SEO Tips & Information

Trading links with other websites can still be a help in boosting the performance of a website. One way links are best but a link exchange can still be good. I tend to think of a good link exchange as an insurance policy. If the links to my sites fall away it’s likely my link partners will still pass me good link juice - a kind of safety in numbers thing.

If you’re going to trade links with another site there are a few things to look out for. Personally, I never feel comfortable about doing a link exchange unless I’m getting a fair deal at the time of the exchange. I also like to feel confident the value of the link I get won’t drop off over time. For these reasons I always do some research on a potential link partner before doing a trade. Here are the main things I look for:-

Check the backlinks make the PageRank believable

Does the PageRank of the site match the number of backlinks the site has? Examine the site’s backlinks using Yahoo SiteExplorer. Got to www.yahoo.com and type in link: followed by the domain you want to check, e.g.

link:www.dowebseo.com

If the site has a PR of 4 and only 2 links, the odds are the PageRank shown on the Google toolbar is out of date and the real PR of the site is a lot less.

What share of the available link juice will you get?

How many other outgoing links are there on the webpage you’ll get a link from? Are there loads of links in the sidebar/ blogroll and footer? I never trade with a site that has more than 10 outgoing links on its homepage and unless the site has PR > 5, I like to see less than 5 links. If the page is PR 3 and there are 50 outgoing links, you aren’t going to get a lot of link juice passed your way.

Does the site have unique content that will turn up in searches?

Check if the site contains content duplicated on other sites. Take a few phrases from the site and do a search for them on Google. Place the phrases in double quotes when doing a search, e.g.

"this is the phrase to search for"

If the phrase turns up on a number of sites, the content is copied and the site is not a good candidate for a link exchange.

Does the website look a bit shady?

Does the name of the domain match the theme of the content? For example if the domain name is pet-food related but the site contains reviews of gadgets like mobile phone’s stay away. It’s likely the site is a dropped domain and the value of any backlinks it has are likely to be discounted by Google.

Does the site look like it sells links?

Does the site contain other outgoing links to unrelated sites on different themes? If it does then the site may be selling links rather than gathering quality link exchanges. The value of any link from the site might be devalued by Google.

There are other things you can look out for but I’ll go into these in a later blogpost. Following the 5 tips above is a quick way to spot the majority of bad link partners.

General SEO, Link-building

Back a while ago I wrote about a simple way to find dofollow blogs. The method I recommended showed how to find blogs that were part of the “u comment I follow” movement. Recently I’ve come across another set of SEO tips on how to find blogs to comment on. This method lets you find blogs with a specific domain extension, e.g. .gov or .edu. These blogs are usually thought to be more valuable than .com sites since Google reputedly puts more trust in links from .gov or .edu sites.

Finding .gov or .edu blogs is really easy. All you need do is use the site: operator in the Google search box.

For example, to find blogs on .gov sites:

site:.gov inurl:blog

or blogs on .edu sites:

site:.edu inurl:blog

Of course visiting blogs found using the above method doesn’t mean the blog is necessarily dofollow. to make spotting dofollow blogs easier, I’d recommend using the FireFox browser and installing the NoDoFollow plugin. This plugin highlights nofollow/ dofollow links on a web page and will help you pin down possible linking opportunities.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

Happy blog hunting!

General SEO, Link-building

When you want to boost the performance of your website in SERPs, you need to get backlinks. Submitting to directories is one of the easiest ways of building links. Backlinks from directories aren’t normally the strongest types of backlink you can get but directory submission beats most other forms of link-building for its shear ease.

Often the recommended route for making submissions is to do it manually. Make a post on a webmaster forums asking for advice on directory submission and you’ll probably get a ton of responses saying that the manual way is the best. Trouble is, no-one every says what they really mean by doing it manually. Really, what people advise when the recommend submitting manually to directories is:-

Make sure you submit your site details to the most appropriate category in the directory

If you don’t submit your site to the most appropriate category, two things are likely to happen:-

1. The directory owner will be more likely to reject the submission as spam.
2. Since your website details are out of context the worth of your backlink will diminish.

The problem with using fully automatic directory submitter tools to do submissions is that your relying on the tool choosing the categories for you. You’ll save a load of time and make hundreds of submissions but you’ll never really be confident that the submissions end up in the best categories.

There’s a similar issue with paying someone else to do manual submissions for you. How do you know they’ll pick the best categories? A lot of times you’ll find people offering to do 1000 manual submissions for $10 or so. These prices are so low they make me suspicious - that’s 1 cent per directory! People must value their time very low to be able to run such a service. Are they really just running a fully automatic submission program?

The best method for Directory Submission

If you want to be sure that the directory submissions are done correctly, the best way is to do them yourself. You can still use a software package to help though - a semi-automatic directory submission software package.

Semi-automatic packages load up directories and prefill the submission form with your website details BUT unlike fully automatic packages they let you verify the selected directory category before making the submission. You save time but can still ensure quality submissions.

One of the best semi-automatic directory submitter packages I’ve come across is SliQ Submitter. This neat, easy to use package lets you submit to over a 1000 directories. The package costs $10 for 3 months use. If you want to use the package for longer you just pay another $10. For your $10 you get to submit details for as many websites as you like and you get updated directories download automatically from the SliQ Submitter website.

For more information on directory submission, see Directory Submission SEO Tips.

General SEO

This question gets asked a lot on webmaster forums. Usually people want to know whether their new domains are in something called the Google Sandbox. Google is reputed to deliberately make new domains do poorly in SERPs. The length of time that a new domain spends in the sandbox is usually thought to be about 5 or 6 months. The advice given when trying to make a new website rank well for a set of keywords is:-

1. Keep adding good, keyword-rich textual content.
2. Keep adding backlinks with good anchor text.
3. Wait!

People also ask if there’s a secret to escaping from the sandbox. The advice here is to get high PR links, i.e. links Google trusts. This is meant to help a new domain escape from the sandbox and begin ranking well in a shorter period. Of course, no-one outside Google really knows if the sandbox exists for new domains but my experience is that there is very probably some age-related factor affecting the performance of domains.

The very first website I tried to optimise struggled for the first few months it went live, moving from page 9 or 10 of the results to about page 4 or 5 after 5 months or so. A strange thing began to happen around month 6 though. At certain times of the day, my website would appear in the top 4 results for a pretty good keyword. It would then drop back for the rest of the day. This continued for about a month until eventually I hit the jackpot and stabilised in the #4 spot. I then hovered around this position - say between #4 and #5 until the site was approximately one year old when it stabilised at #2. Ever since the site has rotated between #1 and #2.

Here’s the Google analytics for the site over the first year and a bit after the site went live. Organic traffic only started to really increase after the first 6 months even though I’d done a ton of link-building from the second week. The traffic in the first 6 months is also inflated in the graph below since about 50 to 75% came from Google Adwords

Of course, this graph doesn’t prove anything about how domain age affects performance in SERPs but I’ve since repeated the experience with other websites - for the first few months of the website’s life, SERPs performance and traffic can be hard to come by.

General SEO

In earlier posts on do follow blog commenting, I’ve given some simple tips on how to find dofollow blogs. I’ve recently come across another really neat way of finding relevant dofollow blogs. To get the most benefit from a blog comment, there are three key things to find:

1. The blog comment will be on a page with a decent PageRank.
2. The link to your website will have use your keywords as the link anchor text.
3. The blog is dofollow, i.e. the link won’t have a rel=”nofollow” attribute.

This link-building tip can help you with all three of these factors. The tip involves finding blogs that have the KeywordLuv Wordpress plugin installed. The owners of these blogs want people to comment and in return they give back a dofollow link with keywords of your choice. It’s a fantastic plugin for both bloggers and blog commenters.

To find blogs with the KeywordLuv plugin installed, search for the following on Google:

“YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field”

Keep the quotes around the search term and DON’T replace YourName or YourKeywords - type the search phrase exactly as it appear above. All blogs that have Keyword Luv installed, have this text as an instruction to commenters on how to get their keywords as anchor text. This tip helps with point 3 above and, if we assume that on average higher PR blogs will appear higher in the SERPS, it might be of some help with point 1 above too.

Helping out with point 2 is simple too - add your keywords to the search phrase. So if your keywords are SEO tips, search for this:

seo tips “YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field”

Google will then return results containing all of the phrases. Spend a few minutes seaching and you’ll find loads of blogs to comment on. Remember to make a good, relevant comment that adds to the blog post/ discussion. Owner’s of blogs with KeywordLuv are good enough to provide high-quality links to their commenters so don’t abus the blogs by spamming or the owner will go no follow wiping out most of the worth of any links.

For more link-building tips, read: Using Press Releases to build links and Link-building using DoFollow Blogs

Blogspot SEO, General SEO, Link-building

Whenever you ask for advice on SEO for a website, the main advice you get given on webmaster and SEO forums is to keep building links. This is usually closely followed by advice to keep adding fresh content. Link building is an essential part of SEO - having great content is good but nothing beats a nice set of links from high PR pages.

As far as adding new content regularly, if your site ISN’T a blog, I’ve never found that adding lots of fresh content has significantly improved the site’s ultimate performance in SERPs.

What I mean is that if your site is selling a particular product or service it’s usually optimised for a specific set of keywords. If I have a page optimised for a specific keyword then the performance of that page in SERPs doesn’t seem to improve a great deal just because I add extra pages to my site on a similar topic. The extra pages might start to do well for the keywords they target but the older pages on my site remain pretty static in SERPs unless I go and get more incoming backlinks. The hard part about adding new pages is to make the pages work as well as your existing pages. After all there’s likely to only be a smallish set of keywords that are worth attacking in SERPs.

I’ve come across some people who were a bit overkeen on adding new content to their websites. I’ve seen sites almost turned into article directories where they add a new page containing a short article every couple of days. As more and more articles get added, the article contents gets increasingly irrelevant to the main topic of the site. The articles will pick up long-tail traffic but the traffic will be mainly junk as the visitors will land on a page with little relation to the main purpose of the site. Some people put in more effort and try to write more and more  landing pages for different keywords. Often they end up falling into the same trap as the pseudo-article directory approach, the keywords on each page get less and less relevant and although the number of visitors increases, the visitors are less and less likely to stay on the site and buy the goods on offer.

Some tactics for adding fresh content can have a negative effect on SEO and should be avoided. Never be tempted to add a directory (like a PHPLd directory) to your site expecting that as people submit listings your content will grow and improve your SERPs performance. Directories are unlikely to be looked on favourably by Google.

In most of my site’s niches my main competitors have very static sites with homepages that change very infrequently - sometimes not for months. This doesn’t seem to harm them and their position in SERPs is very stable.

Of course, regularly adding fresh content (new pages or additional or altered text on existing pages) does have advantages. If your site is updated often, Google will reindex your site more often, meaning that any changes you make will be reflected in the SERPS more quickly. For example, if Google reindexes your homepage every day, you can try out a new title tag with new keywords one day and see how you do in the search results the day after. If Google only reindexes your site every couple of weeks, you’ll only be able to see the effect on SERPs of a change once every two weeks.

So, does adding fresh content improve SERPs performance? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes” and “maybe”. Yes, fresh content helps if you have a blog and you just want to attract visitors and readers - who might be tempted to click on some nicely placed Adsense. If your site is selling a product, if the new content is highly relevant to the product and written to encourages sales, fresh content is very useful. It can be a lot of effort to come up with great new content though. Don’t worry though if you can’t keep coming up with new content, your old content will still keep on working for you.

General SEO, Keywords, Link-building

Since making this blog dofollow 3 months ago, I’ve experienced a big rise in spam comments with over 2000 total spam comments being posted. Luckily Askimet seems very good at spotting spam so all I have to do is periodically press the Delete button to remove the scores of comments I seem to get every day. Still, it’s a monotonous job filtering out the good from the bad and I’ve considered going nofollow to discourage the spammers.

However, on balance, I think the reasons for being dofollow still stand. There are two main purposes:-

1. It encourages people to make comments. In exchange for a decent comment, people get a good backlink. I’m only OKing good comments though and any comment where the author name is a keyword I delete straight away.
2. People keep posting lists of dofollow blogs in various places - forums and other blogs for example - so from time to time I pick up backlinks. This is a pretty easy way of building links.

Having said that neither of these reasons for being dofollow are pretty strong. I’m still not getting many decent comments and the rate of link-building is low. If my PR drops in the next toolbar export or the rate of spam increases significantly in the next couple of months, I’ll probably go nofollow and hope the spam dies away.

General SEO

Back on my dofollow blog commenting tips post I gave some ideas on how to find dofollow blogs. One of the ideas I talked about was to simply search on Google for “list of dofollow blogs” to find lists of blogs other people had already put together. You can also use a dofollow blog search engine to search for blogs on particular topics.

Recently though I came across another way of finding dofollow blogs. There is a dofollow blog community called U COMMENT I FOLLOW. These blogs have dofollow comments and also display the following image on their website.

An easy way to blogs with this image is simply to search on Google for the words “u comment i follow”. Usually the blogs will have these words mentioned somewhere, often in the alt tag for the “u comment i follow” image. You can experiment by searching on the usual www.google.com search engine and on the images search engine http://images.google.com/.

Remember when commenting on blogs that links to your site from pages on relevant themes are likely to be worth more than those from irrelevant pages. To try and find dofollow blogs with relevant posts, you can experiment with combining search phrases, e.g. to find dofollow blogs related to software development, try searching for:

“u comment i follow” “software development”

This is an easy method of finding dofollow blogs. When you do find a dofollow blog, it will also be quite likely to link to other blogs that are dofollow so spend some time looking at the sites linked in the blogroll.

Remember though that any blog that is deliberately dofollow will also have an owner that is carefully vetting and moderating any comments. If you want your comment to be approved, make a quality comment rather than a short and spammy “Great post! Thanks for the info” type of comment. In my experience, comments where the author’s name is obviously a keyword, e.g. “seo tips” instead of “Dave” are very unlikely to be approved.

General SEO, Link-building

When I initially began optimising my main web site to improve the performance in SERPS I treated the exercise a bit like software engineering. I researched some keywords, mainly by looking at competitor sites, then wrote my web copy to include the main keywords plus a few long-tail variations. However, by no stretch of the imagination am I a salesman. I guess I wrote the web copy to include the keywords in various orders BUT I didn’t write copy that sells. I ran the text past a few people, including my wife, but these people weren’t marketing/ sales oriented either. Recently it’s been brought to my attention that my websites need rewriting to make them better selling tools. Here are the main tips I’ve been given:

Emphasise the Benefits

In order to get lots of keywords into a page, I tended to talk about features. Features are OK, but showing the benefits is really important. OK, so you can save a document to PDF but what really matters is that you can email your invoice, saving paper and postage and getting paid more quickly.

Build a Trustworthy Image

As my customer base grew I collected testimonials every now and again. I’d post the testimonials onto a page on my site but I could have made more use of them. For example, I could have placed testimonials directly onto the homepage so that new visitors would know they wouldn’t be alone in buying my products. The other thing I could have done is put the logos of larger, more well-known customers onto my homepage. These would be a quick visual cue to visitors that other big companies trusted me.

Have a Range of Products

The last major tip I was given was to increase the number of products on offer. With one, small product I could look like a bit of a hobbyist. With two, three or a complete range of products, I’d look more substantial and better able to give things like support and ongoing development.

Conclusion

When performing SEO, it needs to be part of an overall sales strategy. Not only do you need to get people to find your site, when they land there you need to be able to make a sale. You need to write Web copy that isn’t purely optimised for SEO. Your web copy needs to be clearly written, simple to follow and, most importantly, your copy needs  to sell benefits to your customers.

General SEO

I recently came across someone who was really chuffed he’d achieved #1 position on a major search engine (MSN) for the phrase Search Engine Optimisation. He got short shrift from some members of the webmaster community when the search volumes for the keyword were pointed out. There really weren’t a huge number of searches for the keyword since “search engine optimisation” is the British English spelling whereas most of the English-speaking world use “search engine optimization“, i.e. they spell optimization with a z.

Using Google’s keyword tool to look for monthly search volumes ..

search engine optimization - 300,000 searches
search engine optimisation - 18,000 searches

This means that, on Google at least, less than 5% of the searches are for the UK-specific spelling.

Now, you could assume the guy was a bit foolish to publicise his supposed success on a forum with an international group of members. The more knowledgeable members soon pointed out he was top of a very small heap.

On the other hand, you could think that the guy was being very astute. He was at least ruling the #1 position for a good keyword, even if the number of searches isn’t huge. If you aren’t on page 1 for a keyword then really you aren’t going to get much traffic. It’s better to concentrate on being on page 1 for a pretty good keyword than be on page 10 for a superb keyword with 20 times the search volume.

Making searches localised is a good way of reducing the pool of competitors - so “search engine optimisation” is easier than “search engine optimization” and “adsense optimisation” is easier to rule than “adsense optimization”. Of course, localising results doesn’t just involve choosing locale-specific spellings. For example, you might choose to concentrate on the keyword “web design london” rather than the ultra-competitive “web design”. Think carefully when choosing keywords for a website and, with young websites at least, start optimising for less competitive phrases first.

General SEO