SEO tips = better search engine ranking

Buying blog entries

What better day to revive an old blog than my birthday? I was actually inspred by this Search Engine Marketing Blog - there's some stuff on bidding directories - I'm not a big fan of those - but there's an interesting one on buying blog entries.

Now this I like. Much better than bid directories. Anyway, one of the points the author stresses is that bloggers should stick to their topic if they want their links to be worth something. That's why I hate all those payperpost blogs that have 2 million categories so they can snap up as many $5 opportunities as possible. If you lbog about everything, you're links are pretty crappy for say a travel site or and SEO site.

Assuming, of course, that the travel site can get links from blogs that do only travel or that the SEO site can get links from blogs that do only SEO.

New Project

So I'm starting a new project, getting a few sites to rank better for some fairly non-competitive keywords. The sites are LARP related, Live Action RolePlaying games. And I only need to get them ranked for their area. An example or two would be LARP NJ, LARP New Jersey, etc.

Honestly this should only take a few links with the right anchor text and a little patience. Anyway, this will determine how well a few powerful links do for a non-competitive keyword. I'll try my paid directory and a few of my other sites and see what happens.

Time for a few hundred free directory one-way links

So my healthspan blog is still doing well. This is the one I did the article experiment on - I counted 3 backlinks from article sites last week, so it would be hard for me to say this wasn't worth the 30 bucks (plus the little time it takes to write an article or money it costs to have one written).

Well at the moment we're looking at 81 links according to Yahoo. This includes a few ads, pinging services like technorati, a few articles, a few recips, a few paid directories, a trackback, and many pages from my own healthspan blog (which of course all link back to my homepage).

The next step is paying 30.00 to submit to 300 free-inclusion directories. In the past these have always increased the number of backlinks showing without any adverse effects. Let's try it again and see what happens.

Submitting articles for new Healthspan Blog

I recently tried a little article submission experiment on my new Healthspan Blog. Titled "Advice for men who want to look ripped" (yes, I also published it on my blog) the article was on weight lifting, cardio, diet, and muscle definition.

The article was submitted to 250 article sites by someone over at DP. On April 25, 2006 I started getting approval notices and I started counting backlinks. It didn't take long. I've gotten 1 backlink from the articles this week.

It seems that for articles to be effective, you need to steer clear of the general article sites. Write unique articles specifically for high quality (and high traffic sites) in your field.

Dating Culture site doing well

Here's an update on my new dating culture site - if you need to refresh your memory, this is the site where 300 free non-reciprocal directory listings and two or three other links helped me avoid Google's sandbox.

Anyway, at the end of our first month (well 2 days left but I can't wait) we've seen over 1,000 unique visitors. Search engine traffic is fine for such a young site (though notice how Yahoo is missing - maybe I am in the Yahoo sandbox!):

Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list
- Google 572
- MSN 213
- Dogpile 8
- Unknown search engines 2
- MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 2
- WebCrawler 1
- AOL 1
- Mamma 1

Clearly with this traffic I'm not on page 1 for "dating" but I do see some traffic from pretty competitive keyword phrases that involve dating and marriage. I'm still waiting for all those links from .edu sites and other culture and education related site, so still no ads on my site. I'd actually love to keep it that way forever, but once the traffic is there, I'll probably be too greedy not to try an Adsense unit, just one ad under tha navigation menu to see what happens...

Starting a contest to market your site

You don't have to be a webmaster site like v7n.com to start a contest that gets your site noticed. John Scott has said that the v7ndotcom elursrebmem contest has incresed activity on his webmaster forum.

There's clearly some buzz going on here. Links from people who report on SEO things, discussion on SEO related message boards, etc. I want the buzz!

I want the buzz for my travel blog, so I started a 2006 Summer vacation plan travel writing contest. The idea is to get submissions, publish them, and then give out prize money (1,000 dollars total).

This will do a few things (I hope):

1. Give my readers something to read that I didn't write. Sure sometimes I pay for articles, but this should generate lots of good travel articles by lots of different authors. One cool Moroccan vacation plan has already been submitted.

2. Get me some links. John Scott was the first blogger to mention my contest - hopefully he is not the last.

3. Get traffic. People should come to my site to check out the contest, read the travel plans being submitted, or just because they heard about me (if the contest generates buzz, people who never would have heard of my blog otherwise will come check it out).

Wish me and my contest luck!

Planning SEO for the new site

My new site is going to feature articles on dating culture; for example did you know that physical intimacy develops more slowly for young couples in Korea (Many of my university students were shocked at the idea of kissing goodnight on the first date and insisted that this would take from 1 week to 2 months in a typicl Korean relationship).

So the question is where can I get links? Well with ads on my site, maybe nowhere but directories. But with an ad-free site, maybe Education sites, cultural studies sites, etc.

It's true that a content site with no ads will lose money, but after it's PR 6 and gets lots of traffic a few paid links from dating sites, or a couple of well blended Adsense units could be considered.

The tip here is to look for links before putting up ads.

Improving the directory

One issue that plagues many paid inclusion directories is that search engines don't like them. Many times this is due to poor content, for example categories with no listings look an awful lot like spam pages since they have no content.

So I just spent about an hour cleaning up my paid inclusion web directory which is still well liked by the search engines (Google has 12,000 pages indexed and Yahoo shows 2,630 backlinks). I didn't have many empty categories since I started the directory with 300 categories and have added them as needed (and now have around 600).

All in all I'm confident that I'm doing everything I can to keep search engines interested in my paid inclusion directory while not flooding it with sites (which would dilute the value of each listing).

How many sites to run?

When I built my first site I started studying SEO and decided that it would be smart to build a number of sites and link them to mine. I soon had over 12 sites and not enoguh time to develop each one properly. Now I'm trying to decide which to sell and in what order because if I ahd spent all my time on one site and really developed it, I'd be rich.

The other thing I've tried is hiring people to manage sites for me. So far this hasn't worked out too well. I bought ozband.net and hired the previous owner to manage it. When the PHP Nuke got hacked he promised to fix it. A few hacks later and the site still wasn't updated. My hosting was suspended and I sold the site at a loss. The original owner bought it from the person I sold it to by the way.

What I've learned from my experience is to concnetrate on building a couple of great sites. I say a couple because if the revenue from one dries up (say a shift in search engine algorithms or something causes a huge loss of traffic) your revenue is not completely gone.

SEO for forums

My grunge forum has over 7,000 posts and an archive but onle 771 pages indexed by Goolge. This has been as high as 6,000 in the past and I figure I need a boost.

Also, I want to rank higher for phrases like Nirvana forum and Pearl Jam forum. To accomplish both these goals I've linked to every individual forum on the footer of every page on the main site. I ahven't done this for the archive as I want to see what happens first.

Getting indexed (part 2)

So my handful of directory listings has not been enough to get Exercise Plaza indexed in the past 3 days. I've added a few deep links from my health directory. Also added two more deep links from PR 3 pages at jtrotta.com.

If the site is indexed soon after these links (and they are not especially powerful) I'll have enough anecdotal evidence to work under the assumption that deep links get new sites indexed by Google faster than links to the home page.

Digital point ad coop: overview

Over the past few months I've shared many of my personal experiences with the Digital Point Link Coop. Here, I'd like to consolidate my information to help people make an informed decision, especially important now that there are other viable alternatives to the ad coop.

How it works: You set up the ad coop on your site. The set up process depends on the type of site you have but always includes a .php file with the coop code, a .txt for storing ads, and an include. The set up instructions are easy to follow for message boards and blogs.

Once the coop is installed on your site, you will get a weight based on your PR and number of pages indexed. You may submit ads, which will appear across the network. The number of times your ads show depends on your weight.

How well it works: It works very well for Yahoo! and MSN but not as well for Google. Because ads rotate to different sites in the network, links do not age. There is strong evidence to suggest that Google values older links and this explains why the coop is not as effective for Google as it is for Yahoo! and MSN.

In my case it works so well for Yahoo that I can not imagine life without coop. I have gone from almost no Yahoo! traffic to over 1,000 people a day for one of my sites (tw different keyword phrases).

Where it works: I have coop installed on blogs, message boards and AWS sites. AWS installation is more difficult but if you're having an AWS store built you might as well find a designer who can handle a coop installation.

The alternatives: Link Vault, which generates less link churn and therefore may have a greater effect on Google results has been getting a lot of attention recently. I will report back when I have more information on Link Vault and some examples of how well it works.

Content and SEO should be kept separate

Search engines will not find your great content unless you help them. When I started my ESL site it was the second best free English learning resource available. I got around 10-20 visits a day through word of mouth.

Now (2 years later) I'm getting 1,000 people a day. The content is still good, but it hasn't been updated in a year. The search engines don't care. All they know is that I have more incoming links now.

Regarding on page SEO, it's only worthwhile for non-competitive keyword combos. My advice is to forget about it and focus on good content for humans and links for search engines.

phpbb SEO hack and Google index

I recently had the seo hack (but without mod rewrite) installed on my forums. The first thing I noticed that my grammar forum went from nearly 3000 pages indexed to under 200. However, several forum owners were reporting similar issues.

We're back to 2,200 now. Interestingly, some of the indexed pages have old cache dates. I imagaine that some of these (like the profiles) will eventually be dropped from the index since we no longer have incoming links to the profiles.

ESL Ad

The last time I wrote about my ESL Ad AWS store it had 47 pages indexed on April 30. Now it has 518 pages indexed. This is probably due to two PR 6 links (which I mentioned in the April 30 post).

However, I also changed the header navigation so this experiment doesn't really tell us anything (at least not about the importance of the two PR 6 links alone). It will be recreated without the navigation changes. Once my new AWS site, exerciseplaza.com is set up - I'll give it a couple PR 6 links and see what happens.

How to get indexed by Google quickly

Regular readers will remember that it took me a while to get Buy Links indexed despite investing in directory listings at thisisouryear, uncoverthenet, seoma, sevenseek, and linking to it a few times from this blog. By the way it did finally get indexed and the recent PR update showed us a 4 which is not bad for a few directory listings and a few forum sigs.

Anyway, I didn't want to wait for my new site, www.eslad.com. I started off with a few deep links in the shopping category at jtrotta.com. I didn't expect this to have an effect, but a Google site site:http://www.eslad.com/ search currently turns up 47 pages indexed.

This is a small start, and obviously I need more pages indexed to make the Digital Point link coop ads more valuable. So I've just added links to the homepage from 2 PR 6 pages at www.eslgo.com/sstore.html and www.eslgo.com/tstore.html

What I want to see is these two strong links getting a decent chunk of the site indexed. I'll let you know how this little experiment works out.

Link-Exchange.net

These guys sent me a success story:

After creating 50 pages that are keyword relevant to debt consolidation and all the state abbreviations 4 weeks ago, AL, AZ, NY, FL ect… and creating a new listing on links-exchange.net for www.americandebtco.org/American-debt-consolidation/ and www.americandebtco.org/debt-consolidation/, which is linked to all of the state pages. The listing went strait to the top 10 for almost every keyword phrase, in less than two weeks from being indexed. Check it out for yourself, go to Google and type in debt consolidation MN, debt consolidation MS or debt consolidation and any other state abbreviation and somewhere in the top 10 you will find americandebtco.org. The reason I am sharing this information with you is, we want to see all of our members in the top 10 for your keywords. And of course to show the skeptics that the Links-Exchange.net system does work extremely well if your site is optimized properly.

....The best tip we can give you is to create new directories for each keyword that you are targeting and only target one or two words per page. This also includes those of you that have chosen option 1 (to host your own links page) in our program. We recommend option 1 over option 2, and when using option 1 to place the new ASP or PHP page in it’s own directory, Example www.americandebtco.org/links/ . This is only a recommendation, not a requirement.

My network marketing blog hasn't seen top rankings, but I didn't expect it to. What did surprise me was a drop from PR 3 to PR 2 indicating to me that Google doesn't value these links (which they shouldn't). However the testimonial contradicts my experience...

Interestingly they are also giving out free copies of the 79.00 SEO Book. That was in a link in an email already sent so I'm not sure if signing up now will get you one...

Adding sites to the coop

The new Google update has left me with a few more candidates for the Digital Point ad coop. It's better for message boards than blogs because home page PR is part of the weight calculation but internal pages PR is not.

That means a PR 5 blog with 100 PR 4 pages indexed by Goolge would get less weight than a PR 5 message boards with 200 PR 0 pages indexed. But my Father's antique car photo blog is a good candiadte with many pages.

More weight coming

So the folks over at digital point ad coop taught me how to get coop links installed on my grunge forum and the archive. Since I just removed session IDs from the regular forum I think both it and the archive will be indexed. The header and footer on each is different so I don't think it will be considered duplicate content. I mean there are lots of stupid DMOZ clones getting indexed...

I'm happy

So my new grunge message board (not really new - I bought) has a weight just under 30,000 in the ad coop.

I'm happy with that. That's enough weight for me to get the board up there for "grunge music" and point a little weight at a few toher sites I think. And since it's an active message baord weight should increase as more people post and more pages get indexed. And right now it's only PR 4. I can get that up to 5 no problem for some added weight...

Getting Google results

From a recent comment on Google's blacklist:

I have a Question I am hoping someone can help me out with. I recently started a work at home related web site. When I do a google search for realdealjobs, it shows about 40 results, but when I search for link backs (link:http://) my site doesn't even show up. If I do the same thing on MSN search it shows about 20 link backs so far. I have a google page rank of zero!!!!! I cant shake it. Frustrated, I am trying to redesign the whole site. I don't know what I did wrong to get a zero rank or have google not even recognize the site, but it stands to reason it is only fare if they are going to impose a rank on the relevancy of your content, potentially hurting ones search engine ranking, they should have some sort of information on how to remedy a negitive outcome. I would really appreciate it if someone might take a quick look at my site, http://www.realdealjobs.com and let me know if you see any "red flags" other than the reconstruction of the site. I have done alot of research on SEO lately, followed the recomendations, still google hates me. What can I do? Feel free to e-mail me directly if you like.

I wouldn't redesign the site. Google has been very slow to pick up new sites recently. Just keep getting links from sites Google really likes (high PR sites which rank well) and eventually they have to index your site. In your work from home industry this can be difficult. There is lots of competition, and many of your competitors will have well established sites. With a big enough budget you can submit to every paid directory, but even that may not be enough. Buy a few links from related contnet sites and make sure your content is unique. And wait. MSN seems to like new sites so you should see results there before you see them in Google.

See old and new sites of more info.

Get high ranking ads

I'm not sure how many of you caught the Site Pro Newsletter in your spambox, but this latest one actually had an interesting idea:

1) I find other established sites that already have good PageRank and adequate incoming links.

2) I make sure these sites add new content every day. Sites with frequently added content get visited by the Googlebot often... sometimes every day.

3) I then place an advertisement on these sites, promoting my actual web site. When the Googlebot pays these sites a visit, the ad itself (NOT my web page) is ranked in Google for the keyphrase I've used. On many occasions my ads have reached the #-1 position in Google for my targeted keyphrase, in as little as 48 hours.

Believe it or not, a handful (literally a handful) of classified ad sites fit the description to a tee. Backpage.com is one of them.

Sponsored by Autos for Sale, a good place to look for used cars.

Quality content

People say "content is king" and they say all kinds of crazy stuff about the importance on content and SEO. In reality, content does one thing - It makes your site worth visiting. Maybe your copy sells a product, or maybe (like this bog) you hope people like your content and come back for more. The more people who keep coming back, the more advertising revenue you're looking at.

Content has almost nothing to do with SEO. Abdillahi Abdillahi argues that fresh content "is very important" for increases in PR. I've been in this business for over 2 years now, and have never seen any evidence to support that claim.

SEO is about one thing - links. You need lots of quality links from external sites with keywords in the anchor text. Links from your own site help too.

Getting started with SEO

A while back I wrote about how having an active message board is worth a lot. And my health message boards are doing OK.

But internal links are not as good as links from other sites. So I'm working on my health web directory. It still looks a little weird, but it's getting there. The important thing is that people will start using it soon...

New header

I haven't done the whole site yet, buy my ESL go forums probably account for a majority of the pages I have indexed in Google.

Besides the new color scheme, the most important thing is that the header navigation is all html/css wheras my old header was a graphic. I used to use footer links but Google started ignoreing my footer in September 2004 or a bit earlier.

Let's see how these rankings change when Google notices my new header. Today I am:

#10 for "English class"
#9 and 10 for "English classes"
#11 and 12 for "free English"
#6 and 7 for "free ESL"
#14 and 15 for "ESL quiz center"
#17 for "English practice"
#55 and 56 for "ESL teacher" (and #55 is a page being removed soon).
nowhere for TESL/TEFL resources

And the big ones:

#26 for "ESL"
#9 for "English as a second langauge"

Reasons to join the Digital Point ad coop

One repeat and one new reason why you should join Digital Point's free coop advertising exchange network:

My ESL site is still #9 for "English as a second language" on Google. That's the old reason.

The new reason is that I'm up to #26 for "ESL"

Thanks to the ad coop, my backlinks went up from 305 to 1,430! How else can you get results like that without spending a fortune?

Digital Point coop ad network review

As I mentioned in get one way links there's a new tool that is getting some people great results (the creator of the tool is on the first page for Ebay with links only from this tool). Digital Point's free coop advertising exchange network is helping me too. I'm up to #154 for "stock market investment" for my stock market blog.

My ESL site has not seen any improvement yet and is at #23 for "English as a second language" and #37 for "ESL".

The other site I'm working on in the coop is my travel blog. Google still hates it, but Yahoo! has me at #1 for "travel idea"!. I'm seeing lots of traffic and a site I considered abandoning is now doing quite well with Adsense!

Adding to the list

A list of SEO techniques that work:

1. Build a site with good content.

2. Use a smart internal linking structure with keywords in the anchor text.

3. If the site is not a message board or blog, try adding one. This gives you more content and more links to your other pages. It also let's you join Digital Point's free coop advertising exchange network. Any site that supports PHP can join but sites using vBulletin, phpbb, movable type, blogger, and maybe another that I'm forgetting get specific instructions on how to install.

4. Buy directory links.

5. Have your own directory (I like WSNlinks) to make exchanging links easier.

Beat Google's sandbox

I've been complaining about Google's sandbox about as long as I've had this blog. Today I'll complain about my English grammar forum and how it's #3 for allinanchor:learn english grammar online but not in the top 100 in the search results.

The forum was started around June and got it's initial PR very quickly. I haven't been adding many links, but there have been a few. There has been lots of fresh content; The forum is up to 400+ members and 1200+ posts.

It's detail page in my langauge directory is #30 (which again shows that WSN links is a good value directory). The link pages ranking higher than the site is a classic sandbox indicator.

Anyway, how to beat the sandbox: Buy the domain, set up some content and get a few links 6 months to a year before you plan to officially launch the site. Maybe an obscure link from the bottom of one of your old blog entries or a contnet page with PR that doesn't see much traffic anymore. Maybe a few paid directories, especially one that promises money back if your site isn't accepted.

Make Google think you're an old timer when you're ready to begin.

Where not to go to set up an ecommerce site

My wife and I recently signed up as Nuskin distributors (Nuskin is a network marketing company). I love their products (they even cured my eybrow dandruff) but I hate their web sites (which are touted as high tech, part of their Big Planet technology division).

For starters, Nuskin doesn't want to share search engine traffic with us distributors; they (Nuskin Enterprises and its divisions) have fully optimized sites but distributors are restricted to sites with session IDs that can not be removed. I've also been told that it's against company policy to set up a site that sells Nuskin stuff that's not running the poor Nuksin Nuskin shopping cart and hosted on overpriced Nuskin servers.

The site can be set up relatively quickly, but even setting up GWP is not bug-free. And once it is set up you've got great products and a great compensation plan but no traffic. Since we can't get search engine traffic to the site directly, I am considering Adwords and other advertising options. I'm also working on a new site which will be optimized and will link to the shopping cart for people who want to buy. More on the development of that new site later though...

For now if you want to see what we're up against, our Korean Nuskin page is located at: a href="http://faq.mynuskin.com/cgi-bin/gwpweb/igwp/splash/splashInit.jsp while our English Nuskin page has a URL like this: http://faq.mynuskin.com/cgi-bin/gwpweb/igwp/splash/gwpFrame.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1370046850.1100662382@@@@&BV_EngineID
=ccchadcmmikdfmecefecehhdfjfdfkf.0&cntryOID=185336&toURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nuskinusa.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Fnsweb%2Fhome%2Fen%2Fns_home.jsp%3FgwpID%3DCEEXEeCECCHDHFCIDEHGBOAYA88VTVEV3t&nextPage=%2Fproduct%2Fen%2Fns_shopOnline.jsp - I don't even know how to remove the session ID from the URL to make a working link.

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/

New site's uncomplicated SEO

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?

Sponsored by Search Engine Optimisation Company UK

New keyword targets & shorter title

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").

SEO with phpbb message boards

I removed session IDs for Google and Slurp so that they can index every thread on the forum.

Go to includes/sessions.php and find

global $SID;

if ( !empty($SID) && !eregi('sid=', $url) )

Replace with

global $SID, $HTTP_SERVER_VARS;

if ( !empty($SID) && !eregi('sid=', $url) && !strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Googlebot') && !strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'slurp@inktomi.com;'))

So it should look like this:

function append_sid($url, $non_html_amp = false)
{
global $SID, $HTTP_SERVER_VARS;

if ( !empty($SID) && !eregi('sid=', $url) && !strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Googlebot') && !strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'slurp@inktomi.com;'))
{
$url .= ( ( strpos($url, '?') != false ) ? ( ( $non_html_amp ) ? '&' : '&' ) : '?' ) . $SID;
}

return $url;

I'm testing all my changes by comparing the modified www.learn-english-grammar.com to the unmodified www.learn-english-vocabulary.com. This one works. 53 grammar pages are indexed by Google and only 4 vocabulary pages (the ones with direct links to them from external sites).

Blog comment spam

I've written about anchor text and links from different IP addresses. Well by leaving comments on different blogs you can get both. Use a name that has one or more of your keywords and the URL for your site... The problem is that too many spammers are doing this. You may have noticed the spam comments on this blog. I delete them as fast as I can, but I've been getting thousands of them and I can't keep up. I spend more time deleting comments than writing posts...

Anyway, bear with me when you see bad comments. I'm going to delete them and do something to stop them.

Where does your anchor text come from?

It's no secret that having links from lots of different web sites is important. There's an argument that the IP address of each web site also plays a role. For example if I have ten domains (all linked to each other) under one hosting package (which means they share the same IP) I get a little boost. Take the same domains and put each one on a different host and I get a bigger boost. There is some evidence to support this claim in the form of a few examples, but a more sytematic test would be nice. There's another discussion on the same forum about different IPs.

I'm always talking about anchor text, and I see competitors with 30,000 pages indexed beating my 800 or so pages. I figure the anchor text from those 29,000 pages is what's killing me. I'm certain that's part of it, but the IP addresses of incoming links may play a bigger role than I thought while links from different domains may play a minor role if they come from a common IP.

Text links over image links?

Of course text links are better than image links because of anchor text. So naturally if your main navigation is an image map, you want text links too, probably in the footer. And of course you want Google to count the text links on the footer rather than the anchor text-worthless image map links. I thought I had solved this problem (on my ESL web site by moving my image map code to the bottom (underneath my footer html). I figured that text links on the bottom that said "ESL go-free English second language home" would help me out for important keywords like "ESL" and "English second language" or "English as a second language". Even thgouh Google says it doesn't count "as" and "a", the results were different.

Well they still are different from each other, but they are not much different than they were April 27. For "English second language" I'm exactly the same, at #8 (#6 allinanchor). For "English as a second language" I'm up one spot to #17 (#15 allinanchor). Now I recently allowed Google to index my message boards which should mean that 1,000 or so pages get indexed at some point. If my allinanchor rankings go up, I'll know it's working - I'll know Google is counting my text links in the footer. If they don't I'll cry. And then I'll try to figure out a way to make sure Google counts my text links...

Sponsored by Web Design Company Manchester, UK

Tools for choosing keywords

1. A tool for Google Adwords publishers to use when forming advertising campaigns.

2. Overture's search term suggestion tool

3. Digital Point's keyword suggestion tool, which shows popularity on Overture and WordTracker

New keyword targets

One thing I love about blogs is that it's easy to change the title of every page and since that title is linked for all my blogs (I use movable type) that's some serious anchor text. For example, I hit #10 for "stock market idea" with my Stock market investment blog, but I still wasn't seeing much traffic so I decided to go after "stock market investment" too. My new title: A stock market idea & stock market investment weblog

Another site went up to #4 for "NY Giants news" (#3 for "NY Giant news"). I'm getting good traffic but not from that search term. I really wanted "New York Giants" or at least "New York Giants football". I figured I was diluting my keywords too mcuh with "NFL-Giants: NY Giant news from a New York Giants football fan" so the new title is NFL-Giants: NY Giant news - New York Giants football. By the way, for all you page rank fans (Hey I like PR too but it's more like something to look at than something that gets you good rankings), this site dropped from PR 5 to PR 4, but search engine rankings increased. I haven't lost any links and two of them come from PR 6 sites so I can't explain the drop. But I'm not too worried about it either.

Cheap content

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...

Search engine news

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.

More on the importance of 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).

Keyword stuffing: Yahoo likes it but Google hates it

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...

Getting banned from search engines

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.

Where do search engine robots want your text?

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.

SEO mistakes: - vs. _

It has been reported that Google treats ESL-blog as a URL with the keywords ESL and blog. ESL_blog would be one keyword, literally ESL_blog (I can't imagine anyone ever searching for that). I've written about domain names before, and they are not a huge factor but if you believe as I do that every little bit helps, use dashes not underscores in your domain names, at least for now. Google being as smart as they are should correct this seemingly dumb distinction between underscores and dashes soon (I hope).

from #95 to #62

Recently, ESL go.com moved up from 65 to 62. This may have been a result of clicking. Anyway, since I started this journal of my search engine rankings, I've gone from #95 to #62 for the search term "ESL" on Google. 33 spots in 2.5 months isn't too shabby. Here's a very brief recap on what I've been doing to get these results:

SEO tip #1 - Get your keywords in the title. Putting "ESL" in the title three times (instead of one time) got me from 95 to 78 in Google search results. Some of the increase may have been the result of new incoming links however.

SEO tip #2 - When you get links, look for increased link popularity and keyword density by getting keywords in text links to your site.

Theese seem to have had the biggest effect, in addition to clicking (as mentioned above). There are other things too, which you can read about in past entries.

Sponsored by UK Web Site Designer

Moving code from the top

It's well known that search engines value what's at the top of a page more than waht's at the bottom. Naturally you want lots of keywords near the top. Currently the top of my page (not counting the head) looks like this:

<body>
<a name="top"></a>
<img src="http://www.eslgo.com/graphics/ESL_English_learning_teaching.jpg" width="748" height="94" border="0" usemap="#Map">
<h1>ESL go - free English as a second language: learning ESL + teaching ESL/<h1>
<p class="normal">ESL go.com is a free English community of ESL students and ESL teachers. The goals of ESL go.com are 1- To give ESL students <strong>help learning English as a second language</strong> through <a href="classes.html">free ESL classes</a> and <a href="forum.html">free English practice message boards</a>.
2- To share <strong>teaching ESL</strong> <a href="resources.html">activities for TESOL, TESL, and TEFL</a> with ESL teachers.</p>

That's because I moved the image map (which goes with my header graphic) to the bottom of the page. I used to have this:

<body>
<a name="top"></a>
<img src="http://www.eslgo.com/graphics/ESL_English_learning_teaching.jpg" width="748" height="94" border="0" usemap="#Map">
<map name="Map">
<area shape="rect" coords="6,8,142,50" href="index.html" target="_parent" alt="ESLgo.com home page" title="ESL go.com home page">
<area shape="rect" coords="580,23,619,37" href="about.html" target="_parent" alt="About ESLgo.com" title="About ESL go.com">
<area shape="rect" coords="628,23,675,37" href="sitemap.html" target="_parent" alt="Table of contents for ESLgo.com" title="Table of contents for ESLgo.com">
<area shape="rect" coords="681,23,742,37" href="mailto:jim@eslgo.com" alt="Email comments to jim@eslgo.com" title="Email comments to jim@eslgo.com">
<area shape="rect" coords="681,45,743,85" href="forum.html" target="_parent" alt="ESLgo.com's English practice message boards" title="ESLgo.com's English practice message boards">
<area shape="rect" coords="559,45,676,64" href="slinks.html" target="_parent" alt="Links for English students" title="Links for English students">
<area shape="rect" coords="559,67,677,85" href="tlinks.html" target="_parent" alt="Links for English teachers" title="Links for English teachers">
<area shape="rect" coords="435,45,554,64" href="sstore.html" target="_parent" alt="ESL and English learning products for students" title="ESL and English learning products for students">
<area shape="rect" coords="437,67,554,85" href="tstore.html" target="_parent" alt="ESL and English learnin products for teachers" title="ESL and English learnin products for teachers">
<area shape="rect" coords="314,45,432,64" href="quizzes.html" target="_parent" alt="Test your English grammar and vocabulary" title="Test your English grammar and vocabulary">
<area shape="rect" coords="191,45,309,64" href="classes.html" target="_parent" alt="Free online English classes" title="Free online English classes">
<area shape="rect" coords="191,67,432,85" href="resources.html" target="_parent" alt="Activities for the ESL or EFL classroom" title="Activities for the ESL or EFL classroom">
</map>
<h1>ESL go - free English as a second language: learning ESL + teaching ESL</h1>

I'll let you know if I see any improvement. ESL go is currently #67 for the search term "ESL" on Google...

SEO web site

http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm has some useful advice for checking out your competition's use of keywords and comparing them to your own. Now they provide this advice hoping that you'll pay for their SEO services, but the free information is quite useful on its own.

Title length + keyword repetition

Not too long ago, I changed a title to "ESL go: free English as a second language - learning ESL + teaching ESL" When my site showed up in a google search it looked like this: "ESL go - free English as a second language: learning ESL..."

I wanted that third "ESL" to show up, thinking it might boost my rankings because while I'm stuck in the 60's and 70's, a top ten site has the same page rank as me, but "ESL" in the title three times.

So I changed my title to "ESL go - free English second language learning ESL teaching ESL" ("as" and "a" aren't included in searches anyway). Now the entire title shows up in Google seach results but the ranking improvement has been marginal: I think I went from 68 to 63.

key words in the title

Previosly, the keyword "ESL" was mentioned once in my ESL site's title and heading. I recently changed the title so that it's now mentioned 3 times: ESL go - free English as a second language: learning ESL + teaching ESL.

What kind of affect has this had? Not as significant an effect as I would have hoped. I seem to have moved up about 15 spots, from the mid-nineties to #80. Google has also registerd about 40 new links to my site (though my page rank is still 6) so link popularity may have also fueled the increase.

Key words in text links

I recently realized something I've been doing wrong since I started ESL go.com - English as a second language learning and teaching and that is the text of the hyperlinks. For example a link like ESLgo doesn't help for the keyword ESL. That's why a domain name like esl-go might have been better. Now I realize the problem and ask people to put ESL go in the text link. Of course other ESL sites don't want me to do better in the search engines so I get annoyed dealing with webmasters who insist on eslgo for my site's title.

Another thing I realized is that graphic links don't contain any keywords. Master of the obvious eh? On my site, I have a graphic header and drop down menus for a footer, and in the end my 250 pages of internal links don't help me out with key words at all. The header has to stay, but my footer will be redesigned to consist of keyword rich text links.

Domain names and SEO

According to http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary/english/201, Lycos does consider domain names when determining search results (so other search engines may too) and if you want to make sure that words are separated, use a hyphen. That tells me that for my ESL web site, I should have all links pointing to www.esl-go.com and own www.eslgo.com (point it to www.esl-go.com) since it's the one people will remember and type into their browsers.

The Lycos guy points out that it's a small factor, but every little bit helps, no? Anyway, it's too late for ESLgo.com, but www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com is a name that tries to take advantage of this. Of course if you like my site you'd better add it to your favorites; www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com may be tough to remember...