Google does not use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking. Google’s Matt Cutts explains this in a Webmaster Central video. This is not breaking news, by any means, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this.

In fact, Cutts mentions that people have sued each other for meta tag keyword theft, when really this is just a waste of everybody’s time, because they don’t even play a role in the ranking of sites on Google!!.

WTF?

“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page,” says Cutts. “In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”

Just because Google ignores the “keywords” meta tag, that doesn’t mean it ignores all meta tags. In fact, there are several that the search engine definitely uses. For one, Google sometimes uses the “description” meta tag as the text for search results snippets. But even in then, the “description” meta tag isn’t used to influence ranking.

Google also recognizes the “google,” “robots,” “verify-v1,” “content type,” and “refresh” meta tags. Information about how Google understands these can be found at this page in the Webmaster Tools help center.

“It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely,” Cutts says of the “keywords” meta tag. “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.”

So the moral of the story is, if a competitor is jacking your keywords, and using them in their own “keywords” meta tag, this will have no effect whatsoever in how they rank in Google when compared to your site. Cutts says other search engines might use the information, but Google doesn’t.

Google does note that its enterprise Search Appliance has the ability to match meta tags, but this is of course separate from Google web search.

As I have said before, these videos and other tips Google frequently gives out are worth paying attention to for any webmaster looking to rank well. Whether they’re talking about duplicate content, meta tags, or paid links, they’re all aimed at telling webmasters how it is, and clarifying any misconceptions to the contrary. Whether you agree with Google’s methods in all cases or not, the tips are for your benefit.

Like it or not, Google controls what people find on the web when they search. The company’s huge market share is just something that is. There is always the possibility that could change in the future, but at this point, it looks like webmasters are not going to be able to ignore Google for a long time, if they hope to be found on the web by searchers.

We realize (and Google surely does too) that many well-seasoned marketers already know that Google ignores the “keywords” meta tag, but webmasters are born everyday, and not all of them have been so heavily seasoned to this point, and that’s why Google puts this information out there. There is always misinformation (particularly when it comes to search), and sometimes the record just has to be set straight. Who better to do that than Google itself?

So what you think about this?

WRONG! Here’s what would happen as competition increases in this Google Slap-free, zero-Quality Score world:

More and more advertisers – meaning a flood of affiliates with ugly one-page landing pages ( thrown together with Microsoft FrontPage) flooding every possible niche and market out there. As a result, the bid prices will rise higher, and higher, and HIGHER.
• Eventually, the bid prices will get so high that most advertisers will be squeaking by with a tiny ROI, or breaking even just acquiring a customer (NOT good for affiliates doing CPA). And forget about the people still bidding $0.05; they’re on page 12. So, here are Google’s reasons behind introducing an increasingly stringent Quality Score:
• They want to keep raising the bar on the quality to make sure the user experience is high.
• They want to make sure their advertisers are always making a nice profit.

I want you to really think about this. As Google raises the bar for any given niche/keyword, more advertisers will have their ads bumped. This way Google can assure that bid prices stay low enough so that the advertisers that don’t get bumped are making good profits. A smaller supply of advertisers means lower bid prices, and more profits for advertisers that survive the Google slaps.

Here’s something Google sneaked into the Landing Page Quality Score not too long ago: They now want to know how fast your site loads up. Why? Think about it — it is ALL about the user experience. If searchers are clicking on ads, and it takes three minutes to load the landing page, those searchers are going to be angry about it. If they’re angry, they’re less likely to click on an ad in the future. As a result, Google’s revenue takes a hit. As long as you don’t load your site with tons of graphics and complicated code, you’ll be okay.

Website Bounce Rate

Now some of you are wondering: “What in the world is a bounce rate anyway?” Here’s a startling fact: 80-90% of people who visit your website — or most any website, for that matter – hit the back button within 10 seconds. Ten seconds! If someone spends roughly 10 seconds or less on your site, it’s called a bounce. They basically hit your page and immediately hit the back button, because either they didn’t find what they were looking for or couldn’t figure out what the heck your site was about. Here are some steps you can take to improve your bounce rate:
• Make sure you’re bidding on targeted keywords
• Have a big list of negative keywords; this will improve your keyword targeting
• Follow the landing page guidelines  – you need to have the key elements above the fold so the visitor knows exactly what the page is about in less than 10 seconds

Google Manual Reviews

Here is something that Google does NOT want you to know about: After you launch your site, at some point – it could be two hours, or it could be weeks – someone at Google will manually review your site. Imagine what Heidi, who has a Ph.D. from Stanford, will think when she’s perusing your site? I can guarantee you she won’t like anything that resembles an affiliate site. She especially won’t like three-page sites. This is why it’s critically important that your site looks professional, and that your site has value added content in the form of reviews and/or links to informational articles, etc. Ever launched an affiliate campaign that just killed for a day or two, and then suddenly your first page bids went way up and your traffic plummeted? Guess what happened? You guessed it – the manual review.

Profitable advertisers are happy advertisers that will continue to give millions of dollars to Google! I don’t know about you, but I’m super excited about this! If you are willing to comply with Google Quality Score rules, you’re just going to keep making more and more money! And you know what? Most affiliates won’t comply with Google. That’s more profit for me, and YOU if you take my advice!

I launched this campaign on one of my newer Google accounts that I was using primarily for testing campaigns. I was shocked to discover that most of my keywords were disabled with an OK-to-poor Quality Score! Now, here’s the kicker – I paused this campaign, and launched it on my main Google account (one I’ve had since I’ve started), and ALL MY KEYWORDS BECOME ACTIVE. In fact, my Quality Score was GREAT and my minimum bids were all between $0.03 and $0.05! My CPC also dropped from around $0.47 per click to $0.30 per click! AMAZING! So what happened?

This is where Account History and Account Quality Score comes in.

Account History

There have been widespread claims in the SEM world that people who have had Google accounts for years have a significant advantage (in terms of lower click costs) over newbies who are just starting out. Google claims that it takes only four months to overcome the disadvantage of having a new account. What stinks is that when you first start a new account, you could be paying 30-60% more per click than you otherwise would, just for having a new account! Why does Google do this? Simple. When you’re just starting out, Google sees you as a credit risk. After about four months of consistent payments, Google no longer sees you as a risk. So don’t sweat it. The longer you’re in the business the easier it gets. No joke!

Account Quality Score

Yes, there’s an Account Quality Score. This is basically some kind of crazy sum of all the Quality Scores of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. The better your Account Quality Score, the lower the CPC and minimum bids you will get. But, you may ask, “How can I use this to my advantage? Whenever I start a new campaign, I frequently get a low CTR before I optimize the campaign, and sometimes my Quality Score is REALLY bad.” Great question. Here’s an easy 4 step trick:

1. Open two Google accounts.
2. Your first Google account is for testing and optimizing campaigns only.
3. Once you have a fully optimized campaign that has a good Quality Score and high CTR, pause it and move it over to your second Google account.
4. Call this your “Gold” Google account where you put ONLY fully optimized campaigns.

Do this and you will discover that since the “Gold” Google account has only high Quality Score and high CTR campaigns, your Account Quality Score will be KILLER. You’ll get amazingly low CPC and TONS of traffic. So now do you understand why switching my campaign to another Google account made such a huge difference?

Campaign History and Quality Score

Now some of you have heard that when you first start a new AdWords campaign, you’ll get a high click cost and/or poor ad positions until you’ve built some history. This is called your Campaign History. But how long do you have to build history on a new campaign, anyway? Again, according to Google, it takes approximately two weeks to build up a Campaign History.

So over the first two weeks of building up a campaign, expect your traffic to increase and your CPC to drop as your history builds.

Campaign Quality Score

In these first two weeks, a Campaign Quality Score is also established by Google, which is the weighted sum of your CTR, LPQS, and Quality Score of your keywords and ads.

You know how they say first impressions are lasting? Well, that’s the case with campaign Quality Score. The campaign QS you establish in the first two weeks will be mighty hard to change. This is why I tell you in Module 4 to start with a smaller, more targeted keyword list BEFORE you go crazy stuffing thousands of lateral and long-tail keywords in your campaign. If you can start out with a good CTR on your campaign right off the bat, it will make a big difference on the long-term performance of your campaign.

Three Action Steps

1. Use two Google accounts – one for testing, and another one for your optimized campaigns.

2. Start with a small, highly targeted keywords list for the first two weeks of a new campaign to build a good campaign QS.

3. Be patient; once you build four months of Google account history, things will be MUCH better

Why Bother with Google?

I know some of you are thinking: “The heck with Google! Why should I do all this work just to make Google happy?” Or, maybe you’re using stronger language than that. Even after reading the the last six simple steps, I bet many of you will decide NOT to follow them! When the Google Slap had first hit, I found hardly one affiliate who was actually interested in making a Google-happy site. Most of them wanted to find a workaround to the system. Some affiliates decided that they’ll just change their display and destination URL every time a Google Slap comes around. Changing URLs seems to work so far. To be honest, that’s what I initially did. As far as I’m concerned, however, this is just the lazy affiliate mindset! You may think you can outsmart Google, and you may be able to do it in the short run. But honestly don’t you think Big G will catch on? I mean, come on; they hire the top minds in the world.

Advantages of Playing by Google Rules

Here are some of the advantages of playing by the rules and building a real site for Google:

• You never have to worry about future Google Slaps.

• If you set up targeted landing pages with unique relevant content, chances are your conversions will take a jump (yes, people ACTUALLY read the content on your site, especially if it’s relevant).

• You’ll have a competitive advantage over other affiliates, since most affiliates will try to dodge the rules. Your Quality Score will continue to improve over time as you grow your site and make more targeted landing pages, and you’ll receive more and more traffic.

• As you keep growing your site, you’ll get more and more free search engine traffic in the long run.

• Your site will look and feel like a real website; again, this will help your conversions.

Some affiliates may have 30 affiliate sites and dread the idea of having to add content to every one of them. However, I would take this approach:

Chances are that you make 80% of your profits from the top 20% of your sites. Build up just those sites.

I personally know super affiliates who have dozens of affiliate sites and make very good money. But let me ask you, how “long term” do you think this approach is? Click costs are going up every year, markets are becoming more and more competitive, and Google will continue to tighten its landing page “quality” score requirements. In fact, Google does not want people throwing up quick landing pages to make a fast buck. Instead, it wants people building and growing real sites, just like you would build and grow a real business! (There is a tip in that!) So sure, the “let’s make 20 affiliate sites a month” approach may work in the short run; but in the long run, you’re dead in the water! There is no way you’re going to be able to keep up with the increasing competition in dozens of different markets plus the increasingly strict Google Quality Score requirements.

The Bottom Line

You need to build a small handful of affiliate sites and keep growing them, split testing your pages, and responding to the market changes, etc. Over time, your affiliate sites will become powerhouses, bringing in MASSIVE sales from both PPC and free search engine traffic.

Google Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman dropped some facts at SES. 300 million digital photos are taken every day. 100 billion images are taken per year. There were half a trillion images in circulation by 2009. That’s the past up to the present. Do you think it’s going to slow down? Pittman says there were 800 million camera phones sold last year, and there may be more images online than web pages.

On Google there are hundreds of millions of image searches every day. Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting says that image search makes up about 5.7% of all Google searches. “We estimate that up to 15% of all search is image related,” he says.

Why Image Search is So Important

If the above information wasn’t enough to convince you of the importance of image search, consider this. When images appear in blended search results (such as Google’s universal search), the images affect what is clicked on the results page. Enge says an eye tracking study proved this, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. The image is obviously going to catch your eye, regardless if it’s the top result or the 5th.

Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager for Bing says that engagement is quite high when it comes to image search. Consumers looking for images also end up visiting a lot of web pages. In many cases, images can simply speed up the decision process on the consumer’s part. You can see why this would be effective in eCommerce. “When users are expecting images in a search session it actually increases the speed of a searchers task,” says Schwartz. “Images simply speed decision making.” He would know. Bing  is the “decision engine.”

Here are some tips from Search Engine Journal’s Dev Basu, who recommended the following for image SEO:

- Add images to your Google Local Business profile
- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
- Add images to local business citation sources.
- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

Here is some additional info from Google:

Schwartz says for Bing, you should name the images properly and upload product categories for eCommerce images.

Enge suggested some even more basic tried and true SEO tactics that should still be applied. Include alt attributes in <img source> tags. Name files appropriately, and consider the nearby text, overall page context, links, title tags, etc. This stuff is all good, but you should know that the way search engines are handling images is evolving.

How the Search Engines Handle Images

Pittman says it’s no longer just about looking at tags and stuff, at least at Google. “We now use computer vision and search to find similar images, object recognition, and facial recognition,” he says. “We look at everything such as exposure data to help determine the quality of an image. If your image quality is low your photos will not rank as high. If you make only a thumbnail of an image it won’t rank as well as a larger image of the same subject.” (Emphasis added.)

Back in June, Google released a fascinating research paper that looked at building a web-scale landmark-recognition engine. The goal is to get computers to recognize landmarks (for example, the Eiffel Tower, the Lincoln Memorial, or the example Google shares – the Acropolis). This is no easy task when the engine has to rely on images of the landmarks, which are incredibly varied by angle, lighting, photo quality, etc.

This was just a research paper, and not a Google product, but one can only imagine where this research will lead with regards to how Google handles image searches.

The image filters that search engines use are worth paying attention to. If you’re trying to sell products especially, it could help to consider where you want your images to rank. Google lets users search images by size, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing), and color (full color, black and white, specific color).

Bing lets users browse results by size, layout, color, style, and people. That is in addition to the query-specific options you get.

As far as regular web searches, Bing and Google both present a number of options for users to refine their searches. Bing of course has the explore window, which for many queries, provides multiple categories. Google has its search options. Images are included in that.

Just like with any content, there is always concern that stolen material will rank higher than the original source. Pitman was asked about this at SES with regards to images. He said that image search ranking is largely dependant on how often that image is clicked on for the search query being done. He says Google is trying to combat “hotlink spam.”

Social Media and Images

Social media accounts for a huge amount of the pictures on the web. Not only do you have sites like Flickr and Picasa, but there are so many people uploading so many photos to Facebook and MySpace, not to mention apps like TwitPic for Twitter.

Believe it or not, real-time search plays a vital role in image search, just as in regular search. People want up-to-the-minute information, and that often comes in the form of images. Some real-time search engines are expanding how they handle media like images and video.

Perhaps the more significant part of this equation is the reputation management factor. Real-time search helps in this regard, when you’re trying to protect your reputation, but good old-fashioned Google searches are vital too.

“Think about the pictures that your employees are putting up on social sites,” says Liana Evans, Director of Social Media at Serengeti Communications. “Images can hurt your business reputation.”

Social media has a direct relationship with search rankings too.

Conclusion

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to images on the web. A couple other things that we didn’t really touch on are SafeSearch filters and Creative Commons licensing. These are things you should explore further if you think they will affect you. There is plenty of info out there about both.

One other thing I’d like to mention is that Google’s Insights for Search analytical tool now includes image search data. This could be a very useful tool for anyone looking to improve their performance in image search.

If you’re ready to take your affiliate business to the next level and start building your own VRE (Virtual Real Estate) empire then this information could take you from earning $1,000 or less per month to making six figures per year in passive income. The “secret” is to work smarter by building, expanding, and duplicating the process over and over again until you’re at the level of income you want.

I’m sure you’ve heard of term “rinse and repeat“. Well, this is the concept in all its glory! It will teach you how to make money online.

First, let’s assume you’re targeting a high demand niche that has a constant flow of hungry prospects eager to buy what you’re offering. This is an essential part of the master plan.You want to position your sites in a prime location where they can benefit from a niche that has a massive amount of consumer spending. This will enable you to increase the scalability and profitability of your business in the long run.

Smaller “less well known” niches that don’t have some sort of mass-appeal won’t be as effective with this strategy but can still prove to be viable. Only your own test results will tell.Think of building a VRE niche empire much like you would a real-estate empire. The more properties you own and control the more money you can make.The same holds true on the internet if you know how to build quality sites with a solid foundation of traffic and incoming links.

To achieve this you need at least a shared hosting account that offers multiple dedicated IP addresses so you don’t leave any footprints that the search engines can follow. Multiple sites in the same niche on the same shared IP address can trigger a red flag to the search engines.

You don’t want to risk getting your sites slapped!

You’re also going to need a system for building sites that can be quickly and easily duplicated without sacrificing quality. For this purpose WordPress is really the best way to go.WordPress has become the easiest to use and most SEO friendly platform for creating affiliate sites hands down. It’s definitely not just for bloggers anymore!

Today’s savvy marketers are using WordPress as their preferred platform for creating affiliate sites.

Why WordPress?

Because not only is it quick to install but themes are easy to modify and customize to your needs. You can turn WordPress into just about any kind of site you want without having it look like a typical blog.Here are two of my favorite types of affiliate sites that can easily be created using WordPress.

Automated Niche Content Portal Sites

These sites are the foundation for your network of niche affiliate sites. They’re like an all-inone niche portal that provides the much needed “link juice” and traffic to new sites until they have enough PR (Page Rank) and incoming links to stand on their own rankings.For building a niche content portal you’re going to need a WordPress theme that looks like a portal site. I’ve found that the magazine style themes like the popular Revolution2 theme work best for these sites.

What’s makes these sites automated is by using RSS feeds to fetch content from a variety of sources and posts it to your site. The content feeds can range from news, articles, videos, podcasts, and any other type of syndicated content available in your niche.Just like any other portal site you can setup categories for each type of media content you use. You can even add links to these categories on your site’s top navigation bar. These content portals are automatically updated with fresh new content that the search engines love. Once you set one of these sites up you can leave it alone and it will continue to generate a steady flow of free traffic and incoming links on auto-pilot. To monetize your niche content portal you can insert affiliate banner ads into the sidebar that are targeted to products in your niche.

But to make money online directly from these sites isn’t the ultimate goal. The beauty of it is being able to leverage the PR (Page Rank) for your “money sites” to help boost their rankings.To find the RSS content feeds to use for your niche portal site all you need to do is download a free RSS reader and search for your niche keywords. Another way to find them is to simply search Google for “keyword +RSS feed” and you should be able to find plenty of them.

Getting you site’s content crawled by Google News is not the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, Google has a number of guidelines that can help you get your content in. Furthermore, today, on the Google News Blog, Abe Epton of the News Online Operations Team posted 8 tips to help Google News better crawl your site. These are:

1. Keep the article body clean
2. Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
3. Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
4. Check your encoding
5. Make your article publication dates explicit
6. Keep original content separate from press releases
7. Format your images properly
8. Article titles in Google News

Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. He does elaborate on each of them in the post, but I’ll clear a few up here. When he talks about cleaning up the body, he’s referring to formatting as well as HTML.

“If your article body is broken up by tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result,” explains Epton. “In addition, if you place the beginning of your article’s body near the title in the HTML, we’ll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.”

With regards to the stock tickers, they simply help Google better determine the subjects of articles. On encoding, Epton notes, “We occasionally see articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1).”

As for the “article titles in Google News” tip, I’m admittedly a little hazy myself. At the time of this writing, Epton’s explanation cuts off.

Beyond these tips though, there are plenty more to be obtained fairly easily by perusing the Google News help center. For example, a look through the technical requirements section for publishers will give you precise details about URLs, domains, drop-down menus, dynamic content, javascript, flash, forums, frames, languages, etc. The resources are there. Use them.

Choose an online widget editor like Widgetbox to use in creating the widget. The widgets it creates need to be compatible with Facebook. Widgetbox is free and the widgets made there are compatible with Facebook.

1 – It makes you stop trying to innovate. When people suddenly rank #1 for their keywords a lot of times they stop working on new things and settle.

2 – Its hard work. Its no joke SEO is hard work and its rules are constantly changing.. which means what you are doing today might not be acceptable tomorrow.

And i start thinking really why some blogs rank top 1-30 let’s say for make money online niche, and they have a poor backlinks low quality posts..or they done their homework on SEO ?? ever wonder??

Rest of Shoemeney article you can read here

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