The Secret to SEO Success
There’s a pretty good article over at Ask the SEO Guru entitled Squeezing The Juice Out Of The Low-Hanging Fruit. It basically lays out the White Hat way to SEO and admonishes about taking shortcuts. Taking the quick and easy way of backlinking with links that are not relevant will only lead to lower PageRank.
However, taking the time to make sure your site is in the right directory categories and linked to from sites that have higher PageRank AND are relevant to your topic will bear fruit.
Here’s the money quote:
Use your head and look for the places you belong.
Using Modifiers to Your Keywords to Improve Your Search Ranking
Search Engine Guide has a great article on how you can use modifiers or differentiators in your keyword phrases to set your web site apart from your competitors.
In Using Differentiators in Keyphrases: What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs to Know, Scott Buresh describes how you can improve your search engine optimization by getting more specific in the key phrases that you use in your content in order to distinguish your site.
SEO and WordPress Categories
Pearsonified has an interesting post that we will hopefully be able to put into practice called What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories.
It’s mainly about how to get better Search Engine Optimization with WordPress by changing how your posts are linked.
The Big Word Project: Good for SEO?
Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, two masters students from Northern Ireland, have developed an experiment to explore what different words mean to different people and they are going to make some money at the same time. The have created a new site called The Big Word Project which is selling words for $1 per letter.
What’s the value? Well, when you buy a word you can “change the definition” by having the word link to your site. Sounds like a good deal to me.
So, does TBWP makes sense for Search Engine Optimization? Well, since you can only buy a single word and it must be in the dictionary it’s not going to help keyword optimization for most sites. However, TBWP may help increase your website traffic for the same reason that The Million Dollar Homepage could. Because of the uniqueness of the site and all the press attention it may get there will be a lot of curious visitors.
Go Directly to Google Jail (Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect…)
Two recent posts talk about how difficult it is (impossible?) to get included again in Google’s index once you have been penalized for using Black Hat techniques.
Sebastian’s Pamphlets describes one such unfortunate schemer in You can’t escape from Google-Jail when… and Search Engine Roundtable similarly describes how bad links can hurt your site in Bad Links Can Kick You Once You Are Down.
Building More Links to Your Site
ProBlogger has some tips on how to build links to your website, in fact how to build 22,938 links!
Here’s a summary:
- Pick a Niche and Own It With Quality Content
- Get Involved In The Community
- Get Press
- Social Networking Sites
- Directories, Craigslist, Wikipedia
- Give People An Incentive To Link to You
Search Engine Optimization 101 - Page Rank
The whole point of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is to improve your web site’s ranking; that is to move it up in the list of search results so that it is as close as possible to the top. Many users will look no farther than the first page of search results and some will only look at the first two or three. Therefore, the higher you rank the higher your number of web site visitors.
Search engines like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo use very sophisticated algorithms to rank web sites. The most famous algorithm is Google’s PageRank. The name PageRank is a Google trademark and the process is patented by Stanford University where it was developed by Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page in their paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.
In a nutshell, PageRank assigns a value to each page based on the other pages on the internet which link to that page. A link to your page by a higher valued page will increase the ranking of your page. In other words, it’s not just what you know but who you know. The idea is that your page has more credibility if it is referenced by other credible sites, especially those sites which are relevant to the keywords used in a search.
Search Engine Optimization 101 - Getting Indexed
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of improving the use of keywords on your web site in order to increase the number of visitors from web searches using those keywords and phrases.
The term SEO is used when referring to “organic” web searches as opposed to paid web search advertising. Organic search results are based on a combination of the actual content of your web site along with links to your web site from other web sites. Search engines like Google and Yahoo use sophisticated algorithms to rank the popularity and relevance of web sites based on the content and links. Keywords are a very important part of this equation.
Search engines like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo use computer programs called robots or crawlers that go through the internet page by page, analyzing and storing the data found on each page and then following the links from that page to other pages. Once a page is store in the database it is said to be “indexed”. Your web site will be eventually be added to the search engine databases if a link to your site is found on another site that is already indexed.
Another way to get your web site indexed is to submit it to the Open Directory Project or by creating a Google Webmaster Tools account and adding your site. Yahoo also offers paid directory submissions.