Daily SEO Dose

[jeremiah]

I figure that many here know a lot that not everybody might and in order to get this section going, growing, and give people a reason to come back and contribute, we need to share some of what we know to help each others move our sites up there.

So what I'm suggesting is that everyone who has some SEO related knowledge, to post an SEO Tip on a daily basis.

If you have more than one, type down the others and come back tomorrow to post another one.

One tip per post, there's no 'best tip' or 'unimportant tips' al count as both advanced users and ones new to SEO will visit this section. Also feel free to discuss, ask questions or call B.S. as you see it on methods mentioned but be constructive and mature. Let's build one awesome archive for everyone delving into SEO or looking to further their SEO knowledge.

Here is my first one: Domain names do have a strong importance for SEO -- if only because so many people will link to you with your domain name.

But what do you do if all of the good keyword rich domain names in your niche are taken?

The answer is: Use Stop Words.
Stop words are words which are ignored in searches, such as "are, as, in, to, etc. . ." So, if your keyword is "Costa Rica", look for domain names such as "To Costa Rica" ;)

[Eve]

Useful idea. Quite a few members here are learned in the subject.

My tip: Register with a social network application or aggregator, to interact regularly with a target community.

[AceInfinity]

Useful idea. Quite a few members here are learned in the subject.

My tip: Register with a social network application or aggregator, to interact regularly with a target community.

theres active users on social networks all the time, and it's a very popular trend in todays world. So I would agree with you there, no depending on getting a good google rank to get network traffic to your site, and as long as you make people interesting in a first look perspective on how you advertise it on facebook or twitter for example determines how many first views you get coming from that method. One of the greatest methods in my opinion. I know I post my website link in all of my youtube videos as well (the ones that relate to it). As well, i've even made an introductory video to my website for that url. Every little bit helps, register everywhere, I know some people even go to the extent of registering on a competition forum to advertise their site in desperation lol. I see it all the time. People sign up where ever they can really..

[jeremiah]

Great tips guys, good point about registering everywhere. Placing a virtual finger print around the industry you're in and developing a large online presence will only help with widening exposure and generating a wider potential client/user base as a result.

Another hot tip: When you have a webpage, and you have more than one link to the same place on the same page. . . say for example a nav bar link to another internal page followed by a text link to the same page later on. . . Google will take the FIRST one it finds and assign the weight to it, including the anchor text and associated other text. Google does this to prevent double and triple linking from carrying too much weight

If you want to get the maximum value from your internal linking, make sure to no follow those who are above others where there is better anchor text to be had. That way Google finds the anchor text rich links rather than devaluing them.

[AceInfinity]

I've had lots of troubles with SEO on google the first time I ever made a site. It was the worst site ever, i'll admit that lol. and I still remember the one I created on a free hosting service for a test run when I didn't have any money to invest in my experimenting. Now that I finally understand it I have 2 registered domains currently.

Yahoo, takes the meta tags for the search engine queries, whereas Google, simply decides by itself what to take from your website. So it usually takes any content that it finds from your website. This is why you should be sure to use as many of the words that you want for keywords... to appear in the content of your writing. I've also done extensive research and found that sitemaps are useful for that internal linking idea that you've mentioned. Backlinks as well, which are not internal links.

Another tip (since you have added one): Do not forget to put alt tags on all your images on your website, or most of them. But you do not want repeat text very often. So keep in mind that each webpage you have should be unique to each other to ensure the diversity of the search that will make your website come up. Use keywords often, and keeping your webpages updated with a blog or anything that will force you to update the content on your webpages will refresh your rank on a search engine as well. If you just left your site alone, and the content stayed the same, you'd find that you would not be as high of a rank on a search engine as you once were.

If your lazy though, you can go to google and pay 70-90$ USD, (I forget how much it is, but thats around the right price range) to become a sponsored link, which will update you to the top of their first page consistently.

[jeremiah]

First off Infinity, I love your posts and tips in this thread, if anything they prod a little into the 'to be discussed' realm and that's great! Thank you for contributing and I hope you do so on a daily basis!

Yahoo, takes the meta tags for the search engine queries, whereas Google, simply decides by itself what to take from your website.

Yahoo does not simply base it's serp decisions on a sites meta tags, in fact as of late, they've put very little weight on them, whereas as you mentioned, Google puts even less weight on them, almost negligible. If you look at how you're indexed in the SERPs, you'll notice that Yahoo is more prone to taking your meta description for example, and placing that along with the pages title as your indexed listing, just expanding on this so those new to SEO get the full picture.

So it usually takes any content that it finds from your website.

Again, Google does not take 'just any content'. Google will do the math and decide if the meta description is more relevant or not, if not, then it finds the 'first chunk of relevant text' and uses that instead. Factors that determine this are based on how the crawler bases the relevancy to text ratio. But again, not accurate that yahoo 'takes the meta tags for the se queries' as stated. Now if you're suggesting Google simply takes any chunk of text to base where it ranks you in the serps for certain queries then that's not accurate at all. Content is one factor (and even then it weighs the entire page) but you have multiple other factors, one of which is obviously backlinks...i'll open a separate thread to discuss ranking factors soon to explain this a little more for sure though, so thank you for bringing it up.

This is why you should be sure to use as many of the words that you want for keywords... to appear in the content of your writing.

What you're suggesting borders on a very gray/black hat technique known as Keyword Stuffing. (I'm 100% sure you were not implying people should but again, clarifying for others that may not be aware). Google does not favor sites with excessive keyword usage, they expect the content to be tailored to 'users' and not 'bots' so a high ratio of keywords within your content on a single page will in fact raise flags for keyword stuffing, and in fact hurt you considerably in the SERps, sometimes, a penalty will be put into effect so be very careful. The best content has and always will be that which users find useful.

I've also done extensive research and found that sitemaps are useful for that internal linking idea that you've mentioned. Backlinks as well, which are not internal links.

Agreed, sitemaps are very important, specially automated ones that update as new pages/posts/content is added. G will make an effort to check it more frequently if the sitemap is constantly being expanded, so that's always important.

Another tip (since you have added one): Do not forget to put alt tags on all your images on your website, or most of them. But you do not want repeat text very often. So keep in mind that each webpage you have should be unique to each other to ensure the diversity of the search that will make your website come up.

Brilliant tip, and very true. Image alt tags are important, and never more so since Google has rolled out a new sponsored links system on image search meaning they see more and more traffic and feel it an investment and pretty much safe move to offer that to publishers. Ranking in image search therefor will yield more and more traffic, image alt tags are pretty much the only way to rank in the ISRPs.

Use keywords often, and keeping your webpages updated with a blog or anything that will force you to update the content on your webpages will refresh your rank on a search engine as well. If you just left your site alone, and the content stayed the same, you'd find that you would not be as high of a rank on a search engine as you once were.

Good tip on keeping it updated, that's very important but again, content is not a deciding factor, it's one of many variables. If for example a page is put up and never updated, but a constant barrage of backlinks are made, Google will determine it's an authority page and one that is 'vouched' for by multiple authority sites etc and eventually rank it high regardless of whether it's being updated or not. I have blog posts that have maintained high rankings for years and never been updated thanks to strong links from authority sites etc.

If your lazy though, you can go to google and pay 70-90$ USD, (I forget how much it is, but thats around the right price range) to become a sponsored link, which will update you to the top of their first page consistently.

How much you pay depends on what campaign you're going after Infinity. So you can pay $50 for an adword campaign or $5,000 all depends on how long you want to stay as a sponsored link and also depends on how much you bid for certain keywords. Some are $15+ per click so your $70-$90 wont last a few minutes in some cases But that's a decent enough suggestion for those that choose to pay for competitive keywords for branding or long tailed keywords for targeted traffic.

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My tip for the day:
If you have a lot of web sites to promote, it's often cheaper to buy domains and web sites than it is to buy links.

A PR5 domain can be purchased for as little as $100 and you can use it to link to lots of your other pages. Plus, this gives you more control over the links than you would have by purchasing links.

[Brandon]

This is a very very useful thread!

My contribution for today:

Make sure that when you are backlinking using anchor text that it links to a page with the same keywords as your anchor text.

What I mean by that is, if you're going to use a "buy cheap product" as your anchor text that your meta keywords on the page it links to also contain "buy cheap product".

Just my contribution for today . I'll try and add new ones daily.

My tip for the day:
If you have a lot of web sites to promote, it's often cheaper to buy domains and web sites than it is to buy links.

A PR5 domain can be purchased for as little as $100 and you can use it to link to lots of your other pages. Plus, this gives you more control over the links than you would have by purchasing links.

That is a fantastic tip. I need to try that more

[jeremiah]

Great tip Brandon, many forget to pay attention to the relevancy of their anchor text in terms of what pages they link to and just use their main sites keywords etc. Nice one!

Today's tip is a pretty simple one:
Take 3 of your top 10 competitors and check out their backlinks. When it shows do follow blogs, forums, do follow social networks, make sure you get links from as many of them as possible. Only one backlink per site needed but hit as many as you can. Give G less reasons to rank your competitors higher than you ;)

(secondary related tip: Brad Callen's SEO Elite is a pretty good tool for finding and copying competitors backlinks.)

[Eve]

Find forums which have a related interest to your site, and become a contributing member there. If the community accepts and respects your contribution, posting backlinks and signatures for your site will be looked upon more as knowledge contribution rather than mere advertising.

[jeremiah]

Eve, truer words never spoken. It was through your contribution on this site and feedback on a few of my threads that made me not only check out the site in your signature, but also register. Great tip!

Here's my tip of the day:
Put your desired keywords in the copyright info on the bottom of all of your pages. Google assigns a little extra weight to what is in your copyright information. From my experiences and experiments google actually takes into account keywords within your copyright section, I think, and this is hardly an educated guess, that Google assumes the most relevant keyword, your site name or company name, are more likely to be in the footer/copyright section...so it's good practice, if for no other reason than to give it a try, to put your main keyword/keyphrase down there.

For example if "Online Broker" is you keyword (random i know):
YourSitesName © 2010 Online Broker.