Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

The ROI of traditional Digg focused link bait was already pretty bad, but it just got much worse. In January Digg did an algorithm update which requires much more voting diversity to rank, and sometimes hundreds of votes to make the homepage.

In the past some of my friends were able to rank stories by just having a group of friends vote on the same stories. Now that Digg has so many members they de-weighted the ability of a small group to vote a story to the homepage by requiring a wider group of votes.

Originally posted 2008-02-04 01:21:56.

Popularity: 4% [?]

You need traffic, and Google can give you traffic. There are two ways that Google can send traffic to your site: an expensive way and a free way. I'm going to show you how to make Google give you traffic for free.

You need traffic, and Google can give you traffic. There are two ways that Google can send traffic to your site: an expensive way and a free way. I'm going to show you how to make Google give you traffic for free.
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Originally posted 2007-02-28 23:40:38.

Popularity: 7% [?]

First off, common sense usually goes pretty far. If a page or site links to a bunch of off-topic or low-quality garbage, you can feel safe, assuming the page does not pass link authority. If you have doubts, you probably do not want to link.

Secondly, Google has a toolbar that shows how it currently views a web page or website. The Google toolbar is one of the top search engine optimization tools for a person new to search engine marketing. It works on Windows and is downloadable at http://toolbar.google.com/.

PageRank is a measure of link popularity, which can come and go. It's not hard for a successful business to rent a few high PageRank links into their site and then leverage that link popularity for link exchanges. A site with decent PageRank can get penalized just the same as a site with low PageRank. Usually, you will want to error on the side of caution off the start.

Instead of making PageRank your primary criteria when evaluating a page or site, just think of it as a baseline.
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Originally posted 2008-03-13 10:18:43.

Popularity: 11% [?]

One of the primary ways that search engines find site pages is by following the links from your home page to other inside site pages (this process is also known as "spidering" or "crawling"). In order to allow search engines to effectively crawl your site and locate your inside pages, it is important to ensure that your menu structure does not present search engines with any barriers that interfere with their ability to follow internal links. Complicated JavaScript or other dynamic menu features can sometimes get in the way of effective crawling. As far as search engines are concerned, when it comes to finding links to your site pages, the simpler the better.
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Originally posted 2007-03-08 23:36:15.

Popularity: 4% [?]

You may have hear it here and there, get links, get lots of links to your website. By getting links, it is the solution to your website problem. Well, what people are saying is not a myth according to my experience and I believe that they are true.
Getting a related backlink to your site will boost up the authority of your site in the eyes of search engines. Having related and relevant content with each other's site represents the legitimacy of your site to search engines that it is not just another spam blog. The whole idea about related backlinks is that as long as it is relevant, related and natural then it's all good.
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Originally posted 2007-10-11 06:33:42.

Popularity: 6% [?]

On-page Optimization Explained

There are two main types of search engine optimization – on-page and off-page. On-page is probably the simplest of these two aspects of search engine optimization. It relates to the elements on the web page itself. That is, the words, and what importance is given to the words on the page.

Search engines want to know first and foremost what a web page is about. So they will look at the various word elements. Search engine robots (or "bots") cannot read images or things like javascript or most other scripting languages. So they have only the pure text to rely on. They look for various clues within the HTML (hyper text markup language) on the page to find out the important words.
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Originally posted 2007-03-17 19:13:00.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Most directories are not of amazingly high quality, listing many lousy websites. Martinibuster, a link building guru, often emphasizes avoiding being heavily located in known SEO circles.

For example, common SEO strategies for a new site might be to list a site in a bunch of directories, write a press release or two, trade links with many low-quality sites, get a few links from signature files from SEO forums, and submit a few articles to various article banks.

If your link profile matches that of most SEO websites, then it may be harder to rank than if you can come up with creative ways to get links from places that few other SEOs are listed.
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Originally posted 2008-02-29 12:45:11.

Popularity: 4% [?]

When the supplemental index was first launched Google labeled the supplemental results. SEOs came up with hacks for figuring out how many supplemental results different websites had, and after they got popular Google disabled them and removed the supplemental results label.

Google has an auxiliary index where it stores some documents it may not trust enough to include in its regular index. Supplemental search results are used to provide search results when not enough regular search results are available. Why do sites get put in the supplemental results?
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Originally posted 2008-05-29 00:12:06.

Popularity: 3% [?]

A recent theme in SEO is finding ways to appear natural. Search engines do not want the most optimized sites at the top of the search results. They want the best pages and best sites.

There are only so many things search engines can look at to determine the quality of a website. You can emulate many of them, but as search algorithms advance, it will continue to get more difficult. Inevitably, influencing people directly (instead of going after the algorithms) is going to have a higher ROI for many webmasters.

How do you create a natural linkage profile? Create something that lots of people link to without you needing to ask them. Build a real brand that will get people's attention.

How do you write optimized content? Make the page title clear and then write content remarkable enough that people will want to reference it.

Originally posted 2008-02-05 09:07:16.

Popularity: 4% [?]