The fact that no body wants to admit is this:

You can not effectively do SEO on more then 3-10 keywords or phrases at once.

If you are trying to, then you are really hurting your bottom line because it will take you forever to achieve the rankings you are looking for.

Having said that, sure you could have an entire team in the Philippines doing blog spam for you in order to try to get back links for dozens of keywords at once, but that’s just sloppy.

Honestly, the formula for SEO success is to focus on 3-5 keywords CONVERTING keywords or phrases ONLY at a time.

Once you achieve your desired rank (that should be #1 of course) then and only then should you start to focus on other keywords.

I am continually amazed when I see people trying to do SEO on dozens of keywords/phrases at once. This sort of SEO strategy will cause you to lose in the market place – every single time.

Because your competitors who understand the value of focus and targeting will start to capture the top spots for each of your chosen keywords/phrases one by one.

At the end of six months, you’ll be sitting there scratching your head wondering what happened, and where all your traffic went!

And the worse part is that you’ll have a devil of a time at that point playing catch up, and most likely you won’t ever catch up and here’s why.

Let’s say you spent the next 90 days trying to rank for 100 keyword or keyword phrases and you managed during this time to get 1000 new back links.

Not bad right? That’s 1,000 new links to your site! Wow! That’s sure to pump up your back link profile and give you some ranking juice, right!?

Well, not so fast. Yes, you did get 1,000 new back links, and that will help your domain gain some new authority overall, but because your  efforts were divided between 100 different KWPs, you only managed to get 10 new anchor text back links per keyword phrase.

Think 10 back links per keyword phrase is enough to move your chosen page up in the serps for that keyword phrase?

Let’s be honest. If you are targeting a CONVERTING keyword phrase, then chances are that there is going to be a lot of competition, and 10 new links per keyword phrase isn’t really going to move you.

But what about your competitor who has the same list of 100 keywords that you do, but instead of trying to optimize for them all at once, they focus on just 3 of the keywords / phrases during the same 90 days.

Using the same effort, they also managed to get 1000 new back links – but since they focused on just 3 keyword phrases instead of all 100, they were able to add 333 links per keyword, where you were only able to add 10 links per keyword.

Do you think that 333 new links is going to move your ranking? You bet!

Search Engine Guru Dan Thies calls this “Having your lunch eaten” because, they moved up in rankings a lot, and you didn’t move at all. In fact, they stole your ranking out from under you and you didn’t even see it coming.

At the end of 90 days, you are still working on getting back links the same 100 keywords, while your competitor has moved on to the NEXT set of 3-5 keywords on the list.

Let’s look at what happens:

Now for the sake of argument lets assume that the rate of link acquisition remains constant.

Day 180:

• You now have 20 back links for each of the keyword phrases on your list of 100.
• Your competitor now has 333 back links for EACH 6 of the keyword phrases on the list of 100.

At the end of a year:

• You now have a whopping 40 back links for each of the keyword phrases on your list of 100.
• On the other hand, your competitor now has 333 back links EACH for 12 of the keyword phrases on the list of 100.

But let’s scale that out and you pump more of your profits into seo and hiring link-getters. And let’s say you went big and DOUBLED your work force and got double the results.

At the end of a year:

You now have a whopping 80 back links for each of the keyword phrases on your list of 100.

Don’t get me wrong, 80 back links per keyword is great!  But it took you a year to do it, and during that year you had new competition come into the market.

On the other hand, your competitor now has over 660 back links a piece, for 24 of the keyword phrases on the list of 100.

And I can guarantee that they are making more money then you – hand over fist because they are CRUSHING you in the search engine results.

Seriously, think of it this way. At the end of the year -

You have 80 back links per keyword phrase / url

They have 660+ per keyword phrase / url!

How will you ever catch up? You won’t.

Be smart, find which of your keywords converts the best and then FOCUS your SEO efforts on 3-5 keyword at a time.

Then and only then move to the next set of 3-5.

Doing your SEO this way ensures consistent results, dominance over your competitors and a sure and steady income.

You can read that post here: http://www.mastersitemanager.com/882/seo-monitor-outbound-link-tracking/

Now when we released this feature we strongly suggested how important this little number could be. Not know how many outbound links your site has is a disaster waiting to happen. And why paying attention to the Outbound Link Tracking feature of our SEO monitoring software is so important.

In a nutshell – If you see the number of outbound links on your site jump dramatically, (upwards of 200-300 over night) check the source code of your site ASAP!

It’s likely that a hacker has managed to get in and plant links to his porno / casino / sex drugs web sites.

What happens in cases like this is that at first Google will depress your rankings because your site is linking to “Bad Neighborhoods”.

Then after a period of time (Google won’t say how much – but we are thinking 60-90 days based on what we’ve seen) if you don’t correct the issue, Google will just de-index your site altogether. Ouch!

Here’s an example how bad the problem is with blogs like Word Press.

If this happens to you, it is correctable but it’s a huge pain in the you know what as you’ll have to go in an modify the WP database table. Restoring the blog/site from a backup won’t fix the problem in most cases.

But we found a very good explanation on how to clean your blog “IF” you’ve been hacked. Here’s another great WP hack prevention resource.

Now why would I say your account has been hacked?  Good question…. The answer will surprise you.

We recently did a maintenance  survey of the sites using MasterSiteManager.com for their SEO rank tracking and monitoring. And what we found was shocking even to us!

Almost 1 in 50 client sites that we monitor on MasterSiteManager shows that they have  over 200 outbound links on them (in other words – they got hacked).  1 in 50! Wow!

But that’s also a pretty good indication of how wide spread and prevalent the issue is on blogs all over.

So I urge you to login in to your MasterSiteManager account right now and check the outbound links for each of your sites.  After all, you can’t fix a problem you don’t know you have.

This was accomplished by splitting the database over multiple servers. Unfortunately, one of our programmers forgot to update the database look up table, and so a few users (less the then 4) were not getting their stats updated as quickly as normal.

The issue has been corrected and now all user accounts are operational, with the added advantage of even faster look-up speeds for both keywords and general statistics.

I personally apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you or your clients.

Thanks for your continued support!

Don Schnure
MasterSiteManager.com

There are several reasons that you’d use a 301 redirect on your web site. Maybe you renamed  / deleted a page, or post.

Typically by default – depending on how your web host has their servers set up – your web site can be accessed with both www.domain.com and domain.com.

This is NOT good… Why?

What this means is that when Google comes along to spider / index your site – it “sees” TWO identical copies of the site. Opps!

And because Google penalizes ON-SITE duplicate content, you should restrict the access to either www.domain.com or domain.com. In other words, you need to decide right now if you want your site to be know on the web as www.yoursite.com OR yoursite.com.

You can’t do both…. well you can, but Google won’t show your site the love that it deserves if you do.

Some links may be outside of your website scope and/or the search engines may have already indexed your website under both addresses. If that’s the case, there’s not a lot you can do about it, but setting a 301 redirect up will help.

So the question is “How do I redirect all links for www.domain.com to domain.com ?”

Simply create a server side 301 redirect up in your .htaccess file. It’s not as hard as it sounds.

*** BEFORE making any changes, though I do recommend taking your EXISTING .htaccess file and archiving it so you have a back up in case you break something…

Create a 301 redirect forcing all http requests to use either www.domain.com or domain.com:

* Example 1 – Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com:

Simply add this code to the top of your current .htaccess file. Be sure to substitute your domain name in the code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

* Example 2 – Redirect www.domain.com to domain.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Ok, let’s look at what this does with this explanation of this .htaccess 301 redirect:

Let’s have a look at the example 1 – Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com. The first line tells apache to start the rewrite module. The next line:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]

specifies that the next rule only fires when the http host (that means the domain of the queried url) is not (- specified with the “!”) www.domain.com.

The $ means that the host ends with www.domain.com – and the result is that all pages from www.domain.com will trigger the following rewrite rule. Combined with the inversive “!” is the result every host that is not www.domain.com will be redirected to this domain.

The [NC] specifies that the http host is case insensitive. The escapes the “.” – because this is a special character (normally, the dot (.) means that one character is unspecified).

The final line describes the action that should be executed:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The ^(.*)$ is a little magic trick. Can you remember the meaning of the dot? If not, this can be any character(but only one). So .* means that you can have a lot of characters, not only one. This is what we need because ^(.*)$ contains the requested url, without the domain.

The next part http://www.domain.com/$1 describes the target of the rewrite rule. This is our “final” used domain name, where $1 contains the content of the (.*).

The next part is also important, since it does the 301 redirect for us automatically: [L,R=301]. L means this is the last rule in this run. After this rewrite the webserver will return a result. The R=301 means that the webserver returns a 301 moved permanently to the requesting browser or search engine.

I know this may seem pretty daunting to some who feel it’s too techniucal but it will pay off big time for you in the SERPs. If you don’t know how to do this or feel uncomfortable doing it, hire someone. It really is a “must do” for any site looking to secure top rankings.

If you write an article about MasterSiteManager.com and we will give you our
SEO Silver package for FREE – (A $468.00 annual value!)

BUT THIS IS A LIMITED TIME OFFER…..

To qualify for your FREE SEO Tracking account:

• Just write an original article or review about MasterSiteManager. We ask that your article run 400- 500 words, with a “do follow” link pointing to back to www.MasterSiteManager.com and a screen shot of our software or homepage.
• Once you post your article, just send us the url where it’s posted on your web site so we can activate your new account!

*Your website/blog should be industry related to MasterSiteManager.com’s target market (SEO, Internet Marketing, IT, Hosting, etc). 

*Don’t want to write your own article or review? No problem. We’ll give you one you can post on your site – just ask!)

You can download the MasterSiteManager logo and promotional screen shots from our Press Center page.

Google has extended its personalized search functionality to users who are not even signed in.

This goes for Google users around the world, in over 40 languages. What this means is that when you search with Google, it will provide results that are aimed at higher relevancy to the individual user, as opposed to relevancy for the average person.

“For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes,” Google explains in a blog post on the subject. “Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.”

What Does This Mean for Natural SEO?

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

“Honestly, if this makes Google more relevant for their searchers – all power to them,” comments Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick, which offers SEO services. “I am not going to say I know what is better for the average searcher. They can quickly figure this out after days and decide to keep it, turn it down, or off completely. SEOs will adapt, like they always do – we are a strong and smart bunch – I am not worried.”

My guess is that all of the same best practices for search engine optimization will apply. What you may have to pay greater focus to is your target audience.

On the other hand, personalized search could play to the strengths of the horizontal content approach. Rich Ord, CEO of iEntry Network and Publisher of WebProNews has an interesting take on the matter. “There is going to be the same number of searches and the same number of clicks to content,” he says. “So basically, personalization in search will just be dividing up the traffic pie more.”

“This could make people think more about the long tail instead of just focusing on their top key words that they would like to rank for,” he adds. “It could also make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords.”

Could personalized search directly contribute to an increase in revenue for Google itself? You bet!

The feature has been available to Google users who have accounts, are signed in, and have their web history enabled (on Google) for a while. Now it appears to just be the standard way of delivering search results to everybody.

“This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser,” Google says. “It’s completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users). You’ll know when we customize results because a ‘View customizations’ link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we’ve customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.”

If you’re worried about privacy, settle down, because Google lets you turn personalized search off altogether. For signed-in users, all you have to do is remove web history from your Google account. For signed out users, click “web history” in the top right corner of a search results page, then click “disable customizations.” You can also just clear your browser’s cookies.

On a related note, Google is also rolling out the inclusion of real-time search results on regular search results pages for some queries. These results draw from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and numerous other sources.

This means you have yet another opportunity for visibility, but it also presents a new challenge, as with any other universal search element, it may push organic listings down on the page. Are you glad to finally see some real-time search make its way to Google?

About the Author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

If you are not keeping a log of the changes that you make to your site and SEO efforts, then you’ll always be behind the guy who does – and you’ll wonder why you can’t ever crack the top 10 in the serps. But the built in “Notes” feature in your Master Site Manager SEO monitoring account makes keeping a log, easy!

In essence, it will show you how effective your current SEO strategy really is, where your doing well and where you need to improve.

With this page you will be able to see “at a glance” the most important overview data for each one of the websites you are monitoring immediately.

We track PR, Back links from Google and Yahoo, how many of your sites pages are actually indexed in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Alexa too.

And though it carries less weight than it used to, we even track the Alexa ranking as well automatically.

As with other tabs in the system that offer monitoring functions, you are able to sort each column a number of different ways to suit your liking and to reduce the time that you need to spend searching for information.

Now, in the SEO STATS overview grid, Green numbers mean an increase in something, Red numbers mean a decrease, and black indicates no change.

By using this color code system and presenting all of the major monitoring indicators on the same screen, you’re able to immediately get a sense of what’s working and what’s not.

You’ll quickly be able to tell where your SEO efforts are paying off and where you need to get to work

But let’s say you want to drill down a little bit further.

For example, let’s say that you see an GREEN number in Yahoo back links column. This indicates that the number of back links that Yahoo is counting toward your site has increased. (Bo0 Yah!)

Simply click on any number you see in the grid and the system will launch a chart that displays that particular stat over time.

Now the real beauty of this is that now able to see in real time the effectiveness of any linking campaign over time. And the longer your site is in the system, the greater trend history you’ll develop.

Now to check other stats, simply click the “JUMP BACK to STATS” link at the top of the page, and the system will drop you back into the overview grid so you can check other ranking indicators or review other indicator trends.

Lastly, on the far right hand side you’ll see the KEYWORDS column.

Here you’ll see the number of keywords you’re tracking for that particular domain.

To view those keywords and their statistics simply hover your mouse over the word “VIEW” and click the link.

A new page will pop up that lists every keyword you’re currently tracking and your position for that Keyword in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Once again you be able to click on any number in the keyword listings and have the system draws a trending chart that shows your position for a particular search engine for that keyword over time.

The bottom line is that you no longer have to spend an average of 15 to 20 minutes per URL several times a week trying to compile all of the SEO stats needed to be able to see the big picture of how well your websites are doing because we’ll do it for you automatically and have it ready every time you login.

If you’ve got multiple websites or you’re managing sites for clients, you just saved you a whole lot of time.

Watch the video here

It’s too early to tell exactly how this is all going to play out. But rest assured the way Google ranks websites is changing.

So it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your site’s positions in the new index, dip your toe in the water coffee of the new Google and test out what SEO techniques work there.

In case you’ve missed the news here’s a quick note of what it’s all about.

Google Caffeine is the developer preview of the next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.

In a nutshell this means that Google is testing new things and the way it’s algorithm works.

For example, they are tweaking:

• search features
• indexing
• ranking mechanisms
• etc.

Once the testing is done, Caffeine is supposed to substitute the old Google bringing all the changes with it.

There’s no telling as to how and when this transfer will take place, but we do have an official public preview of what the new Google will be like at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

Today Google looks pretty much the same on the outside, but functions differently.

There are changes in the number of pages indexed, keyword suggestions and most importantly — in the search results and how they are displayed.

To give you that unfair advantage of knowing better make sure you are tracking all your web sites and keywords via Master Site Manager.com

The Master Site Manager Rank Tracker, Keyword Tracking, and Backlink Tools let you know exactly what’s going on with your site and how the new Google Caffeine will effect your rankings and ultimately your bottom line.

• Check your rankings in Google over time
• Monitor ranking fluctuations
• Spot trends and test the effectiveness of various SEO techniques in the new Google

It’s the first step in a process that will let Google push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. — Google Webmaster Central Blog.