Hello, I am returning to the SEO game after a two year absence. I imagine things have changed a lot while also staying the same. I'm going to write down the way it was. If you have any advice for the way that things ARE now then please advise. 1. Submit site/sitemap to search engines 2. eliminate duplicate content from site via .htaccess file 3. use title tag 4. use meta description 5. use meta keywords 6. Write good content with decent keyword % 7. Clean/pretty permalinks 8. Submit to social bookmarking sites 9. Submit to directories 10. robots.txt file to prevent access to admin pages 11. Comment on other related blogs 12. Ask/trade/beg for backlinks from other sites. 13. Domain name with keywords. If anyone has any advice for the current stage of SEO please do share. I think these things must be important but know their value is skewed. I already went through the process of buying a domain with decent domain name, with a couple of keywords in it, that has been around for 10 years to sidestep any sandboxing. The site needs to fly ASAP and is in a saturated niche. Love, me please...
1. No, never manually submit a site to search engines and xml sitemaps are not SEO related. 2. Fair enough but, also make sure to not have both www and non www versions of the site as well via .htaccess 3. <Title> is a page attribute but yes, it is the most important element to deal with. 4. Meta description is for marketing, not SEO. 5. Keyword tag has not mattered for years. 6. Keyword density is not a usable metric. Write content for your visitors not the SE's. 7. Sure, I agree in a sense. It is not vital but I am picky so usually try to enforce that. It's good practice but according to the experts its a non issue. 8. No point really. I call those transient links. Work on getting links that stand the test of time. 9. There are 2-3 that may be worth the effort. Directory submissions are largely pointless. 10. Sure 11. Assuming you can note the difference between contributing to someones site vs. what folks sell as blog commenting services here this is ok. Make a substantive, useful contribution not "cool post" and then paste a link to your site. Some folks will say hey, a link is a link. This is not accurate. Additionally, if what you are doing is important... half ass backlinks like that just make you and the site or business in question look like idiots. 12. I am not above it lol... 13. Still is and will always be a ringer.
Thanks for the advice. Anything you'd like to add based on experience? And the site submissions are done via Google webmaster tools, Yahoo site explorer, and the Bing one. Nothing else.
Sitemaps are worthless from an SEO perspective. Won't speed up crawl. Won't get more pages indexed. Only useful to get sites with zero inbound links indexed... to help get deep pages on huges sites (100s of thousandds of pages) indexed using prioriy... or to get pages on sites that are not crawlable indexed... If you are speaking of fixing eliminating duplicate content due to URL canonicalization issues using 301 redirects then you are correct. But it won't fix 'true' duplicate content where people are republishing content from other sites (like from RSS feeds from article submission sites). Yep. <title> is still the most influential on-page ranking factor. So optimizing title tags... err... title elements is STILL a very important part of on-page SEO. Not used at Google for ranking. Is likely still used at some of the other search engines for ranking. Optimizing the meta description is still important even at Google primarily because it is sometimes shown in the SERPs as the snippet and can affecxt click-thru-rates to your site. Not used at Google or any other "real" search engines for rankings... Oh wait. Danny Sullivan proved after SMX a couple weeks ago that though Yahoo! said at the conference that they don't use it either for ranking, the morons there at Yahoo! still actually use it... Sooooooooooo sad. Good content is still king in that is is the most likely to bring you natural inbound links over the long haul. Keyword density is less important... Write content for readers, not search engines. The keyword density should take care of itself. Keyword rich (but not spammy) URLs likely carry a little more weight these days than they did 2-3 years ago. But still it is minor in comparison to other ranking factors like <title> and inbound links. Great way to get quick traffic, especially if you can target people in your niche. But don't expect it to help from an SEO perspective. Most links from social bookmarking sites like Digg have been changed to NOFOLLOW. And you're not likely to get inbound links because of it unless you are bookmarking something on your site that is VIRAL. Directory submission doesn't work as well as it used to. Google has modified it's algorithm and discounts links from many spammy directories. Some respectable human editted, niche directories are still effective. Of course, DMOZ, BOTW, Yahoo! and probably Business.com links likely carry weight still. But directory links (like blog commenting links and forum signature links) are generally considered low quality links. Robots.txt is not as effective as using <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in keeping pages out of Google's index. <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> is guaranteed to keep your pages from being shown in the SERPs. Robots.txt disallow: directives won't always prevent Google indexing. 99.99% of all blogs on the planet are NOFOLLOW. So spamming comments on blog posts is a waste of time unless they are in your niche. You can get a little occasional traffic from good comments on related blogs, but at Google those NOFOLLOW links are not going to help you rank. Only bother if you are going to do so in person or on the phone and from relevant sites where links to your site provides that other site's visitors some benefit. Doing so via form emails is not going to result in any backlinks. Very effective for helping your site rank for search phrases that EXACTLY match the user's search phrase. Not much more effective than having the keywords/keyword phrase in the folder or page name(s) when the user's search phrase is only a partial match.
ROFLMAO... Nigel and I OBVIOUSLY think alike... I was typing my response at the same time he was... Only as you can see I'm a little more long winded. He's a bit more to the point. But I think our messages are still generally the same.
Absolutely the right tools are as you said.But you can also try other major search engine players like www.anoox.com www.exactseek.com www.jayde.com
You want links that "stand the test of time" As a general rule of thumb, if its being offered in the services section on DP, its a load of crap eg: link wheels etc. Your first order of business should always be the research. Both keyword and demographic(competition). As for #1 NO, do not do this. It is pointless. Simply generating one useful backlink pointing at your site will get it indexed in due time. It is much faster than manually submitting it. I have not submitted a site manually for almost 8 years. So, a few things. Not much has changed per say, but it is certainly quite pressing to do things correctly. Google likes authority sites. The trick is to makes sites an authority on the matter, not game the SERPS. I touched on a few things briefly here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1535228 I am about to roll out a ton of copy explaining how to properly do a wide range of things but I am a tad swamped with clients.(As of late based on that thread actually) Fortunately, there are a few readers of DP that can think for themselves. I hope that helps. I am happy to answer questions. While albeit a tad narcissistic, I am on a bit of mission to try and teach folks there is no quick and easy way to do things, especially backlink related. I again am referring to the services section. I can't believe the crap I see roll through there lol.... Nigel
Given you are 1 of about 5 people around here that does not have their head up their ass about SEO(at least that bothers to post) I will have to take that as a compliment Nigel
Nobody has much new information to add to this? I was hoping besides comments on what I wrote their might be some new techniques.
Now a days most popular and most effective SEO techniques is high quality link building. I don't know it was working before 2 years or not.
OK . Great. Now article marketing is what.. submitting a decent article niche related with interior links to pages on the site you are promoting? And then sent to article submission sites? Same thing with the video?