The Rank Magic Blog

10 Questions Before Hiring an SEO Consultant

December 27, 2007 ::: Don't outsource your search engine optimization without asking these 10 questions.

Improve Your Ranking By Writing Articles

December 18, 2007 ::: Writing an article that is topically related to your business and submitting it to article directories like ezinearticles.com, findarticles.com and buzzle.com has the potential to pay off big.

Imagine the effect of getting a link from the Los Angeles or New York Times. There isn't a sure-fire formula for achieving this, but providing quality articles and adding your link in the resources box of the article will allow search engines to find and index you faster. If the content is interesting and newsworthy, the journalists may start calling. Even if they don't, other web site owners may reprint your article on their web sites ... along with the link to your site.

Read much more in this good article at Entrepreneur Magazine's web site.

Google Pigeon Rank Explained

December 13, 2007 ::: Quoting Google: "As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools."

Google goes into some length explaining why this process works so well, including a list of FAQs. It's well worth understanding this aspect of Google's technology.

Paid Links - Good or Bad?

December 10, 2007 ::: Buying links in an effort to gain better search engine rankings has been a part of website promotion for a long time. But if you're considering paying for links, there are some risks you need to be aware of.

Paid links can tip the balance for a website by helping it rank higher. But that’s something the search engines have taken steps to combat, with some success. We're not sure how good Google is at telling that a given link is a paid link or not, but it's abundantly clear that they have become very good at identifying irrelevant links and causing them to pass little or no PageRank to the target page. It's also been confirmed that Google is manually identifying paid link networks and selectively devaluing link sellers – reducing the PageRank of their pages so that links on those pages lose value.

Perhaps the most immediate risk of buying links comes from your competitors. Google actively encourages webmasters to report link buyers and has made it easy via their Webmaster Tools website, as well as from search results pages. If your competitor reports you for buying links and Google has penalized your rankings (or even banned you from its results), it's hard to get that undone.

For more, see the article To Buy Or Not To Buy from Website Magazine.

10 Useless SEO Worries

December 4, 2007 ::: People trying to optimize their web sites for better rankings tend to thrive on extremes. They create lists of things that absolutely must be done and lists of things that absolutely must not be done. But far too often, within either of those lists are things that simply don't matter at all. So with that preamble, here are ten things that you simply don't need to spend more than a half a second fretting over: