Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

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.

Popularity: 11%

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.

Popularity: 13%

Friendly Links
One of the nice things about being a well known blogger and knowing a lot of bloggers well is that no matter what you are promoting some of your friends have probably covered the topic or similar topics in the past. Asking friends for links from related posts is a good way to get a couple extra links if you need them.

Leading vs Following
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs not only get many links from within their community, but they also lead new ideas (instead of just following competitors) to create strategic content and get links from outside their traditional communities.

Easy Community Link Ideas
I am not suggesting that everyone should go around spamming all of these sites, but it does not take a lot of effort to put up a blog on a community site, write a half dozen decent posts, and tag them with popular relevant tags to drive link equity from the community hub sites to your blog on their site and on through to your personal websites.

• eBay offers member blogs
• Fast Company recently started hosting member blogs on their beta site
• Intuit offers their JumpUp community
• and of course older traditional community blog hosting sites like Wordpress.com also work.

(more…)

Popularity: 14%

Getting other websites to link to you is one of the best search engine optimization method to help your site rank higher in search engines. Your site will be more popular in the eyes of search engines such as Google if more websites link to you. This in turn, will result your site to be ranked higher in search engines and this also means that you will have a higher relevancy rank than any other website that has less incoming links that you do.

If you are a webmaster who frequently make reciprocal link exchanges with many websites, you will definitely want to consider on having a software that will verify whether your link exchange partner maintains your sites link.There are many high-end softwares that has this feature but unfortunately, they are all either a commercial software or an outdated software that may contain malicious code.
(more…)

Popularity: 19%

Have you noticed that it is easer to get ranked higher on Google with older websites than it is with new websites? Have you ever wondered why is this so and what does it take for you to do to get a high ranking if you have a new website?

Why is it easier to get high rankings with older websites?

Spammers oftenly use brand new domain names to make a quick profit. Spammers often buy hundreds of domains at once and fill them with crap or scraper content and hoping to make a profit with the advertisements that appears on the sites (usually spammers use AdSense to put ads on these kind of sites). Black-hat webmasters also sometimes use new domains to test for new search engines exploit (mainly on spamming techniques)

It is obviously difficult for Google to know which sites (or domains) can be trusted and this is why Google had invented a filter system which down-ranks new websites until Google decides they can be trusted.
(more…)

Popularity: 34%

Some of you may already know this but for those who don't, here are the facts.

- According to this report, as many as 60 directories were penalized by Google
- The directories had dropped in rank
- Google are now specifically targeting paid link directories (as it is against Google's Quality Guidelines)
- Competitors may have helped Google by making a report by a paid link reporting form

Big and well known web directories such as Aviva, Alive, Big Web Links, Ewebpages, Directory Dump, Elegant Directory, and Biz-Dir are heavily affected and hundreds of directory pages have been removed from Google's index.

Read the rest of this entry @ WebProNews »

Popularity: 12%

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.
(more…)

Popularity: 15%

At WebmasterWorld forum, a hot debate about the possibility of Google removing the PageRank score from the Google Toolbar.

This is because of a few reasons:
- Toolbar PageRank numbers are always out of date…usually 3 months or more
- There are cases of 'buggy PR updates' that seriously misrepresent a sites or page's real PageRank.
- Matt Cutts (from Google) has frequently blogged that PageRank updates are a non-event around Google
- A flawed economy of massive link building and trading to increase a certain sites or page's PageRank.

Google is keeping an eye on this situation seriously despite the rants that go on and on in forum threads.
(more…)

Popularity: 13%

1. For your blogs (eg. Wordpress) add a "Similar Posts" or "Related Posts" feature. I recommend using the Similar Posts plugin.

2. Make a list of popular posts (Top 5 or Top 10 list) and feature it preferably on your sidebar or anywhere that is suitable for your blog/site.

3. Build a quality and long-term inbound links. - Go to the Link Building section for more help.

4. Open an account at Technorati and claim your blog. Make use of the Technorati tags.

5. Do a sticky post which are keyword rich that always appears on your homepage. You can also do a separate sticky post for each of your category to spice things up a little. WP-Sticky is highly recommended.

6. Take advantage of the Buzzlogic tool to identify the influential bloggers and get them to link to you by referring their site to your readers first. Get into their blogroll as trackbacks and comment will not do much good.

Popularity: 19%