Archive for Search Engine Optimization
SEO or Compelling Content?
Posted by: | CommentsBoth! Right?
Well, after attending a panel discussion of local bloggers in Richmond, I’m not absolutely sure.
John and Sherry Tetersik from ThisYoungHouse.com, Arnold Kim from MacRumors.com and Jeff Kelley from Tobacco Avenue made quite a few points that resonated with me.
All bloggers stated that they didn’t practice any formal SEO strategies with their blogs…and all 3 had great traffic that is continuing to grow. As a matter of fact, ThisYoungHouse.com has jumped from 800 visits per month to over 360,000 per month…in a year! No SEO folks.
Just pure, compelling, unique content that is updated 2-3 times per day. This couple actually takes photos of projects from their home, not from magazines or other sites (well, on occasion they do). They have a growing community of readers who come back again and again and post comments!
When asked how they got readers, all of the bloggers agreed…“Good, regular content”
John and Sherry added that being a good consumer of other industry-related blogs has been key for them. This means…
- Reading and commenting on other blogs
- Linking to other blogs in posts
- Adding other blogs to your blogroll
Bloggers are known for their regular give and take…link love is often reciprocated.
One more point that is pretty key, in my humble opinion, is that they all agreed that a tightly focused subject in which a large group of people are interested contributes to their success.
I did look at the number of backlinks using Yahoo! and the numbers are quite impressive:
- ThisYoungHouse = 12,619 (Blog Age – 1 year, 5 months)
- MacRumors = 1,012,788 (Blog Age – about 9 years)
- Tobacco Avenue = 9,650 (Blog Age – 1 year, 3 months)
What’s important to note about these backlinks is that many of them come from pages on their blogs…another beautiful thing about the blogging platform. Think about it if you write 3 posts a day for 1 year, you will have 1,095 backlinks. In addition, with WordPress, each category generates its own page and each tag generates a page. You’ll probably have at least an “About” page and if you build your entire site in WordPress, you will most likely have more than a few pages.
ThisYoungHouse has actually become quite popular, has been mentioned in mainstream press and has a regular column in a national magazine, so I’m sure that many of their links are from other industry-related sites who genuinely think their content is great and link-worthy. I’d have to confirm, but I’m pretty sure (based on the number of hours they spend running the site) that they are not building many of these backlinks manually. This is what happens when you have a blog that generates a great following.
So, what’s the takeaway…there are several…
- Build a great website about a topic in which you know people are interested
- Nurture your website by updating content regularly (this is a lot easier if you have a blog, so the next one is…)
- Start a blog
- Give love to other blogs
- Don’t stress out about not ranking on the first page of Google for your keyword or phrase
- Focus on doing great work and building a community of readers
PageRank Explained
Posted by: | CommentsThere are several articles online that explain Page Rank:
From Alvit.de…
Google PageRank (one word) is Google’s measure of the relative importance of a Web page on the Internet. The numbers rank from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the stronger the PageRank.
From Google…
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
From GoogleGuide.com…
In other words, Google conducts “elections” in which each web page casts votes for web pages with hyperlinks to those pages. But unlike a democracy a page can have more than one vote and links from pages with high PageRank are given more weight (according to their ranking) and thus help to improve the targets’ PageRank.
From SelfSEO.com…
The facts that we do know about page rank are;
1. One-way inbound links from websites with topics that are related to your website’s topic will help you gain a higher page rank.
2. Other one-way inbound links from pages with high page rank but unrelated topics do help a little, but not nearly as much.
3. The number of links outbound from the website that links to you also determines the value of the link. A related website with 10 outbound links that links to you is much better than a related website with 100 outbound links that link to you.
Also important to keep in mind that search engines crawl and index webpages not websites, that is why your page rank may vary from page to page within your website.
Good internal linking and navigation can help distribute page rank well throughout your website. Your index page is the most important page Google indexes and your other pages will inherit some page rank from your index page because it is linked from there.
I have one website that is a PR4 on the main page but contains several PR5 and PR6 webpages in the interior of the website proving that Google ranks webpages individually.
When you are doing your link building campaign, do it for more than just the index page. Put links out there for your interior pages as well.
Webmasters and individuals will link to quality content and quality content is the single best way to higher page rank and search engine listings. Content is still king. Links are not king.
People link to articles and content that is original and well-written and that contain quality information not found elsewhere. Google also ranks webpages higher in listings that have quality content. That’s why it is still the best SEO method there is.
The Best SEO Tips for Bloggers
Posted by: | CommentsThis is an excellent, pretty comprehensive of practical tips for bloggers who are trying to increase their organic traffic from Google. If you read it, you’ll see that none of this SEO stuff is quick and dirty. It truly takes some forethought and effort.
Here’s a summary of the tips, but you must read the entire article for the meat and great examples:
10 SEO tips that I know can have a profound impact on your search traffic:
- Adopt the proper mindset
- Prepare the targeted keywords in advance
- Target 3 and 4 word phrases
- Know where to find the right key phrases
- Choose the right 3 and 4 word phrases to target
- Optimize page titles and permalinks
- Optimize the internal links within your site
- Add No Index meta tags
- Remove unnecessary links
- Building up a ridiculously sized tag cloud can be a good thing
