What is SEO?

It’s often seen as a bit of a black science, SEO (search engine optimisation). It’s expensive to find someone to ‘SEO’ your website, and if they guarantee results…they are probably trying to con you. If you hope to rank first for ’small tent on a hillside in Tibet’ you are OK, but to rate high for ‘cheap software’ will take longer.

But is it really so hard? Well, no, not for most sites. But it takes a long time. Forget all the whispers and dark arts you’ve heard about, mostly they don’t work, and those that do, well they won’t work for long.

Let’s get one thing clear. If you want your site to rate number one in google for its subject, the best and probably only way is to actually have the best site on the subject. If you throw together a five page site using free articles and expect to rate top for your keyword, you usually won’t unless it’s that Tibetan hillside phrase above.

You can SEO your site all year, and add 1,000 link pages of link exchanges, but if your competitors are attracting natural links because they have a better site they will continue to outrank you.

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Link exchanges can still be an effective way to gain inbound links to your site, but the method is changing.

In the most recent pagerank export many link pages had their pagerank removed and are now showing as a grey bar. Possibly they still count for passing pagerank and possibly not, but the fact is google are getting much better at identifying link pages, and if they can do that they can also ignore the links, either now or in the future.

Presumably it’s pretty easy for Google to spot site sections where all the pages have 10-40 neatly arranged links to other sites, with the destination site in careful anchor text at the beginning of each sentence. Typically the link section will have no incoming links from external sites, and may only be linked to internally from the footer of the site.

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In the last couple of weeks it has been clear that google has penalised sites for buying links. In principle this can never happen. But I am convinced it has.

A common idea is that google can never penalise a site for the links TO the site. They can ban or otherwise penalise sites that sell links, but the idea is that they can’t penalise for bought links because it makes it easy to attack your competitor, simply by buying ‘bad’ links that point at their site.

We can all recognise, almost immediately, the majority of paid links and pay per post blogs. But can an algorithm do the same? And can a manual inspection be completely sure? I suspect that the algorithms are sufficiently advanced to prompt a manual investigation, because bought links almost never replicate manual linking patterns.

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SEO has, for a long time, consisted of focussing on two things - onsite factors and offsite factors.

The most important onsite factors are concerned with having carefuly chosen keywords, above all in the ‘title’ and in the heading, plus a couple of times in the text - which should also be surrounded with relevant text to emphasise what the page content is about.

Offsite, we have been concerned with links of course. Where possible, these should be links with our keywords as the anchor text, as we all know, plus a decent percentage of variants in the anchor text so we don’t appear to be cheating.

Pretty straightforward stuff, and effective. But times, as they say, are a changing.

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There are some people who earn more than $10,000 per month by adding google adsense to their websites, but many others who earn less than $100 per month. Not surprisingly, those in the second group want to be in the first group.

So how to become a big adsense earner? The answer, in principle at least, is straightforward - forget about adsense!

Newcomers to the adsense program are tempted to focus on the placement of the ads, the colour of the ads, and how to get more people to click on the ads - often by putting more, bigger ads at the top of the page. This is not a good use of your time.

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Anyone who follows webmaster forums will know that directories have taken a bit of a knock recently. Some appear to have been penalised by google, possibly for link buying and selling, perhaps temporarily perhaps permanently.

Be that as it may, as a result of the ‘discussions’ that have resulted I now have a much clearer sense of the direction that big tangle will take in the future.

Curiously, although for my other sites I was only interested in attracting relevant inks, for directories my thoughts have always been towards finding links for pagerank. It is now clear to me that directories must be like any other site - interesting, relevant, and containing useful information in the form of recommended sites.

With hindsight I can’t see why I missed this obvious point - I’m just slow I guess. A link from a relevant page with PR1 is better than an irrelevant link with PR4. I always knew it for other sites, but missed it for directories.

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For anyone who has been living in a cave for the last few years and is unaware, pagerank is the score out of 10 (strictly out of 11 since the scale runs 0 - 10) that google give each page in a website, and can be seen in the google toolbar as a little green bar. In principle at least it represents the importance of the page. More is good!

Every few months google republish the visible pageranks based on data from a few weeks earlier. Originally this ‘PR export’ happened more frequently - perhaps each month or so - then more recently every three months, and now it seems they are further extending the time between updates - it has been about three and a half months since the last full export (although some sites appear to have seen changes over the last couple of weeks there has not been a full export).

This pagerank export occupies a lot of people for a lot of the time - primarily:

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There is often talk about the need to diversify your internet based businesses - as with any business, online or offline, you don’t want all your ‘eggs in one basket’ because there is a risk that your income will disappear following a change in advertisers, search engine algorithms, natural demand, seasonal factors, new competitors, and so on.

So what does diversification mean and what do you need to do?

Diversification is a means of reducing risk - the risk that your income can substantially reduce due to conditions beyond your control.

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The debate about paid links and google continues - they say we mustn’t buy and sell links (unless we mark them as ‘nofollow’) because it distorts the search engine results. Well OK there’s a lot of truth in that. But life is never so simple.

Ignoring for a moment the problems that they will have in identifying which links are paid and which are genuine links - another whole debate - there are a couple of other issues to consider.

First, consider what the search engine results would look like if all reciprocal link agreements and paid links suddenly got completely ignored, as google would like. Many many sites would simply disappear into the ether, but to be replaced by what? In the real world, many sites simply don’t attract links.

Do you link to your local plumbers because they have best prices on showers? Do people link to a hotel listing site because they had a nice holiday there? Well, no. The hotel sites that get linked to are the expedias and tripadvisors of this world, and it is these large, well established sites that will come to rule many aspects of the internet.

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One subject I haven’t touched on often in this blog are the various ways to make money from a blog. The possibilities are numerous, and among others include Google Adsense, link sales, sales of affiliate products, direct advertising and paid blog posts. I’ll try and cover some of these in the weeks to come.
The best approach for your blog will depend on the content of your blog and your target audience. The approach discussed below is ‘paid blog posts’. What this means is, someone pays you to write a review of their site, product or service on your blog. They do this for two main reasons:

1) To get traffic and visitors to their own site
2) To get improved search engine ratings - this happens as a consequence of your (and other) blogs linking to theirs.

The main challenge for a blogger has historically been to find people wishing to advertise in this way. For the advertiser the problem has been in finding blogs willing to accept this form of advertising. hence various companies have come into being that attempt to solve this dilemma. Comapnies such as ReviewMe keep a register of bloggers, and advertisers can choose a blog on which they would like to appear.

The trouble is, this is very expensive for the advertiser. Companies such as ReviewMe keep 50% of the cost themselves. Well, nice work if you can get it, but it means that instead of paying, say, $25 for a blog post the advertiser needs to pay $50. This makes the service prohibitively expensive for many advertisers.

Enter stage left…the blogging service from PayPerPost.com - PPP Direct. This enables bloggers to deal directly with advertisers, while still being assured that they will receive payment for their work. PayPerPost charge only 10% of the total cost for themselves, and half of that is necessary for paying PayPal and associated charges.

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There are two approaches when you start building a website: the first builds the site and all subsequent links around a particular phrase; the second adds as much interesting and useful content as possible, in the hope of attracting the less searched phrases in google and the other search engines.

Most sites will focus on both of these, to a lesser or greater degree, but they require fundamentally different approaches and it helps if you know which you are following, and what your target is.

The first approach is to choose a subject matter that you would like to build a site about, and built the site essentially around that phrase. I’m thinking of a genuinely useful site by the way, not 20 articles copied randomly from wikipedia. For many niche subjects 25 pages is plenty, although must can be expanded later on as necessary.

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Google this week announced (via Matt Cutts blog) that they have setup a system for webmasters to report any sites that they believe are involved in buying and selling links. This is an attempt to prevent distortions in the search engine results and provide a better service to users of the google search engine, they say.

Sounds good? Well at first glance it looks like a good idea. If I am selling, say, ‘cheap software’ and can be first in the google results for that phrase, I will get a lot of customers. If I can only be first in the results by buying links on 50 other high ranking software sites I might be inclined to do it. Perhaps I can pay $1,000 per month for those links and make an extra $10,000 a month in profits. Of course I will rush to buy the links, who wouldn’t?

This article is not about the practicalities of such an idea, which probably make it impossible to implement. Instead let’s take a little step into the murky world of economics. I can’t go into every detail of economics here but the following should get you thinking.

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A quick look at some indispensable SEO tools, remarkably all from the same person (Mong at Digital Point forums). Make these your friends!

I’ve explained what they do briefly below, but go check them out and see for yourself and all will become clearer.

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When developing a site it is crucial that you understand the concept of ‘anchor text’.

We have seen previously the importance of link building, directory submission and site promotion. We have also mentioned that on-page factors can play a significant role, such as the text you use for the title of the page, the description of the page, and in the page itself, both in the headings and the text.

The ‘glue’ that holds these items together is the anchor text used by other websites that link to yours. With your on-page factors you have described what the page is about - let’s assume ‘red cars’ is the theme of your page.

It is now necessary for google and the other search engines to be sure that your page really is an interesting page about ‘red cars’, before they include it in their search results.

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A few years ago, SEO was crucial to the success of a website. It was necessary to learn the techniques that search engines used to rank their results, and then ensure that the pages of the website used that knowledge to rank well themselves.

Usual techniques included excessive use of the keyword in the title and description of the file; keyword stuffing (ie excessive use of the word in the keyword field); and then a liberal sprinkling of the same keyword in the titles and text. Ideally, pictures on the page would have the same keyword repeated excessively in the ‘alt’ field, and if you were very reckkless you could include a whole paragraph of invisible text at the bottom of the page, just to get the message across.

Getting links was also simple - do as many link exchanges as possible with all and sundry, relevant or not, and the job was finished. This could also be achieved using various link-farm / link exchange software that avoided the need to actually search for link partners.
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Discussions about the importance of pagerank are ever present, so I thought I’d offer my thoughts on the subject.

Everyone is agreed, I think, that we can rank well for an easy-moderately competitive phrase with a page with low toolbar page rank, and often outrank pages with higher pagerank. Let’s say the phrase is ‘is pagerank important’.

To get started on ranking well for this phrase I’ll need some links from relevant pages. Other things being equal, it seems easier in my experience to achieve this if these relevant pages have high PR.

I have often seen a SERPS improvement a couple of days after getting a high PR link, seldom after a new PR0 link. I believe that if MattCutts linked to this page from his blog with the link text ‘Is PageRank Important’ that would be enormously more successful at improving my SERPS than if a new unknown site did the same.

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Having had our bigtangle directory up and running for quite a few months now, it has about 3,500 sites listed and has at last got PageRank - pagerank may not be important for a lot of websites but it is for a directory. OK it’s only a PR3 with internal categories PR2 but its a start.

Meanwhile I have a second directory, five weeks old - never announced, never had a submission, and only with a few selected inbound links, as opposed to bigtangle which has over 1000 inbound links. The curious thing is, that also has PR3 with internal categories PR2. The directory is at wilddarkness.com if you are interested (currently accepting quality reciprocal entries but not free submissions).

On ‘non-directory’ sites I have an old site that I haven’t changed much for many months, that has increased to a PR4, and two other sites that I have been working hard on, with both relevant link exchanges and directory submissions, and neither has increased PR (both are currently PR4).

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When you are actively seeking links for your site, you will find that not everyone is quite as open and honest as they could be.

If someone has linked to your site out of the goodness of their heart, there is not a lot you can complain about it if it is not a ‘genuine’ link. But if you are entering into link exchanges, or you are buying links, you need to know that you are getting what you agreed to.

What is meant by a genuine link? Usually this would be a link on a page that is indexed in google (and MSN and Yahoo), and without the rel=nofollow attribute being part of the link.

If you are not familiar with rel=nofollow you should be! It is HTML code used within the definition of a link, that tells the search engines to ignore the link (not to follow it) and hence not to pass page rank or search engine benefits from the link.

This blog entry was prompted by someone who submitted a site to my niche travel directory, where either payment or a reciprocal link is required. All looked fine, and I approved the link. But later, I started wondering why the home page of the site had PR5 and the links page had PR0. This wasn’t a big issue for me - it was a good and relevant site for my visitors, which is of more use than high PR - but it seemed a bit unexpected.

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A key part of many webmasters link-building strategy is directory submission. Some site owners submit to every directory possible, some only to directories with high pagerank, but nonetheless it remains a key tool in the ‘link development’ arsenal.

This blog is part of the bigtangle site and directory, and I also frequently submit sites to other directories, so I can see the reality of directory ownership and submission from both sides of the fence, as it were. Which brings us to the topic in hand - automated directory submission.

I have written before of the possible advantages of directory submission software and how it can dramatically increase the speed at which you can submit a site to directories. I use it myself in certain situations. But there is a problem with directory submission software that has started to trouble me.

First let’s recall that owners of free directories still hope to make money from their work. In part by selling featured links, but also in part by having advertising on their websites.

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The most common ‘words of wisdom’ you hear when you read about getting more visitors to your website is ‘add quality content’. You add hundreds or thousands of pages of quality content, interesting yet with a personal touch, and the visitors will come flocking in.

But is it true? Well yes, to a point. But this leaves a couple of little problems.

1. Big sites tend to have certain pages or sections that attract far more visitors than others. I am confident that on a 1,000 page site I have - which is all carefully crafted and hand-written content, and took ages - some of the pages have never had a visitor, and many others have had very few. So I was perhaps sometimes wasting my energy.

If I had spent more time on analysing keywords, to find out what people are really looking for, I could perhaps have a 200 page site that attracts 90% of the traffic, or even a 40 page site that attractes 80% of the traffic.

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