Got SEO Questions? Ask me Anything.

What is h1 & h2 in the source code ?

 

H1 and H2 are headers. You give headers a style - they are usually large font and bold, and then you assign headers to text using the H# tags. Search engines look at header text to quickly assess what your site is about, so make sure your headers have keywords also.

 

I've got a question that I'd really like to hear the answer to. SEO concepts are simple, doing SEO is fairly simple as well, but it takes FOREVER! You, having worked for a company doing it must have streamlined it somewhat. What would a simplified agenda to rank a site look like for you, and what tools or services do you use to speed it up?

 

Article submissions

 

Hi,

I do article submission as a part of SEO for my website. I was wondering if anyone knows whether it's good (from Google perspective) to also place these articles as content on my website. Would Google see it as duplicate content?

Thanks

 

This is duplicate content and not recommended. If google favours your site, then the backlinks get disregarded. If google favours the article directory, then your page gets disregarded.

 

Pro SEOs will have a list of trusted and relevant go-to sites that they use ... they'll also have lists of the best directory sites, blog sites etc.

They also have the experience that whatever they're submitting is actually good ... rather than a newbie that may be submitting sub standard stuff but to all the correct places.

However it does take a while, I always advise clients never to expect dramatic increases in rank within the first 3 months... there's no easy (or quick answer) SEO is an investment. If you want quick results, use different methods.

 

thanks for this interesting info (nice topic with lots of info), i actually have a question that i always wondered and you might be able to answer, if i do articles submissions daily (with backlinks to my moneysite) with new articles everyday, will google sometime find out that the only reason for posting these articles are actually to get backlinks and will stop counting your backings or your articles as valid??

 

Are the articles original content? Do they offer useful information to whoever reads them? Or are they rubbish (pointless) articles that are there purely for the backlink?

This is more a case of thinking about the user ... think about potential traffic if you wrote a great article & it got picked up by a leading website in your field.

Never write articles purely for the sake of it.

 

thanks for the quick reply! they are actually unique articles (language localized for different countries) that contain useful information. but i just get afraid that if i keep doing this too much then google can stop counting my backlinks...

but honestly most of guys that are doing SEO i believe think more about the generating traffic then thinking about the user itself

 

@KliliPiti... Hi there. @JLSpartz is absolutely right about the H1 and H2 headers. It is just a little HTML code. Here's a more detailed explanation: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Use_h1_for_Title
H1 and H2 provide a small SEO benefit so don't expect to go from 87 to 1 just because of implementing this.

@JLSSpartz Thanks for helping out with the previous question and great question. I agree with you, most SEO is pretty simple. In fact, after you work on a few sites, you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again. So yes, streamlining these processes is very important for an SEO company.

I don't use too many special tools. I use SEOMOz tools to help show the clients site VS the competitors sites link graphs. I use SEO Quake or the SEO Book plug in. Honestly, I don't use a whole lot of special tools. I don't know of that many other professional SEOs that do either.

One piece of advice about streamlining is to assign different tasks based on individual skills. For example, have writers do all the on-page optimization in word. Content writers skillset is not in figuring out how to change the CSS in a website. It is writing. Let them do only that.

Same goes for tech guys... have tech guys figure out CSS problems, do robots.txt uploads etc.

I realize this is all common sense stuff, but it really is important. Assign tasks around people's strengths in the company.

Next you've got to get a work flow set up. Think of this like a big check list that a mechanic will go through before fixing a car when you bring it into the shop. He probably doesn't know what's wrong just by looking at it... so he will slowly go over his mental checklist of parts--carburetor, belt, motor oil--until he solves the problem.

Just like the mechanic, make a checklist of things that you will cover with each new website you work on. That way everyone checks the same SEO metrics and the results are consistent over all your clients. Some things you'll want to include on your checklist include looking for robots.txt, load times, title tags, meta descriptions, ensuring the pages are being indexed etc.

This is a great question JLS. Anytime you can automate, do it when it comes to SEO. It will save so much time in the long run. Also, not to plug my own product but if you sign up for my fast start kit I provide some documents that can help you automate and standardize your SEO projects. Check out the monthly report as this will give you an automated way to provide client updates. You can find it in the signature. You'll be automatically signed up for my newsletter with that but you can unsubscribe right away if you don't want it.

 

@Artem You would definitely want to rewrite these articles before placing them on your site.

 

@DOA Here's my perspective: I outsource my rubbish articles. Employees in the Phillipines rehash content and create some new content for syndication on Press Release and Article sites. Maybe rubbish is being a bit tough, but it's not of high-enough quality to publish on my own blog.

When I'm writing for my personal blog or guest posting, it's killer content that is written with the intent of getting picked up, tweeted, linked to, and all that good stuff.

But I think it's ok to generate some rubbish content that's only purpose is to get a couple of backlinks. In theory, it would be great to write a game-changing content every time. But that's just not realistic.

My rule of thumb. Only post great content on your own site and other authority sites that matter. If you're just trying to pick up a quick backlink from http://www.articlefeeder.com/, go ahead and take the short cut.

 

Where you can get into trouble is when you join these link rings where everybody in the same group links to everybody else. Reciprocal situations like this... not as good. Back in the early 2000s though this strategy used to crush it in the search engines from what I hear. Does that answer your question sufficiently?[/QUOTE]

What if you aren't in a "link ring," but you DO have a set of blogs with a mutual interest--that link to each other? I own a blog (called Tucson on the Cheap). I belong to a network of other city sites that offer deals in other cities. We do link to each other, but I think in this case, it's quite reasonable.

Your thoughts? Thank you.

 

Hi McBrett,

Thanks for posting this thread. I do have a question. Ok, so we know that linking to "bad neighborhoods" could get you penalties from Google - which includes adult entertainment websites (can you really?). But what about linking to adult webmaster forums and adult entertainment directories? Would that be considered a "bad neighborhood"?

I'm working on a site right now. It's fairly new so it does not have a lot of links yet. To improve the rankings we would need links. But one of our target markets is the adult webmasters and business owners so in order for them to find us we would need to advertise to those sites and get links to those so that they find us but I am afraid that it might hurt the rankings of the site. It's sort of a catch 22 really.

 

guyz its only a matter of time where google update your pagerank,, I know what you all do its good , just keep on doing it.

 

Or do it the other way around...like post in on your blog first then submit it to article directories that accept articles that's been published in other parts of the web and to other web 2.0 properties.

 

My question is:- ok tell me one thing...if we have two anchor tag with same url on the same page of other site then is it good or bad

 

@gilchrist Google does not crawl duplicate links found on a single. There's been quite a bit of documentation about this from sources like SEOMoz and BusinessOnline about this. There's actually a cool little tool you can use to see which one will get credit here: http://www.firstlinkchecker.com/.

Let me know if you have any additional questions about that.

@armiantz I'm cozy with that advice to gilchrist.

Regarding your earlier question: That's a really interesting question. I've never done any SEO for an adult site before so I've don't have any real-world experience.

If your site is about adult themed, however. I would suggest taking a look at the backlinks of some authority adult themed sites to get an idea of where to go with your link building: i.e. Check out PlayBoy.

My thought is that if your website is being marketed toward an adult themed audience you should be fine.

 

Thanks for answering my question mcbrett. There's been a lot of misinformation going around about SEO best practices especially with regards to sensitive subjects like linking to adult websites/bad neighborhoods. It's good there are people like you who are willing to help out and clear those things. Thanks mann!