Future of Your Google Rankings: Saving Searches

I was browsing MotorTrend today and noticed in the right hand column they have a little box, which is below:

When you click on that link, you get taken here. I think we're seeing a glimpse into what SEO could be like in 5-10 years.

As Google increases grabbing our personal data to provide more and more personalized search results, SEO's are going to find alternative ways for people to subscribe to the content and save the content directly with Google, making the information "credible". The more personal saves, or "subscribers" you have to your content, the higher you'll end up in the SERPs. Maybe, just maybe, they're already starting to integrate this data into the Universal platform (which I think they already are with the "Searches Related to:" section).

On the other hand, Motortrend might be wanting their visitors just to subscribe to their content so they'll continually come back, resulting in more pageviews and ad revenue.

I think we can all take a page out of MotorTrend's methods and start providing a way for our visitors to subscribe to our content directly with Google, outside of Feedburner. This type of ranking benefit will take time for growth, in which case I'd get started NOW! What if you knew links were going to be so important in 1995? You would've started gathering all the links you could so you could be ahead of the curve. I think MotorTrend is showing us we have that opportunity now.

PS - I can already see this as a way for spammer's to manipulate; creating fake accounts and subscribing to their own MARKOV pages.

Underground Links - Providing help to helpless SEO's

As many of you know, Google has decided to really start tackling this "problem" of websites selling text links to monetize their site. Google has lowered the PR of tons of sites they may or may not be selling text links. Other companies have voiced their opinion about links going underground.

I've been thinking of starting a text link service, offering text links that are underground. Text Link Brokers have a good thing going on - but unfortunately - they're just not enough. We need more companies like TLB; keeping the links underground and out of site from Google. TLA isn't helping that much. I contacted a dozen other text links "brokers" and they all weren't that great either. I had one text link company send me their entire database of sites in an excel sheet. I couldn't believe it.

It's going to be a long while before Google starts really pushing their algorithm away from a link based ranking model, if ever. They're trying their best, grabbing personal data and buying up other online properties to see what you're all about, hoping to make the elusive "perfect SERP", which in my opinion, is not close.

As for starting this new venture, I think this could be an excellent niche catering specifically to SEO companies.

I love SEO..I really do!

You know, this industry has always fascinated me. I really do love SEO and everything it comes with. Its a great feeling to know that you get to do something you love to do. I love working with clients, building their website into a selling machine - making them huge amounts of money - because of the rankings my company has achieved for them.

A couple of nights ago, I told my roommate's girlfriend I'd help her with their website. They have a website selling custom sashes, which is a great idea and these girls are full of them. They didn't have any analytics, so I got them hooked up with Google Analytics. They didn't do any keyword research, so I did some via Keyword Discovery. They didn't have optimized pages, so I optimized, based upon the keyword research, as well as create more pages to target 2nd and 3rd tier keywords.

THE RESULT...

They're already starting to rank. I love it. They made a sale today - I'm not sure if it was because of me, but helping people grow their business never gets old.

I hope in the future, as my personal wealth increases, I'm really able to focus on that. Providing more services and products that really help people. I'd love to work more with the SMB community more. A lot of those people, unfortunately, have no clue about "internet marketing" and what they're missing out on. Forget the classic YellowPages book - get some good 'ol website optimization and start making GOOD money. :)

Link Building Tactic #1: Give to Get

New Year...new posts. I thought I'd start giving away decent tactics to get links. Link building is one of the hardest parts of building up your SEO "portfolio" to Google, Yahoo and MSN. I've decided to give a little more this year. Here we go:

Tactic #1: Article Distribution
Now, you may be thinking of article directories like EzineArticles.com or ArticleDashboard.com. Those are good places to submit articles to, but that's not what I'm talking about. Here's the process.

1. Hire a writer. You can find someone who will do articles at 0.01 a word. They're all over the place.
2. Have them write 10-15 articles for you. They don't have to "I graduated from Harvard with an English degree" article, but at minimum legible.
3. Go to places like DigitalPoint and give away this content in the freebies forum
4. When giving away these articles, make sure you let them know that they must keep your link on the article. They're getting a completely fresh article piece on the net - so no duplicant conent and all you ask in return is that you keep the link that's in the content.

They'll have no problem with putting your link up for a piece of content they can slap some adsense on. And for $4-$10 per article, you're getting one-way links on nice, on-topic sites (at least, that's what you're looking for). Make sure you hold out until you find sites that fit within your niche. No need to put your cat articles on an HD-DVD site with links back to your cat site.

The CONs to this tactic is you can't really monitor them and if they do decide to remove your link, you're kinda SOL. Having said that, you could publically humiliate them within the forum, completely ruining their credibility and they're probably add it back - if it comes to that. So at worst, you may lose a couple of bucks.

Stay tuned for our next Link Building Tactic!