Third Level Push

Websites are typically made up of levels or tiers. The first level is the home page itself. The second level includes your main categories. The third level opens those categories into products, information, etc, and so on. Because second tier pages end up on global navigation bars, this causes those pages to gain a lot of page rank at the expense of 3^rd level pages. The third level push essentially takes some of that 2^nd tier page rank and pushes it down to 3^rd tier pages. To accomplish this task you simply just need to add a “nofollow” attribute to all links on the 2nd tier that point to other 2^nd tier pages. Not too difficult really.

From a spider’s perspective your global navigation is different on the 2^nd tier. The result of all of this is that you get more traffic on your 3^rd tier pages, which are typically your product pages and that means more sales! This technique can get more complicated though. You can get even more ambitious and do the same for your 3^rd tier links but link back to the home page, not the 2^nd tier pages. You can be even more aggressive by nofollow-ing links back to the home page on the 2^nd and 3^rd tier.

Getting into the more advanced side of this technique can be risky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Try it at your own risk and only if it makes sense.

We often speak with clients who want to be #1 in Google for a wide range of keywords that describe their business, but really don’t have enough traffic to justify working on. It sometimes is hard for them to understand why we would not recommend going after the key phrase that perfectly describes their business. After a lengthy discussion, we’re able to explain to them that getting to the top of the search engines for a group of keywords won’t do them any good at all, if there is no one searching for those keywords. This is basically the reason it’s called Search Engine Marketing, and not Search Engine Positioning. We’re “marketing” your company and trying to increase sales through your website, not just trying to make you feel warm and fuzzy that you can type in some obscure keyword and come up #1 in Google.
A lot of SEM companies really don’t focus on the marketing aspect. They get the list of keywords that the client gives them, don’t make any recommendations, and then just work on getting them to the top for those keywords. If they get them there, they’ve done their job. But is that the way it really should be? We don’t think so, and neither do most of the reputable companies in our industry. The only real way for us to measure the effectiveness of our work is by looking at how much we’ve increased the traffic to a site. Increasing traffic is our “real” job. Getting companies up to the top of the search engines for high-traffic keywords is just the way we do it.
Here’s a good example: We have a new client that provides an amazing alternative to Lasik eye surgery that gives you perfect 20/20 vision through wearing special contacts at night while you sleep. It’s called Orthokeratology, or Ortho-K. Ever heard of it? Neither has anyone else, but people are interested when they do hear about it. So instead of going after the word “Orthokeratology,” which has an extremely low amount of traffic, or “Ortho-K,” which isn’t much better, we’re going after high traffic terms related to “Lasik Eye Surgery,” which have a huge amount of traffic. We are making the site relevant for being a Lasik Alternative, rather than making it relevant to Orthokeratology. It would be much easier to get to the top of Google for the Ortho-K based keywords, but they wouldn’t produce anywhere near the results that the Lasik based keywords would, which means the more effective marketing decision is to use the Lasik based keywords.
Pop Quiz:
Which is better: A #8 position for the word “Mexican Food”, or a #1 position for the word “Mamacita’s Authentic Mexican Tortillas?”
How about this one: A number #10 position for “iPod Accessories,” or a #1 position for “Portable hard-drive based music player accessories?”
Here’s a little bit harder one: A #22 position on the word “financial planner,” or a #3 position on the word “Los Angeles Financial Planner?”
The first 2 are pretty clear cut, but on the last one, if you’re a financial planner in L.A., it might be better to have a #3 in the L.A. area, rather than have a number #22 nationally. Being able to discern and understand which keywords will be the most effective and bring the highest amount of traffic is what makes the difference between Search Engine Positioning, and Search Engine Marketing, as well as being the difference between a good SEO firm, and a great SEO firm.
It’s all about marketing. The emphasis is on marketing. This entire industry is about marketing. Marketing, marketing, marketing… marketing. The search engines are an amazing way to drum up new business and can be effective for almost every company, as long as the focus is on marketing and not just getting high search positions.

For those of you out there that like to stay up-to-date on current SEO practices, I know of a few websites you might be interested in.  There are literally thousands of websites out there that claim authority on the subject, but I’ve found that most of them just repeat what they’ve heard, regardless if whether they know their advice to be true.  That being the case, I’ve narrowed my selection down to a few good sites that I recommend everyone in the SEO community read for reliable, up-to-date information on the latest and greatest in the wide world of Search Engine Optimization.  They include:

1. SEOBook Blog
2. SEOmoz Blog
3. Bluce Clay Blog
4. Search Engine Journal
5. Search Engine Watch
6. Search Engine Land
7. Matt Cutt’s Blog
8. Netmark Essentials’ Blog

We don’t use gimmicks or unscrupulous search engine spam techniques that could get your site removed and “blacklisted” from search engines. Instead we perform legitimate optimized writing and programming that meets search engine rules and makes for top search engine positioning that lasts and continues to perform well for months and, in many cases, years.
Here are some of the questions we believe you need to ask before hiring a SEO company:
•    Find out how long the SEO company has been in business (in the SEO world 3-4 years old is very old)
•    Does the SEO firm or its principals have marketing experience background?
•    Will they perform an analysis of your competition’s websites to understand why the other sites rank highly?
•    What will the SEO company base their keyword recommendations on? Keyword research is a necessity to determine relevant, targeted keywords in order for a SEO campaign to succeed.
•    What are realistic traffic expectations for your site? Obscure keyword phrases may bring top ten or #1 ranking positions but if only a trickle of people search for the term each month, it likely won’t result in increased sales.
•    Does the SEO company differentiate between “traffic” and “qualified traffic”? Bulk unqualified traffic arriving at your site for irrelevant keywords is unlikely to convert to a sale or new customer. Does the SEO firm understand what it takes to create a sales conversion? More than likely, you as a business owner knows!
•    Does the SEO company fully comply to search engine’s posted best practices and a strict no-spam policy to avoid your website being penalized, possibly indefinitely, by search engines?
•    What methods will the SEO company use to increase traffic? Will they make changes to your existing web page coding or will they just be adding or revising meta tags? Will they be performing search engine optimization copywriting and editing to add relevant keywords to your visible page text? Will they be adding new pages, or possibly redesigning your navigation to make it more search engine friendly?  Do they recommend an entire redesign when it is not necessary?
•    Does the SEO company use Latent Semantic Analysis for proper keyword placement?  Do they know the proper keyword density needed?
•    Is what the company does standard for everyone, or are certain techniques used for your specific needs? (Keep in mind that the same shoe does not fit all companies feet, so to speak)
•    How many pages will they be optimizing in your website?
•    How many people actually work at the firm? 90% of SEO firms have 4 people or under.  Are they going to have the resources, time, and man power for your campaign?
•    How much, if any, of their strategy relies on pay-per-click advertising and how much will that cost? Remember, pay-per-click is like leasing vs. buying a car. When you stop paying, the traffic stops. We sometimes recommend pay-per-click advertising for specific marketing strategies, but not for ongoing search engine visibility. Pay-per-click is not a long-term solution unless you have deep pockets. Obtaining “free” search engine positions in natural search engines, such as Google, is the preferred - and longer-term - route to more qualified traffic.
•    If the SEO company is offering high ranking guarantees - how is that possible when no-one can control or influence the search sites? Even Google’s own published guidelines states: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEO’s that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a “special relationship” with Google, or that claim to have a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.”
•    How will your website traffic be monitored and measured? What type of reports will you get and how often will you receive them?
If you can feel good about all of the answers to these questions about your SEO firm, you have probably made a good decision.  Why wouldn’t you hire an SEO firm that is willing to go the extra mile to follow strict standards to make sure you see success?

The rules change daily: First you should understand that search engines are enhanced every day. What I mean by this is the people at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the other major search providers out there are working hard every day to improve the quality of their search results. These search providers are continually adjusting how they find information, store it and rank it; among many other adjustments that are being constantly applied.  Their thinking is this: If we (as a search engine) can continue to provide the most relevant results to the user (you) for the terms they are searching, you will more than likely continue to use our engine.  Many people are constantly trying to defraud the results and manipulate the traffic to their own websites (relevant to what you want or not).  The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc…) are actively trying to keep these people at bay.
How they operate: Search engines (also known as spiders and crawlers) crawl and index the Internet constantly by first visiting the websites they already know of, then following links. They collect information by following the links from page to page and site to site looking for new information. As they gather information (text and images, etc., from the sites they visit, generally referred to as content), it is reported back to their main databases where it is compared and updated if necessary. In doing so, they employ their “Algorithms.” Think of this as “today’s rule book.” In short, it determines everywhere they go, what they keep (or cache) and how often they do everything they do. But most importantly, it determines how they rank your website based on keyword and key phrases, page titles and how they compare to page content, every type of tags (heading, title, bold, super, strong, etc…), the theme of your site and how the text content supports that theme and a great deal of other criteria.
Search Engine Algorithms: Make no mistake, search engine algorithms are highly complex. We estimate over 1600 or more lines of code written!  Everything that they are and do affects your page rankings. (On a side note, page ranking is the indication of how much Google trusts your website) Our experience is that almost nothing is off the table; keyword and key phrases, tags, titles, how content matches those tags and the theme of your page, and site, information such as how many searches were performed that resulted in searchers clicking on your link in the search results; how many links on other sites link to your site, and even how valuable those links are based on the sites where they are found. The upside to all of this is that the top search engines do a good job these days in providing us with quality information. The downside is that you will have to spend a considerable amount of time developing a high quality, extensively detailed and informative website to garner their attention and achieve high search engine rankings.
In short, SEO requires constant attention to both your site and the industry, so be prepared to give some quality time (if you are attempting this yourself) to achieving good rankings. It doesn’t come easy.
Caution: We recommend that you disregard the advertisements from services and software providers that guarantee great rankings by submitting your site to hundreds of search engines. Automatic submission software does nothing but resubmit your site over and over to the same search engines. Google, for one, clearly asks that web masters/developers not do this. This slows the submission process for legitimate “manual” submissions and can cause your site to be penalized with lower rankings. They already know your site exists there is no need to keep telling them over and over…..