So my father is starting his first web site about collectible car show photos. Here's how I'm helping him (beginners can do the same things to help themselves):
1. Choosing key words. I decided to go after "collectible car" and "car show photos".
2. Design a site that's easy to navigate and that has good internal linking structure. One nice thing about Movable Type blogs is that the title of your site automatically links from every page on your site back to your index page. I recently wrote about the importance of having text links throughout your site. My father already has about 30 links with the anchor text "collectible car show photos" pointing to his index. He has 500 more pictures ready to upload which will mean 500 more links.
3. Get links. Links from your own pages help a lot, but links from external sites are vital. In my father's case, he'll submit to free directories and he'll contact different antique car clubs to see about exchanging links.
Who says SEO is complicated?
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It's not easy to find one way links without buying them. You've got your free ditrectories, but then what?
http://www.web-page-optimization.com/want-some.html is a page for webmasters who control multiple sites. Write in the URL of the site you want links to, the URL of the site you want to link from, and hope they get back to you. I'm still hoping...
Then there are a few forums offering links in exchange for posts, but I wonder how reliable these are. Once the forum deides they don't need you any more they can delete your link. I would imagune they'd want to once the forum got popular and those text link ads get more valuable. Anyway here are a couple: http://www.webmaster-talk.com/showthread.php?t=14690 and http://www.jimworld.com/apps/webmas...
Another ppossibiltiy is http://www.linksvirus.com/ but this one will require some trust and patience. The idea is that you link to link virus and 5 sites listed with them. Then you get added tot heir list and hopefully people add you to their list. Must be done from the homepage, so you're giving 6 links from your homepage, but who knows how many you'll get? I'll try it out and let you know.
Clickz reports a study that found only 9% of fortune 100 companies have effectictively optimized sites. For the study, good SEO included "unique title tags, unique meta descriptions and meta tags, relevant body text, and anchor text containing primary keywords or phrases."
Of course that last one, anchor text, is probably the most important (although links from different IPs may be necessary for full benefits) and Fortune 100 companies could probably buy all the anchor text they need...
So my New York Giants blog is doing much better than the football team. I used to be top ten, but I'm currently up to #4 in Google for "NFL Giants". I've added the site to a few directories (I certainly have more to go) and I've been a busy blogger adding lots of fresh content...
Still nothing special to report about other search terms for this site. Still, I've come a long way: just a couple months ago I was #40 for "NFL giants".
I used to be #1 for " free SEO tips" but now I'm #2. I recently checked my stats and realized that no one finds my site through searching for "free seo tips" but they do find me for "seo tips" (currently ranked #7). A few keyword checkers assured me that having "free seo tips" in my title was a waste. I also realized that I'll proabbly never be in the top ten for "search engine optimization". So the old title, "Free SEO tips: search engine optimization = better search engine rankings" is gone. The new title is "SEO tips = better search engine ranking" is 39 characters (you should keep titles under 60 or at least under 70).
As you can see I want two keyword phrases: SEO tips (Wordtracker reveals: seo and tips 16.0 /day & seo tips 2.0 /day while Overture shows: seo tip 17.7 /day) and better search engine ranking (Wordtracker = 38/day and Overture = 92/day).
I'm currently #5 allinanchor: better search engine ranking, but am number 70 something in Google's regular results. That's probably a result of two things: Until my new title, that phrase was too far back in the title (which is also a hyperlink on evry page of this blog) and very very few external sites link to me with that anchor text (they link to me with "Free SEO tips").
So I came back from summer vacation and found traffic was down on my ESL site. I just went to my stats and looked at the search terms people were using to find my site. "English class" and some variations used to be a big one, but not anymore. I check Google, and where I used to be #1 and 2, I'm now 21 and 22.
Allinanchor I'm 23 and 24, but there's a big problem. The URL ranked #24 is linked to from every page of my site. It should be way ahead of the URL ranked #23 as I have over 3,200 pages indexed by Google. The other page probably has 20-30 pages linking to it. I guess Google stopped paying attention to my footer. That's annoying.
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After a scary drop out if the top ten, my stock market blog is up to #4 in Google for "stock market idea". No word yet on "stock market investment idea" or "stock market investment" which seem to be far more competitive terms. Nearly all of the links coming into my site are from blogs or message boards. The blogs are typically related somehow, but the message boards are generally webmaster boards (I've got the stock blog in my signature on these boards). I think it's pretty clear that these unrelated links are helping which means two things to me:
1. The people who say that links must come from relevant sites are a bit off. (I just finished deleting a bunch of gambling spam comments from this blog - would they be spamming me if it hurt them in the SERPs? Nah, they want unrelated links.)
2. I proabbly have to stay active on different message boards and find blogs to comment on... Not that I never spam a blog. I always think about the entry and only post if I have some thoughtful comment or question. Also, most of the incoming links are from blogs that put me in their sidebar (thus giving me links from virtually every page). There are many other links to so the PR must be pretty diluted, but PR isn't all that important anyway.
So I wrote about removing session IDs for my grammar message baord, and it worked: I'm #11 allinanchor: learn english grammar online. Since few of those links are coming from external sites, and since it's sandbox time anyway, I can't find myself in the normal search results. With the school year starting, this forum is about to get used a lot. I also have been and will be submitting to free directories so hopefully I won't be waiting for Google much longer.
Naturally I'd like to see top ten for learn english grammar online, then "learn english grammar, then finally english grammar.
Here's an article about the importance of search engines that raises a few old points but a few very interesting ones (even though I'm skeptical, they're worth mentioning).
1. Don't expect users to spend much time navigating through your site. Provide relevant links to your context on the probable lnading pages.
2. Some search engines will penalize you for using keywords in the stem of a URL. This means that www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com would be OK but www.whatever.com/seo.html would not be. This of course is pretty worthless without some mention about which search engines. If we're talking about Google, this is important. If we're talking about Ted's search engine, no one cares.
3. "Relevancy is vital. Some search engines will also penalize a site for irrelevant links or irrelevant keywords." Again, which search engines?
4. Pointer pages should have useful content according to this article. Really thoguh, I suppose any relevant content would do. The search engine spider will never know if the content is actually useful to humans. They used to do this based on link popularity, but I bet a pointer site with crappy content could find lots of reciprocal link partners these days...
Not too long ago I wrote about links from different IPs. I recently asked my webhost about the possibility of getting different IPs and found there is none (unless I get a new host). Anyway, one person has been trying to convince me that there's no way a search engine can determine a site's IP (and therefore they could never determine if too many of your links come from the same IP). I know of two papers that discuss devaluing links from different IPs.
Again, there is no direct evidence that this is used, but there is circumstantial evidence. Google has been reported to ban sites that buy a ton of links from just one or two other sites.
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php