I think that sometimes, we in the field of search marketing try to make the concept of ranking more difficult than it really is. True – there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank well for a particular keyword in standard organic results at the engines, you’re really only talking about a few big key components.
#1 – Keyword Usage & Content Relevance
While I don’t believe in keyword density (reference: nonsense), there’s no doubt that using your keywords intelligently and creating a page that is actually relevant to the query and searcher intent is critical to ranking well. My general best practice is to use the primary keyword phrase as follows:
- In the title tag once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (subjective, but necessary)
- Once in the H1 header tag of the page
- At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there’s a lot of text content)
- At least once in bold
- At least once in the alt tag of an image
- Once in the URL
- At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag
- Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself (this is a bit more complex – see this post for details)
For those who’ve done the nonsense words testing to see how the engines respond, you know that you can certainly get some extra value out of going wild and stuffing the keywords all over the page, but we’ve also seen that once you reach about this level of saturation I’ve described above, you’re getting about 95% of the value you can get, and even the tiniest amount of extra link juice can make a page like this outrank a “super-stuffed” page (usually).
#2 – Raw Link Juice
Some people call this PageRank or link weight or link power – basically it refers to the raw quantity of global link popularity ascribed to the page. You can grow this with internal links (from your own site) and external links (from other sites). A page with a phenomenal amount of global link power, even if the sources aren’t particularly relevant and the keywords are barely used, can still rank remarkably well in Google & Yahoo! (MSN & Ask are both a bit more keyword & subject focused from what we’ve seen).
Link juice operates on the basic principle that was used in the early PageRank formula – that pages on the web have some (low) inherent level of importance and that the link structure of the web could help to point out pages with greater and lesser value. Those pages that were linked to by many thousands of pages were very important and thus, when they linked to other pages, those pages must, by extension, also have great importance.
Carrying this theory back to your own pages, you can see how raw link juice will have a large impact on how the search engines score their rankings. Growing global link popularity requires both link building (so your site has enough link juice) and intelligent internal link structure (to ensure that you’re flowing that juice to the right places).
#3 – Anchor Text Weight
As the search engines evolved in the early 2000’s, they picked up on the usage of anchor text and found that by weighting the keywords and phrases pages used to link, they could get an even better idea of what pages would be about and which were most relevant to particular subjects. The anchor text of links is now a critical part of the ranking equation, and when seen in great quantity, it can overshadow many other ranking factors – you can see plenty of web pages that are weaker in all the other three factors I describe here ranking primarily because they’ve earned (or, oftentimes for commercial terms, bought) many hundreds or thousands of links with the precise anchor text of the phrase they’re targeting.
Note that anchor text comes from both internal and external links, so if you’re trying to optimize, it’s wise to think about how you’re linking to material from your own pages – using generic links or image links may cost you some of the ranking power you’d otherwise earn by having internal links with accurate, relevant anchor text. However, you can go overboard here, so be cautious – and note that 100,000 internal pages linking with anchor text doesn’t provide the same value as 100,000 external links with that text.
#4 – Domain Authority
This is the most complex of the factors I describe in this post. Basically, domain trust refers to a variety of signals about a site that the search engines use to determine legitimacy. Does the domain have a history in the engine? Do lots of people search for and use the domain? Does the domain have high quality links pointing to it from other trustworthy sources? Does the domain link out primarily to other trusted sites? Do analytics and registration information and temporal link growth fit with expected patterns?
To influence this variable positively, all you really need to do is operate your site in a manner consistent with the engines’ guidelines. If you want to earn a lot of trust early on in a domain’s life, get lots of sites that the engines already trust to link to you. And if you’re looking to spoil that trust, link out to bad neighborhoods, use manipulative link growth practices that don’t match up to queries or traffic patterns and play the churn & burn game.
As a wrap up, I’d love to hear your opinions on these four factors and whether you think there should be 5, 3 or 20 instead.
p.s. Remember that this post is my personal opinion only! Sure – I’m basing it on my experience, which is relatively robust, but I don’t doubt that others have there have very different conceptions of what comprises the bulk of the rankings equation, so please use your own judgment.
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I could have sworn that someone has already a great post or forum thread on this topic, but I can’t seem to find it (no matter how advanced my operators). I’m sure Mr. Malicoat has it in his bookmarks, but since blog posts are one of my personal systems for public bookmarking, here goes.
Eleven Guidelines to Successful URLs
- Describe Your Content
An obvious URL is a great URL. If a user can look at the Address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before ever reaching it, you’ve done your job. These URLs get pasted, shared, emailed, written down, and yes, even recognized by the engines.
- Keep it Short
Remember always; brevity is a virtue. The shorter the URL, the easier to copy & paste, read over the phone, write on a business card, or use in a hundred other unorthodox fashions, all of which spell better usability & increased branding.
- Static is the Way & the Light
Not to bring religion into this, but I can tell you with certainty that some of the engines absolutely DO treat static URLs differently than dynamic ones. And no human likes a URL where the big players are “?,” “&,” and “=.”
- Descriptives are Better than Numbers
If you’re thinking of using 114/cat223/, go with /brand/adidas/ instead. Even if the descriptive isn’t a keyword or particularly informative to an uninitiated user, it’s far better to use words when possible. If nothing else, your team members will thank you for making it that much easier to ID problems in development and testing.
- Keywords Never Hurt
If you know that you’re going to be targeting a lot of competitive keyword phrases on your website for search traffic, you’ll want every advantage you can get. Keywords are certainly one element of that strategy, so take the list from marketing, map it to the proper pages, and get to work. For dynamically created pages through a CMS, create the option of including keywords in the URL.
- Subdomains Aren’t the Answer
First off, never use multiple subdomains (e.g., siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) – it’s unnecessarily complex and lengthy. Secondly, consider that subdomains have the potential to be treated separately from the primary domain when it comes to passing link and trust value. In most cases where just a few subdomains are used and there’s good interlinking, it won’t hurt, but I wouldn’t take the chance. To me, the benefits derived from reputation management (by flooding the SERPs with your subdomains) are minimal compared to the potential loss of link/trust juice. I also think that subdomain takeovers of SERPs is not something the search engines see as beneficial to their users and may shut down at any point. Luckily, if you’re doing it now, you can always 301 to the main domain.
- Fewer Folders
A URL should contain no unnecessary folders (or words or characters for that matter), for the same reason that a man’s pants should contain no unnecessary pleats. The extra fabric is useless and will reduce his likelihood of impressing potential mates.
- Hyphens Separate Best
When creating URLs with multiple words in the format of a phrase, hyphens are best to separate the terms (e.g. /brands/dolce-and-gabbana/), followed (in order) by, underscores (_), pluses (+) and nothing.
- Stick with Conventions
If your site uses a single format throughout, don’t consider making one section unique. Stick to your URL guidelines once established, so users (and future developers) will have a clear idea of how content is organized into folders and pages. This can apply globally as well for sites that share platforms, brands, etc. Re-inventing the wheel in situations where reliance on convention makes everyone’s tasks easier is folly.
- Don’t be Case Sensitive
Since URLs can accept both uppercase and lowercase characters, don’t ever, ever allow any uppercase letters in your structure. If you have them now, 301 them to all-lowercase versions to help avoid confusion. If you have a lot of type-in traffic, you might even consider a 301 rule that sends any incorrect capitalization permutation to its rightful home.
- Don’t Append Extraneous Data
There’s no point to having a URL exist in which removing characters generates the same content. You can be virtually assured that people on the web will figure it out, link to you in different fashions, confuse themselves, their readers and the search engines (with duplicate content issues), and then complain about it.
Example Time
The following are some grievously heinous violators of the guidelines above:
- http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/602-9912342-3046240?_encoding=UTF8&frombrowse=1&asin=B000FN0KWA
Target (who’s powered by Amazon) doesn’t describe their content, use keywords, or keep it short. That and the horrifyingly useless data that can be removed from the URL without changing the content make this URL downright ugly.
- http://etsy.com/view_item.php?listing_id=477443&pic_id=2
Despite being one of my favorite sites, Etsy’s URLs provide no descriptive information, use multiple dynamic parameters and separate breaks with underscores.
- http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=98115&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1&iwloc=A
Google should be ashamed – their guidelines for URLs practically set the town for the recommendations, but their maps feature is almost unusable due to inefficient, bloated URLs (when they must know that millions want to copy those URLs into emails)
These few below are doing a considerably better job, but could still go the extra mile:
- http://men.style.com/news/gadgets/092006
It’s almost there, and one could almost argue that the subdomain use here is justified for branding purposes. It is too bad they gave us so much data, but then cut out keywords and descriptives right at the end
- http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html?skipIntro=1
Nasa has uselessly appended dynamic parameters onto the page, and added /home/index.html for no logical reason
- http://www.newyorkmetro.com/fashion/fashionshows/2007/spring/ main/newyork/womenrunway/marcjacobs/
They’re trying to be descriptive, which is great, but not separating words and going 7 folders deep is really pushing it.
These last examples have done nearly everything right:
- http://www.wahidqazi.com/seo-help/
Brilliant – it’s short, descriptive, static and obvious.
- http://blog.wahidqazi.com/11-best-practices-for-urls/
Despite the subdomain, everything else is near perfect.
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jk35.html
I’m letting the White House off the hook for not using “john-kennedy” as the page title, because they’ve wisely also provided his number (the US’ 35th President).
URLs seem like one of the most simplistic parts of SEO, but I find myself returning to this issue with nearly every client. Hopefully these guidelines can help a few folks make use of best practices before it becomes an issue down the road.
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Who doesn’t want to get Top Ranking Positions in Google? 1st Page Placement in Google is NOT difficult, you need to follow Google Optimization Guidelines, and this Article has Summary of the Seven Fundamentals for Google Optimization.
Google optimization is about following Google guidelines, Google likes ethical SEO practices, those SEO practices which are to help website owners as well as Google and it has published guidelines for SEOs here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html
Top 7 Fundamentals for Google Optimization
- Fresh and Original Content
- Clean and Validated Code
- Easy and Accessible Navigation
- Good Interlinking of Web pages
- Healthy and Relevant Incoming Links
- Domain Age and Registered Period For
- Same Contacts at Site and Domain Registration
Fresh and Original Content
Google love fresh and original content on web page, selectable content/text copy of your web page, google can’t read content on images or at pics but if your website is completely based on images so there’s a solution for you, you can use your slogan on ALT tags.
e.g.; “<img src=”image source” alt=”Search Engine Submission | Submit Your Website on 100 Search Engines With a Single Click. “>
Clean and Validated Code
Clean and validate code helps google to crawl deeply, try to put content at the beginning of your web page, ignore nesting, javascript or comments, in fact try to shorten the text format with the help of external CSS.
Easy and Accessible Navigation
Text or image base navigation helps google to read, google bot can’t read javascript, dhtml, flash base navigation, try to avoid using these practices which google doesn’t like. Keep your navigation at top or left side of the web pages, make sure to add a sitemap page which will guide web surfers and web bots to read each and every page of your website, if you have huge website then make sure to add at least all main categories’ links at sitemap page.
Good Interlinking of Web pages
Web links are like roads and streets at website, make sure all website’s internal links are text base or image base, with relevant content.
Healthy and Relevant Incoming Links
Google likes referred websites, specially referred from quality and relevant resources. The more referrer links the more top rankings. Here one thing should be remembered that one relevant incoming links is better than hundred irrelevant links.
Domain Age and Registered Period For
Google started keeping new registered domains in sandbox since April 2004, in sandbox almost all new domains kept on probationary period for 6 to 8 months, in some cases for longer period, Sandbox domains don’t get good rankings.
Google also likes to rank better to those domains which are registered for longer period like for 5 or 10 years, because whoever registered domains for longer period shows how much s/he is serious with her/his business and most probably won’t do SPAM with those domains.
Same Contacts at Site and Domain Registration
Google likes true businessmen and a true businessman doesn’t misguide his website visitors, google likes those websites which have physical mailing address to their contact pages and google compares it with that physical mailing address which is used in domain registering.
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
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We all know how important link popularity is for better rankings in top search engine like google, yahoo and msn! In this article you’ll come to know the linking types and brief comparisons of manual submission and automated submissions.
Comparisons of Automated and Manual Submissions:
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Automated Submissions
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Manual Submissions
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Can’t recognize PR of the Search Engine / Direct-ories/ Sites
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Manually You can observe real PR of the Search Engine/Directories/Sites
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Can’t recognize Type of the links
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Links Type is easily recognizable
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Will leave few input fields empty or wrong filled
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Will never leave any required field empty
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Will fail to recognize necessaries fields
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Will easily recognize necessaries fields
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Can’t recognize Title, Description Limits
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Manually Title and Description Limits can be seen and can be utilized those limits very well
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Can’t recognize which format keywords should be supplied, either with commas or with spaces
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Can easily read either in which format keywords are required to supply
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It’s Fast
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It’s slow but very correct
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Unreliable
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It’s 99.99% reliable
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Can’t make multiple compositions according to situations
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Manually you can compose multiple titles and descriptions to maximize the benefits of submissions
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Can’t read text over images, these days search engine and directories have started putting a image with text to filter automated and manual submissions
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Text over images at the time of submission can be easily seen in manual submission and successfully proceeded to submission
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Majority of the search engines and directories in their database is not validated and checked
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Manually you can update the search engines and directories and can have record as well
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They are limit to their database, they normally don’t have search criteria defined to update their database
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Manually you have no limit, the more you search the more you’ll come know about search engines
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They can’t reply to the validated mail and can’t validate the submissions
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Manually you can validate your mail sent at the time of submission from search engine or directories
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Wrong data input to fields, sometimes company names or contact person are supplied to title
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Manually you have very less chances of wrongly filled data in required fields at the time of submissions
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After looking at the comparisons, you can easily know why manual submissions are considered to be good and recommended by professional SEOs. Don’t look at the shortcomings and a little ease in automated submission, these shortcomings and little comfort can be a nightmare. Submissions are a very important part of link building campaigns, and if your submissions are made correctly they can play huge rule in link building. Try to submit manually so that you can get the maximum benefits out of it.
More links VS More Valuable Links?
Effective manual submissions can be very useful increasing link value, automated submission can create only more incoming links but effective manual submissions can give those links more value.
A professional submitter should always take care of few things, which can give his/her submissions more value.
Take Care of These Elements When Submitting…
- Should know the type of the link, going to be visible after submission
- Should know the limits of title and description
- Should create multiple titles and descriptions according to limits
- Should check and re-check those submitted links periodically
- Always keep passwords and ids save for future updates
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It is seen many times that website rankings get stuck and some times started going down. Is it due to lack of SEO knowledge? Weak link popularity? Poor content? Pathetic coding? There must be a way to get things going. In this article you’ll come to know what makes your web ranking stuck and how to improve your rankings!
Search Engine Minimization!
The term search engine optimization is not valid specially after Google’s Florida update, in that update google introduced a new term called “Over Optimization” and it’s very well known today. Well there is no measurement tool to analyze either the practice is optimized or over optimized that’s why SEO should go for search engine minimization, what is search engine minimization? Search engine minimization is a technique that deals with basics and its primary purpose is to get the website listed in top 500 website rather looking directly for top 5 placements.
Focus on the Competitors!
When your website rankings stuck and you are short of ideas, what to do? How to move forward? The very first thing you should do is to not worry, but don’t get relax it’s time to keep an eye on your competitors, observe the top 5 competitors and the top 5 above of your rankings that means 10 for each keyword, look at them and try to find out either there is something missing what you are doing or your competitors are very intelligent enough. Your competitors can make you learn the best lesson sometimes.
There are certain areas in search engine optimization which should be improved with time, if you don’t take care of those elements, your website will be out-dated and miss-fit in front of your competitors, since all your competitors are fighting for top positions.
On Going Content Improvisation
Look at the content either your website has fresh original content with balanced keyword density, content is still king, never ignore the value of quality content, you can compare keyword density balance with your competitors.
Active Link Building Campaign
The more inbound qualified links your website has the better position it will get, never let your link building campaign die, link popularity is like oxygen for life, try to find out more relevant and qualified incoming links, permanent and one way links will be obviously preferable than temporary reciprocal links.
Optimized, Validated and Error Free Coding
Your website code is one of the very important element of your search engine ranking, you must check your website code for quality assurance periodically, sometimes everything looks fine but you never know your competitors, they might be doing something very special which you might have ignored.
Some other Tips to Get an Extra Edge over Your Competitors
- Increase domain registered period for at least next five years
- Keep the same address at website and at domain registration
- Apply proper formation technique such as H1, H2, Bold, Bullets…
- Don’t miss Alt tags
- Don’t miss title tags for image base links
- Proper directory and file structuring
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Incoming links are like votes in election for your website but it’s not like majority is authority, quality incoming links are considered more valuable than poor links even if you have 1000s. One quality link is equal to 100 poor links, in this article you’ll come to know how to get qualified links which can strengthen your website ranking and also how to build successful link building campaign.
Do you want to waste your hard earn money on getting poor incoming links to your website? Even if you don’t spend money, are you ready to spend your valuable time focusing on those irrelevant incoming links pointing to your website? Choice is yours!
Mistakes You Should Avoid When Link Building
It’s never too late to focus on the right direction to get qualified incoming links. Now look at the mistakes why majority of the people go wrong when they start link building. They misuse their money and valuable time, here is a list of the few major mistakes that you should avoid in link building.
1- Focus on Quantity than Quality: If you are looking for healthy amount of incoming links rather qualified ones, you should focus on getting quality and qualified links. Don’t go for amount, it’s the quality of incoming links that will bring your website at 1st page
2- Link Exchange or Reciprocal Links: Link exchange or reciprocal links should be avoided specially after Google big daddy update
3- Ignorance of Check and Balance for Links: If you don’t check and balance your listings periodically, you may lose your hard gain incoming links
4- Purchase Bulk Links: Search engines become very intelligent these days, you can’t make them fool by purchasing bulk links, because search engine check your incoming links frequency as well with time
5- Paid Links: Paid links can be very healthy but if they are used as a part of the strategy, if you have no idea of how many paid links you are going to have, that can create big upset in your overall link building campaign
Do You Have Categorized and Simplified Database?
In link building campaign, your database is your key to success, it is the backbone of your overall link building strategy. If you have a poor database, which is not categorized and simplified, you can’t be comfortable from your link building strategy.
Try to have categorized and simplified database, make a master database with following mentioned fields.
Important Fields for Master Database for any Link Building Campaign
- URL
- Direct Link (Direct Link of Submission or Registration)
- Industry Type (Show Biz, Construction, Telecommunication…)
- Link Type (One Way, Reciprocal, Paid)
- Link Style (Anchor link, Title Hyper Link, URL Link, Vote Link)
- Link Period (1 Year or Life time)
- PageRank (1, 2, 3…10)
- Title Limit (Characters Limit)
- Description Limit (Characters Limit)
- Keywords Limit (Characters Limit)
Let Everything Come to Your Master Database!
Now your master database (structure) is ready, what’s next? You need to make it valuable by inserting data to it, it requires an on-going updates. Don’t let anything go away, if it’s not required right now that’s ok, you might need it for your future projects.
It’s a two part article series, in next part (Part 2) you’ll come to know, how to make a successful link building strategy, linking types, styles and their weights for you link building campaign.
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SEO SPAM techniques are practices and tactics, which are banned and strictly prohibited by search engines, you may find few websites applying these SPAM techniques and having good positions, it doesn’t mean that search engines have allowed those websites, it may be because those sites are not yet caught, I would like to mention one thing here that I’m writing about these techniques to create awareness in Young SEOs so that they can avoid using them, I would highly recommend everybody to avoid using these SPAM techniques.
List of the SEO SPAM Techniques
- Hidden Text
- Doorway Page
- Hidden Tags
- Useless Meta Tags
- Search Engine Specific Pages
- Redirection
- Keyword Stuffing
- Duplicate Content
- Cloaking / IP Delivery
- Link farming / Un-natural Linking
- Over Optimization
- Mini-Site network
- Blog / Forum Abuse
- Link Exchange / Reciprocal Links
- Excessive CSS Playing
1. Hidden Text
There are two types of hidden text, the first type of hidden text is invisible text to human visitors by keeping text color same as background, the second type of hidden text is text that is hidden behind images or under document layers.
2. Doorway Page
Doorway is one of the oldest SEO SPAM techniques, in this technique web pages are developed keeping search engines in mind, they point to website but they are not linked with website that’s why they are called doorway through which website will be accessed.
3. Hidden Tags
There are plenty of tags used by webmasters to perform variety of functions such as “comment, style, noframe and http-equiv tags”. Unethical SEOs use these tags by inserting keywords to them.
4. Useless Meta Tags
There is a huge list of meta tags but search engine spiders don’t read all, using all meta tags probably won’t make your website penalized but it could badly hurt your website ranking, since all those useless meta tags will occupy initial characters of your web pages and search engines gives lot of importance to initially used web content.
5. Search Engine Specific Pages
Search engine specific pages are multiple but similar documents, specially designed to focus the requirements of various search engines algorithms. This SPAM technique is no longer applicable, today search engines are more intelligent and enough efficient to catch this technique.
6. Redirection
Redirection is a technique in which one page redirects the visitors / search engine spiders to another page or domain, redirection is a SPAM technique and it is usually done through JavaScript or meta refresh tag.
7. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is 100% SPAM technique, in this technique bunch of keywords are kept at webpage it may be in anchor link, alt tag or at bottom of the webpage.
8. Duplicate Content
There were days, when you can copy content from other website and keep it to yours and even bring good results in search engines, but search engine are getting smarter everyday. It’s even hard to have duplicate content on similar domain these days, search engines are extremely intelligent to recognize either the content is original or copied.
9. Cloaking / IP Delivery
Cloaking is a SPAM technique, in which one set of information is served to search engine spiders and another set of information is served to visitors, it’s mostly done by IP tracking that’s why it’s also called IP Delivery, search engines don’t like webmaster to treat them different than visitors.
10. Link farming / Un-natural Linking
Link farming or un-natural linking is a technique in which webmaster try to have more incoming links pointing to their domain unethically by FFA or link buying. Search engines are very smart these days, they can easily recognize un-natural linking by link monitoring.
11. Over Optimization
After Google’s Florida update, there is a new term called “Over Optimization” introduced to SEO industry, in that update, those websites got penalized which have excessive optimization. There is no criteria to measure search engine optimization efforts either they are balanced or over, but one thing is for sure and that is excessive optimization or implementation of SEO techniques comparatively than your competitors.
12. Mini-Site network
Google gives huge importance to qualified incoming links to any domain that encourages Black-Hat SEOs to create multiple relevant websites pointing back to a central sales website. The primary purpose of those multiple relevant websites is to win Google Trust and get good PR because they can control everything on all these domains, since they belong to same company and behave as mini-site network.
13. Blog / Forum Abuse
Blog / forum abuse is another SPAM technique, in this technique unethical SEOs try to get link back to their domains by posting their links to blogs and forums, it may be through their signature or through their own promotion.
14. Link Exchange / Reciprocal Links
Link exchange is Black-hat technique in which two or more websites exchange their links to influence Google, these links can be two ways and three ways, and this technique is also called reciprocal linking.
15. Excessive CSS Playing
Excessive CSS playing is very hot technique these days, in which webmaster controls website formatting through CSS. Actually search engine likes heading, bold, italic, paragraph, hyperlink, anchor link tags but sometimes utilizing all these tags can spoil the look of the website, that’s why webmaster control formatting through CSS.
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