Posts by canadafred

Some good insights here.

Your suggestion is elementary.

Repeating keyphrases in each of these webpage components is over-optimizing and essentially of little value to the Internet visitor.

I strongly suggest the ethical SEO practice of Keyphrase Dynamicability whereas keyphrases are substantially variated; a much more rewarding practice then using the same keyphrases over and over again regardless of where they are located.

This is explained extensively on my blog.

Create something worth visiting.

Influencing off-site factors is search engine manipulation.

In today's world, the search engine still counts and values the link in spite of the link condoms and robot exclusions.

Do your keyphrase research to find industry specific and highly searched keyphrases. Make yourself some keyphrase targets.

Analyze your keyphrase competitors; check their coding, internal linking structure, backlinks etc.

Revolve a website around your keyphrase targets.

Read up on how to properly optimize your on-site webpage components.

Deploy a powerful internal linking structure.

It is understood that you should try to create unique, evolving and important content. Exceptional content will encourage incoming link building.

If you want to concern yourself with influencing off-site factors that will expediate your quest for top spots, rather than go out hunting for incoming links or creating useless articles/comments, create yourself an additional website/blog if you can justify them have unique marketing agendas. Make sure they contain unique cointent and in no way mimic your mother web site. Then focus on their on-site optimizable webpage components.

Do this for a while and you'll get pretty close to the very top spot in practically any keyphrase competition.

Not true. An adequate number of targeted text links from other domains will allow you to gain rankings. Just make sure that those terms are present in your "title" and visible on the page itself. Also the more relevant the site that links to your site is, the more "link juice" will be transferred for ranking purposes.

The problem with a four page web site is that even the most powerful link building scheme will max out in no time because of the lack of fresh content being inserted into the web site. There's a proportion to all of this incoming link building idea. Externally inflating the volume, relevancy and quality of incoming links quickly becomes a useless pursuit in this case.
It has been a long time since I've seen a powehouse four pager, eight pagers exist but four is a little bit on the puny side. Sure, it can be made to rise in the ranks somewhat with external stimulus but not for long and certainly not to the top bunch of keyphrase competitors. Now, if you think you have an example to show me otherwise, I'm open-minded enough to investigate.
This is why the web site owner should concentrate on marketing sources outside of SEO, other forms of Internet marketing perhaps, as suggested by other responses and outside the Internet altogether.

If you're trying to rank for very competitive terms you will likely wait forever to attain good rankings using only internal links.

Yep, it could take a long time or it can be speeded up too, depends entirely on the search engine marketing strategy. In the meantime, it is impossible not to acquire some incoming links, it happens naturally to some degree. If a webpage can ammass a volume of naturally generated links it can speed up the process of attaining credibilty and importance even more.

There is no doubt though, highly optimized well-crafted webpage/websites fair better in the SERPs, their rankings are easier to maintain and their market share of qualified traffic evolves as the web site promotion grows.

Could u please mention some of the advanced techniques used for SEO.

Basic SEO - work the optimizable webpage/website components.
Advanced SEO - learn to effectively use the English language to empower keyphrases internally.

My site has is not ranking well in ALEXA search Engine Rank.

Alexa isn't a good benchmark tool in determining ranking. Do keyphrase tests on Google, Yahoo and Bing to see where you stand amongst your keyphrase competitors.

can the moderator please remove this

Total hogwash. Domain age has nothing to do with how well you rank. The reason that older domains rank higher for certain keyword phrases is that they have had more time to accumulate inbound targeted text links.

Actually, what is important is credibility. Credibility can only be acquired over time. A web site that is well optimized and using ethical SEO strategies can acquire credibility rather quickly whereas a link building schemer needs much more time. Over time the cheater catches up but by then the ethical strategy is SERP levels ahead.

It doesn't take an intelligence level much above idiot to determine what the major keywords are just by viewing any site. There are search engines that still utilize the keywords meta tag to help them discern what your page is about. One of them is in the top three.

Ya, that's right but more than that too. Even Google takes into consideration what the web designer wants the search engine to think are the important keywords. The keywords meta tag is a search engine tag. The search engine created it and still use it. To not provide the search engine with such a valuable indicator is like going fishing in a canoe without an extra paddle (in case you lose one in the rapids).

After checking copyscape I see its about copy and paste.

There's just so much of it (replicated content) that it becomes difficult to have conversations with people, actual people who write stuff that may need steering in the right direction in order to become better optimizers. It all went nuts when Google stopped letting people have no content on their webpages except their ads. The minute they dictated that a webpage must have its own unique content and that they'd start penalizing for lack of content, heaven forbid on the monetized ad pages especially, the world went nuts trying to find innovative ways to create unique intelligent content and link mad. PR friekin' insane. To the extent some are going to generate links is absolutely unreal. Ads everywhere now, everybody making a nickel and dime here and there, and more at who's expense? The poor unsuspective small business web site owner mostly from North america and Europe paying into the farce and who's making the money?

Sorry about the rant. Here's a guy who's obviously at his limits again with all the spamming and the middlemen who so freely move his money around without transparency.

In your case you may want to use media outside the Internet like a magazine ad or a radio commercial. Get yout URL out in as many different ways as you can. Put your website address on your business cards, letterheads, envelopes... If you want local attention don't be shy to post message on bulletin boards, in flyers etc. Get networking too, let everyone you run across know about your site and its web address.

After 13 years of practicing SEO and hanging out with other optimizers I found that there are two types of search engine optimizers:
1.the real ones who know what they are doing
2.the ones that pretend to be like the real ones

...and the tools is where...

I thought you were writing about how to search then you throw in something about meta tags at the end of it. I have a question: What is your article about?

I thought your post was rather poorly written and essentially useless. I would think you'd be better off choosing another career. Thanks for showing up though.

Indeed there are several factors that contribute to Google's calculation of a webpage's PageRank; one significant source being the volume, credibility, importance and relevancy of the incoming links to the web page, another being the volume, credibility, importance and relevancy of the internal links (from the same domain or sub-domain) to the webpage; commonly known as the internal linking structure.

Let's look at this a bit more. I fail to see what's the PR frenzy is still about. Bear with me ...

A webpage can reach as high as a PR4 simply from the inside of the web site itself (this is quite common); beyond that it appears to require external stimulus; hence comes into the play the power of a corporate blog or additional website(s) dividing the marketing agenda logically. What I'm saying is, you can probably get to wherever you want on the PR scale armed with your own resources. For example, you may want to attain a PR7 status, for whatever reason. You probably could pull off a PR5 or 6 on your own, with the use of enough of your own ingenuity and you may have to maximize in your innovativeness. After that you'll most likely require additional fortitications so ... so eventually you get to PR7 and wonder, where the heck's my prize for this effort ...

Oh boy, you my dear need to start from the beginning.

Your suggested keywords have very little search frequency, not many people search for it. Example: kw vibrator is searched 0 times a month whereas vibrator is 1,830,000

1. You'll have to perform some keyword search frequency tests in order to determine what are the competitive keyphrases in your industry. What keyphrases are going to make your telephone ring if you can position your webpages highly in the SERPs. The one you pointed out is fairly useless with no significant competition to speak of. If all you want is the keyphrase you suggested then I would say to try to repeat it a couple more times in a Heading tag (Hx), an additional hyperlink or two on a secondary page, name an image keyphrase.jpg with a sentence or two describing the image in the alt attribute (while incorporating your keyphrase), name a webpage keyphrase.htm with a textual hyperlink or two to your splash page. That could be enough to bump your two remaining competitors.
2. Analyze the keyphrase competitors for the keyphrase that are worth targeting (read their content, understand their internal and incoming linking strategies, how many webpages in the site ...).
3. Come up with an attack plan and deploy it promptly.

I don't really have much of a problem with Adwords (it is actually a brilliant search engine marketing model), Adsense, on the other hand, is a disaster; worshiped as a god in some places, but that's another story.

From a search engine optimizer's perspective, I ask myself: why should a webpage be rewarded in any degree for successfully manipulating a search engine; especially for artificially enhancing the volume, credibility and relevancy of links. How did links become the pot of gold whereas anybody, anywhere in the world, could profit just by exploiting links? Links once had usefulness and English words had meaning.

Then I ask myself from an ethical business perspective, out of concern for my neighbours and my once proud industry: How can one search engine become the middleman who so generously awards money, success and free marketing to webpage promotions designed to exploit, pillage and plunder the average, unknowing, deceived consumer and finally, how can the misuse of links for profit (ad click scams, global, celled and satellite click warehouses) be such an easy source of revenue, off the backs of the average Joe web site owner; how cvould Joe's search engine marketing budget be so easily diverted; sometimes to causes that have malicious intent. These troubling questions cannot be resolved with transparency. Unfortunately, in today's search engine world, everything that a search engine does is a trade secret.

Also is there a possibility of an orphan page penalty?

Sure, things like that are possible but I doubt that would be much of an issue for you.

I think I speak on behalf of most around here when I suggest that you need to provide us with a little more detail into what's going on. I understand that you may not want to post your URL for us to dig into the code a bit and check things out.

It's really hard to say for sure what your SERP troubles are but I think I can help you a bit anyway.

You must understand that your market is extremely competitive and there aren't many optimizers around who have the degree of expertise needed to deploy effective Whitehat SEO, particularly with so much Blackhat going on around you. Your faced with competitors that have been using off-site factors as SERP leverage for many years. Developing your on-site factors enough to compete against them will not be easy. It will take time too.

Essentially, and I say this blindly, to begin with, you'll have to learn how to write better optimized content than the rest, develop an internal linking structure that is more powerful than their artificially externally inflated ones and evolve your website at a more rapid rate than them.

They may already have 10 web sites empowering each webpage, you'll have to do a David vs Goliath scenario. It is possible but it will …

Submit again after few hours.

... and maybe try another generator, I briefly glanced at your XML and something just didn't look right although it looks OK. I'm not much of a scripter so I can't say for sure but why don't you just try another like this one http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ or an equivalent free generator and resubmit.

...Links from main pade / default page are better for your PR...

I would suggest that the OP make a decision right now: Do you want to increase PR or do you want to increase qualified traffic generated from highly ranked webpages deriving from the organic search engine results. If your choice is the latter then this is what I would do:
1.Your landing page (splash page/default page ...) is the most important webpage you have.
2.Look at the links that are in your header and footer (or navigational system). Those should become the important webpages, secondarily.
3.Auxilliary web pages will generate qualified traffic too, but, again, in a more minor role.

Concentrate on building up the important webpages, using the auxilliary ones as support. Read what I wrote about Keyphrase Dynamicability and Anchor Congruency!

Completely disregard PR. Google doesn't consider this factor as important a ranking aspect (because of the tremendous amount of manipulation that has evolved over the last five years) as the inexperienced SEOs that praise it. Google uses at least 200 other indicators when it decides how to rank webpages for a keyphrase search. Work these over and work them well.

Stay focused on what is within your control: your web pages, the power of well-optimized webpage components, an internal linking structure that enforces your keyphrase targets and crafting indisputably unique optimized content.

Vent? Why vent? The guy's completely right.

as far as I know, NOTEPAD is sitebuilder , not so called seo software,dude

Thanks. I was trying to make a point.
Notepad is a primitive text editor that originally came out with the first commercial version of Windows (3.11 I think). My point was that trying to find shortcuts using software for link building, webpage submissions etc. is quite dangerous, from an SEO perspective. As a matter of fact, many of these paint-by-number website creators puke out some horrendous code; full of errors (ie: links embedded into links, or having three Titles, or having unclosed Heading tags etc.) that diminish a webpage's credsibility with the search engine; the Internet browser (Explorer, Opera ...) compensates for these sloppy messes but the SEs are not so easily convinced that the webpage has been crafted in a way that indicates it is important to the web designer/SEO. When something is intended to be a value it should be well constructed.
In SEO, first learn how to write in HTML, line by line, tag by tag. Notepad works well for this exercise. After a while, merge into a half-decent HTML editor to speed up repetitive processes but work in the code and not in WYSIWYG. Apart from that, an SEO doesn't really require any other software to be effective.
That's what I meant.

... I have basic knowledge of making websites "friendly" for search engines...

You do? In English?

I think the best software on the market today is Notepad. Learn how to use Notepad and you'll be well on your way to becoming a decent search engine optimizer.

Your own links are more powerful, predictable and credible than ones deriving from external sources.

Google PageRank technology is a dinosaur that plays an incredibly insignificant role when it comes to gaining rankings in the SERPs, although most of the search engine optimizers you'll encounter in forums such as this don't see it that way, I can't figure out why. I always suggest for people to concentrate on working with your on-site factors (the optimizable web page/site components) and let any Backlink volume develop naturally on its own.

Could this be considered grey or black hat SEO? Canada Fred, any thoughts?

It's perfectly OK. It's your webpage and you can do whatever you want with it. Maybe the web page will need to do something like this ten times or more. It is often a completely natural occurence. White hat all the way (it works pretty good too).

I just wrote about this ethical SEO technique more in depth (in my signature for ease of reference: Anchor Congruency).

Well, you can try some of the already popular methods including: buying, borrowing, stealing, begging, convincing, blackmailing, swindling, swapping, um ... um ...

So, the image link does count as backlink, but does it help in ranking also if alt attribute is my keyword ? Just like anchor text in hyperlinks.

It counts as a backlink but one that is not as strong as a textual link and usually cannot be degtected in the backlink results meaning that it is considered as an auxiliary link. Your alt attribute should contain more than just a keyword. Write actual complete sentences to describe the image appropriately and cleanly (naturally) insert your keyphrases in there when the situation merits.

Does the benefit of alt attribute pass to the linked page.

I would think it does, indirectly; particularly in cases when the alt text is on a webpage whose content is related to the linked webpage's content.

I doubt very much we have seen the end of this round of search market share wavering. I'd suspect by the end of Microsoft's push that they will indeed have evened out the ballfield, somewhat. I also think, knowing a bit of the history behind this long fought battle, that Microsoft has some fancy marketing plan up its sleeve to propel Bing even further. It's amazing to watch Bing's momentum starting to build though, and there doesn't seem to be much stopping it at the moment, in spite of Google appeals (aimed to please their investors no doubt; squeaking like a frightened boy whistles in the dark).

It's a GreyHat technique. Should the content of webpages be just a mishmash of the content of other webpages then eventually (or perhaps even already) the search engine will realize this and demerit or give merit to webpages as appropriate.

Oh, the search engine knows all about the linked image and it's subsequent linked webpage but you may not necessarily be able to verify it.

For SEO, how it scores image links is obviously a bit lower than it would a textual link but the image link can still be quite usueful and it can create some important value; for relevancy purposes moreso than for developing Backlink volume.

Linked images can be used, lightly, to fuse two credible webpages together in order to support each other with related content. It's a win-win deal. Be sure to make good use of the alt attribute and give the image a logical-name.jpg [doean't hurt if the subsequent webpage is also logically-named.htm . Throw in some related textual content (Hx tags are good for this) near the image too (such as in an image caption) to make little concentrations of keyphrases.

When discussing link building strategies in SEO, Google has started using language like: "These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.".

In this same way, I would think that blog pages that are improperly maintained (harboring link spam in the form of comments) are subject to some form of damper penalty or at least non-rewarded.

... New Goal = PR 3 by the end of the summer ...

Are you expecting some sort of prize when you accomplish this?

Just so that you are aware, you have achieved nothing and are heading for never-ending nothingland.

... It would seem to me that this type of activitiy is grey hat SEO if not pushing the limits of black hat SEO.

OK. Hiding links as some form of SEO tactic is a somewhat dark greytone hat SEO technique. Going fishing. See 'ya.

... And whether SEO-conscious or not, links help a site get traffic, and PR is one measure of links.

Gathering a volume of useless links in order to acquire higher PR (especially from directory submissions and link exchanges) attracts very few new qualified Internet visitors, what many see as traffic is actually spiders, robots, crawlers and dataminers of all sorts and this can easily appear to be legitimate traffic but it isn't. Crawlers of this nature absolutely love high PR sites because they dig deeply into all the various link suppliers that these webpages rely on for PageRank.

Sure, a knowledgeable webmaster/website owner can easily differentiate between what a qualified visitor is and isn't but most just look at their hit counters, as long as they are spinning through the roof this pleases them for some reason in spite of inquiries for sales or service not increasing.

Personally, I'd rather have one hundred qualified visitors (those that come directly from the SERPs as a result of finding your webpage highly ranked from a keyphrase search) than 50,000 bits of Internet noise.

It's not uncommon for a new web site to start off with a PR4 landing page immediately after coming out of the sandbox effect (PR0). Chances are that you have acquired two or three decent incoming links and that you have deployed an effective internal linking structure. It also seem common that these new web sites that start off with entrance pages having a PR4 will drop to a PR3 in as little as two weeks (not that any of this really means anything significant other than your SEO work is sound and off in the right direction). I'd say: keep up the good work and you should see some good rankings starting to spring up in the SERPs in the next few months.

... So i think that if you are using proper drop down menu than there should be no issue related to the search engine point of view ...

I tend to agree with this assessment. As long as the search engine can find the anchors all should be well but some scripted drop-downs can be tricky for even the search engine robot to decipher so it is usually wise to offer an alternative linking choice; such as the standard type of textual anchors to the important webpages within the website. This can be placed in either the web page Header or Footer, or within the actual content. Doing so will ensure two things: the search engine will unquestionably find the important links and for accessibility reasons such as when a browser has scripts disabled the Internet visitor will be able to find the important links regardless.

Instead of preaching about the negative effects that buying links can have on a webpage's ranking, here's what is written by the search engine ...

"However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."

... Value to me could be anything from a great source of information to a good laugh. ...

I'd tend to agree.

I enjoy reading blog articles that are well-written, information filled, industry insightful, cutting-edge and often controversial in nature.

I think blogs are a perfect place for employees of a company to show-off their skills and expertise in a particular subject, display their more human side and invite commentary by potential customers.

Company blogs are an excellent addition to serious web site promotion strategies.

Ok. But as Google has the smallest character count wouldn't it be wise to stick to that? ...

The search engine will consider all other characters beyond their displaying limits. This provides an opportunity for website promoters to throw in additional but not repetitive keyphrases that the search engine will use to determine the value of a webpage for a search.
Maximize the first couple of short sentences to capture the imagination of the potential qualified visitor but don't be afraid to give the search engine substantially more fodder.

I guess the SEO basics could be:
- learn how to write optimized content
- learn how to employ the optimizable web page components
- learn how to logically name stuff like graphics and webpages
- learn how to develop a powerful internal linking structure
That'd be about it to get someone going in the right direction.

PageRank is like a carrot dangling on a stick in front of a mule. It didn't take Internet marketer long to realize that it was easy to convince their clients of their "superb" SEO service because they can pump up a little green bar with volumes of useless links.

Once upon a time PageRank played a significant role in ranking web pages in the results pages, but it wasn't long lasting and even the techies at the Googleplex must of been amazed at the extent of the search engine manipulation they helped create with this dinosaur.

As mentioned earlier, PageRank hasn't much of a role anymore when it comes to ranking webpages, it's role is almost exclusively used as leverage that marketers use to exploit potential clients.

Why does Google insist on keeping it active? I don't think anyone really knows (including Google itself) what the search engine is doing anymore. As long as their corporate bottom line gets met and they have dividends and Adsense money to spread around the globe then we'll all just keeping searching and advertising through it; kinda' like a modern day waltz; we all just keep on dancing together through the night ... the illusions are intoxicating ...

Thanks Fred on explaining how Google picks the snippet it shows in the search results. Keeping that in mind, do you know if there is a better chance of the meta description tag being used if it is exactly the length or shorter in terms of characters that are proscribed by the search engine?

Keep it short. One or two short but complete sentences, exactly how many characters that takes varies.

Spam is spam whether the search engine can follow a link to it or not.

If you haven't anything worth writing about on someone else's blog comments section then don't write it. If you want to write a comment on someone's else's blog for the purpose of getting a couple of your links followed and valued by the search engine then you are a spammer.

These type of link building schemes never amount to much anyway, even when the stragtegy is deployed in huge volumes. A person interested in getting their webpages highly ranked in the search engine results pages for any meaningful keyphrase can make much better use of their time by performing the standard ethical SEO stuff: rewriting some stagnated Headings, crafting web page Titles and Meta Descriptions, tweaking paragraph content, working with image names and attributes, making the web pages more user friendly and accessible or just by building a couple of new web pages and introducing them to an already powerful pool of well-linked webpages within your own web site.

Any of the above mentioned link hiding techniques (including the cloaking suggestion) are an easy ticket to having the web pages in question demerited. I'm not saying that the search engines won't find out about it, I'm implying that it is likely that the search engines will most likely determine that your link is being hidden and thus devalue the web pages accordingly.

It is all based on simple logic, if you want to hide something from the Internet visitor but want to make sure the search engine finds it for "SEO" purposes then, the link really isn't of any value. The search engines are pretty swift to recognize this and in most cases will slap your web site promotion efforts with the appropriate penalty.

It doesn't really matter too much how many characters the Description uses as long as the most important parts of it are at the beginning of the tag's content; within the first and second sentences. Anything after a certain character limit may not get used in the SERP description but will still get reviewed by SE as meta tag content. In other words, if it takes 200 characters to write the complete Meta Description then so be it; 250, 300 whatever. Nothing sneaks by the SE, it all gets reviewed, no matter how insane it may be (ie a 2000 character Description that seems more like the content of an entire webpage moreso than a synopsis of it).

A one liner can prove to be effective but usually a decent description will require two complete but short sentences.

As far as Google goes, it can sometimes choose to use the Meta Descrition that you offer it in the results pages, or it may not. Depends mostly on the direction of the wind striking the Googleplex that day, I think. Google loves to create its own rediculously looking little snippets and can use that or, even more bizzare, it can even use the DMOZ assigned description (which is becoming increasingly rare but extremely painful when it happens).

The point is, should the description gods choose to use the one you have offer it then it better be a good one; one that briefly but clearly explains what is …