SEO - Going from 0 PR on up

Wow - I am impressed with your expertise!

As I understand it, the more inquiries, the higher the search ranking will get. Google watches for hits on subject matters and search words.

I sold caramels on-line and paid a small amount thru GoDaddy to get on less well known search engines. The search tags were important.

Then I just spent a lot of time "searching" for my own site. I asked friends to do inqiries, too. Within 3 months I was in the top 5 on the search engines and Google, too.

Thank you. I am trying to do both without paying for placement. Both sites do get some incoming search engine traffic, and they both get referral traffic. The issue is to get both up. Also, interestingly enough (at least, it's interesting to me) is: my own site has a longer average time on site, with more page views and more returning users. The robotics site has many more new users but the time on site is shorter. Their bounce rate is lower than mine, too. Hmm.

make a video of your companies product and post it on youtube. avrlay the vid with the company web address

How was your OpenCoffee Cambridge Meetup Weekly Meetup?

It was delightful. They're gonna start calling me Robot Girl soon, I s'pect.

Yes, we have to do video. There are a few videos out there but they're student-done.

PS Thanks for the suggestion.

I like to do volunteer tech articles for more popular folks than me.

anyplace you can stick your logo or address for free is optimal.

(or start a rumor involving a famous person and your client)

have you thought about adding the word porn to your company title, usually generates some traffic

hmmmm, off to google robot porn right now

Ah, well, that's one option.

But I suspect the writing for others will work out slightly more, er, optimally.

Well that is easy, you just need links (that pass pagerank*) from pages with pagerank. But Google doesn't update visible pagerank (often called "toolbar pagerank" in the SEO community because the Google Toolbar is the original place it was displayed) very often anymore. Typically it only updates every few months (not regular either, but it seems to be about every 3-4 months).

So you may already have pagerank above 0, but you can't see what the current pagerank is anyway and will have to wait for a "toolbar pagerank update" where the displayed pagerank for sites is updated.

If I remember correctly it last happened a month or two ago. So I'd guess we are about 2 months away from the next update. But do know that pagerank is just not as important as it once was and now is largely just for show. Nowadays search relevance is computed on a per-query basis. So if you want to rank for "blue widgets" it doesn't matter if you have a pagerank of 5 if you have no links with "blue widgets" as the anchor text.

So in short, pagerank is largely flair. It's important mainly in that others think it is (for example, a site displaying a pagerank of 0 might be less trusted by some than one that displays a higher pagerank).

* if the link uses the nofollow attribute, certain javascript or redirection it may not pass pagerank (or any seo love). Certain sites/pages may also be manually blocked from passing pagerank by google.




Don't bother to "submit" to search engines, they ignore that completely for the most part. The main ones only add to their index if they find links to it, so the time is better spent on linkbuilding because links from pages they spider is how they discover new sites and pages.



Both should be rejected (I am a dmoz editor, and am just giving you a friendly heads up that the sites don't yet meet dmoz standards of worthiness). Personally, I would wait on Dmoz submissions until the sites are more solid (things like not having 0 pagerank shouldn't matter, but might to an editor).



Those are all fun things to look at, but mainly to look at other people's data, not your own. Alexa is useless for your own sites (your own analytics is more useful data) but has useful information about other people's sites (especially their search analytics in Alexa's case for e.g.).




Most blog software nofollows the links in comments, so they should have little to no short-term SEO impact. However the engagement with the blogosphere can bring editorial blog links, so as long as you are doing this for the engagement it is worth it. If you are doing it for link building it's largely a waste of time.




Cool! But I just want to say that I've never read any books about technology myself and I think the web is a better place to learn the web (books don't keep up to date as well, and are often written by people better at getting published as an author than being an actual expert).

I would advocate using RSS feeds to start reading informative sources and asking questions on forums as useful additions to your learning (IMO better than books in the long run, but that may be a matter of preference).



Link building is something that Google wants you to do organically, that is have great content and people will link to you. But there's a lot you can do to help get yourself out there and the key is to focus on relevance.

The secret to link building is to get links from pages that are relevant, those are the only ones that really help you rank anyway.

So you don't want a digg link (it's nofollowed anyway until it is made popular) as much as you want a link on a page that ranks highly for the keyword you are targeting.

Here is a mini-tutorial on what to do in SEO:

1) Keyword research. Basically, you need to decide what keywords to target. This really just boils down to search query volume and competition. SEO is a winners take all game. If you move in rank from 1000 to 20 you are getting virtually no gains in traffic. The top 3 results get the overwhelming majority of the traffic so if you are going to target a keyword it is often only going to pay off for you if you can realistically get in the top 3.

So as an example, even though it has much more search volume you may want to avoid a term like "computers" and go for "localtown localstate computers" if you think the competition for "computers" is too tough to crack.

The best free place to research this is currently Adwords (you can use the external keyword tool here) and Google tools such as Insights for Search.

By the way, that is an example of why I don't see books as being as useful, one of those links recently changed if I remember correctly and books aren't always up to date on the latest best resources for the data.

Ok, so now you have the tools to pick keywords, do so wisely and:

2) Incorporate them into the site. The following places matter the most (more or less in order of importance):

- Page title tag
- Domain/URL (keywords in url can help, if for nothing else it means naked links have keywords in anchor text)
- Header tags (h1 etc)
- paragraphs of text (google focuses on the body of the content, trying to de-emphasize navigation and repeating content).

Make sure your words are in there (naturally, don't "stuff" the keywords in ) and your on-page optimization is off to a good start.

3) Get links on relevant pages. An easy way to find relevant pages is to... search for them. The higher the page is ranked for your term the better it is as a candidate for links to your page. So if you want to rank for "blue widgets" you can search for sites that rank well for the term and try to get backlinks. Often these are not sites that accept links (e.g. it may be a competitor) so some strategies include things like appending "add url" or "submit" to the term to find directories etc that might be relevant.

I'm going to quickly list some common linkbuilding strategies, noting that relevance should be your guide. Some are generally low quality strategies and you should try to focus on relevance primarily.

- Commenting - historically mainly on blogs, for which the nofollow attribute was primarily invented, but also on forums (as you can often see here). This can range from very spammy to somewhat relevant and is a typically low-quality source of links.

- Directory submission - this is a large source of links, both paid and free, but there are also a lot of low-quality directories. Ideally you would target ones with high editorial quality and that are not penalized by Google for selling links (Google does not approve of links sold to increase ranking). This is one area where toolbar pagerank can be somewhat useful as a very general indicator of quality.

- Blog posts - there are many networks and blogs that will accept 3rd-party content where you can include links. Of course, as usual Google frowns on the paid links.

- Create your own - one way to get links from good sites is to build other good sites. So you can have a widgets store and a separate widgets forum that links to it, for example. Overdoing your network interlinking can be bad, but remember that if you use relevance as your yardstick you would likely not overlink.

- Social media - Social media is actually not that great as short-term SEO. They usually nofollow the links (twitter, digg, delicious etc) and very few (reddit) will give you a real link anyway. So the return here usually only comes if you are able to make content popular on the social site, and the keys to that run in direct opposition to SEO (the users on those sits often hate SEOs as a result of all the spam they get).

So social marketing can't be treated like low-level link building. The social media users aren't interested in your site, or your employers site. They are interested in content. So if you want a social media strategy you need very compelling content and should avoid submitting content that is not compelling (their algorithms for popularity will often include a signal-to-noise ratio for users and domains so if your submissions always get a good response they are treated better than if you fling it and see what sticks).

- Article directories and syndication - I touched on blog post placement but there are also article syndication networks where you can submit content and include links. These are usually saturated and fairly low quality sources.

- Press Releases - This is another form of content syndication with links, that is also (like nearly any common linkbuilding source) overused.

There are many other ways and angles, for example you can email people and ask for links and often get very good ones, but there is a lot of link building spam out there and you will also often get people pissed off. SEO can be a slippery slope to spam, but the basics are to make compelling content (e.g. instead of your company home page, you make a great article as link bait) and promote it on relevant pages.

Gotta run now, but if you have more questions lemme know.

By the way, SEM can often be cheaper in the short-term than SEO. SEO, when competitive, isn't a free source of traffic and requires long-term investments.

SEM is also often a good way to test SEO, you can spend a day at the top of the page to see if it's worth trying to get there in organic results.

So, erm, am I doing anything right?

Not to sound flip about this but it is looking, to me, like I'm not going in the right direction at all (except maybe with content).

I haven't followed all that you have been doing, but I think you are doing pretty well so far and just need to focus the activity (things like identifying keywords to target) for it to turn into sustainable traffic.

Ah, whew. I think the way I read it this morning was "everything you know is wrong". So thank you.

I'm meeting with the Pres today. I've done a lot of going out and pressing the flesh lately; probably would be good for me to have some in-office time and do some keyword research now. We'll talk strategy, too, I want to start off on a good foot with content strategy and not be trying to untangle a huge mess in a few years, God willing we're around as long as that.

Nah, more like there's a lot of ways to make spinning wheels in SEO and you can do a lot right but without a good plan at the big-picture level it won't translate into significant traffic.

You know, keyword research and picking your targets is probably the biggest missing link, with a good list of initial targets you can then tie the rest of what you do into it.

My advice is to pick some low-hanging fruit to start (e.g. instead of "widgets" go for "blue widgets in location" or a more complex query that is easier to get ranked 1-3 for) because SEO won't help much without #1-#3 rankings in most cases. That way you can get the end out of your means more quickly and by doing a lot of those variations you are building up relevance for the main keywords anyway.

For example:

You initially target a lower-traffic, more-complex term like "community manager in Boston" (not researched so I don't know if this is competitive) and try to rank top 3 for that before moving on to a more competitive term like "community manager".

You may find that some of these "long tail" (less of more) search terms just need a page with the term in the title and a link to it with the term in the text of the link (anchor text) to rank first for it and get a trickle of traffic, and if you rinse wash and repeat you can build up a solid stream of traffic that is helping your site get ready to target the trophy keywords (targeting "blue widgets in Boston" will help you build relevancy towards "widgets").

I have read that and never really realized why it would be done. NOW it makes sense.

I went to a meetup for an SEO group last night. I'm still processing the info. One of the things they mentioned is that putting hyphens in your site name does not help if you are looking for an exact name boost. Which I am not, but I figured I'd pass that along (e. g. if your site is dogfood.com it can get an SEO boost from being exactly the same as the key words used to search for it, e. g. dog food, but calling your site dog-food.com does not help as much). Or did I not understand what they were saying?

The speaker last night was rather dull and rambling. Good information, I feel, but it could have been far better presented.

This is what now Google Is changing and Its continues changing in feature.

Thanks

we need help for promotion now