I have been focusing a bit on trying to get a higher rank in the listings for the search term ‘Alex Jeffreys‘ on Google as per the $1,000 competition Alex announced. Now for all those readers that are NOT Alex Jeffreys students, understanding how to improve your Google search position is highly important as it allows you to apply that knowledge to any search term and thus dominate the crucial top positions for any markets you choose. So it is essential to understand how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) works to really be on top of your competitors in any niche.

So, I’ve been going through all my Alex Jeffreys Coaching Course notes and trying to put things into practice to increase my ranking. Now before Christmas I was in the Top 5 returned results for ‘Alex Jeffreys‘ but it seems the more popular my blog and subsequent increase in traffic, I have actually slipped down the rankings to number 21 !! Obviously I’m not that pleased about this so am going to make a concerted effort to get up in the Top 5. This is going to be an ongoing task until I meet my objective.

One of the best SEO experts in our group of Alex Jeffreys students, that I know of, is JT Martin. So I am going to read more closely some of his posts that I have previously read. I notice he has been making a move up the rankings (present ranked #15), no doubt using his skills but then I thought to start out I would do some ‘spying’ (market research) on the leading student blog in the rankings. Presently, ranked at number 5 on Google is Steve Harold and this took me by surprise and even more so when I started to investigate what he was doing to manage such an impressive ranking. So I started to compare my blog with his to try and glean any nuggets to improve my rankings. And this is where I became even more confused as you will see by the results of the comparisons.

Firstly, I used the SEOQuake plugin to get some vital stats for both our sites. I was really expecting this to show me where I was failing and thus I could focus on. But look at the snapshot below:-

(Click to enlarge)

Steve Harolds’s blog is shown at the top and my figures at the bottom.

What it shows is that for every statistic (bar one and this is to do with MSN so I think we can discount that), my site is rated higher in every respect. And not just marginally so; mine absolutely trounces Steve’s site by quite staggering margins in some areas!! (Sorry Steve, no offence here, but I just want to use you as an example to highlight that the factors I excel at obviously have no bearing on securing a better search position in Google, which is the very surprising conclusion).  Very surprising ! Let’s just take a few stats which you would have thought were directly relevant to getting a high ranking to highlight the apparent extreme differences between the two sites by comparing the respective figures for Steve’s site against my own:

Google Rage Rank:      0 v 1
Yahoo inbound links:  44 v 712
Yahoo linkdomains:    72 v 1053
Alexa Ranking:        16,806,261 V 239,787
                         (lower the better here)

Next I popped over to Steve’s Blog to see if I could see anything that was going on there to get to the bottom of his very impressive Google search position. Nothing stood out. He had a good functional blog, but again when I critically examined it against my own to see where I could improve I was left scratching my head. There appeared to be nothing Steve was doing with regard to onsite SEO that I felt I was not doing on my own. I viewed the page source on many of his posts to see if there was something hidden away and yet if there was I couldn’t find it !! In fact, I get the impression from Steve’s site he his no SEO expert as even his permalinks structure wasn’t SEO friendly so whatever he has done to get the Top 5 ranking didn’t appear to be there.

So this left me to focus on one of the SEOQuake stats that could reveal a significant clue to the way Google ranks sites for its search results. Steve only has 24 links to external sites of which 11 have the ‘Nofollow’ attribute set, thus 13 ‘DoFollow’. I have 85 external links of which 77 are set to ‘NoFollow’ and 8 ‘Dofollow’. Now I have far more external links and does this have an impact on the way Google ranks its search results?

Does Google see my site as somehow not worthy of inclusion high up as I link to far too many other sites for its liking, albeit most are set to ‘nofollow’. Now this ‘NoFollow’ attribute I only set a week or so ago when I did my Blogroll changes as prior to that I would have had way in excess of 100 external links on my front page plus far more on secondary pages too. Do this ‘Nofollow’ change take a while for Google to take account of? Doesn’t appear so if you look as JT Martins posts on the subjects.

So I’m left with a dilemma. I want to improve my search position but to be honest I don’t have a clue which way to turn now. All the factors Alex Jeffreys mentions in the ‘Traffic Tornadoes’ webinar when I critically analyse Steve’s application of them against my own, then by all accounts I should be higher in the rankings. But I’m not. There is some other piece of the jigsaw that is missing and MISSING FOR ALL OF US I FEEL. Is it the external links ‘issue’ I have identified above? Or is it some other factor? But what? There is little point in me focusing effort in any of the areas mentioned in the webinar to improve my search position as like I say if it were purely down to that I would be higher than Steve’s blog already. So I need to delve further into this area to ensure I understand more to enable me to rectify it.

This reminds me that earlier in 2008 I purchased a SEO course which at the time I thought was very good. However, until the Alex Jeffreys course I didn’t really understand how to use such knowledge to build a business. With what I know now it’s probably a good idea to revisit that course and see if I can put it to good use. Maybe the answer will be hidden somewhere in there.

I’d also like to know what others think about my appraisal of the above position. Have others had similar sorts of findings and are struggling to make progress? What about the SEO experts out there; based on the above information why is Steve Harold’s blog ranked so highly? I think the answer will be of interest to everyone. Or is it a mystery to them too?

Filed under: Garry Parkes • General

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