Some regional-based search engines or indexes will only list sites that are registered
in their country code. If your site exclusively or primarily caters to a specific
country, then you will most likely want to register a domain using the local country
code.
Some search engines will still show your site in regional based search results if your
site is hosted within that country, has links to and from other local sites, and/or has
your address and phone number in the page text, but many directories are
extremely picky and will only list regional domains.
As search progresses, localization of results will become more common. Some of
the major search engines already give sites a regional ranking boost based upon
where the site is hosted and the domain extension.
If you develop a regional domain (.co.uk for example), I also suggest buying the
.com version of your domain, if it is available, and forwarding it to the regional
domain you registered. By buying the .com version and forwarding it your site, you
help retain traffic you may have lost by people forgetting to put your region
specific domain extension in their address bar when they type the website address
directly into the address bar.
I prefer to use a .com version of a URL over other generic TLDs. People may
assume your site is a .com even if it is .net, .biz, .org, or .info when they go to look
for it on the web. If all they remember is your domain name, they may type your
domain name followed by ‘.com’ because ‘.com’ is the default TLD in most
people’s heads. If you don’t own the .com version as well, you are giving some of
your hard-earned traffic to a competitor.
If you are running a charity or organizational website a .org may be seen by some
people as a sign of credibility.
It is a good idea to place your business location on your web pages. If you are in a
country where the search technology is primitive, local searchers will frequently add
the country or city name to their searches, and if you have them on your pages you
stand to be returned as a relevant result for more searches.
Some sites that are not aggressively promoted still fall out of favor on occasion. As
a webmaster following Google’s guidelines, you still can not expect Google to owe
you free traffic. You have to earn it by making others cite your website.
SEO Feedback Loop
The effects of SEO do take time to kick in. At any given time, considering how
dynamically the web changes, there will be some holes in search algorithms that
make certain SEO techniques exceptionally effective.
I have spoken with current search engine engineers working at major search
engines in regards to this e-book. I also have spoken with database programmers
who later became some of the world’s most technically advanced SEOs. Some of
these programmers have told me what some would consider tricks that work really
well, but they only work really well because few people know about them.
I do not try to promote the latest search spamming techniques in this e-book for
the following reasons:
• They are the most likely to quickly change. Some things that are
cutting-edge and effective today can become ineffective and actually
hurt you tomorrow.
• Some of them can be damaging to your brand.
• Aggressive techniques are the some of the most likely techniques to get
your site banned.
• Some things are told to me as a secret, and if they are made openly
available to anyone (including search engine engineers—some who
have read this e-book), then they lose their value, and I lose my friends
and resources.
• I do not have a lot of experience with exceptionally aggressive
promotional techniques, as I have not needed them to rank well in
most the markets I worked in.
• People who use aggressive techniques are not evil or bad, but I cannot
possibly put accurate, current, useful, and risky information out to
everyone in an e-book format and expect it to not cause problems for
some people.
• To me, effective web promotion is balancing risk versus reward.
SEOBook.com got on the first page of Google for SEO within nine
months of making the site, with less than $5,000 spent on promotion.
Most sites do not need to use overly aggressive and risky promotional
techniques. SEO works so well because most sites on the web do not
actively practice effective SEO.
Search engines make billions of dollars each year selling ads. Most search engine
traffic goes to the free, organically listed sites. The ratio of traffic distribution is
going to be keyword dependent and search engine dependent, but I believe about
85% of Google’s traffic clicks on the organic listings. Most other search engines
display ads a bit more aggressively than Google does. In many of those search
engines, organic listings get around 70% of the traffic. Some sites rank well on
merit, while others are there due exclusively to ranking manipulation.
In many situations, a proper SEO campaign can provide a much greater ROI than
paid ads do. This means that while search engine optimizers—known in the
industry as SEOs—and search engines have business models that may overlap,
they may also compete with one another for ad dollars. Sometimes SEOs and
search engines are friends with each other, and, unfortunately, sometimes they are
enemies.
When search engines return relevant results, they get to deliver more ads. When
their results are not relevant, they lose market share. Beyond relevancy, some
search engines also try to bias the search results to informational sites such that
commercial sites are forced into buying ads.
I have had a single page that I have not actively promoted randomly send me
commission checks for over $1,000. There is a huge sum of money in
manipulating search results. There are ways to improve search engine placement
that go with the goals of the search engines, and there are also ways that go against
them. Quality SEOs aim to be relevant, whether or not they follow search
guidelines.
Many effective SEO techniques may be considered somewhat spammy.
Like anything in life, you should make an informed decision about which SEO
techniques you want to use and which ones you do not (and the odds are, you care
about learning the difference, or you wouldn’t be reading this).
You may choose to use highly aggressive, “crash and burn” techniques, or slower,
more predictable, less risky techniques. Most industries will not require extremely
aggressive promotional techniques. Later on I will try to point out which
techniques are which.
Ease of Reference
If my site was sold as being focused on search and I wrote an e-book or book
about power searching, it would be far easier for me to get links than running a site
about SEO. For many reasons, the concept of SEO is hated in many circles. The
concept of search is much easier to link at.
Sometimes by broadening, narrowing, or shifting your topic it becomes far easier
for people to reference you.
Primitive Search Technology
As the Web grew, content grew faster than technology did. The primitive nature of
search engines promoted the creation of content, but not the creation of quality
content. Search engines had to rely on the documents themselves to state their
purpose. Most early search engines did not even use the full page content either,
relying instead on page title and document name to match results. Then came
along meta tags.
Meta Tags
Meta tags were used to help search engines organize the Web. Documents listed
keywords and descriptions that were used to match user queries. Initially these tags
were somewhat effective, but over time, marketers exploited them and they lost
their relevancy.
People began to stuff incredibly large amounts of data (which was frequently off
topic) into these tags to achieve high search engine rankings. Porn and other highmargin
websites published meta tags like “free, free, free, free, Disney, free.”
Getting a better ranking simply meant you repeated your keywords a few more
times in the meta tags.
Banners,
It did not help anything that during the first Web bubble stocks were based on
eyeballs, not profits. That meant that people were busy trying to buy any type of
exposure they could, which ended up making it exceptionally profitable to spam
search engines to show off topic random banners on websites.
The Bubble Burst
The Internet bubble burst. What caused such a fast economic recovery was the
shift from selling untargeted ad impressions to selling targeted leads. This meant
that webmasters lost much of their incentive for trying to get any kind of traffic
they could. Suddenly it made far greater sense to try to get niche-targeted traffic.
In 1998, Overture pioneered the pay-per-click business model that most all major
search engines rely on. Google AdWords enhanced the model by adding a few
more variables to the equation—the most important one is factoring ad clickthrough
rate (CTR) into the ad ranking algorithm.
Google extended the targeted advertisement marketing by delivering relevant
contextual advertisements on publisher websites via the Google AdSense program.
More and more ad spending is coming online because it is easy to track the return
on investment. As search algorithms continue to improve, the value of having
well-cited, original, useful content increases daily.
Advancing Search Technology
Instead of relying exclusively on page titles and meta tags, search engine now index
the entire page contents. Since search engines have been able to view entire pages,
the hidden inputs (such as meta tags) have lost much of their importance in
relevancy algorithms.
The best way for search engines to provide relevant results is to emulate a user and
rank the page based on the same things the user see and do (Do users like this
website? Do they quickly hit the back button?), and what other people are saying
