Most web traffic comes from people searching long tail keywords or key phrases. When people search google they usually type in more then 2 keywords looking for specific information. You can see how people find your site by going over to Hittail and signing up, put your info in and sit back and see in real time your visitors and what term they used to find your site. Hittail will then give you suggestions on other long tail keywords to use to build more pages, edit your current ones or what else to blog about. Here is what’s on their What Is It page.

“HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It’s that simple.”

So for this site it shows me this as an overview. You can see the majority of my traffic comes from the long tail.
Top Ten Keywords are 11.9% of your search traffic.
Long Tail Keywords are 88.1% of your search traffic.
Total unique keywords collected: 895

You can use this tool to fine tune your SEO project and if nothing else see how people are finding your website. It seems to work great and you need a little time with it, maybe a month or two to really see a good overview of your where your traffic is coming from. They also have a forum if you need any help or explanations.

So I first saw Google updating it’s pagerank and posted about it on the 19th of Sept. That was more then a month ago and now it looks like the dust is finally settling. For the past month I’ve seen my sites go back and forth between the old pagerank and the new so I’ve been keeping track and watching the #’s over at http://livepr.raketforskning.com (which by the way I’ve never understood what that domain name says). What is raketforskning anway? Anywho, I’ve noticed this site jumped up to a 5 which is nice since it used to be a PR3 with subpages ranked PR4 which makes absolutely no sense. So basically it looks like things are settling (fingers crossed) and it’s time to move onto the work for the next update.

I need some good links to get this site to a PR6 and I’ve thought the one good way to do that is to give away css templates or wordpress themes because we all know that when you give, you receive. So, to push this site upward I need to start giving stuff away. This site also needs a theme redesign, which probably won’t happen for awhile since I’m super busy. We’ll see how it goes.

Update Feb 7th..

Looks like Google is still dancing around,, I don’t quite understand it. Not sure if others are seeing this as well but if you do please share your thoughts or what you’re seeing. Basically Google’s pagerank is jumping around back and forth and it makes no sense.

Well I just saw the first signs that google is updating it’s pagerank. A new site I started awhile back is now displaying a pagerank of 4. It was a zero before that. It looks like google is getting ready for it’s next pagerank update. There updates usually take a few weeks to a month to settle into their new places. This is good though because it’s been so damn long. I remember when they use to update monthly now it takes forever. I wonder what the purpose of them updating quarterly is? Is there some benefit to it or does it just take them longer to parse through all the information. The world may never know.

In the old days webmasters could freely exchange links with other webmasters without worrying about being penalized by search engines. In the old days I mean 2005 and earlier. Things change quickly on the web and the search engines are catching on faster and faster to webmasters trying to artificially boost their search engine rankings.

Old fashioned link exchanges consisted of 2 webmasters placing the others link on their site usually on a designated links page sometimes consisting of tens of hundreds of pages. The idea was to gather as many link partners as possible in hopes of boosting Pagerank and in turn increasing their rankings in the search engine result pages. It didn’t matter if webmasters traded links with site owners who had sites completely unrelated to theirs because in the beginning it didn’t matter. The more incoming or inbound links you had the better.

More and more webmasters caught onto this fact as the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization became popular. The web became saturated with links pages and the search engines caught on. Search engines like Google essentially want their results to be as accurate as possible because it is their livelihood so they began changing their algorithms to factor in such activity amongst webmasters. With some major search engine updates webmasters and SEO marketers soon figured out that incoming links from related sites were better then from unrelated ones. So they continued exchanging links but now with related sites only.

The problem with this is that the search engines can quickly tell who links to each other so it’s a simple way to see who is trying to boost their own rank. Google and probably Yahoo too now penalize sites that have been involved in serious link exchanges. I’m talking about webmasters who have traded links with hundreds of other sites and who have complete link exchange directories on their sites. You will notice sites like this who have resources or link exchange pages that extend to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 pages.

Because this is so easily detectible by search engines it’s time to start doing link exchanges differently. Link exchanges are not going away, so the way links are exchanged has to well, change. Here are a couple of suggestions on doing link exchanges differently.

The Three Way

No, I’m not talking about anything sexual here silly. I’m talking about creating a 3 way link exchange where one of the two link partners has 2 sites and links to his or her partner via their second site instead of directly from their first. This requires one of the partners to have a second site preferably in another location with a different class-c IP. I’d even go as far as to say with a different person named as the domain registrant so the whois information doesn’t show the same info for sites 1 and 2.

This requires of course more resources on the part of the webmaster with 2 sites but it’s not uncommon for webmasters to own more then one site. Directories or information portals are types of sites you could use as your second site. They should contain useful and unique content as well and have incoming links from other related sites. To get a boost of Pagerank needed you will have to submit your site to other directories, maybe publish a press release, articles or even purchase a text link or two. Your second site should be well ranked and give your partners a good reason why they should exchange links via this method. Basically you want to create an Authoritative directory of sites in your niche.

The Blog Way

Blogs seem to have special powers on the web. I’ve seen blogs with blogrolls a mile long and I’ve never heard of a blogger being penalized for linking out too much. Blogs can be a great link exchange medium and you can see this from bloggers who again have long blogrolls and who have high Pagerank. Starting a second blog is actually easier then starting a second website to use to exchange links with. it’s free at blogger.com to start a blog and once you do it’s easy to manage and especially link out to your partners sites. Like the first method you want to create an authoritative resource on the niche you are trying to conquer.

I don’t recommend using blogger.com if you want to actually own your site. You can start a blog at blogger.com but you never really own your site. I would recommend using wordpress, drupal or typepad on your own domain, again hosted on a different host then your first site. When your blog is set up you can blog about your niche related news, discuss or rate other sites in your niche (giving you a perfect way to link to your partners) or simply place your partners in your blogroll list.

So now you have 2 sites in your niche, one you use as your main site and the other you use for exchanging links. This means you don’t have any link exchange pages on your main site, which is great, but what about your partners site? Does he/she have a huge link exchange directory on their site? You don’t really want your link hidden in one of their deep link pages do you? I pass up any link exchange offers made by webmasters who are so kind as to offer me a link on their links page located 3 subcategories deep on a page with 200 other sites.

Here is what you can do. Besides telling them they should scrap their entire link exchange section you can suggest they give you a spot outside their link pages by offering them a full page of content. If that’s too much maybe a paragraph of content including your link they can include on one of their main pages. Maybe a testimonial of sorts they can add to their site. Most webmasters trade links on pages that are similar in Pagerank so you will have to be willing to offer up their link on a page with equal or greater Pagerank.

The above methods are long term and are only suggested if you are serious about gaining one-way inbound links to your site. Although the work involved is great so is the reward.

Google’s patent application 20050071741 displays how they rank sites on historical data.  Meaning that they pay attention to when your domain was registered and how long it’s been registered for.  Older domains have an advantage in Google’s serps over newer domains.  If you have a domain name and plan to be around for awhile then it’s good to register your domain for longer then the 1 year minimum.  I’d say register your domains for atleast 3 years in advance just to let Google know you are serious and plan to be around for awhile.  Most spam sites are only registered for 1 year then let expire so it’s good to set yourself apart from these domains by extending your registration.
Here is the Google Patent in full.  You will see #’s 38-40 pertain to a domains information.
38. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes domain-related information corresponding to domains associated with documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: analyzing domain-related information corresponding to a domain associated with the document over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on a result of the analyzing.

39. The method of claim 38, wherein the scoring the document includes: determining whether the domain associated with the document is legitimate, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether the domain associated with the document is legitimate.

40. The method of claim 38, wherein the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.

An overview of the importance of domain age can be found in this article at webconfs.com.  I just extended jeffhendricksondesign.com until 2010.

Did you know you can artificially boost your Alexa traffic ranking by simply installing the Alexa toolbar and visiting your sites over and over?  Yes, it’s true.  Because of this fact I don’t trust Alexa rankings at all.  I never really thought Alexa was worth a damn even back in 2001 when I first personally heard of their toolbar.  Because it tracks the sites you visit some people consider it spyware.  But I don’t think that’s the big problem.  The problem comes when site owners or webmasters base the worth of their sites on their Alexa rankings.  To me Alexa rankings don’t mean jack.  I don’t know anyone who uses it and who are these people that do?  I first installed their toolbar back in early 2002 after all the buzz, but I thought, ok this is lame and uninstalled it.  You can read a good post titled “stop using alexa for serious traffic analysis” on makeyougohmm.com.