Statistics and Monitoring

What percentage of people click on the first listing in Google?

Only Google knows for sure, but estimates range from about 40% to 50%. AOL once released their data, which suggested that 42% click on the first listing. “Heat map” studies tend to lean more towards 50% or more.


How do I use Google alerts to monitor the SERPs?

All you have to do is get a Google account and then go to Google Alerts. There you enter the keywords you want the tool to monitor the SERPs for, choose “comprehensive,” choose the frequency you want to receive the alerts and then enter your email address where you want to receive the alerts.

Once you’ve completed those simple steps, you’ll get alerted when new pages that use your keywords appear in the search engines.

You can also use this tool to monitor your backlinks as they appear in Google. Just enter this search term into the alerts field: link:www.yourdomain.com/filename.html

Replace the above URL with your actual link, of course.


How can I track the number of backlinks I have?

There are a variety of tools available to you, such as using the Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster tools (check the links report) and SEO Quake.

Using these tools is preferable to searching directly in Google. That’s because searching manually generally yields only a sample of the sites that are linking to your site.

Ultimately they’re all wrong! Don’t obsess about tracking these things just focus on building more.

Lesson Four: Link Building Basics

What is a backlink?

This is when a third-party website links to your website. For example, if you write and submit an article to an article directory, then you’ll have an incoming link – a backlink -- from the directory.

The search engines prefer one-way incoming backlinks from high-quality, relevant websites.


What is anchor text?

When you create a link, the anchor text is the clickbable part of the link. For example, in the phrase, “go to Google,” Google is the anchor text.

The reason this is important is because you want to use your keywords as your anchor text on incoming links. So if you’re trying to rank for “gardening secrets,” then those two words should make up the anchor text for several of your backlinks.


What is a do-follow/no-follow link?

There are two types of “nofollow” attribute. The robots meta tag version –

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

Lesson Two: Other factors about Advanced SEO

What other factors affect rankings besides backlinks?

Where you’re getting your links, the quality of these links, the relevancy of these links, how many links you have and what keywords you’re using as the anchor text all affect your rankings. But there are other factors that affect your ranking, including but not limited to:

• On page optimization factors – this is how well you’ve optimized your tags, content, formatting, keyword proximity, site map, and links on your web page. This also includes whether you use your keywords at the top of your page and in your “alt” tags (both good things).
• Having a lot outgoing or reciprocal links pointing to “bad” sites (like link farms) – can negatively impact rankings.
• Whether you have unique content (which the SE’s like).
• How frequently you update your site. Faster isn't necessarily better. Check what ranks well for your niche and aim to match it.
• Whether your domain includes your primary keywords.
• Your domain’s age, reputation, IP address and whether it’s a top level domain (e.g., a .com is better than a .info although probably not by much).
• Shady practices such as keyword stuffing or using text that’s the same color as the background can negatively affect your rankings. Only an issue if your site gets manually inspected and you don't have a legitimate reason for it.
• Showing one page to the search engines and other page to visitors negatively affects your rankings. (Cloaking and doorway pages.)
• Frames negatively affect your rankings.
• Using content that the search engines can’t read, like audios, flash, videos, graphics (without alt tags), etc.
• Whether you have a robots.txt file that tells the search engine bots to stop crawling or indexing your site.