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Internet Marketing Class Notes

September 2004

The following is a collection of notes that I made for myself during the class.  They are provided in the event they may be useful to other attendees. Copies of presentations made in class are available on the "Past Clinic Topics" page at the end of each class description. Current information of interest will be added to my Internet Marketing blog.

 

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9/29/2004	Jay reviewed his activities of several weeks ago when he used statistics as a guide to making site ranking improvements to one of his sites (http://www.residential-landscape-lighting-design.com/). Within a very short period of time, his modifications resulted in top first page rankings for all of the terms he focused on. He stressed the point that keeping a site ranking hig is an ongoing process that takes persistent effort and attention. Pages and performance have to be continually reviewed and modified based on changing search engine practices and standards. One example he cited is the changing view of the value of keyword metatags. Search engines do not consider these tags very important (Google does not even read them!), but they can be useful for "low end terms" and for getting ranking on misspellings that you do not want your site visitors to see. Misspellings are common on the Internet and can generate valuable traffic, but using them in your content does not enhance the professionalism of your site. Previous practice in the keyword tag has been to repeat important keywords frequently, but the engines are now taking a different view of this practice and can actually penalize your site for "stuffing" this tag excessively. He spent some time reviewing a newly discovered keyword density analyzer (http://developers.evrsoft.com/seotool/) and pointed out a new standard for Google of 2% (preferred ratio of keyword phrases to total word count). This tool has a number of features that simplify the process of finding the best keyword phrases for your site. Another change in the works is that Google appears to be looking at outbound links somewhat differently and may enhance your site rankings based on the quality of the sites that you link outward to. {Jay's notes in Word} {Jay's notes in RTF}
9/15/2004	The class went through a presentation on the purposes and general practice of linking to your web site in order to increase your ranking in the search engine results. Next a presentation was shown illustrating the functions performed by a particular link management software package.
9/8/2004	Jay made several points during the course of his remarks: Modify your site until you get the position you want in the rankings. Jay showed how he had made changes to an existing site several weeks ago, and illustrated how the rankings had changed as a result. Freshness of your site is considered by the search engines. "Doorway pages" and other techniques used by web spammers do not often change.  Search engines are taking this fact into account to attempt to counter these techniques. Use 30 pages as the low end number of pages that you need to start an effective web site. Jay has sometimes cited the minimum number of pages required for a new web site to be 100. For sites that are not in a very competitive space, a lower number can still be effective. One good link is worth 100 poor links. Investing the time to find good links for your site wil pay off in the results. Unreturned outbound links will hurt your site. Outbound links "leak" page rank from your site. When those links are returned to you, the leakage is reduced.
9/1/2004	See the presentation available on the "Past Clinic Topics" page.