SEO Tips & Information

One of the often repeated myths about Google PageRank is that these days it has no effect on the performance of a website in the SERPs. Today Google is supposed to treat content as king and in some ways this is true. Type a search phrase into Google and look at the results. As you go down from position 1 to 10 you’ll find that the PR of the sites in the better positions isn’t always higher than the PR of sites in the lower positions. Sometimes sites with a PR of 0 will outperform pages with PR 5 for a particular keyword. If you write a program to analyse the top 50 results though you’ll usually see a general trend towards lower PageRank values as you go further down the results.

With a little thought it should be pretty obvious that PageRank alone can’t determine the position of a website in the SERPs. Simply because two pages contain the same keywords and have the same pagerank doesn’t mean they’ll appear next to each other in the search results. Read my top 10 SEO factors post for more information on how non-PageRank factors affect the performance of a page in SERPs.

There is one way in which PageRank can have a BIG effect on the performance of a website though. Pages in the supplemental index are unlikely to turn up in the SERPs except for very obscure keywords. The best - if not the only - way of pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get backlinks from pages with decent PR. The higher the PR of the pages you can get links from the better. With smaller websites that have only 10 or 20 pages, a home page with a PR of 2 or 3 and a half-decent internal linking strategy, most of the site’s pages will be in Google’s main index.

However, with large database-driven sites that have thousands of pages, usually the only way of improving the performance of the site and pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get some high PR links to the homepage and to node pages within the site. Node pages are pages which link to lots of other pages in the site. In a site like a web directory, an example of a node page is a category page. For large sites, getting links from pages with PR 6 and above are ideal.

You can find the supplemental index ratio for a site using the site: command. First type the following into the Google search box to find the number of pages in Google’s main index for a website (replace www.dowebseo.com by the URL of the domain you want to examine). Note the number of results returned.

site:/www.dowebseo.com

Then type in:

site:www.dowebseo.com

and again note the number of results returned. The ratio of these numbers gives the supplemental index ratio for a site. For a large site with 30,000 pages and a homepage PR of 3 or less it’s fairly common to get a ratio of 0.075 meaning that less than 1% of the pages on the site regularly turn up in the SERPS. Getting some good links from high PR pages should pull more pages out of the supplemental index within a few weeks. For tips on link-building and ideas on where to find high PR pages, see link-building using dofollow blogs and link-building using dofollow forums.

admin General SEO, Google PageRank, Link-building

A couple of database-generated sites I own have in excess of 50,000 pages each. Building links for these sites requires a different strategy to link-building for my smaller sites with 5 to 10 pages.

With smaller sites you can quite easily build deep links to the inner pages of the site as well as links to the website’s home page. After building links to the main pages on a small site for a few months, you should end up with a good number of landing pages that do well in SERPs.

With larger sites though like PHPLd-based directories or PADKit-enabled software archives, it isn’t practical to build external links to all the pages on the site. The internal linking within larger sites is critical to the website’s performance in SERPs. Ideally, each page should get a decent number of links from some of the other pages within the site. As with all link-building, the best links are those from pages on a similar topic.

Link Back To Category Pages

Almost all large websites have a tree-like structure. The homepage links to category pages, the category pages to sub-categories and then finally, in the case of a software archive, to details pages. In the case of a software archive, each details page will show information about a single software package. The main link juice or PageRank for the site is likely to be provided by the external links to the site’s homepage. The PR will then flow like water through to the category and subcategory pages to the details pages. The link juice can be better distributed around the site by linking back from the deeper pages to the higher level pages as shown in this picture.

Link Related Pages

If the internal linking strategy ends here though, each details page is getting only a small share of the available link juice. By the time the link juice gets to the details pages it’s been divided up many times so that there’s little left. More work must be done to maximise the link juice to the details pages. The details pages are the real content of the site and the pages you really want to do well in SERPs.

A really good way of improving the performance of details pages is to link related details pages together. For example, on a software archive, if a text editor program is listed on one details page, the page could also link to 10 other text editor details pages on the same site. Luckily, when software is submitted to a PAD-enabled software archive, the PAD file lists keywords for the software so with a bit of programming you should be able to quite easily match programs based on keywords.

admin Link-building, Uncategorized

Google provides a really handy keyword tool to help find search volumes each month for specific keywords. The most obvious use of the tool is to find the best keywords to optimise your website for. All you need do is type in a possible keyword, e.g. “small business software” that you think people will search for then press the Get Keyword Ideas button to get a list of volumes for your keyword plus similar variations. Often you’ll find that the variations will have higher traffic volumes than the one you originally entered.

By picking keywords with higher traffic volumes, the theory is that you will get more visitors to your sites. In practice though, high volume keywords often have a lot of competition and getting your site into the coveted Google page one of SERPs can be difficult. The trick is to pick keywords which have a reasonable balance between search volumes and competitiveness so that you can get a decent amount of traffic without doing too much optimisation such as link-building. Finding this balance between search engine traffic and competitiveness is quite a difficult exercise. Although the Google Adwords Keyword Tool gives good figures for search volumes, it only gives a very rough guide to the level of competition. See the picture below: you get a nice number for the number of searches but only a roughly-scaled green bar for competitiveness.

A second use of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is as a research tool when thinking of a new market or product to attack. For example if you were thinking of designing a new fishing float and wanted to see how big the potential market was, you could look at the search volumes for words like “fishing float”. If the search volumes are low this can tell you either that the market is very small or that running a business selling ONLY fishing floats will be very difficult. Only recently, I’ve been asked for advice on internet marketing by a company who had invested thousands in developing a product for which there was no significant market. The product is excellent and worth patenting but with a little research it’s obvious that they need to develop a whole range of matching products to have a viable business.

admin Keywords

In my link building tips post about dofollow blog commenting, I forgot to mention one other thing to look for when commenting on a blog post - the Top Commentators Widget. If a Wordpress blog has this widget installed then the blog will show a sitewide list of the top commenters with links back to their sites. This means if you are in the top 3 to 5 commentators you get a free sitewide link to your website. Obviously, if you want to be in the top commenters list you need to get your comments approved so spamming is definitely a no-no.

If a Wordpress blog has the Top Commentators Widget installed, it’ll have a “Top Commentators” title on each page. If you make good comments on the blog then you are more likely to able to go back and make more since the blog owner obviously likes getting comments the widget is installed. Revisiting the blog regularly and making comments should allow to get a nice site-wide link from a blog with good PageRank if you’re lucky.

admin Link-building, Wordpress SEO Tips

As well as building links by posting on dofollow forums, it’s very easy to build links by posting on blogs. Try and make sure that any blog you post on allows dofollow comments - or rather doesn’t put the nofollow attribute on the website URL you put in the comment signature. However, if the blog post has a similar theme to your site and you make a good, interesting comment you might be surprised at how much traffic you get by click-throughs on the comment even if the link is nofollow. Here are a few tips for finding or commenting on dofollow blogs:-

Use a Specialist Search Engine

Use a search engine like www.commenthunt.com or http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/ to find blogs on the same topic as your site or keywords.

Use Google

Search for “list of dofollow blogs” and you’ll soon find blog posts listing loads of URLs for dofollow blogs. The downside of posting comments on these blog URLs is that they’ll soon be spammed to death as other webmasters do the same as you. Your comments have a high chance of being rejected or, in the worst case, the blog owner switches to nofollow.

Hire someone to do the commenting for you

An easy way is hire someone to do the posting for you. On webmaster forums like DigitalPoint, you’ll usually find a lot of offers in the Services thread. Somehow the people offering these services have a knack of finding high PR blog posts - PR 7 is the highest I’ve seen - on which comments seem to be regularly accepted. The downside of using one of these services is that the number of comments per blog post tends to rise rapidly, either because more people use the blog commenting service or because the people who used the service in the first place then make comments for loads of other sites. If you are lucky you’ll find a set of related dofollow blogs allowing you to quite easily find other high PR blog posts that no-one has commented on yet.

Don’t just comment on high PR posts

If a blog has high PR posts that are already spammed with scores of comments, you may find more recent low PR (even PR N/A or PR0) posts on the same blog that don’t yet have comments. It can be worth commenting on these posts. It’s likely the posts have higher PR than the Google toolbar currently shows and on the next PageRank toolbar export, you may find you’ve had a comment on a post that has had a good PR value for a few weeks and you also have had the bonus that there were few other comments on the post to share the link juice with.

For more link-building tips, see link-building using forums, using PAD sites to build links as well as simple link-building tips.

For more tips on finding dofollow blogs, see: http://www.dowebseo.com/general-seo/how-to-find-dofollow-blogs/

admin Link-building

As I discussed in my simple link-building tips post a while ago, dofollow forums are an easy way of getting links to your site. All you need to do is find a forum, sign up as a member, set up the links in your signature and start posting. Each time you make a post, the post will contain your signature links and the links will pass PR on to your sites.

If you do a search on Google for “list of Dofollow forums” you’ll soon find the URLs of dozens or hundreds of forums you can use to gain links. I’m not going to list hundreds of dofollow forums here, but good examples are DigitalPoint and SitePoint.

There’s no doubt that using forums to build links actually works in terms of raising PageRank and improving performance in SERPs. In the past I’ve got sites to PR 3 using forum links alone. However, as in other aspects of life, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and you need to bear in mind the following tips when using forums to build links.

The forum homepage should have a high PR

There’s nothing special about forums. Like every other website, the PR passed between pages is shared out. The higher PR of the homepage, the more link-juice is likely to be passed to your sites from the links in your forum posts and signatures. Sites like DigitalPoint and SitePoint have PRs of 6 or 7. Many other forums have far less PR to share out to all the forum posters. Having said that, if you find a small forums with a PR of 2 but few posts you might pick up more link-juice since PR 2/ 1000 posts is more than PR 6 / 100000 posts. This might not be an accurate picture of how the PR situation will work, but hopefully you see the argument.

The forum should have an active community

Lots of members making lots of posts. This has many benefits. If the forum content is regularly updated, Googlebot will visit the forums and index your posts and links more quickly. There will also be more threads on more topics, giving you more opportunity to make posts.

Try to use forums on a similar theme as your sites

For example, DigitalPoint and SitePoint are good for webmasters/ SEO sites since they are webmaster forums. There are loads of other forums around on games, gadgets etc. so pick ones that are suitable for your sites.

Try to use forums on topics you are interested in

Over time this may become the most important tip. Each signature link counts for little on its own. You need to make lots of posts to have a real effect on your sites. If the forum content bores you, posting will become a real drag.

Don’t rely solely on forum-posting for link-building

If you are determined you can build up a few hundred posts in a few weeks or months passing a reasonable amount of PR to your sites. The problem is that your older posts will fall deeper and deeper into the forum pages as new threads are created. Over time the link-juice passed to your forum posts and signature links will fall away. If you use Google Webmasters to keep track of your backlinks, you may find hundreds and hundreds of forum backlinks disappearing. If the links don’t show in Google Webmasters then they don”t count for anything in Google’s eyes.

For more link building tips, see simple link-building tips and link-building using PAD sites.

admin Link-building

One method of building links to your site is by submitting to PAD-enabled software directories or shareware/ freeware download sites. There are hundreds of these sites around the web. Unlike the usual web directories where you submit a short description of your website together with a link and a nicely worded anchor text, when you submit to a PAD site you are submitting a software package for listing. The details of the software package and its download URL need to be specified in a PAD file.

If you don’t develop software packages, what can you submit to the PAD sites? The temptation is to create and submit is a screensaver. You should easily be able to create a screensaver and PAD file, host them on your site then submit to 600 or so PAD sites and get some links.

Are these links worth it?

The benefits of the kinds of link you get from PAD sites are very variable.

If your site sells software then the links are very worthwhile. Both your site and the PAD site will have a similar topic/ theme and the links will help you in SERPs. The link juice you get from submitting fades away over a few weeks as the links to your site get buried deeper and deeper by newer submissions. You’ll need to top up the link juice by submitting updated versions of your software package every 3 or 4 weeks.

If you don’t sell software, you might find the benefits of the links are marginal at best. You’ll have made a few hundred spammy submissions for no gain. One reason that the links won’t benefit you much is that the PAD site is less likely than other directories to use your company name/ keywords as anchor text in the link back to your site. Most PAD sites simply show your domain’s URL. It could be argued that if you have a keyword rich domain name then you’ll see a greater benefit.

Unless you really do sell software, another reason why you may not see much benefit is that 99% of PAD sites are on the lookout for spammy submissions. Screensavers, toolbars, PDFs and ebooks are automatically red-flagged as spam. These kinds of items are increasingly likely to be rejected. Usually, if you get rejected the PAD site will automatically blacklist the submitting domain and reject any further submissions.

As with all directories, spam is an increasing problem. More and more of the PAD sites are switching to nofollow links and a growing number don’t even provide a nofollow link back to the submitting site.

Sometimes you’ll see SEO companies offering a PAD site submission service. Think before using such a service, as you could well be wasting your money.

For more information, read Link-Building Tips and Choosing Keywords for SEO Purposes.

admin Link-building

If you’ve got Adsense on your website, you might have wondered how you can increase the click-through rate and increase you earnings. I had a site that was beginning to do pretty well in SERPs and serving up a few thousand pages a day but the click through rate was awful. I had with a similar site and a similar amount of traffic but his click-through rate was 3 or 4 times mine. His earning per click was also much higher.

The main thing I noticed about the Google Ads on my website was that the ads weren’t particularly relevant to the page on which they were shown, e.g. I might have a page about DJ/ Disc Jockey software but the ads would be for generic “free software”.

By doing some research on Google I soon found some information. I also did a bit of digging around in the PHP script I’d used for my site. I’d purchased the script but after setting up my Adsense ID, spent all my time concenrating on building links and traffic.

The first thing I found in the script was that one of the Adsense blocks used google_kw:

google_kw = “free software downloads”

At first, I thought this was the cause of my problems. Maybe this ad block was making Google serve up free software ads for all the blocks on each page.

I thought I could do a far better keyword match by coding the PHP to specify relevant keywords for each page. A little more research showed though that you had to have an Adsense Premium account, serving up 2,000,000 pages a month to use google_kw. Using google_kw without a premium account a) didn’t work; b) was against the Google TOS. So I removed google_kw and expected this would help make the ads perform better. After a day or two I noticed the click through rate was still poor and the ads were still not relevant to the pages.

The next thing I tried was using special sections to highlight to Google the content to use for matching ads. I put the following around the main, meaty content on the page:


<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->


Still no luck. A day or two later the click through was still poor and the ads were still mainly “free software” oriented. Then I had a thought - not only did I have to highlight the content, I had to tell Google to ignore the irrelevant content. Here’s a picture of a typical page on the site - the green rectangle shows the keyword-rich content, the red shows the content I needed Google to ignore.
To help the user, I’d put a line of links back to previous levels along the top of each page. I’d put these links in bold to make them clearer to read. It’s also a good SEO strategy to bold hyperlinks too and I wanted my home page to be reinforced with the keywords “Free Software Downloads”. By the looks of it Google was seeing the bold text “Free Software Downloads” on the link and aiming most ads at this text. So I put the following around the line of links:


<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->


This did the trick, the ads were immediately more relevant to each page on the whole and the next day, the click through rate was 5 times the click-through rate before.

admin Adsense Optimisation Adse

You can have the nicest looking website in the world, with fantastic on-page optimisation but if you want to get found by search engines, the vital SEO ingredient you need are backlinks from other websites. Building links to a website is hard work, taking many hours. If you don’t have stamina or dedication, I’d recommend paying a profession link builder to do the work for you. If you’ve got the time though, the process of building links is relatively easy. To get quality links though takes a bit more effort.

Links have two main purposes:-

PageRank - DoFollow links are a must

A good dofollow link can raise the PageRank of your pages and make you do better in Google searches. Really there isn’t such a thing as a DoFollow link. A DoFollow link is simply a link which doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” attribute set in it HTML href. The ideal (high-quality) link is placed on a page on the right topic, with good PR, anchor text matching the keywords you want to rank for and in the middle of a paragraph of keyword-rich text. Getting all these factors right for a link is quite hard but if you get the opportunity for such a link, take it!

Traffic - DoFollow links are a bonus

You don’t have to build links just to do well in Google searches. If a link is well-placed it can bring traffic to your site. It’s essential that the link is placed on a relevant page, e.g. a comment on a popular blog post on the same topic as your website. As long as the link has the potential to bring you traffic it doesn’t matter if it has the nofollow attribute. Who knows, maybe the link will lose the nofollow attribute in the future.

Sources of Links

You can build links posting in forums that allow dofollow signature links and submitting to directories. It’s likely that all these links wil be of very low-quality and will pass little link juice to your site but they are easy to get. If you join a forum such as DigitalPoint or SitePoint you’ll also have the opportunity to pick up SEO tips while posting.

Slightly better quality links can be made by making comments on blogs. Most blog owners moderate the comments so it’s necessary to make a good, non-spammy comment to be sure your link sticks.

You can also do a limited number of link exchanges with other websites and even just ask for a link, e.g. from a friend’s website or from your customers or suppliers.

I’ll go into more detail on the different types of link building in a later post.

admin General SEO, Link-building

With cheap hosting allowing multiple domains to be hosted for a few dollars a month, it can be relatively inexpensive to build up a stable of websites in different niches. Using a network of sites you can link to your key, money-earning sites to boost their performance in SERPs.

The biggest barrier to building up a network of (say 20) sites is time and effort. Each site will need content and for each site you will need to build external backlinks. The easiest type of site to create when building a network is a blog. On each blog you can post an article every day or two to build up the content to 50 or so posts. The blogs can then go into a maintenance cycle with a new post each week.

Over at forums like DigitalPoint it’s possible to purchase articles to post on your blogs. The price of an article depends on whether it’s unique or already posted somewhere else on the internet. the content for your blogs needs to be unique to avoid getting hit by a Google duplicate content penalty. Unique articles might cost $10 each, but for the same money you can purchase PLR packages containing thousands of articles in a host of niches. If you buy PLR content, you’re going to need to reword/ rewrite the articles to make them unique. In fact, even if you think you are buying unique content it’s best to check the content really is unique using CopyScape before going live.

Two other problems arise when building a network of sites:-

1. Can you interlink the sites?
2. Do you need to hide the identity of the site owner?

The answer to point 1 is yes, interlink the sites where it makes sense, i.e. the blogs are on a similar theme. However, don’t do mass link exchanges between sites, e.g. in a network of 20 sites all sites linking to one another. See this Matt Cutts interview where he recommends interlinking no more than 10 sites.

The answer to point 2 is yes, of course. Interlinking too many sites by the same domain owner is a bad idea and may result in a penalty. Don’t rely on whois or nameguard protection to hide your identity, change the domain owner’s identity - ideally purchase the domains in different names. Change the owner ID before you even begin posting content or interlinking sites.

admin General SEO blog network