Crash into SEO with this course
This will be the most valuable thing you learn about getting your website seen
S.E.O. If you have been doing any research on how to get visitors to your website, you will have come across this term one way or another. If not, then let me tell you want S.E.O. means.
Search Engine Optimization:
A practice in making your website friendly or optimized for search engine crawling or indexing.
There are three major things that you should concern your self when it comes to building a website. These are things that you should take into consideration while you are designing, but if you are done designing, you can easily make some changes to optimize your site. So lets start with THE most important thing in S.E.O.
BACK-LINKS
You probably never heard this term before. I didn’t until I started doing some serious research into how to optimize my website. A back link is literally a link back to your website from another website. Its a simple concept really. Google figures that if people are linking to your website, it must be good. They look at a back link as a vote for your site from another site.
The thing is, there are quality back-links and garbage back links.
A quality back link is one that is on a website that contains relevant content to your website, does not have a “noFollow” tag on all things, and is not a “link farm”
Now to explain a little more in depth the whole noFollow thing. The average person’s website does not use noFollow on their links, but there are some scripts like Wordpress, that automatically ads noFollow into your link’s HTML code to tell the search engines NOT to follow the link to your website. If a website is scanning another site and finds a link to your website on that other website, they will follow it and basically record it into the database as a link to your site. When there is a noFollow tag, the search engines just see that link as plain text and it has nothing to do with your website in their eyes. There are plugins and addons for wordpress that take the noFollow tags out of links and links in comments.
A link farm is something you REALLY want to stay away from. A link farm is a place that will offer to sell you 1,000 “quality” back links and claim to get you to the top 10 in google within a short period of time. Now the old adage holds true where if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. These places CAN get you to the top 10 of google, but it is at a HUGE cost to yourself. Basically, google will first see that you have a lot of back-links to your site and catapult you to the top. Then they will do a little more searching and find out that those links came from a spammer’s source or LINK FARM and your website will be black listed and you will have to work VERY hard to your website off of google’s black list. You will basically have to grovel and work hard to apologize.
Now, a directory is different from a link farm. They are not spammers, but simply collectors of links that they organize into certain categories for users to browse. A place like Link Listings is just a collector of links. The difference is that a directory will only give your website ONE link and one link only. A link farm basically owns loads of domains and they fill their domains with lots of listings. Have you ever accidentally typed in the wrong url and ended up on a page that looks like it’s just a directory of random websites? It happens to me all the time. THOSE things are likely owned by link farms.
The best back-links are those that you acquire natural. When a website does post your link on their website, they are truely interested in you website and want their visitors to check it out. So in theory, the whole idea of back links is the really good.
A good way to accumulate quality back-links is to visit people’s blogs and post a comment with a link to your website. The thing is, though, that you really only should make comments on blogs that are relevant to your website, AND your comment should absolutely NOT be just a link. You should always make a useful comment that is relevant to the post. This is how the blogging community has become so tight knit. Bloggers will help each other with this, and usually will return the comment on your site. If you don’t have a blog, and you are promoting some other site, don’t worry, you can still comment on blogs with a link back to your website. Its all good so long as you make things useful and relevant – and friendly.
You have to be aware though that blogs by default automatically make comment links noFollow. So you will need to find blogs that are noFollow Free, or have the uComment iFollow logo. If you look at my comment box, you will see a little line of text that says “This comment could be noFollow Free” There are a few easy ways to find noFollow Free blogs. One is to just google noFollow Free Blog Listings. The other way to download a program called Fast Blog Finder which is a program where you can put in a keyword and then have it search for all types of blogs. It will give you a list and highlight those that are noFollow free. Its a great way to get some good back links AND to find new blogs. There is a free version of this program, so go ahead and download it. I have been using the free version for 6 months now!
And finally, the other good way to get quality back links is to write articles for other websites. If you do an about.com website and add your link to that website, you will get a link back. Go around and find article based websites where you can contribute that are specific to your niche, and get to writing!!!
So while you are tackling the whole idea of building backlinks, you can start optimizing your website’s content for search engines. The whole idea about optmizing your site for search engines is CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT!!. Even if your website is mostly images, you can still add textual content to your pages!
Always add an alt and title tags to your images!! An example would be like this:
(alt tags should also be used on text links!)
Search Engines supposedly give a lot of weight to the content in your footer. If you create a nice little list of links to important pages on your website and give those links alt tags, then you will have that covered. You can see an example here.
And finally, WRITE CONTENT THAT IS DESCRIPTIVE AND RELEVANT TO YOUR WEBSITE!!
So i know this was another long and wordy post, but if you are a newbie, this will be EVERYTHING you need to know to start getting your website to the top. When you have started collecting back-links, you can go to google and type in the following:
link:yourdomain.com
This will show all websites that google has found that are linking to your site. Sometimes it takes a while for google to find new links though.
Check your GOOGLE PAGE RANK HERE 10 is the best and 0 is the least. Also note that you will be at 0 for a long time when you first put your site up. It took 6 months to go from 0-1 with my bscphoto.com website. And a LOT of time was spent on that site.
This is some text prior to the author information. You can change this text from the admin section of WP-Gravatar Someone who is relatively new to web design. I am new enough to still remember how absolutely frustrating it was to try and get anything done in this field, but have also been around long enough to be able to help those that are where I was a year ago.
Aside from web design, I run the office of my dad's engineering business, and do book keeping by trade.
I love my pets.. All 6 cats, 1 peg legged dogs, and 1 hedgehog. LOVE THEM!!
Oh yea, and my husband. He lets me chase my dreams and I let him do the same. We are happy people because of it. Read more from this author
Thanks for short and sweet guide !!
Hey, thanks for this valuable information. I appreciate it. One question… When they say put your key word in the Name section, does that mean I put my blog URL there? Or just list out the name of it… In my case “Good, True and Beautiful” instead of Sharon?
Thanks again.
You just put your name. This way they can contact you about your link if they needed to. There are lots of other directories too. Just start googling BLOG DIRECTORIES and see what you come across with.. Adding your site to TECHNORATI is a good option.
You seem to have a missing italic / emphasis close tag, as the whole article is in italics.
Great read. Can never learn enough info on seo.
Nice, i support You Comment I Follow, thank you.
This is a great post. Thank you.
I was surfing and found this company and bookmarked it. Unfortunately, my computer crashed and I lost the name. I really want to sign up with them.
Could anybody help please?
This was a pretty well written description of what a good backlink is. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a good, clear description of that. Thanks.
thank you dear
brilliant article, SEO is the new kid on the block as far as clients are concerned – no one wants to pay for advertising, but everyone wants a first page position on Google – SEO and van wraps are the way to go for designers at the moment. keep up the great work. Graham
This is an old article, but webmasters should not forget about this basic advice. Today, content is STILL KING!
Even if this is old,I must add that you forget to write about link exchanges.
Sites that can exchange links, can result in huge penalty into the google seprs
Excellent Post. It was certainly an interesting read.
This is a great post. Thank you
Great read! Nice tips, a little bit long but well explained.
Nice article though I found a few discrepancies.
Nofollow links are not seen as plain text and are indexed and counted as a backlink. They simply don’t pass any link juice back to your site. ie: you don’t get a vote from the linking site.
Link farms will not get your site black listed. Google is smart enough to realise that competitors could get each other blacklisted by simply submitting each others sites to link farms. The farm will get black listed and so you will simply not get any benefit from the farm. But it will not get your own site black listed.
Footers have been proven, through testing to not be as important as some speculative opinions have suggested. The reason is because that is usually the last thing that is ever indexed. The spider or robot must start from the top of the page and works it’s way down. Before it even sees the footer it will have already evaluated all the other SEO factors such as META data, keywords, headings, bold and underlined text, relevancy and a host of other factors.
All in all though, a nice description of the overall importance of back links.
NoFollow links are NOT counted as a backlink. Search Engines do not follow the links to their site and therefore result in google folliowing the link.. and if google does not follow the link, they will not count is as a backlink. They might not TECHNICALLY be seen as plain text, but in SEO, they are no more valuable to you as someone writing the name of your blog without linking to it.
The footer thing is also debated from all of the stuff I had read. Its not LESS important just because it is indexed last, and by your methods, if the search engine already formed its own “opinions” about what your keywords are, then putting those in the end is like re-iterating the point that you find those keywords valuable.
Just read here:
Daily SEO on footers and links
oops.. forgot to address the comment about Link Farms.
According to google’s website, if you participate in Link “Exchanges” Link “Schemes” or link “Farms” there will be a long term BAD effect, and while i guess its not technically black listed, it will hurt your site.
quote:
Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:
* Links intended to manipulate PageRank
* Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
* Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
* Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
Lindsay, I can tell you for certain that your idea that backlinks are not counted if they are nofollow links is not accurate.
Most of the links that Yahoo! site explorer and Google webmaster tools list for my sites are nofollow links yet they are indexed.
This clearly proves that while I am not getting any link juice from those nofollow links they are indexed and they are counted as back links.
On link farms, I believe you are misinterpreting the guideline but also you might want to take a look at some of the video archives at Matt Cutts blog.
But if you look at the bullet points it does not say links FROM web spammers or bad neighborhoods its says links TO them.
This means that if you set up a link farm and try to manipulate its PR by linking with followed links then you will be penalized.
The idea that site will be penalized because they have a link to them from a link farm has been debated for years now. It was tested, and Google was queried on it.
As I said Google is clever enough to work out that I could submit your site to a link farm and have you black listed and so they will not do that because it’s just too easy to game the system that way.
This is very different from link exchange programs or paid links. Maybe that’s what your thinking of.
it clearly says that BUYING and SELLING links will be punished.. which means the person who places the link, or the one who collects them. And i take back the BLACK LIST, but it does negatively effect you if you are submitted to such link farms. Not directories, LINK FARMS – which generally cost money to link in and/or cost a link exchange.
Also, it has been proven that while Yahoo does index and possibly counts the noFollow links, google does not count them, but it WILL index a site with NO backlinks (they dont know how google chooses which “orphaned” sites to actually index – i think it might be based on the domain age and content). I have read a study that a web designer did with a BRAND NEW site and domain, and google showed the page had chosen which noFollow links to count.. There is no rhyme or reason to this, except that its either some glitch, or they only count a certain link from certain sites with certain page ranks?
So basically, if there is ANY bit of goodness that can come from noFollow links, its minimal and not worth working hard to get unless you are interested in the traffic from the links and NOT the page rank.
oh.. heres another quote from google on the subject:
We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
google showed the page had chosen which noFollow links to count
This is a little different to what we are talking about. Matts Cutts stated in a video a while back that Google will NEVER show all of the links because it would make it too easy to game the system.
Matt was also called out on a couple of the issue we are discussing while at a conference and disclosed some things that he probably should not have regarding nofollow and back links.
I’m not saying that link farms are a good thing, I’m not say that nofollow links provide links juice and I’m not talking about indexing sites.
What I am saying is that one of that factors involved in determining the relevancy and PR of a page is the total number of in bound links. No matter if they are dofollow or no follow they are indexed but may not be followed.
Following a link and indexing a link are two very distinctly different things that I see many people confusing on a regular basis.
Having said all that, the only way to know anything for certain is to test it yourself because there are just too many people who take the word of others and/or republish outdated or inacurate information which causes confusion and speculation.
Test, test, and test again and then you’ll know for yourself what is real and what is false. Finally, remember that the Google algorithm is a closely guarded secret and Google has been shown to provide misinformation at times in order to protect the integrity of their search engine.
A perfect example of this was when Matt Cutts revealed that even though the Google webmaster guidelines and blog stated that link juice from nofollow would be redistributed to the other links on a page, it was kept secret for over a year that they had in fact changed that policy and the algorithm and in had begun to drop the link juice to nofollow.
Matt even released a video (about June or July) on the subject.
exelent site ,the best information a++ thank you
Who does your SEO work?
Very Nice
I have done my own SEO work paired with the Platinum SEO Package plugin for wordpress.
I am pretty proud of my website’s ranking for certain keywords.
Content is the REAL king!
You still need to good mixture of nofoloow and dofollow so it looks natural. 2000 do follow and 0 nofollow links might look a little suspicious
Nofollow links are useful if they can get traffic to your site – Digg for instance
I have to say I agree with the majority of what is being said here. Your post was so productive to me. Waiting for your next post.
Keep posting for great topics
Thx
Who cares about dofollow or nofollow? There are so other way to generate backlinks. Like buy them lol
Great tips. I think no follow links are only worth it if you think it will drive QUALITY traffic to your site. There maybe a place to drop a link on a high profile site or a very relevant site that can get you a lot of traffic but the link would still be no follow.
Wow! I can not believe it took me so long to find this site.
Thank you for the great info and how to apply it. I learn something new everyday. keep it up.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) could affect the ancient art of grabbing readers attention, but will it really lead to the death of the creative headline? …
A good case study. Just stay together. awaited sequel
A good case study. Just stay together. awaited sequel site
This was great read on SEO , learnt few new things
Excellent Article you wrote up !
My Horizon is steady growing.
Everyday is a Lesson =D
awesome
Let’s start off with the major search engines, the ones that most people use. Google is the most widely used search engine, getting between 55-65% of all searches. Yahoo Search and Microsoft Bing lag far behind with a total of 15-20% each.