SEO tips = better search engine ranking

blogger pointer sites

The things SEOs do to get better rankings! One of them is to get a free site from blogger, create a blog, post hundreds of entries with the same exact content (but different titles) and link the title of each to a different interior page of your site.

This might not fool Google. They don't like duplicate content. Will the different titles be enough? I don't know but this is free and requires little effort. I haven't done it, but I may give it a try at some point. Here's the way it works:

Every post has a different title but otherwise exactly the same content. The ttile of each blog entry points to the actual site. A few examples (I will not link to a spammy site so just copy and paste if you want to see).

http://we2stocktradinggateway.blogspot.com/
http://we4carinsuranceexpert.blogspot.com/
http://we2collegeplanningnetwork.blogspot.com/

Stock market related keywords

I just wrote about my SEO efforts leading to a #1 rank but being wasted because people are no longer searching for the keyword phrase. When I see what the keyword suggestion tools tell me people are searching for, I am amazed to see Overture reporsting 36 people/day searching for "investment market stock". Shouldn't it be "stock market investment"? Word tracker has "stock market investments" at 7/day and "stock market investment" at 4/day. "Stock mraket blog" doesn't show up on either wordtracker or overture (wordtracker does have stock market advice blog - 2/day). Investment blog shows no results and no suggestions, but I know someone is searching for it - it's the number one referral term for my stock market advice blog.

Sponsored by Keyword tracker

#1 in Google for singular, not plural - revising targets

Well, my stock market blog is finally number 1 in Google for "stock market idea". I'm #8 for "stock market ideas". I didn't think that the "s" to make it plural was so important. Now I wonder if I have to forget about my SEO "success" and pick a new keyword target. Looking at the top ten search terms referring people to the site, I see:

1. investment blog
2. stock market blog
3. ustarcom
4. lbtt.pk
5. stock blog
6. lbtt 6
7. bush kerry stock market
8. phizer stock
9. stocks
10. stock market

In fact of the 186 different search terms people have used, "stock market idea" doesn't show up once. A few keyword suggestion tools show that no one is searching for "stock market idea". I'm pretty sure they used to be or I wouldn't have targeted those keywords. I guess I should check on the popularity of my targeted phrases more often...

How not to exchange links

Tip 1: Set your spam filters to allow emails with certain words like "reciprocal" and "exchange" in the subject. It sounds self-evident, but I've actually had emails with very specific subjects get bounced back to me.

Tip 2: Don't send nasty follow-up emails. I recently got one that went like this:

Thanks for ignoring my request to exchange links. Just letting you know your link has been removed. Cheers.

This woman wanted to exchange links with one of my PR 6 sites. Her site is PR 0. I don't need to deal with people like that. Plus I never did receive her first email. Maybe she sent it to the wrong address or maybe it got lost in cyberspace. Who knows? Maybe I deleted it by accident. These things do happen, so write nice follow-ups a week or so after sending the first link exchange request.

Tip 3: If you have to explain the value of alink exchange (and you probably don't), do it at the end of the email so the webmasters who know why they exchange links (virtually all of us) don't have to read that stuff again just to get to your link information.

Tip 4: Find the real email address. When I see an email for webmaster@.... it goes in the trash.

Tip 5: Supply the html. It won't take you long and it will save all the webmasters your asking to link to you some time.

Tip 6: Here's the best one. Look for non-traditional opportunities. See if you can get a link from a quality content page instead of a links page by offering a similar quality link in return. If the site seems to get good traffic, maybe exchaning index links would be good. Blogs and message boards can exchange every page links.

Unreliable PR 4 one way links

Wikipedia encyclopedia entries have an external links section after each entry. Generally there are only 2 or 3 external links and many of these are PR 4 pages. You can add your site(s) but anyone can remove them...

Getting off Google's blacklist?

I've written about how my travel blog seems to be on the Google blacklist. My site, travel-plan-idea.com is slowly moving up in Google search results:

travel plan idea = #8 (Blogshares info page on my blog is #1).
travel plan = not in top 100
travel idea #82 = (Blogshares page on my blog is #8 while Blogshares page on my stock market blog is #38)

Clearly there is still some wacky stuff going on when a page about my stock market blog ranks 45 spots better than my travel blog and the page about my travel blog ranks about 75 spots better. I am encouraged that I'm actually in the top 100 now. I see no reason why the rankings won't continue to improve. It doesn't bring in much traffic, but it's nice to see the site is #6 for travel idea on Yahoo!

Better search engine rankings

On September 13th I was #7 for SEO tips. I changed my title (which also changed my anhor text since the title on every page links to my home page) to reflect my new target "SEO tips". Now, about a month later, I'm #4 for SEO tips in Google. The point: the anchor text of your internal links is vital, especially for sites with lots of content pages. Link to your index using your main keywords in the anchor text from every page of your site.

Traffic for who?

This site claims it can generate thousand of hits for me. I see how it will generate traffic for itself, but I can't imagine CTR high enough to generate real traffic for me. But I'll give it a try and let you knwo how it turns out. Or you can just try it yourself:
Update: These guys cheated! I've learned that they gave themselves credit for referring me when credit should have gone to another site (the one that really referred me).

All links directory

All Links Directory shows its results on a ranking system, so if I send them a lot of traffic, my site ends up on top of the results. I submitted my Giants site a while back, and they say I've gotten 16 visitors in return for four. That's not such a bad deal. It also has good PR and they don't seem overly picky about the anchor text you use. I'm just submitting the rest of my sites as I think this is a good resource.

Truly Open Directory

I've been waiting longer than I can remember for DMOZ to do some things, so I love the new Truly open directory. In about 30 seconds I had my first site listed. I accidentally put it in the wrong category, and I hesitate to move it from a PR 2 page to a PR 0 page, but I guess I'd better go do it. I wonder if there won't be too many people submitting to higher PR categories and making the directory hard to use, but we'll see. Anyone can move any link to a new category, but at the moment the site is too slow for me to spend much time helping out.