweight traffic with these keyword phrases?

This graphically illustrates the difference you can make if you really target your keyword phrases.  Everyone would come up with health insurance leads, that is a no brainer. But health insurance sales lead? That is why research is SO important. Another factor is going from a 3 keyword phrase to a 4 keyword phrase.  More words in your keyword phrase will drastically reduce the competing web sites.  So how did I do on these extremely desirable keyword phrases?

health insurance lead                       24  up from 92!
life insurance lead                            45 up from 68
mortgage insurance lead                 29 up from 75

Pretty interesting, is it not?  2 heavyweight keyword phrases on the second page of the MSN SERPs.  724 Leads has been live EXACTLY 2 weeks today. Who says the little guy can't kick some butt?

If you want to check out the Inktomi PFI (Pay for Inclusion) after reading this. here is the link: Inktomi PFI.  There guidelines also make a great deal of sense, of you are unclear about search engine spam, this is as clear a definition of terms as I have ever seen: Inktomi Content Policy

 No re-index today on Inktomi.  This the first day Inktomi has not crawled my home page at a 48 hour interval.

However,  looks like at least the home page has made it into Google. 13 days after going live we are now in the Google database.  I have a good idea how this happened but won't reveal the secret here. Order Sales Leads for Pennies Now - I explain it all in there. Here are a few of the results from Google on the first day we are live. It appears the home page is the only page Google crawled. Results will improve when GoogleBot crawls the entire site.

insurance sales lead           8
mlm sales lead                   6
health insurance sales lead   2

I am surprised at the initial similarity between the Google and Inktomi SERP's

- Here are the re-index results

sales lead generation                      48   down from a 27
mortgage lead                                Not in top 30   No Change
insurance sales lead                        3 down from 1
health insurance sales lead               1  No Change
life insurance sales lead                    2  No Change

The changes were made to the Title and META Description.  I took out several of the keywords to make the ad copy 'grab' more.  Though we slid a bit in the listings, overall traffic for today has doubled, indicating to me the new titles and description are doing their job. There is always a trade-off.  You have to be in the top 30 to get noticed and your copy has to get the surfer to click. Adjusted the title and description a bit more and we will see what happens.

 --Another re-index in MSN. Here are the results:

sales lead generation                      27   No Change
mortgage lead                                Not in top 30   No Change
insurance sales lead                        1  Up from number 3  listing!!!
health insurance sales lead               1  Up from number 3 Listing!!!
life insurance sales lead                    2  Up from number 10 listing!!!

Spent some time tweaking the headlines and description, lets see if it makes a difference in traffic counts.  Resubmitted the Home Page

 As good as their word, 724Leads shows up on MSN Search

Here are the results:

sales lead generation                      27
mortgage lead                                Not in top 30
insurance sales lead                        3  !!!
health insurance sales lead               3  !!!
life insurance sales lead                   10 

Not bad for a first outing!  This stuff really works, doesn't it?

In case you think I am jerking your chain, check this screen shot:

 724Leads Homepage submitted to Inktomi

7/12/03

Let me explain the next step.  Google is the 900 pound gorilla. They rule the Search Engine market right now.  This could change.  Nothing is ever constant in our fast changing Global Economy.  The problem is Google does things their way, after all they weigh 900 lbs!  A typical scenario would be to get your new website up and running, collect some inbound links and then hope GoogleBot finds you in short order.  Sometimes you are in the directory in 2 weeks and sometimes it is 6 months.... and you gotta hope you optimized everything correctly and picked the right keywords. It sure can get stressful!! Let me tell you about a little workaround.

There is another player out there called Inktomi. They have been around for awhile and were just recently acquired by Yahoo. I bet they become more important in the months to come. Right now, Inktomi provides search results to MSN and HotBot. they have a little paid inclusion deal that is a perfect setup for SEO's.  For $39 annually, you can get one URL included in their database and their robot will crawl your site every 48-72 hours.  See where I am going with this?  For all practical purposes, Inktomi indexes your site just about the same as Google.  Close but not exactly the same.  Close enough that if you can get a decent listing in Inktomi, the same should be true for Google.

So while I am waiting for old GoogleBot to come visiting 724 Leads, I am tweaking and refining and adjusting the 724 Home Page on Inktomi. On my home page, I optimized for 4 keyword phrases. This is going to be a good workout because the competition is TOUGH.  There are a blue million web sites out there competing for the same terms. Here are my keyword phrases:

sales lead generation                       2486 searches/month
mortgage lead                                23535 searches/month
insurance sales lead                        2947 searches/month
health insurance sales lead               1994 searches/month
life insurance sales lead                   1904 searches/month

Ok, with this kind of search volume, this is going to be quite a mountain to climb!

So here is the time line so far:

7/5/03 - Final drafts of web site basically ready to go.

7/6/03  - I 'unparked' my domain name at GoDaddy and activated it.

7/9/03  - First 5 web pages are uploaded to the server. We are LIVE!