Just a couple of days ago, Derek Gehl, CEO of Internet Marketing Center, has just released his new product on Search Marketing! His new product, named Search Marketing Lab is created based on his own experience in search marketing right in IMC.

He said:

Exactly HOW important is a top search engine ranking for your business? Check it out:

• Nielson/NetRatings just reported that over 5.7 billion searches have been performed this year in the U.S. alone.
• And a recent accidental “leak” at AOL revealed that 89.7 % of searchers look at the results on the first page ONLY.

… Which means if your site’s not in the top 10 results, you’re getting a TINY FRACTION of the traffic you could be getting!

Ranking well in search engines organic listings can be one of best ways to drive traffic to our websites. I personally get at least half of my daily traffic from search engines, and I believe this traffic are the ones really coming in, looking for a solution to a problem!

I guess since MarketingTips.com is ranked top in Google for the super competitive keyword “Internet Marketing”, there must be something about what they are doing that most people don’t know.

Here’s also what he said, in another email, about his new product.

In my five-part “Search Marketing Lab” webinar, I sit down with my top two in-house search engine optimization experts, and show you *exactly* how to drive TONS of qualified new visitors to your website by getting your site to the top of the search engines as quickly as possible.

So, if you are really interested to find out what goes on behind the walls of IMC in SEO, check out his new product Search Marketing Lab.

I read this from Just Search today regarding the fact that search engines are changing.

Search engines are changing, they have to so that they can return what they feel is the most relevant website for a given search phrase. Google coop and social book marking websites will encourage search engines to change as well as some friendly competition from Google, MSN and Yahoo.

So how does this affect your search engine optimization campaign?

I think a real SEO expert is one that can optimize a website to stay high in authority and rankings, regardless of the changes in the algorithms and stuff in the search engines. To be frank, I think SEO should be easy. Really. Publish articles or content on the topic of interest, right from your heart, and do everything you SHOULD do, as if you were just publishing a website or blog! Nothing more!

A lot of Internet Marketers out there strive to get to the top of the rankings of major search engines, and they think hard and long and spend time and effort thinking of how to “cheat” the search engines though cloaking techniques, though spamming of alternate tags, meta keywords, hidden or small text, and everything like that… but think about it… Is this what Search Engines really want?

True enough, these people may be able to cheat the Search Engines for once, maybe yes, long enough for them to make a quick buck (this is ugly isn’t it), but is this really what we call SEO?

I one wrote on SEO being a school of thought, it is a way of thinking. Its thinking of how to be friendly to search engines, not tricking them! Dirty tactics are going to work for a short while, but they are not going to last.

So, search engines are changing, but remember, the ultimate aim of a search engine is to bring relevant results for a search phrase. This will never change (if not they will not be called search engines, right?) So how do you rank high? Duh! Provide relevant and truthful content in your blog or website! Do this, and there is nothing to panic no matter how search engine algorithms change.

I was reading an article online, and the author Todd Malicoat, was saying that SEO is becoming a school of thought, rather than a process. It is interesting actually, and I do agree with him. SEO is really becoming a school of thought – a way of thinking!

The process of search engine optimization is straightforward and easy; the understanding of the SEO thought process is ongoing and exceedingly complex.

Well, of course, if you had talked to people not in the SEO or Internet Marketing business, some of them wouldn’t even understand why there is a need for SEO in the first place. Its true that most people still believe in the myth of “When I build a website, people will come”. I had to spend a considerable amount of time yesterday night explaining to my friend over MSN why he needed to settle his canonical domain name issue.

SEO is a subset of the big “Website Marketing” business. There are other ways to drive traffic to your site – like PPC engines, email marketing, and even marketing offline by placing your URL on your physical brochures and namecards.

Internet Marketers do not need SEO

In another post, I’ve read that Internet Marketers do not need SEO., what they need is a hypnotic long sales letter, a huge email list, and an autoresponder system.

Quite true.

SEO results do not come fast. You can’t force Googlebot or Inktomi Slurp to come and spider your site right away, even though you could submit your site to them. In fact, even after almost 2 months, the rankings of this blog on Yahoo! and Google are so different. From what I’ve learnt, Inktomi is slower in spidering new content.

Well, that’s the “SEO School of Thought”. It is not only about optimizing websites by getting your keywords right, paying attention to meta tags and headers, it is about understanding the whole realm of things like how those spiders work and the WHY behind many of these optimizing tips.

Blogs versus Websites

Bringing it back to blog marketing, many argue that search engines favor blogs to normal websites. (Have I talked about this before? :mrgreen:) Is that true? If it really is true, then the next question will really be “What distinguishes a website from a blog?” Is it the frequent updates, the RSS feeds, the comments, the structure of the HTML, or a combination of these that helps the spider make a decision to mark a URL as a blog? That is the thought process of the true SEO specialists!

Wonderful! I just realised today that my Alexa ranking has gone up to 353,226! It was just barely ten days ago that I mentioned that it just got below 500,000. I’m surprised that Alexa came back with a new ranking so quickly.

Not bad for a blog less than 2 months old, starting from scratch (without a prior authoritative site linking to this) hur! But I’ve really put in quite a lot of effort and work for this blog, posting so regularly to build up the content, sometimes up to 5 or 6 posts a day, and getting inbound links from others, for off page search optimization.

Blog less here and more elsewhere?

I don’t think I will be able to maintain posting at that rate though, and I figured I shouldn’t too, because it may be good for the SEs, but human visitors will probably visit my blog once a day even if you are a regular reader.

Maybe I’ll channel that energy into another blog. Maybe I’d write somewhere else on another topic for some income… or maybe even start a blog network amongst some of my friends.

Google Page Rank

Its wierd though, that my Page Rank is still stuck at 0. I understand that PR updates are like once in 3 months, but I’ve checked my future pagerank, and its also 0 on the different data centers of Google! Is there something I have done wrong?

In my previous trekking blog, I managed to get a PR4 when I was 2 months into the blog. I wasn’t so in depth into SEO at that time, I was just putting content and content and more content.

Anybody care to unravel why my PR is still stuck at 0? Is there anything I have done wrong?

What is important?

Actually… while PR does indicate to people how well Google rates you, it is important to know that it is just a measure. The best measure of a website, is how many visitors you have a day, isn’t it so?

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog announced three days ago about a new feature in their Webmaster Tools – Googlebot Activity Reports, and Crawl Rate Control.

The Googlebot Activity Reports show the bot’s activity for the past 90 days, listing down the number of pages crawled per day, number of kilobytes downloaded per day, and the time spent downloading a page. Pretty interesting and useful statistics to know for the search engine fanatic.

I personally find the Crawl Rate Control more interesting! Now you can tell the Google spider “Hey, I have more food for your than you normally can eat. Come back more often!”

Check out these tools in your Google Webmaster Tools.