I’m not sure why I even look at Google PageRank anymore… I know it’s full of crap most of the time and really means nothing when it comes to search rankings.

But, I can’t help but see that big ol’ green bar in my Google Toolbar (I know, I shouldn’t have that toolbar… I’ll probably be taking it down shortly … everytime I go to a website.

So, this morning my real estate blog had a new post on it (that drove a ton of traffic to a webinar I put on last night) and I hopped on over there to check it out again.  Anyhow, I was almost blinded by the Google PageRank bar stretching across my toolbar.

My normal pagerank for that real estate investing website is 3 (for the past month or so anyway)… and I haven’t been able to break it past that (I haven’t really put in much of an effort though either).  Well… what do I see when I head over there today?

A PageRank 6!

I refreshed the page several times and cleared my cache just to see if it would change… it didn’t… it’s still a 6 (for the time being anyway).

So, right now I’m strutting around with a PageRank of 6 (it’ll probably be back down tomorrow).

This Sounds Cool… But It’s Frustrating As Heck…

While it sounds all cool and all to have a pagerank of 6 (even if it is temporary)… it’s really not.  Pagerank means nothing at all… at least I haven’t found a huge use for it other than when I sell advertising some people still ask “what is the PR of the site?”.

Pagerank is kind of like a fancy bra on a car.

Two cars might have the same fancy little sporty looking bra… like this Ferarri…

Or… this Kia…

The fact they both have bras that look similar doesn’t make a difference at all how the car performs.

The Ferarri is always going to kill the Kia.

PageRank Doesn’t Equal Performance…

If you’re deep into the SEO and internet marketing world you SHOULD realize that PageRank has little (or nothing) to do with actual performance in the search engines.  Actually, I’m not really sure what it does to tell you the truth.

Two pagerank 3’s can perform very differently in search results.

For instance, I have a ton of pages (internal pages within sites) that are pagerank 0 that outrank pages for targeted keyword phrase with pageranks of 3 and above.

Why?

Google sees my pages as more relevant to the search term.

Don’t Focus On PageRank… Focus On…

Don’t focus on PageRank.  While it’s cool to see your website out “PageRanking” your competitors… it doesn’t mean a thing because Google doesn’t pay you money based on how big your green bar is.

You’re paid when people find you in the search results… and search results are governed by how relevant Google sees your site to the specific search term.  Thats is.

So, shoot for continued improvement on relevancy of your website and pages within the website to the specific search terms you are going after.

If you’re going after the Green Remote Control Car market… make a blog post or entire page (or entire website would be even better) dedicated to ONLY Green Remote Control Cars.

Be more relevant than the next guy.

If you run a content based website (which is what I’m focusing more and more on w/ my sites)… and your topic is more broad than “green remote control cars” (or whatever your topic is)… make specific sections or specific articles optimized for your moneymaking terms.

I have a real estate site that gives out free information on real estate investing.  But, I also have a ton of very targeted pages and articles on VERY SPECIFIC products and markets. Then, I optimize each of these sections and articles with internal link building and social media.

Guess What??

I rank very very well for extremely targeted search terms (with low PageRank pages) over sites like Amazon.com, Bizrate.com, Business.com, and others with huge PageRank for the competing pages.

I’m just a bit more relevant than they are (in my title, my content, my incoming links, my media within the pages, etc.).

Shoot for relevancy… not high PageRank.

Buy the car because it performs and looks awesome… not because it has a cool looking bra on the front of it.

Capisch?

While I was doing a bit of research and trying to analyze why some sites are ranking high for very competitive search terms…

… I ran across a site that is currently ranking #1 in Goolge for the search term "Cheap Viagra " .

While digging through some of their inbound links I quickly found that a very popular tech website is actually helping them rank #1 because the link spammers pushing this site up to the top slipped a link into one of the Techcrunch web pages.

The Techcrunch post dates back to the summer of 2006… and this link spam was made in early 2007 and blatantly includes 2 links back to their website. (the bottom comment).

(t looks like comments are closed on that post now (as far as I can tell)… but I wonder why Techcrunch hasn’t taken it down yet.  It’s probably that they get so many comments on posts they might not manually moderate comments anymore… but instead use spam filters to do the bulk of the work (this is just a guess though… )

Anyhow, this is a good lesson to put the term "viagra" in your Askimet spam filter.

So… technically… without knowing it … Techcrunch has helped this site get to the top of a huge money term and I’m sure rake in thousands of sales each and every day (Clarification… Techcrunch isn’t raking in thousands from this, the Viagra site owner is).

Just to be clear, I don’t write this post to implicate Techcrunch on anything or insinuate that they even know about this comment on their site… I’m positive they probably don’t have a clue the comment is even on their site.  It just goes to show that ANY website can let spam comments slip through… and we all need to be sure to monitor the comments we approve to keep our company image and professionalism intact.  You never know if a comment like this could turn off prospect reading your website… and cost you real dollars.

Is blog commenting still working for SEO?

Yep… sure is…

Just ask the comment spammers behind the "Cheap Viagra" Google leaders.  Pretty much every inbound link I found going to their site is from comment spam… but not in a way that is blatant URL stuffed generic spam that we all see in our Askimet spam folders everyday.

It seems that a lot of the comments left on blogs from this URL do somewhat reference the post and/or the blog writers name… so they aren’t overtly spammy.  So, I guess you can call this spamming with a personal touch .

Seems to work (but I wouldn’t be able to tell you from first hand experience .

Social media is kind of a confusing term for most businesses today… let alone knowing how the heck to use it to benefit their online presence and profits.

So, I thought I’d give you a quick tutorial on one way to use social media websites like digg.com , fark.com , de.licio.us , twitter.com , etc… to drive traffic to your website very quickly… and build multiple search engine rankings in the shortest amount of time possible.

Who Should Use This Social Media Optimization Strategy?

Well… everyone. Everyone who wants more traffic , more quickly , more often , and for less money and effort . Is that you? If not, I’m going to have to ask you to push the back button on your browser and head over to your favorite news site and not come back here again ( , seriously ).

All kidding aside, every business who has a website should institute this simple Social Media optimization strategy (or one like it) for your important and high quality content.

What Is Social Media and Why Does It Help Your Website?

In simple terms, a Social Media website is a place where a community of people come to share things on the internet, network and connect with others, and find things that are related to their likes and interests.

Sounds simple huh? Well… it is.

Social Media can help your website and business in many ways including:

• Direct people to your website and content
• Build links back to your site for search engine optimization purposes
• Monitoring the discussion in your market… and about your business and products
• Engaging in the conversation with your market… and building a stronger relationship with them
• Networking to find new business joint ventures, partners, etc.

But, in this tutorial I’m just going to cover the part of building links back to your website and content (SEO) and driving traffic to your website quickly and easily.

Social Media Optimization for SEO and Driving Quick Traffic

In simple terms, what we’re going to do here is in 4 simple steps:

1. Create high quality content worth telling people about
2. Go to social media websites and let them know about your content, what it’s about, and create a good and compelling headline that piques peoples curiosity about your content
3. Integrate multiple social media websites together (news and RSS feed aggregators, bookmarking services, and video/podcast posting websites) in a way that best builds a web of links back to your content
4. Rinse and repeat for new content

Really, traffic can come from a few different places by using a strategy like this.

First , you get traffic from people clicking through to view your content (article, video, picture, etc.)

Second , you get traffic from search engines because the actual "bookmarks" or "submissions" on the social media website often show up great in search results (and very fast!) when you title it with the keywords and phrases that your target market is likely to search.

Third , many people who have websites and blogs read these social media websites every day looking for things to write about. If they see something worth passing along to their readers, they’ll write about your article and usually link back to your website… driving traffic to your site and building high quality links.

Okay, here we go…

Step 1: Create High Quality Content Worth Telling People About

This step is pretty self-explanatory… but not as simple as it sounds. The internet today is packed with more information than the world ever dreamed of just 20 years ago. This means that there are more competing places for your target markets attention.  Jeff Widman calls this type of content "wall-able "… meaning we should strive to create content that people would want to print off and hang on their wall because it is so profound, entertaining, valuable, etc.

In order to grab their attention… and keep it… you need to create high quality, high trust, content that is different than the other millions of web pages with similar content.

Whether it be separating yourself by being:

• Humorous
• More relevant
• More detailed
• More honest
• More cutting edge
• More timely
• and on and on…

You need to separate yourself from the pack in some way so your target market stands up and notices what you have to say… and cares about what you have to say. You can be mediocre and get noticed at first… but mediocrity does not last for the long haul and is way more expensive than just spending the extra time and effort to concentrate on getting only high quality stuff out there.

Here are some great resources to check out to help you learn how to create memorable content that will get you noticed:

• Do You Have Remarkable Featured Content?
• A Three Step Approach To Strategic Content Development
• How to Create Remarkable Content When There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

Just remember, when creating content… ask yourself the question, "Why would someone care about this?". If you have a good and solid answer for why someone truly would care about your content… excellent… post it and market the heck out of it. If not, keep writing.

Writing A Compelling Yet Relevant SEO Enhanced Title:

Part of creating great content is to create a great title (or "headline") for your content. Great compelling headlines will likely be read more through the social media websites because people will be compelled to click on them more.

Also, the title of the article, post, video, etc. should contain the keywords and phrases your target audience is likely to type into search engines.

FOR EXAMPLE:

You just wrote content packed article on the in’s and out’s of writing a kick @ss elevator speech.

You want to make sure the title of the article reflects what the article is about, is compelling, and has the keyword phrases that people are actually typing in search engines when looking for the solution your article helps them solve.

So, head over to: (and bookmark this site for future reference)

• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com (free keyword searcher)

Once you’re there type in "elevator speech" and see what types of searches people are ACTUALLY typing into the search engines.

In there you find…

These phrases are the actual phrases that people are typing in to search engines to get information on "elevator speeches". The numbers to the left of the phrases is the estimate of "daily" searches for that specific search phrase. Keyword Tracker doesn’t include Google in these estimates, which accounts for 2/3 of all searches on the net… so if you multiply the number on the left by 3… that’ll give you a decent idea of the search volume (still, this is just good for an overall look at phrases and volume… not 100% accurate).

In this search you see that the most searches are the phrases:

• "elevator speech"
• "elevator speech realtor example" (this shows that you might want to write an article specifically about elevator speeches for realtors)
• "elevator speech examples"
• another is "how to write an elevator speech"

So, now sit down with this new found knowledge and try to integrate one of these phrases (ideally one with more searches) into your content title.

For instance, if your article is on how to write an elevator speech… but you also include 7 examples of great elevator speeches… you might write something like:

"7 Elevator Speech Examples From Millionaire Entrepreneurs and How To Write One Yourself "

or

"How To Write An Elevator Speech That Actually Loses You Money "

Ya, I admit… the first one is a bit long… but you get the picture. With the second title, I used the reverse psychology principle. People will want to read the article simply to make sure their elevator speech isn’t one of the one’s that "lose money".

Notice how I integrated the "elevator speech examples" phrase and added some elements that will hopefully pique the interest of the reader.

Anyhow, that is a quick primer course on writing headlines for SEO and to make them compelling for readers to click on. For more info on writing headlines and content head over to copyblogger … he usually has some pretty darn good content over there on writing online copy.

Step 2: Let Social Media Websites Know About Your Content

The first time you do this step it will take you a bit of time… mostly because you need to go and set up free accounts at each site before you can post content. After your free accounts are all set up (usually takes no more than 5 minutes to set up free accounts on each site), you can really automate the posting process pretty easily.

There are a lot of places to find great social media websites that you can post your content to… and I’m not going to make a full list of social media sites (there are hundreds… maybe thousands), but we’ll just use a solid base of 20-50 social media sites to get the word out.

Various Social Media Websites:

• Digg.com
• stumbleupon.com
• de.licio.us
• propeller.com
• reddit.com
• slashdot.com

And a ton of others that I use.

Rather than redoing the work that other people have already done… here are a couple links that have great lists of social media websites that are great for driving traffic and building great links and buzz for your website.

• Dosh Dosh’s List of 48 Social Media Sites (great list)
• Tropical SEO’s List (good list as well… he’s got some that I hadn’t heard of)

At first, pick 20-30 social media sites (just go w/ the first 30 Dosh Dosh lists or the ones that socialmarker.com has)… and use them for your first batch of social media optimization. I like starting off small so you don’t get overwhelmed by the process and give up because it seems like too much work.

How To Get The Word Out:

There are a bunch of different ways to get your content onto these social media websites. One approach is to do each submission one at a time, which is good just so you learn the process… but takes way too much time if you do it every time.

I prefer to use services that help speed up the "bookmarking" and "submission" process like:

Socialmarker.com -

Socialmarker.com is a "semi-automatic" social media posting service that lets you post your content to about 50 of the top social media websites in probably about 25% of the time it would take you to go to each website individually. I use it a lot of the time because it’s easy and is free.

Onlywire.com -

Onlywire.com is pretty much the same as socialmarker… but with a few different bookmarking sites… and about half of the choices. Really, they both do the same thing (socialmarker supports more sites though) so check them both out and use the one (or use both) that you like the best.

Really, it doesn’t matter how you end up submitting your content to these social media websites… it just matters that it is done… and done correctly. If I were you, I’d start off doing it yourself the first couple times so you can then train someone else to do it in your company… or hire a Virtual Assistant to do it for you (which is what I do).

Submitting Your Content:

Head over to Socialmarker.com and fill in the box in the upper right hand corner of the page with your:

• Content title (optimized for SEO as I wrote above and compelling)
• The link to the content
• Text explaining the content in a compelling way. You are looking to persuade people to click on your article.
• Tags. Basically, type terms that are related to your content. So, if you’re writing on elevator speeches you might use, "elevator speech, how to write, marketing, personal branding" etc.

From there, of course click "submit" and the social marker site will take you to each social media website to submit your content. The first time through you’ll have to set up accounts at each site… so it may take a little while… but after that it shouldn’t take longer than 15-20 minutes to submit to more than 40 social media websites.

Advanced Social Bookmarking:

I won’t go into depth on this because this is a whole other article… but when you really get into social bookmarking your content… you’ll want to create multiple accounts at each social media website.

The reason for this is to of course provide more links to your content … but also to spread the submissions out across multiple accounts so it isn’t obvious that you are only submitting your own content… which social media sites tend to not like. Newsvine.com actually is pretty strict on this and my first time through I got my account canceled in just 3 weeks because I only submitted my OWN content.

And, it is important to bookmark content other than your own periodically to make it look like you aren’t only on their site to submit your content.

In addition, multiple accounts lets you leverage all of the accounts together to form a big web of links between your content and your websites… resulting in better search rankings (that’s the idea anyway).

But, don’t worry about these techniques yet except for the one about being sure to bookmark other articles other than your own periodically to throw off the social media sites from "thinking" that you are only bookmarking your own content.

The Aftermath (RESULTS):

After you bookmark your content with the targeted title, you should begin to see traffic coming in within 24 hours.

How much traffic?

Well… that depends on the quality of your content and how compelling your title was written.

Also, by submitting your content to the social media sites… the search engines (especially Google) will follow the links back to your website and index your content almost immediately. I’ve had my content show up in Google within 2 hours before… which is huge.

Here is a screen shot of the results of one article (with a video I created) after I optimized the article and video in social media. This was taken just 2 days after I did the submissions. This is the first page of a search for the name of a pretty popular product. The first two results are #1: the manufacturer of the product and #2 Amazon.com. After that, I take up 7 or the 8 remaining spots with either my website or social media pointing back to my content.

I didn’t post that screenshot to brag… just to illustrate the point that social media optimization really works when done correctly.

Step 3: Build The "Web" Of Links That All Lead Back To Your Company

The whole aim of social media optimization is to lead people back to you and your company in some way, shape, or form.

Really, I don’t care how people get back to my website… I just care that they do .

The best way to ensure you attract the most visitors back to your website is to cast the largest "web" out on the net.

You can do this by integrating social media and other internet marketing techniques together to get your content out to as many places as possible.

Here are some methods to build your "web":

• Social Media Marketing (as described in this article)
• RSS Feed Syndication
• Video Marketing / Content Producing
• Podcasts
• Press Releases and Articles (I won’t cover these here)

And on and on. Once again, this is a whole other article… so I’ll go over it briefly.

RSS Feed Syndication:

An rss feed is simply a way that people can easily read the content from your website without actually going to your website.  For example, you can "subscribe" to a feed and read the articles in your Google Feedreader or other feed reading service.  Yahoo news (and most other give news aggregation sites) use RSS feeds to gather the news and put it on their own website for their visitors to see.

The first step is to head over to www.feedburner.com and set up a free account.  Once you have your account up and running "burn a feed" (video instructions here ) for your website/blog, etc… and you’re done.

Now, whenever you write an article, your RSS feed is automatically updated.  Now, you can use this "new feed" provided by Feedburner to submit your feed to website and blog directories like Technorati.com , Yahoo News, and www.pingomatic.com which will get your content out to multiple websites automatically every time you write new content.

Pretty slick huh?  There is more to RSS feeds than this… but this gives you a good idea where to start and why to use RSS feed syndication.

Video Marketing / Content Creation:

Another pillar of your "web" should be video.  Video is a very effective way to drive people back to your website, teach online, provide great value, and generate more traffic.

Film a video of you talking about how your target market can solve a particular solution (that you help them solve)… or do a powerpoint presentation with your voice over… title your videos using the tips I mentioned earlier… place your website URL in the video to drive people back to your site… and submit the video to multiple video sharing sites like Youtube.com , Revver.com , Viddler.com , and others.

This is essentially the same concept as the social media marketing … but you are now creating video as your content and submitting the video to video sharing websites.

The same thing goes with submitting the videos…

You can do them one at a time yourself… or use websites like the ones below to "automatically" submit your videos in 5% of the time.

• Tubemogul.com – Free video submission service.  I use this one quite a bit and it works great… but it doesn’t support a lot of the video sharing website I like to use.  Great for free though.
• Trafficgeyser – Membership based automatic video submitting service that supports many more video sharing sites than Tubemogul.  The plans run between $50 and $97 / month and have a ton more features in addition to just submitting your videos.  I’m pretty sure they still have the $1 30 day trial .  I used to be a member but now I go with Tubemogul quite a bit and my Virtual Assistants who do the video posting for me using my systems.

Either way, I suggest you either hire out the video submitting or use one of the automatic posting services above.

That screenshot you saw earlier where I dominated many of the top 10 spots in google for the product name… most of those results came from these video sites.

Podcasts :

I haven’t gotten into podcasts a whole lot… but I do know that they work great for getting out your message and converting people into clients.

Since I’m not an expert on using Podcasts… I’ll point you over to Paul Colligan who is one of the top business podcasting experts in the world.

Bottom line… podcasts are just another way to get your word out and grab more attention.

———-

Whew!

I know this article was a tad bit long… but I wanted to go into as much detail as possible on the overall social media optimization process that I use to easily generate:

• More traffic to my own (and my clients) websites
• Traffic more quickly
• More links to my websites
• Better search engine rankings

Really, the process sounds somewhat daunting at first… but once you go through the process the first time you’ll see how easy it is.

The really important part of making this work for your business is systematizing the whole social media optimization process so it is as hands off for YOU as possible.  Have a secretary or intern in your office take over the system… outsource it to a Virtual Assistant… hire a consultant (like myself) to take it totally off of your hands… etc.

Your job is to focus on creating quality content and serving your customers better… this social media optimization process simply helps you get the word out on the internet much more quickly, efficiently, and cheaply.

Any Question On The Value Of This System?

I know a social media marketing plan like this one is very valuable to my business and the businesses of my clients.  However, many small and medium sized businesses fail to see the value… until they see the targeted traffic coming in as a result.

Social media marketing / optimization works in all markets .  From ecommerce sites like Amazon.com… all the way to mainly offline businesses like attorneys, insurance salesmen, consultants, etc.

Develop a social media marketing and optimization plan (use mine to start) and get going!  You can have more targeted traffic later this afternoon if you want!

——

Social Media Marketing combined with traditional direct response Internet Marketing strategies and SEO are truly a killer combination for driving more traffic and converting it better.  If you’d like to hire Trevor Mauch to help you get the most out of your small or medium sized business website for the highest ROI possible … contact him to schedule a consultation today .

**UPDATE**

I am currently booked out for the next 60 days with project based and retainer clients.  I do have 2 projects scheduled to be completed soon… so email me so I can place you in my consultation cue and get your project moving asap.  I look forward to doubling your online ROI today!

Man, I was checking the stats for one of my own websites as a routine that I have every Monday… and I saw something pretty damn crazy on there that I wanted to share.

One of the sites I run is a real estate investing website that focuses on helping new and struggling investors begin investing the RIGHT WAY. As you probably know, I’m a very part time real estate investor and invest in multi-unit real estate. So, I pass on what I know and help my readers sift through the crap that is on the net and find the truly actionable, truthful, honest, unbiased, and up to date information and resources that will help them succeed… not just line the pockets of gurus.

(sorry… I’ll get off my soapbox for a sec

Anyhow, back to the SEO story…

Okay, I was checking out my stats today and was expecting to see the main search terms referring traffic to be a ton of long-tail terms that I optimize my site and each post for. Hey, that’s what I’ve been focusing on because the generic search term “real estate investing” is one of the more competitive search terms out there… truthfully… I really think it would be a waste of my time to concentrate a ton on ranking high for that search term.

Well…

I come to find that over the past week or so I have been pulling a bunch of traffic from the search term “real estate investing” from Google.

So, like any curious internet entrepreneur would do… I headed over to Google to see what I was ranked for that term.

I couldn’t believe my eyes!

Here’s a screen shot of the actual Google search. (my site is www.thereibrain.com)

The term “real estate investing” is a huge search term w/ over 30 million competing pages and has been dominated by Creonline and REIclub for probably the past 5 years at least. Those two sites have been around since the late 90’s and early 00’s… so Google likes that they’ve been around for a while.

But…

My site just passed the 1.5 year mark a little while back (might be closer to 2 years… don’t remember) and has been doing very well in a ton of long-tail search terms that I have optimized the content for.

How the Sites Been Doing Recently…

The past 6 months The REI Brain has been growing pretty damn well. Traffic has almost doubled every month since January and I attribute that to my highly targeted articles… and the use of social media as of late.

But… up until I noticed my #3 ranking in Google for real estate investing… I haven’t touched higher than the 3rd page for that same search term.

I don’t keep up on the Google algorythim changes a whole lot… I feel that if you put out a ton of awesome content… give the readers awesome value for their time… that other bloggers and websites will link to your site because of the content… and Google will love it for that reason.

Google’s whole aim is to provide the user (one doing the search) with the best quality experience.

This includes:

• The most relevant and timely organic search results
• The most relevant and useful ads
• The results that Google feels will help the reader best answer their question

When you concentrate on #1, providing awesome and timely content… then #2 optimizing it for the search engines… you’ll win.

How did I get this high ranking in such a competitive search term?

Well… to tell you the truth… I can start naming off the ninja techniques I’ve been doing recently…

… or I could tell you the truth and say, “I really don’t know why… maybe a new Google algo”.

All kidding aside, there are some reasons that Google would even consider my site as a top 10 site for real estate investing.

Here are my thoughts…

1. Truly, my site is an awesome resource and is updated on a consistent basis. It sets out to truly help people rather than to make me a ton of money. Google likes that sort of thing.
2. Lately, I‘ve been writing some posts that have been getting linked to a lot on the blog… which would trickle down to the root domain (the root domain is the highly ranked page). Good content = incoming links = Google salivating over your content.
3. I optimized my internal link structure in January using some cool wordpress plugins like the alinks plugin
4. I started using social media big time in January to get the word out about the site.  People gravitate toward genuine content… and social media makes it easy for people to reward good work.  (I’ll write a post later on about how to do this…)

I want to give this a few weeks or a month or two to season on Google.  If it’s around next month at this time… I’ll feel confident that I should continue doing what I’ve been doing to get the word out about my content.

Just an FYI… this is all 100% white hat stuff.  No tricks… just giving awesome content… using simple on page optimization… using social media… and implementing some great internal linking (which I still have a ton I need to do) to make the entire site a bit more sticky and to get people and search engines to do deeper in to the site.

Easy as that.  Give people what they want… be of value, not a spammer w/ a motive… and the search results will find you.

I’ll keep you updated on the status of this ranking and let you know exactly what I’ve done (both on page and off) to get my websites (and my clients websites) where they are.