A few general SEO questions - help your favourite gfy poster out
 

To be honest my SEO skills are horrible. Then again i never really paid attention to how that stuff works. Not my thing. Anyway, i feel like setting up a little network of 30 sites or so. All linking to eachother (i think) with lots of keywords, some galleries, some site reviews maybe.

Im not asking about SEO secrets here just a few general tips about what i should do and should not do would be nice.

Like link all sites to eachother or only certain sites etc.

Would appreciate it.

I'm doing a similar thing at the moment in mainstream, so I want to know too.

What I've done is to link them but not give recips. Also, mine are all on different hosts with different contact info and hidden whois info. Any good?

lazonby's got the right idea, try and avoid to many reciprocal links. In the last big daddy update google devalued reciprocal links. A lot of first page webmasters watched their pages disappear into the ranking abyss!

Its all about one way links now, with got relevant anchor text.. id select a couple of sites as your primary sites and use the others to fire links to the main sites but try and keep the number of outbound links on the main sites at a reasonable level..

Its all about developing a positive link profile, no point having 20 great incoming links if youve got 2000 outgoing!

rule #1: Link should be content related and nonrecip. In context is prefered
rule #2: Dont try to outsmart the SE - it IS smarter than you
rule #3: Focus on the content and make the site precentable to the users. If you try and tweak it to much, you and up sandbagging your site.

different c class ip's will do, and like lazonby diff hosts will do too. But id look for other sites to do link trades and cross link trades, build pr. Some say pr doesnt mean shit but it does, although it all depends on how much keywords you aim at. Do some reading on basic onsite SEO too, very important (although, again, some say it aint (which is bullshit)).
Updates - also very important.

The above is all my own experience from the past year.

and prolly the most important tip i can give is do not make all the linkback text to your site the same, SE's will kick you down from money making SPOT #1 to PAGE #30 or lower.... unfortunately ive experienced that too

don't believe everything people on the forums tell you, a lot of people exaggerate certain points, such as the duplicate content myth

Almost all important things said, I may add a few little uncommon things:

1. Be careful with metatags, make sure they are different on EVERY PAGE or just use none...or you got a problem faster than you can say "supplemental index"...same goes for the page title, it should be at least partly unique on every page.

2. Use different IP adresses, the more the better, although established sites will take a little hit when changing the IP, they recover fast. Just a security measure if google kicks a domain, all on that IP get some negative "points"...the reason why most people on hosts that share IPs for dozens of clients often work off their asses without getting good results.

3. Do not use any domain privacy services, so far it's just a rumor that it hurts your ranking, but google filed some patent that involves a whois check for domains...

4. Read http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ from time to time.

Good tips so far, thanks.

What about keeping the code modern? Does it pay to use <div> and css rather than <table>? <-- that's what I'm doing but does it help with the SE?

I only started learning html about 2 months ago, then I did basic css and now I'm on to php, then javascript is next, then perl........ it's a fucking steep learning curve. I got my first form to work with FormMail last week. I was so happy I punched the air over and over like Howard Dean, lol. Next is to figure out how to get a system to work for taking credit card details. It's a bitch finding out about how to do that.

Back to SEO, I've noticed that alot of highly ranked sites are still using invisible keyword text. Also, the descriptions sites are using for themselves are really long winded. For example, a big tit site is writing 'welcome to <blahblah.com>, you're number one resource for big tits large breasts mammoth melons, etc, etc, etc. I think shit like that should be penalised. Sites are becoming too spammy.

I think the best bet is to focus on content so that people will WANT to link to you with no recip.

If you can, no more than 19 outgoing links on any one page.

im sorry, but that is not true.
One of my linklists is pr4 (www.metroekspressen.dk) it have 40+ outgoing links pr page

Damn, this thread turned out to be great...

I think it depends on the nature of the site.

Stay away from over-used rss feeds :)
WIll hurt ya more than anything
h1 is your friend

Ofcourse! I started it.

the only issue I have run into regarding this is when there is too much code on the page.....like for instance you have 10 lines of meta up top and a bunch of needless code....you wanna optimize your code so there is as little as possible, which is why it is good to have a css file that isn't included with your main pages, it is a seperate file called from the main pages

too much code is bad, but I personally don't think se's care which you are using when it comes to div or table

Fuck, there goes my plan.

you don't have to stay away from them, but make sure they are used properly

for instance, if you use an overused rss feed, make sure there are a lot of other posts surrounding it, meaning the rss feed is not all you are using

everyone talks about the duplicate content shit all the time, and the example I use when disproving that is the Associate Press and the articles they send out...some of the largest news sites in the world use AP articles, and they just copy and paste the article into their news sites, 1000's of sites do this, so the article is the same on every site....but these news sites that do this are never penalized by se's, that is because along with the copy and pasted articles, they also have relevant content they created on their own

Good info posted already... also as an alternative to reciprocal index page links.. go for deep links between sites (of course with a focus on relevency).

Yeah, I'm using css as much as possible. I looked at the source of some of my competitors and noticed that alot of them are using a load of meta tags which just seems spammy to me. And they use that robots, index, follow crap too. Presumably that's bullshit and un-needed.

I was thinking about it from the SE's point of view. Since the www is getting bigger and the amount of information to spider and index is getting bigger exponentially, sites which are too 'spammy' (ie. too many meta tags, too much 'spider-friendly' text saying essentially the same thing over and over, etc) will have to be penalised in favour of sites which are linked to freely by people who want other people to have the same 'web experience' that they have had and who want to offer others help in achieving whatever it is they want to achieve, by pointing them towards genuinely user-friendly sites. It's in the SE's own interests to offer better targeted front page links because they will lose market share and $$$ if the front page is full of crap, which I've noticed has been happening lately.

I've also been creating sitemaps which I intend to submit every 6 months or so per site and for the larger sites, have a sitemap on the site itself. The sitemap links should contain the desired keyword phrases.

URLs should contain the desired keyword phrases too, so classic_italian_cars.html is better than page2.html, etc.

Sorry if this is all obvious, but I'm a n00b at this.

Keep this shit bumped up. It's fun to take part in a business thread for once rather than calling people idiot or going on and on about fucking Muslims. Let's hear some more tips.

link within content

It's an ideal guideline not a hard and fast rule.

Heading, H1,H2 etc where you can use the image replacement technique with css to put some keywords, but always relevant with the page content.
Everything said about links, not too much and relevant link anchor.

hope thats help :pimp

Keep all content related,.. including links, meta tags, title etc

use H Tags

make sure to use ALT, NOFRAME and NOSCRIPT tags. <- big one.

Keep your page size under 50k if possible :)

Make sure your site is always reachable and loading fast.

Don't use any automated doorway programs..

Hire a SEO'r :: cough :: :}

some sound advice here, but you don't necessarily have to hire a seo'er

remember your header tags and dont cheat.

yeah its a good thread :thumbsup :thumbsup

more, more, MORE!

ba ba bump.

how about build a bookmark like thehun

Speak for yourself, midget guy :1orglaugh

http://www.seobook.com/buynow.shtml
http://www.searchenginehelp.com/optimize/

download that on limewire and read it.

Anyone know how I can check how much my competitors are paying per adword word or phrase?

another great tip mentioned in here is google sitemaps, you can have a site picked up and indexed in less than a day with sitemaps

if you are using wordpress, download and install the google sitemaps plugin for wordpress, it will be one of the better plugins you install, trust me ;)

most important key terms in the title of the page, make sure you use meta tags for both keywords and descriptions.

first text on the page is the first seen by the search engines. use alt tags on images title tags on links...the more text the better really but don't be over-using the same keywords. Name your images with keyterms where possible - well if you want google image traffic.

no more than 100 outgoing links on the page, there's few things you can use that can help with the outgoing link numbers, drop me an email and i'll let you know about it..im not gonna post it here to get abused by everyone hahaha.

Best having links coming into you with the key terms you want to bag. If you sign up to google sitemaps - that can really help you stay on track, not only do they show what your top searches & positions are but they tell you what text is used for sites linking in...

updating the content every so often helps too..

:2 cents:
First: Think from the users perspective, and write your title and meta description tags appropriately. (This is what google [and other] search engines use to display your link on their search results page.)

Don't overdo trying to fit too many keywords in a link or tag (i.e.. alt, title, meta).

Use text navigation on your site, and/or any image with a link has a good alt tag.

Get links, only consider PR a general ballpark figure. content and context matter most. A recip. link is better than no link, A link from a page about a subject directly to your internal page about the same subject is optimal.

Make sure you don't forget the users perspective, and write more good content.

Oh yea, if forgot to add.

If you're lazy and frustrated with waiting for update ... use PPC. :D

I could read more, so go on... :)

Just call me the noobie SEO master.

jeez, I can't get over how well putting up a sitemap works out

I put one up last night, entered it into google, and within 1 day all the pages to my site are now indexed into google

Makes sense, but you shouldn't be too spammy with alt tags. The direction google is headed in is to penalise this as being spam.

If you're using images then you're better off using text as a title either above or below the image. alt tags are better used used for when a title is not possible, such as in an image link back to your homepage, etc.

labelling all of my images hasn't been too bad for me, but im not using the same keywords over and over, i try to spice up my site with them - mainly for the surfer, I know when I'm looking for something sometimes i hover over the image to see if there's a story behind the image before i click...

I've been lucky enough to pick up some cool spots in google terms used in my alt tags alone....So that's nice. I guess I use them to make sure I'm staying creative, if I can label everything effectively the search engines & the surfers are gonna like my site.

Google images adds your images when it sees the alt tags.... I'm not sure if im keen on images traffic though...

Franck,

can you hit me up on ICQ I have a pdf you should read I want to send you on seo stuff

Use images with keyworded file names. Use underscores between words. Take advantage of the Alt tags.

Helps to drive Google Image traffic a lot. Use a frame breaker to avoid your site being loaded in a frame.

Don't forget Yahoo's Site Explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com :winkwink:

Best thing I ever did to get better ranking was "fucking nothing".

I gave up on trying to figure the SE out so I just put the minimal relevant stuff in the web page. A few key words, not 50, in the meta tag.
A relevent title and links with relevent text.

That didn't do much at first but once the SE started punishing agressive sites I was like PR1 all over the place.

So I would say, dont get too fancy and don't be too obvious about wanting a better ranking.

PS: Longevity: I've got some crappy sites that are very old and never go down and I think that is the only reason they get SE traffic.