05.23.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:52 pm by Dylan
If you want to launch a new site, the very best time to do it is right after a Google Pagerank update. The reason for this is that all of the link building you do after launching the site will be counted in the next update. Since updates take place about once every three months, you can get a lot of link building done between updates.
Why is this any better than launching at any other time?
Let’s say for example you launch a website in July. You then start a two month link building campaign and get backlinks for the rest of the month. The pagerank is updated in August. Now you get to proudly display a mediocre pagerank to all of your link partners while you continue to build links for another month. Two months after you’ve stopped your link building campaign, another update comes and you end up gaining very little due to the fact that you only did link building for one out of the three months between updates.
I’m currently advising that people launch new websites in August after the next update. Get your design and webpages completed, and keep an eye out for news of an update. When it happens, upload to your host and start link building.
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05.22.07
Posted in Onpage optimization at 3:30 pm by Dylan
The only thing worse than a good site with low traffic is a terrible site with high traffic promoting a good product or service. Getting people to your site is definitly important to your sales, but if you can’t keep them there you’ll never make a dime.
Judge a book by it’s cover. That’s what you’re customers are doing. If you show up at a website and it looks like it was hastily thrown together by someone closing their eyes and typing with their toes you probably aren’t going to buy anything from them. Depending on the type of site you run, flashy colors or a lot of pictures may not be appropriate either. Take a look at your competition to see just what people are expecting when they go to that sort of website.
What do I press to give you money? If your customers can’t find the button to press to give you money, you’re not going to be receiving any. A comprehensive navigation system is very important to a good customer experience. This doesn’t necessarily mean a plethora of confusing internal links. While this may be good for search engine spiders, it can throw off actual people. As my favorite blogger, Courtney Tuttle, once said: “Would you rather have pagerank or money? I, personally would rather have money.”
Useful information. Just because you’re trying to sell something doesn’t mean you can’t provide useful information to your customers. In fact, if you do so, they’re more inclined to believe you know what you’re doing. Take for example Ideal808 (this is just an example, I’m not being paid for this). They have the single best trading card game online database. You can find every edition of every card for many different trading card games, regardless of whether or not they have it in stock. They also provide good quality images of these cards. Also, you can search using the English or Japanese title (or even, as I found out recently, a poorly translated title from Japanese) and still find the card you’re looking for. This doesn’t just improve their navigation, it also gives you a reason to keep going back to their site. I’m certain that it took a lot of work, but I’m also certain that it paid off in the most spectacular way imaginable.
I’m not reading all that. People read on their computers differently than they would read on paper. Most people only skim webpages for useful information. If your customers aren’t expecting a long rambling article, they don’t want to read one. It might be worth it to you to have a professional internet writter do the writting for your website.
These are some of the main things you can do to improve your customer experience. Go over your site and let me know how it works out for you.
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05.19.07
Posted in Offpage optimization, Onpage optimization at 12:53 am by Dylan
If you intend to actually be competition to your competitors, you need to find out what they’ve done to achieve their traffic and search engine rankings and how they’ve done it. Then you need to not only mimic what they’ve done, but you have to outdo them.
“But Dylan, if I could do that I would already be #1 in Google!”
In that case, good news! You can do this. I never said it would be easy, but here’s what you’re going to need:
SEO Elite - SEO Elite is a tool that can help you find backlinks to your competition. It can also help find you link partners and do a few other things, but that’s a different article. For now we’re just going to use it to find who’s linking to your competition. If you don’t want to spend the money for this software, you can also use Yahoo (not Google, since they don’t display all of the links) with the search term “link:http://competitor.com”. These results are in a less managable format, but they amount to the same thing.
A lot of time. Most likely your highest ranking competition has a lot of links to them and a lot of onpage optimization. You’re going to need to analyze all of this if you intend to mimic it.
The onpage optimization is the easy part. When you’ve determined what keyword you want to optimize, take a look at your competition’s website. Do they have the keyword bolded? Do they have it in header tags anywhere? If not, you’re already going to be one step ahead of them when you do it on your site. Take a look at my 10 Easy Methods of Onpage Optimization article to see what you need to do. If they already do this, step it up a little without making your site look too spammy.
Now comes the offpage optimization. Visit the pages that link to your competitor. Find out how and why they are linked to on a particular page. Is it a blog post? Is it a paid text link? Is it a link partner? In the case of a blog post, you probably need to have a blog on your site to get linked to from them. In the case of link partners, contact them and ask for a link. Even though you’ll be contacting a lot of people this way, resist the urge to make it look like a form letter. You’re more likely to get a positive response if you make the email personal.
Find out what directories they’re listed in (those should be in the same search results) and submit your site to them. Since you should already be submitting your site to directories anyway, you’ll have links from the directories you submitted to and the ones your competitor submitted to.
Find out if they have links in any social networking sites. Have they done link baiting at all? Do they have a blog?
If you think this is going to take a long time, you’re right. This is your link building campaign. If you’re not going to stick with it and promote your site like you mean it, don’t even bother. Even if you do stick with it, you aren’t going to start getting results immediately. Directories can take a while to process your submission. Even when you are listed, search engine spiders can take a while to get around to indexing them. Don’t count on an upsurge of traffic the first day. Just remember this; what you’re doing is analyzing and producing what search engines expect from top ranking websites. If you do this, there’s no reason you can’t also have a top ranking website.
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05.17.07
Posted in Other writers' articles, Offpage optimization at 9:58 pm by Dylan
Social networking sites can have a significant impact on not only the traffic but the pagerank of your website. If you have a myspace account, you probably have a lot of people on your friend list (it’s an ongoing contest to have the most friends sparked by Tila Tequilla as I understand it). While most of your friends’ pages probably don’t have a whole lot to do with the keywords you’re trying to optimize, getting them to link to you with good anchor text is that many more non-reciprocal links. Other similar sites (such as hi5) are good for this purpose also.
Then you have what I call social link building sites. These are sites like Digg and Reddit (see the bottom of this post for picture links to more of these types of sites). Putting a link to your article in these sites is basically free marketting. If your article is good enough, other people will tag it as good. This will either mean more links to you or a more prolific link to you (depending on the layout of the site). Andy Hagans actually has a link baiting service to improve link popularity. If you’re not ready to pay for internet marketting, check out this article on his blog, Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and SMM
This article is mainly to call attention to his article, it’s definately worth a post.
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05.15.07
Posted in Link building services, Offpage optimization at 11:12 pm by Dylan
It occurs to me that while my previous article mentioned the fact that directories are a good source of links, I never mentioned why they’re so important. They have a lot to offer that you just wont get from regular link partners.
Non reciprocal links. Most other sites that you receive links from want a link back to them. With directories, you usually don’t have to link back to them. Non-reciprocal links are better for your website because it tells search engine spiders that those sites are recommending you.
Get the link text you want. While other sites might link to you by your company name, you can get directories to link to you by the keywords you want to optimize. This is important because the rank of your site for a particular keyword search is highly dependent on how many links there are to your site with those keywords in the link text.
Related keywords are all over the page. Not only is there the heading related to your website category, many of the other sites in that category will have link text and descriptions with keywords that you are trying to optimize. When a page that links to you not only has your keywords in the link text but also has them all over the page, the link tends to have a higher value.
Did I mention that it’s free? To get a non-reciprocal link from most sites, you need to either have content worth linking to (which you should anyway, but that’s beside the point) or pay for the link. Link directories are free. There are some directories that you need to pay for, but with the exception of Business.com and the Yahoo Business Directory, they aren’t worth it. Just skip them and move on. It’s usually not worth it to pay for featured listings on free directories either.
Now that you know the importance of directories, start submitting your site or let me do it for you.
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05.14.07
Posted in Link building services, Offpage optimization at 5:56 pm by Dylan
There are a great deal of free directories that you can submit your site to for valuable non-reciprocal links. Besides DMOZ and Yahoo, there are thousands of other directories; some with a Google Pagerank as high as 6 (if anyone knows of any with 7 or higher, let me know). However, submitting your site to all these directories is very time consuming. You can’t spend all of your time submitting to directories, you need to run your business too. That’s why I’m considering adding a manual directory submission service to the main site.
Don’t get me wrong, submitting to directories isn’t something that’s hard to do, but you need to use more than a couple if you want to see results. Since link building is my job anyway, obviously I’m going to have more time to do this sort of thing than people who have different types of businesses. Have you ever paid someone to mow your lawn? Obviously you could have done it yourself, but it saves you time and effort to have someone else do it for you.
Most likely if I started this service I would be submitting to about 1000 directories for $300. I’d love to hear what other people think about this. Any thoughts?
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05.11.07
Posted in Blackhat SEO at 10:57 pm by Dylan
Today I’m going to cover several Black Hat SEO techniques. Bear in mind that I am not condoning or recommending any of these techniques. In fact, I can assure you that by using these techniques you will eventually be penalized in search engine results. If any SEO firm uses these techniques, it would be wise not to let them anywhere near your site. First I’ll start with the basic methods that are easy to spot.
Hidden Text is putting a mass quantity of keywords in such a way that a user cannot see them but a search engine spider can. This can be accomplished multiple ways such as making the text the same color as the background, or putting the keywords in alt and noscript tags.
Keyword Stuffing goes hand in hand with Hiddent Text. This is simply the mass inclusion of keywords on a page without much actual content or totally unrelated content.
Hidden Links are similar to hidden text, but their intent is to create link popularity rather than keyword density.
Gateways aren’t just useless flash intro pages. Gateway can also refer to a page that uses keyword stuffing to place highly in search engine results and includes a link to another website.
Those are the basics, now let’s talk about the more advanced methods spammers use to artificially boost site rankings.
Auto-generated pages based on search engine queries are a horrible plague upon the internet. These sites create a page based on what the search engine spider is looking for and cram it full of keywords. Pages like this are mainly used to display Adsense ads, but they can also be used as Gateways.
Sybil attacks is the linking together of multiple websites that are all controlled by the same person or group.
Referer attacks are accomplished by accessing a site through a link on the spammer’s site a great number of times through a script. The reason this generates a higher pagerank is that some sites have a list of their top referers with a link back to them.
Buying expired domains and turning them into spam pages is popular because often times a domain will retain its search engine ranking for some time after it has already expired. It also draws traffic from people who are expecting the old site.
Cloaking is presenting a different page to search engine spiders than would be presented to normal users. This can be achieved by having a script detect the browser and display the page accordingly. The page that would be displayed to search engines would generally have a high keyword density. This can be the most devastating because cloaking can be used for legitimate reasons as well (such as to display a different layout to users with less functional browsers).
So why is Black Hat SEO bad? Black Hat SEO is generally used to promote scams and sites with little or no real content. The reason for this is that real sites with real content can get a high ranking based on legitimate content and links. For this reason, sites that use black hat techniques are generally regarded as useless or harmful. The reason that these techniques are so appealing is that they tend to have an immediate impact on search engine results with less work than legitimate SEO techniques.
Your chances of getting away with black hat techniques are slim, and the consequences outweigh the rewards. If you want your site to rank well, keep reading this blog for some legitimate tips.
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05.10.07
Posted in Onpage optimization at 7:36 pm by Dylan
There are two types of webpage optimization; onpage optimization and offpage optimization. Both of these are important to your Google Pagerank. While onpage optimization doesn’t hold as much weight, it’s much easier to do and could make a major difference. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what we can do.
- Mention the keywords you want to optimize on every page. This shouldn’t be too hard. If your site is about link building, you should mention link building on every page. Using words that are related to what you’re trying to optimize doesn’t hurt, but you need to use the exact words you expect people to search for as much as possible while still making it sound natural. Don’t spam your keyword over and over; that’s a good way to get your site’s ranking downgraded or get it excluded from search engine results altogether. If you’re not sure what keywords to optimize, try the Keyword Selector Tool.
- Use bold and header tags on your keywords. Search engines regard these tags as emphasis. If your page puts emphasis on certain keywords, then obviously it should rank higher in a search for those keywords than a site that doesn’t. This may sound like I’m over-simplifying things, but really I’m not. Once again, you don’t want to spam bold or header tags all over your webpages.
- Place your keywords in your title. Your webpage title is probably the most important onpage optimization. Putting your website name as the first words in the title is almost as big of a waste as putting “Welcome to” as the first words. Spamming keywords here wont help you either (are you starting to see a pattern?), but you can put a few before your website name. For instance, a software engineering site might have “Software Engineering and Software Development - Company Name” as a webpage title.
- Put keywords in your alt image tags. Alt image tags were created to give users with browsers that don’t load images some idea of what the image is. Since your images should be related to your keywords anyway, putting your keywords here is always a good idea. It will also give your page a higher keyword density, which brings me to my next point.
- Keyword density. Keyword density is the number of times your keyword appears in relation to the number of words on your webpage. If your keyword density is too low, search engines may not regard your webpage as an authority on your keyword. However, if it is too high (which is difficult to accomplish without actively spamming), it will end up with a very low ranking. Just try to mention your keyword as many times as you can naturally.
- Use your meta tags. A lot of search engines will use the meta description as the description displayed in the search results. Also, they use the keywords to get information about your site. A meta keyword tag should contain about 10 keywords and a meta description tag should have no more than 250 characters.
- Don’t use frames. Frames make your website difficult for search engines to crawl and are therefore considered difficult to navigate. Sites that are difficult to navigate tend to not rank well in search engines. Also, since each frame is a separate page, it will appear as though you have pages without much content.
- Don’t use flash (maybe). If you use flash as your only site navigation, search engines will be unable to crawl your site. Also, splash pages serve only to lower your search engine rankings. If you wish to have flash navigation, you also need to have an alternative. If you automatically direct the user to a non-flash navigation if their browser does not support flash, you should be able to keep your flash navigation and not loose ranking. If you want to see how your website looks to search engines, use a text only browser.
- Javascript based navigation isn’t a good idea either. In general (there are some exceptions to this), if you can’t view a webpage without javascript enabled, it isn’t very useful to you anyway. This might sound like sour grapes to you, but search engines think the same way. Check if the browser is supported in your script. If not, you need to display an HTML only alternative. Remember, Javascript should be helpful to those who can use it and have no effect on those who can’t.
- Create lots of internal links. Linking to the other pages on your site boosts your rank because it makes your site easier to navigate. Sites that are easy to navigate tend to rank higher than those that aren’t. A good way to do this is to have a navigation bar on every page.
There you have it. Don’t forget to check back tomorrow when I talk about blackhat techniques you need to avoid in order to not be blacklisted by search engines.
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05.09.07
Posted in Other writers' articles at 1:45 pm by Dylan
I plan to promote Linkitforme.com with as little monetary investment as I can (and since I can get a free membership to my own service, this shouldn’t be too hard). Put simply, blogs do a good job of marketing themselves. Between updating search engines for you and backlinking from other blogs, you end up with a lot of incoming links. That being said, blame 102 Ways to Make Your Site a Back-Link Superstar
While you’re at it, blame the whole blog. If you manage a blog, you probably should be reading these articles. If you don’t have a blog yet, see 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog. There are a lot of other valuable articles as well, so much so that I’m considering adding the blog to my blogroll. Any thoughts?
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