Your site is a bit unwieldy but I am interested ... where exactly would you recommend I start my reading on your site to get up to speed so that my question are not meaningless and trivial to the people that would be answering my questions. I assume that every question I have has already been answered and I would like to be directed to books and procedures I can follow to promote my website. Your site seems highly professional and I want to add to that level of professionalism by not detracting from it. My site is fairly new , its a niche market atheistic poetry and essays about atheism. I dont see a lot of high quality atheism websites regarding writing and poetry so I am going to work to build a niche over the next few years. I want to eventually be a number one keyword ranking for some kind of atheism poetry phrase. I would like traffic for the purposes of achieving fame for my atheism I think I am more than most and I think my poetry is more poetic than most. I think I am a quality introspective writer and honestly I want to turn my writing work into speaking engagements with atheist clubs and poetry clubs. I am starting here and I think that if I work to build my site and my traffic good things can happen. That being said , I need to know where the resources are on your site that I need to become familiar with. I also need to know books that are trust worthy on SEO because it is a swarthy topic that I have read horror stories about.
Welcome to DP Nicholas. Don't be afraid to post your questions, thinking that it is wrong to do so because someone else already asked the same question. On these forums, the amount of posts is overwhelming and you would be joining a large group of people who just ask rather than search. It is the DP way. To make your search for specific information a bit more feasible though, go to Google. Search for... site:forums.digitalpoint.com your search term Code (markup): Using the "site:" search feature will let you use Google to search these forums specifically and hopefully get you some of the information you need (you can use the same method for searching any site with Google). I understand the desire to want to search, and prefer doing it that way rather than making a thread, but you won't be coloring outside the lines if you just ask on these forums without searching first. As for SEO books, don't drop money on anything until you get free information first. There is a ton of it out there on the net as long as you are willing to take a few minutes to make a Google search. There isn't anything in an SEO eBook that you can't find online for free and there isn't any single SEO eBook that comes close to covering it all. It can just take a bit more of your time to do the searching, but even if you prefer to pay to save some time, spend at least some time searching before you buy anything. It will help you get familiar with SEO basics and you will be more informed when you do go to make a purchase, increasing your chances that it is a good buy for your needs.
Thank you ... I have an overarching concept of SEO it seems like an art to me something that you have to develop your own understanding of. Here is what I have gathered so far ... Identify a phrase that you want to compete for clicks with and then put that phrase in your Title Tag. Follow up with h1 h2 h3 h4 etc tags echoing the same phrase that you used in your title tag Make certain that your body content echoes your Title and H1 tags Above is all I know for on the page SEO Then off the page SEO is the hard tedious part from what I understand You locate the page that you want to compete with and then you identify how many back links they have Then you go through the process of attaining links that have more link power through SEO research of the websites that you want to link with You post links on forums by hand or pay people to do it for you en mass through paid link building which can be dodgy Above is what I know about off the page link building Then you wait two weeks for the rankings to come in and see if your website has grown in status Sit back and collect your hits and be a good webmaster? Is that essentially what we are talking about or am I naively simplifying this?
I think you have a good basic grasp of SEO. I am no expert at SEO by any means but I have been learning it and using it on my sites over the past 4 years or so. Here are a few things I have picked up from solid sources, along with things that I have learned myself through trial and error, which relate to what you listed in your post. 1. h2/3/4 tags aren't necessarily useful if you are just using them to repeat your phrase throughout your content on a page. Through trial and error, I have personally found that Google penalized my pages where I tried it that way. Instead, take advantage of them by using them to break up your content into sections of a paragraph or two each, making the phrases that appear in the h2/3/4's be appropriate titles for those sections of content. For example, if you were doing a page on Popular Restaurant Hamburgers, you would use an H1 tag to repeat your keyword phrase, then use h2 to give titles to your sections, such as "Big Mac", "The Whopper", "Big Boy Burger", etc. Then you could use h3 to break it down more, such as "The History of the Big Mac", "Big Mac Ingredients", etc. 2. Absolutely make sure your body content echoes your Title and H1 tags. Google tries to replicate the desires of a human. If someone comes to your page about Popular Restaurant Hamburgers and finds that the majority of the content is about Popular Restaurant French Fries, they won't be happy with your page as the title and h1 mislead them. Google thinks the same way and will penalize your page and possibly put a penalty on your whole site, especially if you repeat the same type of thing on a few more pages. 3. Off page SEO isn't so much hard, but I think you have the tedious part right. There are some great options out there, software and tools, that can really help you streamline things and minimize the grunt work of it. Definitely something to add to your list to do some Google searches for. Keep in mind when searching for the info though that there are people who will feed you whatever they think will make you buy through their affiliate link, so do some digging and approach reviews skeptically. 4. Never sit back and collect your hits. Unless you are in a really relaxed niche or competing on some keywords that a serious Internet Marketer or Webmaster hasn't taken interest in yet, you can't afford to sit back. You have to always be working on pushing ahead. Even when you get on top, keep pushing ahead and make some distance. Being on top sucks. You are seen by every person with their sights on that keyword and there is a good chance that you won't see them coming. If you aren't maintaining a solid lead by continually building, tomorrow you could be the guy looking up. Even if you get to the point where you think you have overtaken someone and are sitting back to wait for an update on Google, what is your competition doing? You did sum it up pretty well but what you said was really just a broad overview. There are a lot of specifics involved but it looks like you have a good general idea of what you need to start doing. Just keep learning, find some good blogs where they discuss SEO on a constant basis to follow (but not just recycling the same stuff, usually they will be the ones who stay on top of things and you can see them talking about things like new strategies the day after Google makes a change), and never become complacent. It is also a very good idea to directly follow Bing, Yahoo, and Google. They each have their own areas dedicated to providing information and news on their search engine for webmasters. To get you started with following what is happening in SEO, make sure to bookmark and frequently check up on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
I dont want to say that SEO is essentially HTML common sense but I always thought going in that SEO was like akin to working for NASA if you could do it because of all of the writing and links and websites and just a massive glut of information that I saw. I really thought that SEO involved seriously high tech resources that I would never understand but if I understand what you are saying to sum it up in a metaphor it boils down to this ... we are building a dictionary and the best website that provides a defintion for a phrase or word is number one the second best definition according to google gets number two and so on until the last definition is just random comments. There is a gradient from the most salient information at the top that is relevant to the keyword search and then there is the least relevant definition at the bottom and you want to be working on your definition of your keyword phrase. That being said ... what exactly are some quality seo tools I heard that Market Samurai wasnt so hot anymore and I would be willing to try some new software if you could help me create back links. I have a new website and I need to build links to rise it through the ranks of atheism and i know there is a lot of competition but i am hoping to spend a year working on this website and i want to see how far i can get plus i might change the seo around if i thought that it would garner me more attention for my site.
I'm glad you find something that helps you, but really I found something about seo..its all about backlinks. Any webs can rank with good quality backlinks.
I will read about backlinks right now ... your confidence in your lesson learned makes me want to learn more about back links.
I am sorry Nicholas but I had no intention of leading you to believe that all that matters is content. At one point, we may get there. Right now though, Google (the algorithm) can't understand content exactly like a human does. Google also does not know what humans will like next. That is where backlinks come in. They play a very important part Google deciding what is actually good and what isn't. Google understands language to a certain level. It knows that grammar has certain rules, it has a dictionary so it knows spelling and definitions, it has a thesaurus so it knows synonyms, and it knows repetition when it sees it. Beyond that though, programming the algorithm has to get a lot more creative to think like a human. Since it is limited, backlinks are treated like a word of mouth referral is in the non-digital world. Backlinks show that someone likes your website enough to have a link to you from their site. This is something that Google has been working on and we have seen recent changes showing that Google is getting smarter when it comes to backlinks and is trying to improve how it valuates a link. When a site suddenly gets a larger number of links in a short time, it usually sees a big jump in rankings. This is because Google has little choice other than to perceive this as a big jump in popularity. Your site must have something great on it that people really want to see if 1000 sites link to it in a week. Google thinks this because Google doesn't have a 100% understanding of how people are perceiving your site. Over time it will correct a mistake in perceived popularity and has no problem with penalizing if it decides that your site has done something wrong. Where Google has made big strides is in calculating relevancy and authority for valuing each link. Google has been much more active in penalizing sites for getting junk links in recent years, along with identifying sites that provide poor content and changing how links coming from them are perceived. Google wants to see relevance and a big part of that is having good information on your site. Short term, a site with poor information and lots of backlinks from all over the place may see positive results, but long term it will hurt them and the sites that provide good information while building up a natural amount of relevant and valuable backlinks will see success. As for SEO vs NASA, it isn't really a hard thing to learn as much as it is something that takes time. What makes it harder is that, taking your SEO vs HTML example, with SEO you don't have a definitive line in the sand like you do for HTML. With HTML, everything is a known. Learning HTML requires little more than coffee and memorization. Learning SEO requires guessing and testing. You can see in what I wrote above, I stated what Google will do like it was fact. In reality, it is just my educated guess. Based on things Google staff have said, the changes we have seen made to Google over time, and the assumption that Google views its search users as its customer base (centers everything it does around making them happy), we can make an educated guess at what Google will do (but not actually know). Just remember that this isn't a dictionary situation. Google can't fully understand what a human wants to read so it as to rely on things like traffic data, a rule-set to determine what cannot be good quality, and backlinks.