Like my father, I spent most of my professional career working in professions in which writing was a key part of the daily job. Chris Mitsoff was a newspaper owner, editor and reporter, and I followed in his footsteps. I also followed in his footsteps in committing myself to authoring a book.
The Web Ranking Manual was published in 2013, after I finished an online book authoring course called Bestseller in a Weekend, which I highly recommend. I chose search engine optimization as the topic because I had a high level of interest in the subject, and also had learned a lot of the tricks of the trade in my website work.
There were few books about this topic at the time, and that was one reason I was able to achieve an Amazon best-seller rating:
Published below is the first chapter of the book, if you would like to learn more:
1 WHY SEO IS SO IMPORTANT
It is so important for people to have high rankings in Google because these days, in our current society, that is the equivalent of what a full page Yellow Pages ad used to be.
Years ago, people who wanted to get high exposure in their community for their business would just place a large Yellow Pages ad. These days, Google has replaced that as the way people find information.
“The last time I used a Yellow Pages was at my grandmother’s house,” wrote Malena Ogles of Atlanta, Georgia. “She did not have a computer.”
The data and responses above were gathered in an unscientific polling of friends on my Facebook pages and my e-mail list. They served to verify and clearly confirm the premise of this book.
High organic rankings in Google are the equivalent of what a full-page Yellow Pages ad used to be, in terms of exposure and advertising. Organic means search rankings that you don’t pay Google for. On Google, Bing and Yahoo, you see the paid ads at the top of the page and at the sides, and they sometimes have a slightly tinted background so you can tell that they’re paid ads. The listings that come up without the shading throughout the center of the search results page are ones for which people have not made a payment to Google for positioning. Rather, their position is based on Google’s proprietary algorithm which ranks web pages to determine their potential value to people searching for information.
Twenty or 30 years ago and more, when people wanted to find out the solution to some problem or issue they had around their house or in the community, they would go to the Yellow Pages. That is where you would find a plumber, a roofer or find any kind of specialist who could help.
Now, when was the last time YOU actually picked up the Yellow Pages? For me, it’s probably been many, many years, literally.
(Case in point: As I was editing this chapter, my wife called out to me from the front porch of our single-family home, and as I went to see what she needed, I noticed she had picked up and thrown a plastic yellow bag with what appeared to be the latest Yellow Pages just inside the front door. Three days later, guess where that book still is:)
(That book is eventually going to go straight to our recycling bin, and I suspect the same is the case for most other people.) In the afore-mentioned unscientific survey, I asked:
(The full text of the option which people selected 36 percent of the time was “I ask someone for a recommendation.” All of which goes to show that word of mouth certainly is not dead.)
Internet marketer and Daytona Beach, Fla., resident Chad Cook, a colleague of mine, summed it up: “Only time Yellow Pages is ever used is putting a dot com after it. Everything I do is online.”
Lauren Fink of Quantico, Virginia reminded that printed books cannot respond as well as trusted friends.
“Another reason I don’t use yellow pages is because I find better recommendations online,” she wrote in her survey response. “My favorite way lately, is to use my moms-only Facebook groups to find recommendations from other moms about service providers. The two in my area here in Virginia are Ready, Set, Sell Stafford and Mommy Traders – both are like local, mom-only Craigslists but are useful for asking questions. My latest was ‘Please recommend a good jeweler,’ and I received 14 comments within a few hours.”
Everyone now goes to Google or to one of the search engines to find the things they want to find. Recent studies show that more than 80 percent of people go on search engines before they make a purchase. They want to compare shops; they want to do research on what it is that they need to buy or the service they need. Having a high spot in search engines makes it easier for people to find you – like having a full-page Yellow Pages ad next to a liner or small rectangle ad for your competitor. The full-page ad will always get more attention.
It just makes sense, and there are statistics to back this up, that the higher you are in the search, the more chance that you have of being clicked on and looked at. So, that’s the whole objective — to try to be as high as you can, to be as visible as you can.
It just makes basic sense. Most people will look at the front page of the search results and won’t really go past that, and that’s just human nature. When you’ve done a search and come up with about 10 different options, for most people that is more than enough options to do comparisons and make a decision.
And the higher you are, the better. Studies show that if you’re number one, you’ll get about 40 percent of the clicks that are made on that search results page. If you’re number two, you’ll get about 20 percent. If you’re number three, you’ll get about 10 percent, and then the rest of the seven results left on that first page get the rest of those clicks. So, when you’re number 10, for example, you might get about 1 percent or 2 percent as opposed to the 40 percent of the number one on that page. More than anything else, that explains why there is so much emphasis in people’s minds on “how do I get to number one,” because you get 40 times more clicks than you would if you’re in the number 10 position on the first page. It also explains why the organic search engine optimization initiative in business has become such a big business.
When you have a high organic ranking and someone clicks on your link, you don’t pay for that click. If you’re an AdWords advertiser (someone who pays for those slightly-shaded placements at the top and sides of pages that we mentioned previously), you pay every time somebody clicks on your link. Depending on what kind of business you’re in, those clicks can be very, very expensive.
If you’re a good businessperson, you have done the math and figured out that if you are going to pay $4 per click, you know what your return on that is going to be and whether or not you can make it work profitably. In almost every case, organic search engine optimization is the best way to go to get the best bang for your buck. You’ll pay someone to do the up-front work, but you’re not paying for each click. In Yellow Pages terms, it would be like being charged every time someone calls you on the phone.
Most readers of this book know what SEO is, but if you don’t, it is the abbreviation for “search engine optimization.” SEO is the process of configuring your website so that it is viewed favorably by Google and the other search engines and, therefore, receives as high of a ranking in the search engines as possible. It’s what we’re all going to be talking about here throughout this book.
Organic SEO would be oh-so-simple if Google would just tell everyone the best ways to do it. But the truth is that no one knows 100 percent for sure, because Google has never actually published its ranking algorithm.
Google has not published a guide because they do not want people to know how to manipulate the search results. They want the consumers who use Google to believe that the rankings they’re seeing are completely unbiased and unaffected by anything other than a very specific standard that Google applies to everybody.
However, there are many SEO specialists who have reverse-engineered the Google ranking process to find out what qualities and attributes make one site or page rank higher than another organically. Through this reverse engineering process, there is a very good understanding of what’s important in Google’s eyes and what isn’t, even though Google does not publish it. We’ve learned what it is that they look for, and this book will reveal it to you.
Google actually views SEO in an unfavorable light. They believe if someone is trying to search-optimize his or her site, he or she is trying to falsely improve its position in the rankings. So, it’s considered a manipulation of Google’s product and they don’t like it. Part of what we will cover in this book is the importance of making your SEO efforts look natural – as though it is the result of genuine outside user action, reaction and behavior, and not a contrived campaign.
Google has its systems programmed to detect sites which appear to be getting unnatural SEO attention.
They have, in their massive computer system, signals that go off and say, in effect, “Uh-oh, someone is really trying too hard to make this site higher than it should be, and as a result, we’re going to penalize them and drop them even further than they were to begin with.” (Or something like that.)
Part of the difficulty of an SEO practice is to try to make sure that, while you’re optimizing it for the best possible result within Google’s tolerance level, you don’t overdo it. If you overdo it and Google detects it, then you’re basically sunk. You’ve basically killed your site for any hope ever, ever being ranked in Google. So, it’s a very delicate balance.
If Google penalizes you and your site drops into the dark pit of the internet, nobody will ever find you again online. And if people can’t find you, they can’t buy your products and services.
Despite all of Google’s best efforts to provide quality search results to its users, sometimes you’ll do a search and one of the top sites that comes up is one that looks spammy, garish and amateurish. Most people are surprised to learn that the artistic look and layout of the website is not at all considered by Google. The Big G not look at a site and say, “Well, that’s prettier. Well, that is a nice design or that’s a nice image.” They do not consider that whatsoever.
What they consider — we’ll talk about more later on the specifics — has to do with the text that’s on the page and the links and coding of the images that are on the page. So, you can have a website that basically has almost no content at all show up near the top. More often than not, that’s because somebody has consciously optimized that site to rank highly.
Once the site is ranked highly, then the owner or manager can then add content to turn the site into a profitable business. In what most people would see as a counter-intuitive work plan, the owner-manager will work on the parts of the website that humans look at AFTER making sure the often-invisible-to-human-eyes components that Google’s bots love are in place. When a website builder is striving for high rankings, he or she is building to be seen by Google’s computers, not human eyes. Surprisingly to most, there is a highly divergent perception of what makes a quality page between the two.
This is the approach we use, and it is a great way to see if you can get ranked before you spend a lot of time and resources on creating specific sales content. We haven’t addressed Bing and Yahoo much here, and there is a reason for that. This is my opinion only, based on personal experience, but Yahoo and Bing are insignificant, compared to Google.
According to the respected website SearchEngineWatch.com, Google had about 66 percent of all Internet searches done in April 2013. Bing had about 17 percent, and Yahoo had about 13 percent. Google’s market share is down from its highest point a few years back, but not down significantly enough to signal a major shift in online searching behavior and habits. As I’m working for my clients, I frankly don’t worry about Yahoo and Bing. I don’t spend time trying to optimize for Yahoo or Bing because you’re talking about, in either case, about maybe 12 to 13 percent of the people who are doing searches anywhere who are actually using those two.
I would much rather optimize for a search engine where two-thirds of the people who are doing searches are. Bing and Yahoo’s organic ranking algorithms are not the same as Google’s, and for the reasons mentioned above, there has not been as much research and reverse engineering done on the former two. In mid-2013, as it has been for quite awhile, getting a top ranking in Bing or Yahoo is kind of like kissing your sister, to use an old cliché. So what? You’ll never achieve the level of success that you can with a similar ranking in Google. (Having said all of that, however, we have found that high rankings in Bing and Yahoo very often occur as an unintended consequence of the SEO work done for Google.)
For verification, here is what the people who responded to my survey said about their search engine use:
Internet marketer Gary Chappelle of Duluth, Georgia confirmed my suspicions in his response:
“I am so used to using Google now that I rarely use any offline method of finding a service provider in my area. It’s just second nature now. I’m not sure what I’d do if the Internet ever disappeared.”
On the other hand:
There are many important facets to a successful SEO campaign, but the most important part without question is keyword research. It is critical to know what people are searching for on the Internet and to be able to put your website in a top position for those searches. One mistake that some people make is they will try to get (or stumble into) number one ranking for a term like “Monkeys that can mimic Texas search engine optimization practitioners’ habits.” While you can easily do that, it doesn’t matter because nobody will ever search for it. So, you have to, as you’re putting a plan together, understand that finding out what people are searching for in Google is the most important thing. And understand that being number one for a search term that nobody searches for is nothing more than a moral victory.
A great example is one of our top clients who was starting a national business from scratch, and he wanted to be found in Google.
When I first talked to him, I asked what business he wanted to be in. He said he wanted to be in the water park or water slide repair business. I did keyword research with the Google Keyword Planner (formerly and better known as the Google Keyword Tool) and typed in water slide, just to see what related terms people are searching for.
The term that is searched most often by people who are looking for that service is “water slide repair,” so that is the keyword term that I focused upon. We’ve got him on the first page for that term, and many, many other related search terms. He’s getting lots and lots of business based on not just a main keyword search, but several others.
All successful SEO campaigns consist of “on-page” and “off-page” factors. On-page SEO means changes you make to your actual website. Off-page SEO consists of actions that are taken not on your actual site, and we’ll talk more about that later. These are two very, very distinct processes you go through to increase your site’s ranking. There’s a very important aspect of it that has nothing to do with the page or site that you control.
Have you ever heard someone say, or seen someone advertise, that he or she can guarantee you a number one spot in Google? Sounds great, but that is absolutely impossible to promise — because you do not control Google.
Also, there are millions of other people in the world who are trying to do the same thing — getting a keyword optimized or a website optimized for a specific keyword search. And all you can control is what happens on your own site. You cannot directly control what happens on someone else’s site. So, it’s very possible that someone else has a better plan, a better strategy, a more effective strategy than you do to get rankings.
Therefore, you should steer clear of anyone who promises a number one ranking. And, if you are an aspiring SEO service provider, you should never promise that. However, you can build higher payments for achieving higher rankings into your fee structure. Most people don’t mind paying extra for premium service and results.
If you’re in business and don’t employ organic SEO, you’re basically just hoping that what you have on your website is going to be good enough, and I would say 99 percent of the people really don’t know what the critical components are. Fortunately for you, now that you are reading this manual, you will be in the select company of the 1 percent who do know.
If you’re not going to try to use organic SEO, you basically will be out of luck. The odds will be infinitesimally against you being able to get the rankings you need by chance.
Google is always changing. It changes all the time, and that’s part of the difficulty. If you’re not in on the information loop, knowing where to find the information about changes they’re making, then you really can just get left behind. That’s just part of the difficulty of someone who is not a professional at this to be able to do it and do it well.
CHAPTER RECAP
If you want to be found by your customers these days, you don’t do it with Yellow Pages; you do it with search engines. And you can either do it through paid ads on Google AdWords, or you can do it through organic search engine optimization. When people click on you, you don’t pay for those clicks, and that can be, in the long term, much, much less expensive, in fact, free in a lot of ways as opposed to the AdWords.
If you would like to read more of The Web Ranking Manual, you can purchase it and other books I have authored from my Amazon author page.
