Know Your Target Audience
Most important of all is that you have to know who your audience is. You must write for your target readers and not just about the topics (because you may diverge away from the readers’ needs if you centered your content around topics to write).
Your target audience must be convinced that your content is written for their needs and unmissable. What they want is a 100% relevant content so that their times are not wasted. Even if your content is just 70% relevant, there’s a big chance that they won’t subscribe to it – because some of your content can be missed!
It’s a good trick to write clearly at the top of your blog to whom is it for so that they know right away without even reading the content yet.
Write Good Stuff, But How?
Content is the heart of your blog, so make it a great one. Write posts that give values to the readers, not just for the sake of making more posts. One post packed with values is worth so much more than many posts with little or no values.
If time is hard to come by, it’s okay to post less but make sure each piece have great values to offer. Make your readers’ time worthwhile. Readers will subscribe if they learn a lot from your content.
Expose Your Blog – To Your Target Audience!
There are two ways for people to get to your blogs – links or social media. These are the place to put your effort to build your blog’s exposure.
Links: There are two types of links:
- Links you make in other blogs:
- Links from your comments in other blogs.
- Your forum or social media signature.
- Your by-line as guest-posts.
- Links you get from other blogs:
- Write great articles that people will link to.
- Ask them to link to you or exchange links with them.
The most powerful links that you can make or get are from popular blogs, sites, and forums related to your blogging niche. Not all links are equal – some links are better (in sending readers to your blog) than others. But it’s better to have all these links than to have none or just a few good ones. It’s unmistakable that if you have great and valuable content, links will come naturally.
Try also to write as guest-posts especially in popular blogs. But first, show that your content is worth it.
Social Media: The tip on social media (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) is simply to be an active user. If you vote for other posts, they tend to vote for your article as this is naturally the easiest way to repay the favor. Once your article has been voted, other people will easily build it up the ladder on.
Some principles that guarantees her success are to be friendly, treat every person you interact with respect, always help out in the best way you can, focus on mutual benefit, and give more than you take.
Other Little Things
Without all of the above, the little things won’t work. But once you have the essentials covered, consider putting some effort on the extras
- Make your feed button easily visible (e.g. at the top part without scrolling)
- Add the option to subscribe at the end of each post.
- Put effort on blog design. Readers see that authors’ are more serious with their content if they are serious about their blog design.
- Write often and write well with quality and meaningful content to keep readers interested.
- Submit blogs to search engines to make sure it is listed (it may take time for it to go up the list).
- Link to others using Blogroll. Owners of the blogs you link to will most likely link to you back and have their visitors use the links to go to your blog.
- Use comments efficiently. Increase your readers’ loyalty by responding and interacting with your commenters. Leave thoughtful and relevant comments on other blogs to draw others to visit your blog.
- Syndicate your blog using a feed so that others can get updates to your blog easily. (Read more on how to increase your subscribers.)
- Use links and trackbacks. Links to your blogs are powerful ‘vote of confidences’ that are counted in ranking your blog. You can create internal links from your posts to your other posts too (works best when you use the right keywords to link). Trackbacks are links in other blogs’ comments that link back to your blog. They’re created when you link to these blogs’ posts in your posts. Some blogs either don’t have or don’t allow trackbacks to appear.
- Add tags to your posts. Tags increase the chance of others finding your content in search engines.
- Submit your posts to Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc). If your posts are excellent, others will vote for them as well and make them more visible to other millions of readers.
- Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Use the right and relevant keywords relevant that can draw large number of readers to your posts. Using keywords that’s not searched often will decrease visibility of your blogs in search engines.
- Use images with the right keywords. Other people don’t just search for contents, they search for images too!
- Try to write posts in other blogs as a guest blogger. The more popular those blogs are, the more traffic they’ll send to your blog.
- Participate in forums and social networking with people of relevant interest.
- Promote your blog outside the blogosphere. Add your blog URL in your email signature or business cards. Basically, tell others about it.
- Nominate yourself (or other blogs) for blog awards to get more attention to your blog.
- Don’t be shy to do all of the above.
A website without traffic might just as well have never been built. It’s invisible and unsuccessful. It’s a fact – No Traffic = Invisible! There are many tried and tested free methods for driving web traffic to your website. Many of these free methods are absolute gems that can drive truckloads of web traffic to your website. Here are the top free methods to use in order to gain PR4 and PR5 for most of blogs and web sites.
- Offer a great freebie like an ebook or tutorial, with your web site links imbedded, then let others give it away for free at their site, too. They can use it as an incentive, bonus, or just as a gift for visitors. It adds value for those sites that spread it and it creates more visitors back to your site as your freebie spreads because of your imbedded links.
- One of the best ways to increase web traffic is to accumulate quality links to your site. Not only do you get more people from the linked sites to visit your site, but you get better rankings with search engines. The combination of increased traffic from linked sites and more internet traffic from the search engines will provide a huge pay off for the time and effort you invest. But, stay away from Link Farms and buying links. Go only for sites with quality that matches yours.
- Visit and comment in Forums. If your comments are interesting and liked by the forum members, they will click on your link and visit your website regularly. This is a great way to create a targeted traffic. This mode of free website advertisement is also relatively untapped by many marketers for driving web traffic, so you can take full advantage by using your writing skills and create traffic from the forums. Just remember – Your posts should really be useful to the members of the forum. Don’t post just to sell something. You will be banned.
- Another great method of driving targeted web traffic is joining popular social networking web sites. Social networking web sites can immediately send your website a flood of targeted web traffic. The common factor between all the social networking sites is social interaction. These sites are hugely popular and are liked by the search engines for this fact. Social sites like the Facebook and MySpace are so popular that they can send you massive traffic.
- I saved my #1 method for last – Article Marketing. Article Marketing can dramatically increase the targeted traffic to your web site and increase your search engine rankings at the same time if you provide quality information! Your high quality, original, search engine optimized content will be spread around the web. Your articles feature your Author Box which is where you place a snippet about your web site and it’s products and services.
Article submission sites are extremely popular, and many web masters depend completely on them to borrow free articles for their own web sites with a condition that the articles borrowed shall contain the full text and the Author Box. These could be your articles with your Author Box! This creates a free viral traffic to your website when your quality articles are published by other web sites.
There have been various types of companies started in the past few years and even more so with the creation and startup of the Internet. The world of online businesses has sky rocketed with the startup and design of millions of web sites. Customers search the Internet several times a day, which is beneficial for many businesses who want to increase the amount of clients that they are able to cater to with their products and services.
In today’s society of online businesses, there exist several different kinds of businesses that have designed several attractive web pages. They use different strategies to increase the amount of money that they can acquire and that help their business to improve and grow. Some examples of these online businesses include search engines, trade product sites, and entertainment sites.
Other examples of online business methods that have gained a great reputation the last couple of years are the new web sites called blogs. Blogs have only been around for a few years and help people to display thoughts, ideas, and opinions through the creation of an online web site. These blogs also help people to share different ideas, similar likes and dislikes, pictures, videos, and basically just maintain simple communication through the use of the Internet.
These types of web sites have become very reputable throughout the last decade and have also just recently become a way for people to earn a little bit of money. Once again, they provide for the needs of the enormous amount of Internet traffic and they try to attract a large portion of this traffic to their own blogs. The more traffic flow through their blogs, the more popular and financially valuable the web sites will become.
Many blogs maintain several positive aspects but also have several bad points. First of all, blogs are fairly simple to design and create and do not require a lot of training or experience in order to publish. Anyone who knows how to use a computer and search through the Internet is capable of designing and publishing a successful blog web site.
Blogs are also pretty cheap to design, create, and set up as an online web page . They require little to no money at all and can be published online with the simple click of a mouse. Blogs also provide a great way for people to communicate with each other and to express their opinions freely.
The startup of a web site that includes a blog is also wonderful because they are highly ranked by search engines. Search engines absolutely love blogs because they are full of text and keywords that come up when people are searching for certain kinds of things. Search engines also love blogs because they are a nest for all kinds of links.
Some big pitfalls of online blogs are that many people have gotten the same idea of starting a blog. Many years ago there were only a few blogs that were published on the Internet, which made them very popular and rich. People were able to obtain a great income because there were rare and people wanted to become a part of them.
In today’s world, blogs have gained a great reputation and there are literally thousands and thousands of them on the Internet. You have to compete strongly with all of them if you want to be successful and effective, which makes having a blog much more complicated.
10 Things You Can Do to Get People to Comment on Your Blog
RockyStar : February 13, 2009 10:42 am : SEOFor the blogging community, a comment is a badge of sorts. Every comment you receive represents one person that, regardless of whether they agree with your ideas or not, read your post and felt strongly enough to respond to them. Comments can make even the most jaded of bloggers feel fuzzy inside. So, how does a new blogger start turning those dozens of posts into a field of comments and discussion? It can seem hard at first, but there are a few steps you can take right away that will increase your readers’ willingness to speak up.
Invite Comments
For whatever reason, if you ask your readers to leave a comment on your post, they will be immediately more willing to do so. This is just a natural response that the human brain tends to have. People are often in a hurry, or have multiple things on their mind. They might fully enjoy your post, but as soon as they are done, click to something else. If you ask them to comment, it serves as a subtle reminder that they should join in the conversation.
Open Ended Posts
Even if you are an expert on a topic, don’t try to share every possible detail in one post. Be as open ended as possible and leave a few points for your readers to share. This takes a little bit of the humility mentioned below. If you can keep from throwing every fact you’ve ever read about a specific topic into one post, your readers will not have to think about something to say in response.
Ask Lots of Questions
The obvious way to get responses is to ask a question. If you ask your readers what they think about a topic, or for specific people to give their opinion on a lifestyle, you will get more responses. For example, if your blog is about TV shows and you ask a question such as “What shows did you enjoy in the past that are similar to The Simpsons”, you will get many more comments than if you said “I enjoy old shows like All in the Family, because it is like The Simpsons”. Engage your readers by addressing them directly.
Respond to Existing Comments
If someone comments, respond to it. Even if the comment is short and not particularly deep, a quick response can show that you are always paying attention and willing to engage in conversation with your readers. That commenter is now much more likely to comment again.
Setting Rules
Most blogging platforms such as Blogger do not have a built in set of rules for comments. The comments section is left open by default and you can make changes to it if you desire. Try creating a commenting policy and posting it on your page somewhere. This may seem like it would lower comments, but by describing what is allowed, readers with potential comments they might not have been willing to share initially are more likely to comment.
Show Some Humility
Don’t try to know everything all the time. Be humble and show that you are aware of your own shortcomings, failings and holes in your knowledge. Don’t be self-defacing, but be willing to say “I don’t really know much about this, but I had a thought”. The best part about blogging is that it gives readers and writers a chance to interact on an equal, real time level. If visitors want to read the opinions of those who feel they are always right, they could buy a book or pick up a newspaper.
Controversy
It’s a gamble, and you can go too far, but if you want to breed new comments on your page quickly, pick a controversial topic and make a statement. This does mean you need to become political or religious. You could simply say that you disliked a popular movie. Anytime a blogger disagrees with popular opinion, comments skyrocket. Just be prepared to stand up for your opinion and to do it gracefully.
Graciousness, Admit When You Are Wrong
If you make a mistake and someone writes a comment pointing out that mistake, try to accept their comment and admit your mistake. It is very easy to become defensive and angry on the Internet where you have no personal contact with your readers. However, by showing that you graciously accept someone else’s comments and opinions, you show humility and increase the likeliness of return visitors and readers.
Don’t Make it Hard to Comment
Blogger has an option that allows you to require a login for the posting of comments. This is too much work. If you require a login, many people will decide against commenting altogether, especially if they need to sign up for a new account to do so. Instead of requiring login information, you can set your comments for approval before they post. This allows you to sort out comments and delete spam if necessary.
Make It Worth Their While
If you offer a reward for a good comment, you not only encourage repeat comments, you encourage better comments. Mark especially good comments with a comment of your own, or reference them in a new post. This draws attention to your readers and shows you are reading what they say.
If you want to grow your readership and comments section, the best thing you can do is to be involved and pay attention to what your readers have to say. Do these things and you will start to see your comment spaces fill up in no time.
Reports suggest that a majority of online businesses fail. This means that you will need to avoid the common reasons for the failure in order to make a success of your online business.
Instant results:
In the day of instant gratification and lightning speed, everyone wants everything yesterday. The level of expectations is further heightened by the number of stories doing the rounds about internet millionaires and guys who invented the next big thing online. A huge number of internet businesses fail simply due to the unrealistic expectations the owner had. Now let’s be realistic. You are probably not a rocket scientist or Einstein and while your idea may be good, it may simply not take off. A successful business person has to be persistent and be patient. You will see some failures before success comes and you need to weather through it and persist. This is the most important way to sustain your business – keep at it and don’t give up easily.
Lack of Updates:
If you expect that you can simply put up your site on the internet and people will swarm to it and you never have to do anything again, think again. That simply doesn’t happen. That’s what they don’t show you – what happens after the end of the movie. The hero gets rich but has to work hard to stay rich. It’s the same with your site. You will need to constantly change with the business, the technology and the internet’s thought process to remain in business. You need continuous updating, in terms of marketing, optimization of your technology and content, and even your offerings.
Value proposition:
A number of online businesses fail simply because they do not offer a value proposition to the customer. Do not underestimate your customer – you cannot fool everyone all of the time so people will compare the value you offer to hundreds of other competitors on the internet market before selecting. If you want to get picked, be sure that you have a unique selling proposition and the customer will find value in what you provide.
Riding a wave:
Many people do not have a unique idea of their own and simply want to cash in on the latest wave in the market. The internet has its share of fads and one line of thinking is to create a site based on what everyone else is doing. While this is not a bad idea in itself, you need to remember that if everyone else is doing it, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from them. Further, you will need to have solid understanding on the subject that you select, through research and experience. Also, remember that when the next fad comes, this one will fade and your business site should have a sustainable advantage to keep afloat.
Disinterest:
Some entrepreneurs are simply not interested in providing a product or service. They only want to make money. This harks back to the earlier points of updating and offering value to the customer. If you do not update your site and offer good service to your customer, your lack of interest in the business will show through and customers will not buy from you.
Internet Business - The Best Way to Make Money Online and Work From Home
RockyStar : February 13, 2009 10:32 am : SEOWith so many people dissatisfied with their current jobs, there are constantly people looking for the best way to make money online and work from home. All you have to do is run a search on Google using these terms and you’ll find that there are thousands of results out there. However, many people never really find a great opportunity that really allows them to realize their dreams of quitting their job and working at home full time – that is until My Internet Business came along.
Finally there is a system available that can truly offer the keys to learning to make money online. Wondering what makes this opportunity so different from the rest? Well, here are a few of the key benefits that My Internet Business has to offer those who want to make money online and work from home.
Benefit #1 – Anyone Can Join – One of the main benefits that you’ll find with My Internet Business is that anyone can join this opportunity. You don’t have to be a marketing guru to join this program to make money online and work from home. While it is a great program for those who already have experience in the marketing field, it is also an excellent choice for people who are just getting started in this field as well. Also, it is not so expensive to make it prohibitive to joint. There are several different plan levels that you can purchase into, depending on the amount of money that you are willing and able to spend on this opportunity.
Benefit #2 - Great Training is Offered – Probably one of the top key benefits of using My Internet Business to make money online and work at home is that there is such great training offered. Many people who end up failing in a work at home business do so because they do not know how to effectively market anything. You’ll learn this important lesson with the training provided, which will allow you to start making money with just about any business venture you choose to. You’ll find that this company offers some of the best training out there, and even once you go through the initial training, there will continue to be training sessions each week that can help you as you get started within this business.
Benefit #3 – Ground Breaking Compensation Plan – Last of all, the ground breaking compensation plan that My Internet Business has to offer is yet another excellent benefit as well. Their compensation plan is much different than anyone else’s today. You actually get the money right from the sales that you make, instead of waiting around for the company to finally send you a check. Also, unlike many other companies, once you learn how to properly operate this program, there is room for you to expand and start to use the same principles you learned to sell your own products as well, which brings in even more money for you.
Email Marketing is a part of Internet marketing in which we make a direct mail marketing campaign for the promotion of a product or any service provider. It is very effective way I am going to explain it just right below for better understanding.
- It is better way because we can sell our product and services easily to a person where ever he might be in this world. No Phone Calls, No Postal Fairs, No Paper for printing and also No time just only a simple click and our massage get delivered to any person in this world. It saves lots of time, cost as well as effort.
- Direct mail campaign or E-mail campaign can be easily trackable. We can see how many users clicked our links on that mail which we send and can calculate its effectiveness. Also we can test different messages like we can change its headlines to see what should be the best and possible way to send a message.
The quality and quantity of available plugins can often influence bloggers to choose WordPress when setting up a new blog. However, sometimes the huge number of plugins can become confusing and frustrating. There are several very good plugins that have been developed to enhance the search engine optimization of your blog. Here are 10 of the best, in no particular order.
Take control of your meta descriptions and page titles. You can also tag posts with categories. All-in-One SEO Pack is one of the most popular SEO-related plugins because of the essential functions it allows you to perform.
Another extremely popular plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior helps you to add tags, which are recognized by search engines like Technorati, to each of your posts. UTW provides you with a few different options for entering tags, including simply typing your tags when you’re entering the post.
Internal linking is valuable for SEO and it can also help your readers to find additional content that may interest them. Related Entries will make the process easy. Your posts will automatically include links to related posts (in a list, at the bottom of the post).
We’ve already mentioned title tags with the All-in-One SEO Pack, and SEO Title Tags provides another quality option. With this plugin you can easily control and optimize the titles of every page and post you create with WordPress.
Google and other search engines use XML sitemaps to find and index all the pages of websites and blogs. By default your WordPress blog does not create an XML sitemap. With this plugin the process is automated. Additionally, it automatically updates the XML file whenever you publish a new post.
No, this is not the same thing as #5. This plugin creates a sitemap that human visitors will be able to use, rather than an XML sitemap, which is created for search engines. This type of sitemap also has SEO purposes as it will place a link to every page/post on your blog, not to mention the fact that it’s helpful for visitors.
7. Antisocial
Antisocial is more SEO-friendly version of the very popular Sociable plugin. It adds no-follow tags to the links created by the plugin to social media sites.
8. WP Backlinks
Are you interested in getting more links to your blog? WP Backlinks helps you to collect and manage reciprocal links with other blogs. Other bloggers can fill out a form on your blog, add a link to you, and you will then be notified so you can add a reciprocal link.
This plugin will give you the option to have meta tags automatically generated, or it will allow you to create them manually.
The SEO Master plugin has two modules, the nofollow module and the meta module. Like some of the other plugins listed, it will let you add and customize meta tags, but it will also let you tell WordPress to add nofollow tags to different types of links.
List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website
Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance. If you need more information on particular sections of the checklist, you may read SEO tutorial, which gives more detailed explanations of Keywords, Links, Metatags, Visual Extras, etc.
|
Keywords |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Keywords in <title> tag |
This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the <title> tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning. |
+3 |
|
2 |
Keywords in URL |
Keywords in URLs help a lot – e.g. – http://domainname.com/seo-services.html, where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don’t have the keywords in other parts of the document, don’t rely on having them in the URL. |
+3 |
|
3 |
Keyword density in document text |
Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text. |
+3 |
|
4 |
Keywords in anchor text |
Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular. |
+3 |
|
5 |
Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags) |
One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword. |
+3 |
|
6 |
Keywords in the beginning of a document |
Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table. |
+2 |
|
7 |
Keywords in <alt> tags |
Spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them. |
+2 |
|
8 |
Keywords in metatags |
Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and MSN still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or MSN, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it. |
+1 |
|
9 |
Keyword proximity |
Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words. |
+1 |
|
10 |
Keyword phrases |
In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO services”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match. |
+1 |
|
11 |
Secondary keywords |
Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “real estate new jersey” might have thousand times less hits than “real estate” only but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably better targeted traffic. |
+1 |
|
12 |
Keyword stemming |
For English this is not so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs, doggy, etc.) are considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them. |
+1 |
|
13 |
Synonyms |
Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well, when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken into account, when calculating rankings and relevancy. |
+1 |
|
14 |
Keyword Mistypes |
Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you’d better don’t do it, or do it only in the metatags. |
0 |
|
15 |
Keyword dilution |
When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text. |
-2 |
|
16 |
Keyword stuffing |
Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines. |
-3 |
|
Links – internal, inbound, outbound |
|||
|
17 |
Anchor text of inbound links |
As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don’t, it is still OK. |
+3 |
|
18 |
Origin of inbound links |
Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable. |
+3 |
|
19 |
Links from similar sites |
Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community. |
+3 |
|
20 |
Links from .edu and .gov sites |
These links are precious because .edu and .govsites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain. |
+3 |
|
21 |
Number of backlinks |
Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, etc. |
+3 |
|
22 |
Anchor text of internal links |
This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links. |
+2 |
|
23 |
Around-the-anchor text |
The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it naturally flows in the text. |
+2 |
|
24 |
Age of inbound links |
The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them. |
+2 |
|
25 |
Links from directories |
Great, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar directories is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links. |
+2 |
|
26 |
Number of outgoing links on the page that links to you |
The fewer, the better for you because this way your link looks more important. |
+1 |
|
27 |
Named anchors |
Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors look like this: <A href= “#dogs”>Read about dogs</A> and “#dogs” is the named anchor. |
+1 |
|
28 |
IP address of inbound link |
Google denies that they discriminate against links that come from the same IP address or C class of addresses, so for Google the IP address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. However, MSN and Yahoo! may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always better to get links from different IPs. |
+1 |
|
29 |
Inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites |
This does not affect you in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don’t get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault but in any case you’d better stay away from link farms and similar suspicious sites. |
0 |
|
30 |
Many outgoing links |
Google does not like pages that consists mainly of links, so you’d better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse. |
-1 |
|
31 |
Excessive linking, link spamming |
It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. In the best case only some of the links are taken into account for SEO rankings. |
-1 |
|
32 |
Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites |
Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and vice versa. |
-3 |
|
33 |
Cross-linking |
Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized. |
-3 |
|
34 |
Single pixel links |
when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines. |
-3 |
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Metatags |
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|
35 |
<Description> metatag |
Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use the <Description> metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still rock on MSN and Yahoo!, the <Description> metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results. |
+1 |
|
36 |
<Keywords> metatag |
The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though as all metatags it gets almost no attention from Google and some attention from MSN and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20 keywords at most. Don’t stuff the <Keywords> tag with keywords that you don’t have on the page, this is bad for your rankings. |
+1 |
|
37 |
<Language> metatag |
If your site is language-specific, don’t leave this tag empty. Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the <language>metatag but they still consider it. |
+1 |
|
38 |
<Refresh> metatag |
The <Refresh> metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. Only do it if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the <refresh> metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting through 301 is much better. |
-1 |
|
Content |
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|
39 |
Unique content |
Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings. |
+3 |
|
40 |
Frequency of content change |
Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content. |
+3 |
|
41 |
Keywords font size |
When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text. |
+2 |
|
42 |
Keywords formatting |
Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect. |
+2 |
|
43 |
Age of document |
Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored. |
+2 |
|
44 |
File size |
Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones. |
+1 |
|
45 |
Content separation |
From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content of the page is. |
-2 |
|
46 |
Poor coding and design |
Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this sense poor code and design can harm you a lot. |
-2 |
|
47 |
Illegal Content |
Using other people’s copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines. |
-3 |
|
48 |
Invisible text |
This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don’t be surprised by the penalty. |
-3 |
|
49 |
Cloaking |
Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page. |
-3 |
|
50 |
Doorway pages |
Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines. |
-3 |
|
51 |
Duplicate content |
When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because theduplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper. |
-3 |
|
Visual Extras and SEO |
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52 |
JavaScript |
If used wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes it more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can’t follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings. |
0 |
|
53 |
Images in text |
Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always provide in the <alt>tag a meaningful description of an image but don’t stuff it with keywords or irrelevant information. |
0 |
|
54 |
Podcasts and videos |
Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more popular but as with all non-textual goodies, search engines can’t read them, so if you don’t have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines. |
0 |
|
55 |
Images instead of text links |
Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you don’t fill in the <alt> tag. But even if you fill in the <alt> tag, it is not the same as having a bold, underlined, 16-pt. link, so use images for navigation only if this is really vital for the graphic layout of your site. |
-1 |
|
56 |
Frames |
Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary. |
-2 |
|
57 |
Flash |
Spiders don’t index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don’t forget to give it an alternative textual description. |
-2 |
|
58 |
A Flash home page |
Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide. |
-3 |
|
Domains, URLs, Web Mastery |
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|
59 |
A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and MSN. |
+3 |
|
|
60 |
Site Accessibility |
Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can’t be indexed. |
+3 |
|
61 |
Sitemap |
It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format. |
+2 |
|
62 |
Site size |
Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don’t split your size in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger. |
+2 |
|
63 |
Site age |
Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped up and might soon disappear. |
+2 |
|
64 |
Site theme |
It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme. |
+2 |
|
65 |
File Location on Site |
File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below. |
+1 |
|
66 |
Domains versus subdomains, separate domains |
Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate blablabla.com domain. |
+1 |
|
67 |
Top-level domains (TLDs) |
Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD –.com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old .edu or .org domain. |
+1 |
|
68 |
Hyphens in URLs |
Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL. |
+1 |
|
69 |
URL length |
Generally doesn’t matter but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable). |
0 |
|
70 |
IP address |
Could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when the IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices. |
0 |
|
71 |
Adsense will boost your ranking |
Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your search rankings. |
0 |
|
72 |
Adwords will boost your ranking |
Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way. |
0 |
|
73 |
Hosting downtime |
Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it can’t be indexed. But in practice this is a factor only if your hosting provider is really unreliable and has less than 97-98% uptime. |
-1 |
|
74 |
Dynamic URLs |
Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case you’d better use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly. |
-1 |
|
75 |
Session IDs |
This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don’t use session IDs for information that you’d like to be indexed by spiders. |
-2 |
|
76 |
Bans in robots.txt |
If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site. |
-2 |
|
77 |
Redirects (301 and 302) |
When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page. |
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