Posts by canadafred

If I were to set up a signature in a forum completely unrelated to my website will it actually benefit me? I have an odds comparison website and am struggling to find suitable forums to get appropriate backlinks from.

Despite the fad, signature links are of little value even when amassed by the thousands. A few count significantly but after that they get saturated like any other repetitious link.

I'll throw in a couple.

Avoid anything automated, including dynamically generated pages (although those can perform well if properly structured and free from nesting errors, duplicate tags, repetitious descriptions etc.). When I mean automated I'm talking about link dumping systems, cookie-cutter page generation, submission software that sort of thing.

Check and correct spelling, even in meta tags, alt attributes, title attributes. Whether the text is visible to the Internet visitor or not, spell the stuff correctly. Grammar too. Proper grammar is essential not only for the Internet visitor's experience but for the search engine. The search engine will reward webpages that appear to be intelligently crafted. While on the subject of spelling and grammar, don't overuse a keyphrase. Find synonymous ones, alter verb tenses, pluralize things, use antonyms, use the thesaurus, abbreviations, acronyms ... Intelligently produced content implies that it is important. Important content is much easier to rank than your keyphrase competitor's link-puffed-up mediocrity.

...i will kill myself,if not my boss will do that. :(

Holy cow man get a grip. Forget about the competitors backlinks and start paying attention to your own stuff. Catch up to him in the search engine results pages not in the off-site game. Look at your stuff and improve the delivery of evolving optimized content. Fix your internal linking structure. An internal link can be ten times better for you in the results pages than any incoming one. Work your webpages, build outside and crosslink related but completely unique content if you must. Work it and stop crying.

how worthy are shortened links from a SEO point of view? Should I avoid shortening links whenever possible?

As far as internal linking is concerned I think it's good to mix them up. Have some links with just keyphrases in them, others with complete sentences derived from the keyphrases, others not related to your keyword target at all. Don't be afraid to play around with graphic links with well constructed alt attributes. Throw those in too. If you use the title attribute in your anchor tags then do it consistently across your site, or don't do it at all. Short links, long links, targeted links, random links, graphic links, well worded title attributes. Mix and mash to keep the search engine interested. Organize your internal linking to focus on your important web pages but do it naturally and with the intent to impress an Internet visitor. Don't force feed links to the spider, let it develop a hunger for your content. Let it find the new links in a reasonable volume.

Remember that you don't need many incoming links to satisfying Google off-site factors. The best links are always your own and the ones that get generated naturally from satisfied Internet visitors.

Now if you are building yourself some incoming links, then the same principles would apply, avoid repetition and create innovative anchor text. Don't do like everybody else does. Make it all stand out, your webpages are likely amongst a big crowd pumped-up mediocrity so try to …

A forum signature is supposed to be much like your written signature. It's is about you and what you can offer. It's purpose is for a forum reader to peruse and follow if interested. It's not intended for the search engine, although it might be of some interest to the search engine but it's not a commodity that you want to prostitute. It's your signature.

The fact that your webpages rank highly in Yahoo and Bing is a very good thing. Even if it's unintentional, you probably have unique, quality content and well-optimized web page components.

Just keep doing what you are doing but pay more attention to building new web conent than off-site ranking factors.

The various search engines decide in different ways which links they will show they have found. None of them show them all. Some links are just too insignificant or repetitive or to similar to bother displaying as a unique link. As a matter of fact, don't even concern yourself with this wishy-washy variable. Concentrate on empowering your internal linking structure and focus on deploying important content and the search engines will come around in your favour, eventually.

Hey uniquesofts2009, like everyone has pointed out, it requires experience crafting web pages to really get the feel of what the search engine is looking to reward. Rich content seems to be of utmost value, meaning, content that is intelligent, important, authentic and meaningful. The stuff the search engine wants to provide an Internet searcher as the best results for a search.

Like Jay suggests, read up on recent SEO discussions. Take a half-day and read the search engines' own quality content guidelines. They point out fairly clearly what type of webpages they want to reward.

Keyword targeting is important. Figure out your important ones and any secondary ones. Do search frequency tests using Google tools to find a good mix of heavily searched and lightly searched relevant keywords. Some words with low search frequencies will have a high click-through rate because they are very specific. Sprinkle the keyword phrases and any other relevant keyphrases in the content. Vary the words by altering suffixes and prefixes or pluralizing or any number of other word variations so as not to continuously repeat the same ones and to broaden your qualified visitor net. Learn how to emphasize your important keyphrases using Heading tags (Hx) or bold or italic ... Name your images and webpages logically, throwing keyphrases in them when applicable. You'll have to learn how to write a good Title, a meta description and a meta keywords tag.

Write your paragraphs well.

Another thing you'll have to …

What is the difference between google sandbox & penalty??

This is debatable. The way I see it is that a new web site will require time to convince the search engine that it is of value to offer Internet searchers. Convincing the search engine of the site's credibility will require the ongoing deployment of unique, important, authentic, authoritatively crafted/optimized content. This needs to be done lightly. For example, if a web site starts off with 50 webpages, it wouldn't be wise to develop 2000 more pages a month and generate 10's of thousands of useless links to it. No, a 50 pager should grow maybe 4-5 pages a month until it has convinced the search engine of its value and develop links naturally.

I don't look at searchengine as slapping on penalties anymore. The search engine can devalue or demerit a web page because of excessive and poorly considered off-site influencing activities, basic on-site spamming (ie hidden content) or depreciation in the delivery of the quality of the content. There's a few other things too that can cause a webpage demerit but they are not common.

I look at it this way. For each website, I optimize for primary keyphrases (up to 5) then work the secondary and auxiliary keyphrases using word variations, abbreviations, acronyms, pluralization, altering prefixes and suffixes, morphology, antonyms, synonymous keyphrases...

Using these type of word variables enforces your primary keyphrases and offer a "long tail" keyphrase target approach. The search engines are intelligent today. As an example, they understand that a webpage revolving around SEO is credible when enforced with such terms as "search engine optimisation", "Internet marketing" and "website promotion" be scattered amongst the web page content.

I've set up a little DoFollow Blog listing sorted by PR if anyone is interested. I'm calling it 600ish because everytime I go through it there are one or 2 that need to be taken out. The list is less than a month old so should be pretty accurate yet.

Whenever a person pastes "What a great article!", whether it be 600 or 60,000 times, it still amounts to useless, generic comments and is of no value to the Internet visitor or to the search engine. It becomes just another part of the pile of nonsensial spam the Internet has become.

People must think the search engine is stupid. It clearly recognizes this type of link force feeding.

For SEO purposes, rather than finding convenient ways to dump your useless links, create a new web page or fine-tune an existing one.

The PR value of a webpage has little or no effect as to where it ranks in the search engine results pages.

The link building formula you suggested to overtake keyphrase competitors is somewhat humourous although a common misunderstanding.

Keyphrase competitions are substantially more complicated than "the winner is the one with the most links" as a matter of fact, on-site conisderations play a vast more important role in ranking than off-site factors.

Hi,

I just developed a website for my resume writing and career coaching business. I am an excellent writer who has been working for other companies. I decided it was time to branch out on my own.

Do you know of any affiliate managers willing to work with new entrepreneurs? I sell resume writing and career coaching products.

I appreciate any input you could give me on this topic!

Thanks,
Patricia Erickson
SNIP

Being a writer, you should be able to develop sufficient enough content to propel your web site in the search engine results pages. If you tried focusing on generating your own traffic rather than relying on someone else's, your ROI would improve.

Problem with affiliate banners is that you get a whole whack of clicks, automated ones too, but very few of sincere interest in your service.

When putting ./ or ../ to links instead of writing the whole path, does that affect SEO in any way?

My opinion on this is to keep consistent. If you use the slash once then always use it otherwise, for some strange reason, the search engine can consider a variation as pointing to a different webpages in the same way as www.mysite.com/index.htm is not considered the same as www.mysite.com/ or www.mysite.com

Now, I have a funny feeling that this is changing but haven't seen any concrete proof of this as of yet.

I know this sounds like I am just pissing and moaning but should we start a sub-forum in the Internet Marketing Forum for beginners and people who are new to these concepts? It seems to me a lot of the newbies on here come in and within their first 10 posts they put up some text book definition or explanation of a basic concept of SEO, SEM or how search engines work. Just thinking out loud.

I would think something like a forum for newbies would get the same generic type responses that are visible on other Internet Marketing forums.

A newbie to SEO stands a much better chance of getting sound advice here than in most of the other traditional SEO forums who seem to advocate only the trendy search engine manipulation techniques (off-site manipulation). At least here, a GreenHat SEO is offered a much broader perspective on what is effective search engine optimization and has the option to develop content creation skills rather than just link building skills.

Actually there's two: learn how to write well in English and learn how to effectively work the optimizable web page components.

I think Google doesn't consider either type of links as spam. It assigns some insignificant value to them but that is based mostly on the credibility of the blog or forum. Dumping links on spam forums and spam blogs can actually be harmful from an SEO perspective.

If you post a comment on a blog that is not deemed important than your link will be deemed unimportant. Same for forum links.

As previously suggested, there is a factor considered as relevancy that can add some small value to the link.

Either way, both forum links and blog comment links are of very little value in the bigger SEO picture, even in huge volumes.

Personally, my suggestions, would be ... to first learn how to compose a question effectively and to ... then ... sell your templates.

Hi every body,

My websit's PR currently is #3 and I now need it to be #4 and #5. So could any one tell me how many backlink I have to make for that?

Thanks all,
Quang

As few as three or as many as 67,473. It's your choice really although this PR hunting buisness is a pointless pursuit in today's web page ranking mechanism.

It's always best to concentrate on improving and evolving your own web pages and let whatever off-site effects do their own thing themselves naturally.

Listen. I just wrote you a two page piece but everything I wrote crashed: just as I tried to send my response. I really don't like writing in Word when I'm in my few, various Forums I frequent [OK JUST HERE!], but that would be a good habit to get in. Having the text you wrote instantly come back up for the times this stupid machine doesn't work. And at the same time as having Internet woes, I don't really don't feel like writing over and over again the things I've written about for the last hour, it seems. There's gotta' to be buggering up between this HP beast and Microsoft war going on non-stop. Things want to open, then they don't want to open and other things are trying to open other stuff ... AHHHHHH It's like I only had three megs of ram again.

It's 1:30 in the morning in my neck of thise great, seasonally transitional wilderness I'm a part of and I'm grateful.

OK. this is the synopsis of my earlier thoughts on this interesting headings debate:

A. Use <h1> when appropriate, paticularly when it can emphasize keyphrases and their dynamic variations; including but not exclusive to abbreviations, synonymous keyphrases, plurialization, prefix and suffix transitions and variables, obvious use of linguistics, altering verbe tenses, acronyms, lexicons, morphology ... any other web content apparently intelligerntly produced.

Then you have the <h2>. Think of it like the secondary keyphrase Introduction Channel (some ethical SEOers call this "Going for …

This is my take on this an please read the latest Google SEO guideline (The PDF version which is somewhat difficult to find).

Use <h1> tags to emphasize primary keyphrases.
Use <h2> tags to emphasize secondary keyphrases.
Use <h3> well, you get the picture by now.

Do this consistently across your site.

To the response that mentioned the devalued importance of the <hx> tag, well, maybe it's time to wake up.

Here's a concept: If you are obsessed with acquiring backlinks, why not create important, unique webpages that webmasters naturally deem worthy of offering a link, or not? Your own internal linking strategy is far more valuable than any external one. Why would you want to try out some of the trendy link building schemes whose aims are exclusively to artificially increase the volume, relevancy and credibility of incoming links; in an attempt to manipulate the search engine. Rather than making it appear like you have important content because of the quantity of backlinks, why not just create important well-optimized content. It's much more predictable and completely within your own control.

This will require some new skills however, especially in innovative use of the language and effectively, not overly, emphasizing primary keyphrases.

Hey

Try installing a Google Sitemap. That pretty much forces the searchengine to recognize your site.

On a second note: You have to remember that the different search engines rank a web site differently. Google can reward link manipulation (including internal linking). MSN and Yahoo mostly like on-site optimization.

And then again, I wouldn't worry too much about Yahoo, they're already a dead duck in the water; as MSN has already taken their search over. Be nice of microsoft to unveil the changes. I'm anticipating something like another Bing search bar.

You measure the qualified traffic compared to your hits.

PageRank (Google PR) and ranking in the SERPs (search engine positioning results) have no real corelation. Study and apply the search engine's own requirements for successful intergration into their SERPs. Forget about ranking short-cuts and pay attention to optimizing your on-site web page components. Develop to greatness, don't manipulate towrds it.

If you only had time to do one which one do you think would be the most productive? We ar eabout to hit our bust season for sales to may need to priorotise here, and any tips on how to rank in the top three for googlebase would be most appreciated as it is doing my head in.
The only thing I have noticed is that the longer I leave it before updating my listings the higher rank! Or is this just a fluke

My advice is to learn how to write properly.

Heading tags indicate paragraph importance. They briefly highlight the content of the following paragraph(s). In literature, they are more important than the contents of the paragraph as they condense the words into a single phrase; a synopsis of a larger group of words.

When performing SEO, think in terms of literature; what appears important is important.

I don't think it matters if you have a strong website with many backlinks and good content. Content is king and you will rank well if you strong content and of course backlinks. But if you are relatively new and haven't developed the necessary content and links. You may want to leave out the site name.

Ok, thanks for your comment.

Use your imagination for a minute. For your products or services, come up with a real powerful name, one you can stick in a dot com; to be used for branding purposes. Conger up something that other folks will think and talk about; whenever they think or talk about your product or service. Make the mental connection with the populace. The Title tag becomes the ideal webpage component to introduce the name to the qualified visitors.

SEO is about Internet marketing as much as it's about search engines and hits.

If all your client is looking for is Adsense revenue then good luck with that.

If your client has a web site geared to bring him more business then Adsense detracts from that marketing goal. Adsense is almost like reverse marketing, bring in the qualified visitor so he can click your competitor and you make a few cents, maybe. Makes no sense at all to me why business web sites do this.

I agree with stephen somewhat, ability to optimize web page components is mandatory. Good writing skills helps. Web pages need to captivate the Internet visitor and convince the search engine that content is unique, authentic and intelligent. I don't worry much about off-site optimization as most of that is best left to occur naturally, as a reasult of exceptional content. You can always create your own off-site ranking factors should your internal linking structure be weak (do to lack of webpages).

A good search engine optimizers satisfies three things simultaneously: the Internet visitor, the web site owner and the search engines. This is why innovativeness (out-of-the-box thinking as steven refered to) is essential.

PR's been dead a long time. It has no significance in the SERPs anymore. It did once upon a time, for about three months, then it started to get manipulated.

Today, a well-optimized PR1 webpage can beat the crap out of a PR6 webpage vying for the same competitive keyphrase. For obscure keyphrases, I've even seen PR0s beat PR7s. Go figure. PR value doesn't mean a thing, nothing. It's some dinosaur left from after man developed the wheel. It amazes me to no end how some SEOs (well, link strategists) obsess over this and tout their excellence at manipulating this and convince clients that PageRank is the Internet pot of gold.

Hey Google, if you're watching, get rid of PageRank once and for all so we can move on with developing unique, important content. Do like Microsoft is doing!

On your web site (which you don't have linked correctly) you state:

"Guaranteed Top 10 Ranking
Affordable SEO Services Price
100% Money Back Guarantee!"

If you are having a search engine optimization issue, why don't you just hire yourself? What can you lose?

...hanging by my fingertips I reached 1 star,

you got none..

Ha Ha Ha. That's great! Man, now I know what I want to achieve in life, STARS!! Just like I'm back in kindergarten. That's great man. Go for the stars ... Ha ha

I don't understand how the trendy marketing attitudes still is to just artificially make your web pages appear to be important by manipulating the volume, credibility and relevancy of incoming links.

Why don't you people just build something that merits its own importance?

I can't believe there's still Internet marketers on this planet that think Google PageRank still has some meaning. That was just the starting pistol of this link building race you all still run.

KEYWORD! Where to put key word or the KEYWORD phrase; the keyphrase?

Oh.

The best place to put stuff is in the best place

You'll discover the best places as your compose your content. Develop your content to captivate an Internet visitor primarily; create something interesting enough for someone to read and that’ll please the search engine too.

Dash your keyphrases in Headings and other word emphasizing techniques but use all the other natural, related keyphrase variations, whenever possible. This is make your content appear important.

Now, from the search engine's perspective, in order for content to appear to be important is needs to indicate intelligence, it’s gotta’ look well-thought out. Uniqueness counts big time too. That's why it's always good to study the English language; continuously; to learn how to write effectively in English; to learn how to write intelligently; too learn the power in antonyms or good synonymous keyphrases; altering prefixes and suffixes as you fly, understand abbreviations, acronyms, how to emphasize a keyphrase interestingly and my personal favourite: morphology. IluvU Searchengines.

Write well and for the search engine.

...How to drive more quality traffic to your website effictively..?...

OK. What you do is to make yourself one of those double-sided poster carry-on A-Frame billboards aparatus. Then on each side with a black magic market write "Free Money". Walk around downtown with that for even one Saturday afternoon and I guarantee you 200 visitors. 4 hours looking like a buffoon and tricking people to visit will net ya' 3-400 easily. Change the wording a bit to market another sector, go out at night and create a 1000 visitor a day no problem. You'll have to leave town though after a while because people get a little upset when they see themselves being played. That's why most marketing tricksters use the Internet, they feel more safe, almost invisible behind their keyboards.

I was at SEOchat the other day and there's this guy bad-mouthing me who has 11,000 posts there. 11,000, not the one-liner type neither, no, this guy writes novels. He's been there 6 years.

Now that's taking your forum participation seriously!

Hey thanks alot tigs. Gave you some reputation points for that one. I don't plan to use this twitter thing as marketing leverage. I just like the way I set up my tweets to shows up on my facebook page and in my blog. It's all like a parallel universe man. It's so groovie.

see ya

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

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.

Social media optimization is a fancy way of saying Facebook and Twitter spamming (random commenting with your signature links and often the links of your clients). The basic SEO purpose of social networking is to artificially increase link popularity.

Wrong question. Now you have just incited the linking strategists to tell you a bunch of crap. Don't listen to it!

99% of the best SEO you can get exclusively revolves around working the various web page elements. The off-page factors (links) take care of themselves and are hardly even needed provided you have done the on-page work effectively. By this I mostly am talking about your actual web content.

I'd keep your money and spend more time developing better quality web content and then develop more of it. In essence, this is doing your own SEO.

I can't give you the link to my blog article so here it is :

Top 10 SEO Tips

1. Compose effective webpage Titles for each web page.

Titles should briefly but vividly capture the imagination of both the search engine and the web searcher.

Think about throwing in a near variation of that Title in a Heading tag near the top of the source code in order to propel primary and secondary keyphrases into quick visibility for both the search engine and your web visitor.

2. Use logical naming conventions.

Why name a webpage Page1.html when it can be called web-site-promotion-expert.htm . Similarly, consider using stuff like website-promotion-expert-Fred-Joly.jpg .

3. Write good descriptions.

Search engines read and consider your Descriptions. Your web searchers may get it in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and be intrigued enough to visit your webpage.

4. Craft web content so to be outstanding amongst your keyphrase competitors.

Effectively use the English language.

5. Deploy a keyphrase rich anchor linking navigational system. Create a good site map and use things like Sitemaps too.

Avoid unnatural repetition of your desired word phrases. Be creative and use all kinds of related terms. SEO is search engine optimization, Internet marketing and web site promotion.

Learn about the root and meaning of words so as to be able to increase your keyphrase dynamicabilty. Are you searching for the best web promoter?

6. Continually sharpen …

Guys,

I have a Q.
What is the best/effective method that you found to get a free one way links to your website ?

Thanks,

A. Create something worthy to be linked.