Remember that anchor text is important. I noticed a cheesy competitor of mine using this poster affiliate program to get hundreds of pages of content. It's all completely unrelated to hie site, but each and every page links back to his home page using a few keywords. No wonder his search engine rankings are better than mine. Well the only way to beat him seems to be to join him so I might have to start doing the poster thing too...
One interesting tip from this article about the US Spanish speaking market is to optimize for Spanish keywords which are less competitive than English ones. Also interesting is the increasing competition for many keywords thanks to the importance of web sites for small business success.
A slightly dangerous artice claims:
Linking campaigns, as you can see, while having their overall place in effective rankings and placement within the Search Engines, are not the “be all and end all” of optimization or rankings. Many various fundamentally sound methods of optimization still exist, and should be utilized in any well-rounded Search Engine Marketing campaign.Remember, as I've said before, you need anchor text for competitive keywords. If you don't get it through reciprocal links, you have to get it some other way. On page SEO and even page rank can't save a site with no quality anchor text.
I wrote last time about how spammers get an anchor text advantage. That's why pharmacy and other bad sites are always spamming blog comments and forums. Their keywords are very competitive so they need a ton of links with good anchor text to get better search engine rankings. Plus most webmasters won't exchange links with these sites (they can get penalized if they do).
To demonstrate the importance of anchor text, I did a Google search "allinanchor:esl" and a plain Google search for "esl". The top five sites were exactly the same. The order from 6-10 was a little different but the same sites were listed.
It works for this blog too. SEO-search-engine-ranking.com is #1 for "free SEO tips" and #1 for "allinanchor:free seo tips". I'm in the top 5 for "free SEO" and "SEO tips" but I'm not #1 because I don't have more anchor text than my competetition.
How do you get anchor text? Have a site with many pages and make sure they link to each other with good anchor text. Blogs and forums have an advantage here because by definition they have lots of web pages. Reciprocal links help, of course, but look for "every page reciprocal links". I link to a web site from every page of my site and they link to me from every page of theirs. Make sure its relevant (as with all sites you link to).
About the nigritude ultramarine SEO competition (from p.11 of the message thread):
This competition is very interesting to watch. It shows the Internet how SEO can be done, and how ugly it can be. There is a lot of people competing for top ranking. I'm willing to ask for links from members - but I'm not willing to spend 12 hours a day spamming forums. Others are. Will the forum spammers win? Maybe.
And if the forum spammers win, it will not necessarily be a bad thing. For many search terms, the people who use automated scripts to sign up at thousands of forums do win top placement; and those who draw the line at more "respectable" methods don't.
Either way, when the winners are determined, it will be interesting to note the methods they used to gain top ranking. My guess is, the forum spammers will have at lest 3/4 of all the top ten spots. Spam or not, it is an effective way to gain rankings.
The reason it's effective is because of the anchor text that goes in links. That anchor text counts heavily toward your search engine rankings. For competitive keywords a regular search will show the same sites at the top as an allinanchor search.
This post is based on some SEO history with ESL go.com:
1. My Yahoo and Google rankings as of April 30. I was #65 for ESL.
2. My experiment with repeating the same keyword three times in the title.
3. How Google treats keyword stuffing.
4. My comparison of two similar keywords: On April 27 I was #18 for "English as a second language" and #8 for "English second language".
Anyway, what I did was change my title again, this time to "ESL go - free English as a second language: learning & teaching ESL" because I wanted to do better for "English as a second language". It didn't really work out as planned. From #18 I went to #22. For "English second language" I went from #8 to #11. But for "ESL" I went from 65 to 59. This craziness means that I didn't learn anything from adjusting the title, possibly because Google changed its algorithm. One possibility that wouldn't surprise me is that Google didn't appreciate me keyword stuffing the title (although one site in the top ten has "ESL" in the title three times).
So I wrote about how suggesting my site via Google's "help us improve" link worked for my New York Giants football site.
I tried again from a different computer (different IP) and suggested that they didn't need both giants.com and newyorkgiants.com (#1 and #6 for "new york giants") in the results since they are exactly the same site. And I mentioned my site too. So far I've been ignored...
If you want to do well in search results high keyword density is a huge help. But it means more to Yahoo! than it does to Google. I first guessed this when comparing my Yahoo! and Google search engine rankings.
More support: This "Affordable Web Design" site, lavashark.com, reported a #7 ranking in Google but no rank in Yahoo. After stuffing his index page with the key words, he fell to #14 in Google. And got listed at #2 in Yahoo! These rankings have held steady for a couple of days now...
There used to be a reciprocal link on this page. It was the only external link so my link partner was getting a very very good deal. Don't you hate it when webmasters delete the link to your site without telling you? He was already getting the better half of the bargain...
Anyway, this page is now waiting for something eciting to come along and change its pathetic life.
Here's an article about text ads that pop up when a user rolls his/her mouse over them. I doubt that they pass on page rank and add that to the pop up factor and I think low tech text link ads are far superior.
I complained a few days ago about www.nfl-giants.com. Google had me ranked at PR 5 but only Yahoo! had me listed in their search results. I did a search for "NY Giants news" on Google and clicked on the "help us improve" link. I suggested my URL. I'm now #6 out of 596,000 results! Hopefully that will translate into some nice traffic! I'm #33 for NFL Giants, but I still have to work on NY Giants and New York Giants (not in the top 100 for those two). Looking at the competition, I see no reason why I shouldn't. I think I'll try making a couple suggestions. I'll report back if I get some results...
A (http://www.seo-lab.com/directory-articles/best-free-directories.php - link disabled due to redirect: 10/13/04)nice list of directories that offer free submission and with links that search engines like. Now PR 4 links and higher are generally preferred, and by the time we get into the specific categories with many of these sites (Yahoo! and Dmoz! being notable exceptions) we're looking at PR 3 or even PR 2. But hey a one way link to your site is never bad, right?
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Most people know that certain techniques improve your search engine rankings. Some of these techniques are frowned upon by search engines and could actually get you banned. Here's a page that shows you what the search engines hate.
I recently wrote about moving code from the top to get the human readbale text to the top of the code. The result was a small increase in search engine rankings. Well, it seems a test lends support to the theory that text near the top of the code is important. The test indicated that where humans see the code may be less important and concluded that css should be used so that human readbale text can be near the top of your code.
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php