How To Redirect Multiple Domains Correctly

One of the reasons why you would want to do this is if let's say you bought a lot of domains. Then you wish to redirect all these domains to your main domain.

Usually you would want to do this if you have domain like for example: dogfood.com and wish to buy mispelling domains to grab the traffic.

dgfood.com
dogfod.com

Or you buy yourcompanyname.com OR yourname.com and for all these you simple want to redirect traffic to one of your websites.

There could be other reasons but that's one of the most popular reasons for buying lots of domains.

For SEO purposes it's best NOT to just use the Meta Refresh code to redirect.  

Here's how to properly do it:

If you have lots of these domains pick one of them (any one), let's call it Domain A and redirect it using a 301 redirection to your main site.

Then the other domains redirect them to this domain Domain A, again using a 301 redirection.

So what this does is you'll have just one domain only redirecting to your main site - this is a good technique to apply when you have a lot of domains that you want to redirect. Not when you have one or two, in that case just use 301 redirection and redirect them to which site you please.

This is the same technique you can use if you have subdomains instead of domains and you wish to redirect them. Always assuming you have lots of them not just 1-2, in that case there's never the need to follow this technique.

Why you do this technique you may ask?

Well, it's just a matter of having less redirections, because you'll always have ONE redirection to the main site - no matter how many domains or subdomains you want to redirect.

Simple technique. Google always puts up "Theories" about redirection, this is an SEO Friendly way to use redirections without making Google wonder why you have lots of redirections (1 instead of hundreds). 

Side Note: We use 301 redirection because it's a permanent redirection. Google does not like the Meta Refresh way to redirect... what that does is when you go to a page it automatically refreshes (as if someone pressed the F5 on keyboard or the Refresh button in browser) and the page refreshes to a new one.

Google does not like this sort of "confusion" - the 301 redirection (also known as permanent redirect) makes it clear that page has moved permanently, now it's this one.

So these are all simple ways to make your website/s SEO friendly. In the SEO Booklets you get a lot of these simple techniques that ALL help both to improve your rankings and also to avoid penalties and get Google to love your website and label it as Authority on the subject including reliable and friendly website.

There's one of the three FREE bonuses you get dedicated entirely to answer many of these questions. Remember you can create your websites as you wish, these simple techniques don't have to interfere with the way you wish to create your websites.

How To Redirect Multiple Domains Correctly

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

Canonical Tag Is Not To Be Abused

This new tag is not something every one has to implement on his website. Most won't need at.

This is much like 301 permanent redirect, so say you have two identical pages, you know that search engines will index only one of them. Now you have the choice to tell search engines which ONE you want indexed, which one should not get indexed.

This tag will help you do just that and more.

However note that it's not just a TAG, because there are ways they've created to handle abuse.

So for instance, if you have the known "useless" pages like Terms and conditions, Privacy Policy, etc... you cannot tell search engines to NOT index those but index your homepage for example, something completely different. So the pages have to be similar or identical for you to use this tag, so it must be used where NEEDED.

The other thing is that if you have two pages identical and you want page A to get indexed because it has a lot of backlinks pointing towards it - then you can use of course the tag on the other page (or more than one if you have multiple similar or identical pages AND just like a 301 redirect, pagerank, backlinks value etc pass to the page you want including the fact that it will get indexed - NOT the other one. The other one won't, it will be ignored.

So very useful if you have like ecommerce site with lots of very similar or identical pages - it used to be that search engines would decide which page they will index, which won't themselves which could create problems. Now you have control over situation.

But I only recommend using or thinking about this tag if you REALLY have some kind of problem with duplicate content issues. Like real visible problems.

Otherwise JUST make your website pages unique with original content so you index ALL pages.

Canonical Tag Is Not To Be Abused

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

Little things added together will have a big impact. Thousands of ants can turn your kitchen in a nightmare, while one will not been seen at all.

So for onpage optimization techniques to have effect you need to apply as many of them as possible. Easy and simple techniques, one of them is about file names of your website pages and also your images. Two good ways are to name the file something related to the webpage or the picture if it's a picture file.

Think of your visitors, what filename will make their life easier. If it's an apple image, apple dot html is better than imageone dot html. Same thing for filenames of website pages. If the page has an article about cat owners, than name it cat-owners dot html or whatever your file extension is, maybe php or htm or asp. But cat-owners is the tip here. Use also punctuation symbol - to seperate words instead of using the word and, and it's better than the other symbol _.

One way to look at how your website filenames and folders and structuring is, is by connecting via ftp to your website. You will see in the root folder all your main folders. Is it confusing as hell? You should figure out what your site is about by reading the folder names and the filenames you have. It should be that easy, and it's also very easy to do this simple change.

Please do not go editing your folder and filenames, it will result in tons of 404 page not found. You can though rename and use a permanent redirection. Not normal redirection, permanent, 301 redirect. Or it will be a bigger problem.

These let's call them mistakes occur because you try to create a website for your entertainment which is fine. But always think of the real people that's going to visit your website. If you do that, you can figure out many of these onpage optimization techniques quickly assuming you have a good knowledge of websites.

The other one about filenames is avoiding using characters in the filenames like the question mark symbol, exclamation or other characters sometimes generated automatically when using certain web design functions, which I'm not an expert in.

Too long of filenames is not bad but keep it moderate, I mean ask the question yourself, what would you think if you just saw the filename you have? Some filename are like sentences. Blogger blogs automatically generate quite a bit long of filenames, but that size is appropriate. Note also the use of - symbol to separate words. Now blogger is owned by Google, and optimized for the search engines. That should lit a bulb for you. If Google is doing for their website, in this case Blogger, than it should be something quite good.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

You know that linking to another site is like casting a vote to that site, giving it credit. The more credit and votes a site has the better for its rankings.

Now when linking to another website you're giving some of your website power and credibility and so to speak you give away pagerank. You don't want to link to external sites if there isn't a real reason behind it. The more external links you have the more power you're giving away.

The only time it's good to link to external websites is when doing link exchanges. A website links to yours and you link to them. That's fair, because you give and get credit.

The other way is by using nofollow tag on the external links. But some still do not use it the right way. Using nofollow tag on an external links will appear normal to visitors but for search engines it's like there's no link at all.

Do not use it on your link exchange partners. You risk link partners finding out and remove your link from their website. It's going to get easier very soon that those who use nofollow tags on link exchange partners to get easily caught.

Do not use it if you steal or grab for a better word articles from article directories. You risk penalty of duplicate content. Give credit to author or if you don't want to link to external website when you should, then write your own content. That's better obviously than using some other people's article.

If you start a blogger blog, first thing you notice is a link to blogger itself. If it's not against blogger TOS that you should read, remove that external link.

So backlinks from other sites is like they're giving you votes and credit that's why your rankings increase. Linking to external websites if you overdo it your rankings may get a decrease. That's also why you want to make sure after say two month of doing link exchanges that your link partners are linking back. Then remove the ones that are not.

That way you do not have too many external links. One other punishment of external links is when you link to a so called bad neighborhood. But too many webmasters worry too much about this. First of all if you are using articles and linking to external websites, grab articles from a trusted article directory.

A note about link exchange partners, is that if their website looks good and clean and they are indexed, you don't have to worry they're bad neighborhood at all.

If you use a software like OutRankSmart, it will find only clean websites for link exchanges, making your life easier.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

If you have trouble understand whether something you're going to do will get you a penalty or not by Google here's what to do.

First of all whatever you do put yourself in the visitors shoes, how your change is going to effect him. If it's a good positive benefit for your visitor probably you're on the right track, Google will not penalize you. Since their aim is to give the searcher, your visitor benefits.

Let say for example you had a page in English language, and you changed the language to Spanish. But you did not bother changing the meta tags since all you did was translate the page from English to Spanish. You're confused whether or not to make meta tags in Spanish as well.

Your visitor will like it? No, if he finds your website in Google, read in English the title and description... he expects an English written page, makes totally sense. He may not even recognize Spanish, can't read it at all.

So figure out always what your visitor, not what you like or dislike, need! The same is true for almost everything you do. Most of the optimization techniques you apply on your website, the so called onpage optimization, the bottom line for those optimization is to give your visitor the ultimate experience, in area of navigation, quality content and so on.

So you're optimizing your website to get high rankings of course. But if you yet don't know why you do these techniques versus others or nothing at all, then now you know... This can be news for you, since you can adopt the new mindset now, and start thinking of your visitor. It's the reason why you do onpage optimization.

At first you may be thinking, oh we have to do this and that and alt tags on our website, because spiders love them. Sort of like seo techniques to make robots come your way and rank your website. Applying the new mindset you can quickly and easy figure out the right techniques known as white hat, versus the bad or risky techniques known as black hat. Plus you can figure what's right or wrong yourself in most cases like the example above.

So always think of your visitor, you'll get rewarded fast. I never try to get the perfect keyword density, in most cases I just write content for the visitor. A 6 percent keyword density is more like a way to get spiders to rank your site, than it's a good way to build a quality website. And I bet that's the reason Google no longer gives so much value to that technique. Plus that's also why I never, ever tried to get a specific percentage of density.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

So you know something about meta tags. Here's how to use them properly. First of all if you have a very big site, you cannot have unique meta tags for each page. Or get a webmaster to do it for you.

If your website pages have unique meta tags, it's better. Specifically meta title and description, not the keyword tag or other info like robots tags.

If you have a small site, this will be easier to do. Second thing is don't make use of stop words in meta tags. These are words that spiders don't like, in fact they may not index the page that has these words. Stop words are sort of useless words like Home, And, For, To, Or, and so forth.

Think of your meta title as if writing a PPC ad. If you ever did it you know what it looks like, short, straight to the point and not full of stop words.

Think of your meta description as a description of what the page is. Relevant and short. For seo purposes just enter your main keyword or two once in the meta title and once in the meta description. Then just think of converting. Think of meta tags as an ad that visitors will see not in a newspaper but in Google search results.

That way you get more clicks, even if you are number 3 or further down, probably even more clicks than those above you. Because if ad is interesting not a bunch of keywords, or just another site in the search results, it will attract clicks, it will stand out from the rest! Visitors will quickly notice it.

Most often it's your homepage that you want to get highly ranked. So create meta tags that convert, like an ad for the homepage. For other pages, just make them short and relevant to the specific page. Do not put tons of keywords anywhere in meta tag. That will result in penalty, called keyword stuffing.

The meta keyword tag, not useless, if you can input it, why not. Just do not repeat same keyword, or similar keywords. Do not put for example, dog food, dog foods, cheap dog food, online dog food.

Those are practically identical. Just input your main keyword and then some related keywords. Like dog food, cheap pet food, online pet store.

The other tags in the meta tags, that you should worry about is the robots tag. Here is where you specify if spiders should follow the links on the page or not. Most often you want spiders to follow them, but if it's a thank you page for example, where people visit after buying your product, then you want to block spiders from visiting the links. That way the download link to the product is not followed, so it's not indexed.

Remember that to block important pages like thank you pages, it's better to make use of a robots text file as well. That is safer, than just the meta tag. So pimp up those meta tags, especially your homepage meta tags, visitors will love it.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

This will probably result in a penalty for your website - you might be doing it for purposes to increase rankings - or without knowing it.

Hidden text occurs when you have a white background color of your website and white text. Or black background with black text. In other words there's text but visitors cannot read it.

Search engines can still read it though - and that's why you get penalty.

Years ago and still today some webmasters use hidden text, just to place a ton of keywords for the search engines to see. To get high rankings.

So if you give a check on your website it will be a great idea.

Hidden text or for any other penalty you will be probably notified on your Google webmaster tools account. If you are trying to cheat though and it's obvious you're not going to be notified.

The rule here is: Show search engines and visitors the same thing.

That's also why redirects are "bad" sometimes. You should use the 301 permanent redirect only - if you have to use redirects. That's also why cloaking or creating doorway pages and other black hat techniques no longer work.

There were legitimate cases where Google informed the webmaster and he fixes the problem with hidden text. And penalty after some short time will be gone. Penalty usually is drop in rankings. But if your website lost rankings it's not always a penalty of course.

Always have a Google webmaster tools account to get notified of any WARNINGS your website might have - things you can do better... or any penalties you have. Even if your website is hacked you get notified. In that case even via email.

Something interesting is that many webmasters kinda worry when they read posts like... Google removed from their Google guidelines the following:

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Now that at first may sound alerting... but it does not mean Google algorithm no longer "like" these links.

In fact one of the ways to get high rankings is getting other relevant sites to link to yours. It's what's working right now!

A Yahoo submission will boost your rankings in Yahoo and in Google has obviously the benefit of a quality one way link from high pr website (considered as authority site as well) - and I've seen increase in rankings up till this day with directory submissions. These still work - you can interpret what Google had in mind when they removed those bullets from the Guidelines!

What works is what matters.

If you stop getting relevant links your rankings have no other way to increase.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

This is neat.

It is something you can do, but for Bloggers. For other blog platforms, please find other tutorials elsewhere. Wordpress.org blogs have a free plugin I recommend (and use on my wordpress blogs) called All In One SEO Pack.

So your blogger blog needs some modification - the template basically.

First of all, your blog posts themselves when you are writing I only suggest you do keyword research FIRST.

Pick a keyword and create a post around it. Pick keywords that do not have high competition - so the blog post itself can get highly ranked as well. For example you find a keyword like buy online dog food.

Means you can create a blog post and put title as: How To Buy Online Dog Food.

Then I suggest you write a blog post in a normal fashion - no keyword stuffing - just write for your visitors, that way you should be using at least one time the keyword or part of it. Plus variations of it. That's the right way to create content nowadays. No "spamming", but the natural way.

Another thing I would do sometimes, but not always so my blog does not have an "ugly" look - is put the title of the blog post at the beginning and end of the blog post itself. Plus make it bold.

For the Blogger template now...

First thing you want to do is remove external links - like the Blogger badget/button. External links will reduce your pagerank.

Preferable if your blog is located on your website and you have other pages not just a blog, then put a main menu on the blog as well. It should feature your most important pages. But if your blog is on free blogger - that step is not for you.

Exchange links with other blogs, is something good - but I suggest you limit the number of blogroll links (links on the sidebar of your blogs) to say 45 or less.

Plus exchange links with related websites only - that's my suggestion. For the blogroll (which is not a links page) I would prefer to exchange links with only related sites or blogs.

So just make your blog look great in the eyes of your visitors - and neat.

If you want to show archives, labels or categories block them from being indexed - Important! You can block using robots.txt or make them a drop down menu (instead of text links). Spiders can't crawl links in the drop down menus.

You want to block them because they just display what's already on your blog - means duplicate content.

You don't want that - not for a penalty which you will hardly get - but it will be more difficult for the pages (duplicate pages) to get indexed. Overall indexing may get somewhat hurt.

That covers pretty much everything about onpage optimization for your blog.

Please leave your comments.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

You have quite a few options when deciding on what keywords to optimize. FIRST of all you have to decide which keywords before starting any seo.

Keyword research goes FIRST, the other things follow...

If this is your first website, you are starting seo for the first time the following means - success or failure. Either way you still learn something from the experience.

Failure - if you are selling dog food, and want customers who buy dog food do not optimize your website for the best keyword in your niche - without checking the competition number.

Success - starting out for the first time? Then find a keyword with 50-100 visitors a day and 1-3million competing websites only!

That way, it's not mission impossible.

You can outrank websites who have 24 million competitors - once you gain that experience... just like anything else in life, you need some experience before you can do it perfectly right!

Free keyword tools exist... but there are also the paid ones.

The paid ones provide more detailed results. With a free tool it is enough if you are just starting out - to find that low competing keyword.

But if you have the budget you can go directly with a paid tool - and find those gems of keywords... these are keywords with high search volume and low competition number - something that is amazing.

That means the keywords will be easy to get the #1 rank while at the same time it provides a ton of traffic.

But with a free tool probably you won't ever find such gems.

So you have two options, like test driving WordTracker for 7 Days to see if you find the keyword gems - for "easy" rankings. OR use a free tool to find a keyword with 50-100 daily searches and less than 3million competition.

What next?

You have the keyword in your hand... only ONE.

Next optimize your website around that main keyword.

Here are some common mistakes I've seen a lot.

Mistake #1: So my website is in the business niche, so the keyword I will optimize my website for is business. What's wrong there?

Mistake #2: They put the keyword like ten times in the meta keyword tag, and flood their meta title and description with their keyword.

Mistake number one show the webmaster did not really do his homework properly. Knowledge IS first, you need to understand seo... before you spend your time and money.

Please leave your comments.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

Create Xml Sitemap

This is important that you create it for your website. If you have a blog, not a website you still require to create it... if you are doing seo.

One good reason to do it, is for search engines especially Google. Google has a section specifically for webmasters where you can submit the xml sitemap of your website.

This helps Google search engine spider to find your website pages easier, helping your pages getting indexed faster. Plus Google will give you incredible amount of data about your website pages.

The xml sitemap consists of your website pages, all of them that you wish to get indexed. Means all pages that are worth being in the Google index.

Note: The xml sitemap is submitted and used for Google. For Yahoo you create a so called URL list. That is a list of your website urls in a text file.

The tool I use to create both a xml sitemap for Google and the URL list for Yahoo is free: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp It is a web based tool.

There are software like GsiteCrawler but it does not work well on Vista.

So create the so called Sitemap and go to "Google webmaster tools" and submit it there. Inside you will see a ton of free tools and data about your website. Including those pages that Google recommends you fix. And other useful tips directly from Google to help your website rankings improve.

That's a bomb.

Now, the sitemap creator tool allows you to easily create the xml sitemap and the url list.

You will want to exclude the following from your sitemap. Once you use it, the tool will list all your website pages. Exclude then the following from the list (then you can generate the sitemap):

*Login urls for members only areas.

*Any page that has no useful value to the user.

*http://www.domain.com/blog and http://www.domain.com/blog/ are identical so list only one of them.

*Any 404 pages the tool finds. They are marked in red.

For GsiteCrawler software if you prefer a software rather than a web based software visit: http://www.gsitecrawler.com It's free.

This is really something I suggest you take the time to do. Then create a new sitemap again after a month (if you added new website pages) - if not there is no need to re create a new sitemap. I also suggest you add new content regularly. The more the better, some do it daily, others 3-4 times every week.

As long as the content you create is original and has value the more you have the better.

Always think of your visitors when doing SEO. It's always the best approach rather than looking for shortcuts for high rankings, which often include cheating - which get your website or some pages penalized.

Create Xml Sitemap

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

"If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." -- Tallulah Bankhead

If you answer YES to any of the following, then you need to read this article I wrote quickly: Does your linkspage suck?

>> You have more than 100 links on your linkspage (outbound links, also known as external links)... links pointing to other peoples sites.

>> You do not have categories and subcategories on your linkspage. Means you have just one page or several of them with tons of unrelated links.

>> You do not link to your linkspage (the main page) from your homepage. If you have categories and subcategories you should link to that page. Also known as the index page of your linkspage.

>> You use the nofollow tags on the links, block the linkspage using meta tag or robots.txt or some other way to block spiders from crawling and indexing the links page.

>> You have a ton of pages all named like links1.html links2.html, etc, etc... instead of categories and subcategories.

These are all tiny things you can fix, making your linkspage more visitor and seo friendly. Which means they are neat, attract more link partners, and overall improve your website.

Such things like blocking the linkspages and not linking to it from your homepage - will repel possible link partners...

...I seen sites like that and was going to ask them for a link exchange, but changed my mind.

There is a debate going on about Link Exchanges as well. Effective or not? Waste of time or not?

Personally, I always suggest you learn from your (or someone else) experience? Your positive experience may also NOT be like my positive experience?

I mean 50% of people say link exchanges are not effective and the other 50% say they are. And I bet most of them are newbies, clueless - they just SAY what they hear others say...

In my positive experience, link exchanges are a GREAT way to get lots of backlinks... quantity is important just as much as quality.

You need to get both quality links but you need also quantity. If you are not going to use link exchanges to get the quantity of link you need - there is NO OTHER METHOD available to get the quantity of links you need...

...bottom line is - you either use link exchanges to get the quantity of links you need - or you HAVE to pull out a BIG FAT cheque to pay for one way links (quality)... which still quality alone is not enough to conquer high competition keywords.

Moderation is the key!

I never said go and start getting link exchanges - hundreds upon hundreds.

In fact I always said getting 15-30 link exchanges a day (but keep doing it daily) is the RIGHT way. While at the same time get quality one way links (from article submission or other sources).

There are many methods to get one way links (which are the quality links)... that 15-30 link exchanges a day are also VERY IMPORTANT.

You won't get 30 one way links a day. Not even close, practically impossible as long as you are not Bill Gates - who can pay for one way links as if paying for chewing gums.

So get this straight:

Link exchanges are the method you have to use to get quantity of links. One way links are the method you have to use to get quality links.

One thing cannot survive without the other - use both for maximum effect, maximum impact on your rankings.

You link to me and I link to you is honest as well. Some say Oh, that's sounds like cheating. But the truth is, if your website is about porn I won't link exchange - if your website design sucks I won't neither.

So the bottom line, it means your website is of good quality the more links you get.

To get this message through I want to tell you my story.

You see, I studied hard search engine optimization techniques. I started getting backlinks for my first website. I did well, I got indexed then I started applying other link building methods.

I just could not get the quantity of links I need to get the high rankings. I mean I had one way links from directories, from article directories, from lots of places. It just was not enough.

(For havens sake that's enough to get high rankings for a low competition keyword - but not worth it - low competitive keywords means also few traffic in 99% of the time).

Then I started searching for link partners. That's how I got a TON of backlinks - a LOT in fact it was very easy to get backlinks.

My rankings started to improve.

I got the first position for my chosen keyword, plus hundreds other keywords all ranked on first page of Google.

All this in a very competitive niche of anti adware and spyware.

I used to find the links manually - at that time there was no OutRankSmart, otherwise I would have got the high rankings even faster and easier.

That's my short story on how link exchanges are very effective to get high rankings. The story I told you happened in 2007-2008 (not like 10 years ago). They still work. Period!

I talk honestly, from experience and you will expect results if you follow my tips.

Please leave your comments.

Talk to you soon,

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

Internal linking is when you link to one of your website pages from the homepage or from another page of your website.

However the "thing" is with folders or directories whatever you like to call them.

A folder/directory is something like this:

http://www.outranksmart.com/blog
OR
http://www.outranksmart.com/Affiliates

A webpage is like this:

http://www.outranksmart.com/Terms.html
OR
http://www.outranksmart.com/Support.html

You can write a folder/directory like this as well however:

http://www.outranksmart.com/blog/
OR
http://www.outranksmart.com/Affiliates/

That extra slash is THE THING I shall discuss.

You have to decide, either ALWAYS link to the specific folder/directory with the slash, or ALWAYS link to without the slash.

Search engines seems to treat them as two different pages (sort of):

http://www.outranksmart.com/blog
http://www.outranksmart.com/blog/

...even though there is just the stupid slash / extra.

I prefer to always use the slash when linking to folders/directories. The slash has another function or benefit. It tells search engine spiders (the robots), that the specific page ends there. This speeds up and helps the spiders in crawling the links.

The spiders read a url like for example this one:

http://www.outranksmart.com/blog/ In this manner:

First the domain name: outranksmart.com
Second they see a folder /blog
Third they read the slash and instantly understand that the url ends there!

But if there is no slash, the do not instantly understand that thing, so it will take a WEE bit more time for them. (We are talking here obviously of split seconds).

So those are TWO things about linking to Folders/Directories and about the stupid slash.

Note: When linking to another website (external linking) it does not matter for you if you use the slash or not.

And remember do not go and edit all your links - start applying this small change from now onwards on your site.

Please leave your comments.

Talk to you soon,

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

I have seen many that suck, so I completely ignore doing a link exchange with them. First of all a linkspage is a directory with categories and subcategories where you put your link exchange partners.

Like this one:
http://www.outranksmart.com/links/resources.html

I placed here four simple rules. This will not only make your website more user friendly, but you attract more link exchange partners. If you are not getting enough link exchange requests - or you get many rejected link exchanges - or few emails asking for link exchange - these rules may solve all that...

Rule #1: Link to your linkspage from the homepage - (And no need to link to it from all your site pages, just the homepage). Make it a text link called
Link Partners
Resources
Links
Our Partners
... or something like that.

Rule #2: Do not put nofollow tag on the link that links to the linkspage. Means on that link you put on the homepage.

Why?

Because Google spider will totally ignore your linkspage, so your link partners will gain NOTHING. It is like cheating them...

Do not neither block in any way the linkspage or the links, neither placing nofollow tags on the links themselves. Spiders and all of them should be able to visit your linkspage and crawl every page and every link.

So do not use meta tags or robots or other "brave" technique to block spiders :)

Rule #3: Do not create one page and put all your links on it. Create categories and subcategories. OutRankSmart seo software creates the linkspage for you automatically (including categories and subcategories).

Do not put more than 100 links per page. Google suggest not more than 100 links per page. So up to 100 is ok. I put only 35 per page, it looks neater and I attract more link exchange partners - they love my directory, they know their site will not be buried somewhere - but visible in my neatly organized link directory. :)

Rule #4: Put a search box. If they do not find their link instantly some link exchange partners will go mad.

Not a crappy search box, but one that actually returns results when you type in the domain name or the title of the site. Very important, because if they do not find their site, some will do not think twice and remove your link from their linkspage.

I am not saying anything new here, just important things. I seen countless sites selling awesome stuff, but then it takes me a ton of time to find where their linkspage is.

Why is this important?

If you do not link to your linkspage from your homepage the page will not get indexed. So why exchange links with your site if spiders will never see my link...

Refer to my other post about doing link exchanges:
How Much Are Link Exchanges Effective

Talk to you soon!

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works." -- John Gaule

Little things make the difference sometimes. By that I mean if you can make these simple things - it is better to do so.

Tip #1: When linking to any website from your own site, webpage or url whether it's your own or someone's else website... here is what to do.

If the link is: http://www.domainname.com always put a slash (/) at the end. So you link to: http://www.domainname.com/

You can also do this if the url you are going to link to is for example:
http://www.domainname.com/Affiliates

Put it as:
http://www.domainname.com/Affiliates/

You cannot put the slash if it is a page like for example:
http://www.domainname.com/Affiliates.html

In that case putting a slash will results in page error - the page will not load.

So why this simple slash?

Spiders which are search engine software visit your website and read your content, your links and so forth. This takes time of course. When you use the slash what you are doing is speeding up the time spiders take to read your website.

You are helping spiders in other words... and they obviously like that. It is something good to do.

It speeds up because once spiders see the slash at the end of the url, they know the url ends there. They have many websites to read if you have lots of links, so this will speed up things. It's like someone reading a book, each sentence has a full stop, so it is easier to read of course.

Consider the slash as if it was a full stop in the end of a sentence. The full stop helps the reader and the slash helps the spiders. :)

I do not suggest you go and fix all websites urls you have, because it may take too much time - you can spend that time more wisely probably.

Tip #2: If you have a blogger blog, you can create meta tags inside your blog template.

Step by step instructions with screenshots below.

Let's start step by step. First here is exactly where to locate the template:


(click image to enlarge)

1. Click Template
2. Click Edit Html

Then you will see a box with code like this one below.


(click image to enlarge)

Note that I highlighted in yellow the word head. Under that, I placed the meta tags and I placed a black outline around the meta tags.

You just do the same, post the meta tags under the head word. To make it easier for you just copy and paste the meta tag code I placed on this webpage:
http://www.outranksmart.com/blog/meta-tag-code.html On that page there are also instructions to edit your title, etc.

So those are two small things but make a big difference. The meta tags will create unique meta tag titles for each of your blog post pages. Google prefers this, so each blog post will have a unique descriptive meta title.

The meta title appears in the search engine results... Simple things to fix, but improve a lot of things.

Please leave your comments.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

This is something easy to do and Google highly recommends you to do it. I always teach that what Google likes you should do if possible.

File names are the names of your website pages. For example:
A page about dog food you probably will name it something like dogfood.html

Google suggests you use punctuation marks in your file names. Instead of dogfood.html put it dog-food.html

You should use the - symbol to separate words, not the _ symbol.

This is great way for visitors to understand faster and easier what the page is about. Makes sense!

Google always tried to give their users (the people who search the search engine) the best results and experience. These little things make a difference, and for search engine optimization purposes you will get (even though small) credit... it is a good thing to do!

Do not however go and rename all your website pages. That will results in lots of 404 page not found error pages. Just for next time when you create pages, start using the - symbol to separate words.

Let me give you few more examples.

Wrong way to name a page:

catfood.html
cheapcatfoods.html

Good way to name a page:

cat-food.html
cheap-cat-foods.html

Easy and simple tip!

File names also make more sense.

Something to think about now. Blogger blog platform is created and owned by Google. By default the blogs you created are search engine optimized. Notice the filenames of the post pages. They are all created with the - symbol. Google implemented this in the blogger blogs by default.

I have pages which do not have the - symbol, because they were created before I discovered this simple method.

Here are some more tips on this subject:

1) Do not create a ton of different folders/directories on your website. For example create a folder named articles and put all articles inside it.

2) Avoid creating subdomains with identical or very similar content as your domain name.

3) Meta tags, make meta tags unique for each webpage. If your site is big, you obviously cannot make each page with a unique meta tag. In that case at least make the most important pages with very descriptive meta tags that clearly describe what the page is about.

4) Avoid also creating pages like this:
http://www.domainname.com/Support

(You do that by creating a new folder called Support, then putting an index.html page inside the folder) That can result in some errors too with redirection and so on...

So it is best to create html pages, like this:
http://www.domainname.com/Support.html

These things that deal with how to structure your website and so on are all known as onpage optimization strategies/methods or techniques...

They are not so important as the offpage optimization strategies, which deal with getting links. But they still count and obviously simple things like these you should start implementing them.

If you have any questions, something not clear like always I suggest you post a comment please.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

This technique works great on blogs hosted on Blogger platform only. Google seems to love these blogs and the end result will be that all or almost all of your blog post pages will rank on first page on Google.

You also need to host your blog on your domain!

You will only receive little traffic towards each blog post, but you can post an unlimited number of post, that will add up in good amount of traffic.

First thing is to research keywords that have less than 1 million. Remember with this technique all you are going to do is post content on your blog, not getting backlinks towards each blog post.

You do have to get backlinks pointing towards your blog homepage, the more the better, but there is no need to do link building on your blog post pages as well.

So the keywords you choose must have less than million competitors, the lower the number the better. These keywords will have little traffic, but even if they get five a day it is great.

Pick a keyword and construct a title for your blog post using that keyword. If the keyword you choose is super fast blue cars, then you make a decent title like for example, where to buy super fast blue cars. Then create a four or five hundred word blog post. You need to make blog post decent, provide some value to your visitors, because your goal is to make
money as well. Adsense works great with this technique.

Remember that when creating the blog post title do not change the keywords, or mix them. Keep the words in the keyword in oder. Then also put the title before you begin the post and at the end of the post, and put it in bold.

Publish your post and ping each time you post. Do not post more than one time a day, so it is smooth and spiders have a chance to index the page. Make also sure that on your blog homepage you have a section called previous posts, that lists all your previous posts. So the posts get indexed.

You need to have some pagerank on your blog so this technique will work fast. So if you have a brand new blog, you need to optimize it first by getting backlinks.

To get your blog some pagerank, you can do blog link exchanges, submit your rss field to rss directories, submit your blog to blog directories or if you are a good writer, you can become an author of another blog. Then you post great articles on his blog and link back to your own blog.

There are many more methods to get links to your blog, mainly those that work for your website will also work on your blog, like article submission or forum posting.

Remember the key is to make proper keyword research, make decent blog posts and get your blog homepage some pagerank. You may find great keywords, which get a ton of traffic and have little competition, this does happen as well. These are called hidden keywords, which you are lucky enough to find if you do keyword research often.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

Search engine software that visit your website are called spiders. These notice how your website is structured. Here is how to do it in a way that spiders will fall in love with it...

First of all remove unwanted code in your website html source. Spiders read content not code, and too much code distracts them and they find it less interesting and it is not easy for them to read through your website. You want to make it easy for them so they like it.

This code is most often javascripts. You can learn how to open javascripts from an external file. That method allows you to have less code in your html code while still performing all javascripts you want.

Do not join a bunch of traffic counters since all of them give you a piece of script to put on your website. Use one only is enough, or else it gets messed up with too much code.

There are also tools that allow you to clean your html code, usually fix errors in the code itself. Meta tags must also be unique for each webpage. That is more organized and makes more sense that each page has its own title, description and keywords.

One thing you should not do is create several folders, which are almost all identical. For example put all your articles in one folder called Articles. Put all your images in only one folder called Images. Keep your website files and folders organized not only it is easier for you but also for spiders. They quickly scan throughout your webpages. It is much easier for them. Pages will get indexed faster and all of them will be included in the index.

So here is some of the common mistakes.

Linking to your linkspage from your homepage like Links 1, Links 2, Links 3 and so forth.

You only need one linkspage, which has categories and subcategories. Then link to that one page from your homepage.

Linking to several articles from your homepage. Again you just create on page and put links to all your articles on it. Then link to that one page called Articles or whatever only from your homepage, or from your sitemap. You do not need to link to every page from your homepage, you can put them on your sitemap. Spiders will find them still when they visit your sitemap.

Too many menus on your website is another mistake. Two is enough. One for visitors giving them the most important pages like support, sitemap or maybe products page, download page and so forth. The other menu lists other less important pages like legal information or articles page or a link to your blog.

All pages will get indexed, if your website is properly organized. Spiders visit a webpage and also visit each of the links on that webpage. So they will visit your entire website by following links. If you create a webpage and do not link to it from anywhere then obviously it will not be seen.

Now Google also have the google webmasters tools, and there are software that allows you to create a google sitemap. You put that special sitemap to google webmasters tools. It helps your webpages to get indexed faster. It also monitors which webpages return the 404 page not found or other erros.

You should make sure your website has no 404 error pages. All links should be working well, if not simple fix so called broken links that return error messages.

You can also submit a similar sitemap to Yahoo. There are software once again that will create this special sitemap. When we refer to spiders, we refer to all search engine spiders because every search engine has its own spider.

You should be friendly with these software because ultimately they will determine your rankings. It is the spiders that crawl your site and check how many backlinks you have and so forth.

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

First of all, some people give importance to pagerank and others don't. You do not need to worry about your pagerank much, however it is an indication of how many backlinks your
website has, how good it is optimized...

When search engine software called spiders visit your website, they follow each of your site links, as long as the links have not the nofollow tag, or other signals for search engines to ignore certain links. Like robots files or instructions to spiders in the meta tags.

Now pagerank is given to your homepage and each of your website pages. The pagerank comes from those websites that link to you. So when someone links to your website it is like they are giving you some of their pagerank. The higher their pagerank number the more pagerank they give you.

That means the more websites linking to you the higher your pagerank will be.

So it's important not to link to other peoples sites if you don't have to. You will give them some of your website pagerank when you do so. So avoid linking to other websites from your own, or put the nofollow tags on these types of links. That way spiders ignore these links completely.

When you do link exchanges you give some pagerank but also receive from your link partner. It is important to check they still keep linking to your site because if not you give them pagerank and they give you none. If you have many link partners that do not link back to you, in the end the result will be bad. You will probably not only loose some pagerank but for sure rankings.

To fix the problem, you either contact those webmasters that removed your link, see why they did so and try to make them link back to you again. If they do not remove their links from your website.

In a certain way, the more links you have the higher your pagerank will be. Now your own website pages pass pagerank to each other. So if you link to your homepage from your blog you are giving some of your blog pagerank to your homepage.

The solution is to make sure the most important webpages of your site get the most pagerank. Make sure they are not passing pagerank to other pages they do not really require. It is better that your homepage gets the most pagerank rather then your privacy policy webpage.

So make sure you put the nofollow tags properly on your site, so certain webpages do not receive too many pagerank, while the important pages receive the most pagerank and do not loose a lot. A webpage looses pagerank when it links to another page within the same site or links to another site completely.

Your pagerank improves more if you get one way links. These are links you get when you submit your articles, submit your site to directories, get links from forums, blogs, and other places where you do not link back. So unlike link exchanges these websites give you pagerank and you give none.

Those are the sites that help you increase your pagerank really fast. But they are also the toughest sites to get links from, because it is easier to make a link exchange since there are millions of sites doing link exchanges. Article directories are limited in amount and even other methods of getting one way links.

So make sure you treat your pagerank well, so your most important pages get the most pagerank. That all helps your rankings improve.

Karl Sultana

Labels: OnPage-Optimization

This is a real SEO REPORT I gave to a webmasters. His website is: http://www.unlockaustin.com/

He has a big site, and wanted to optimize it to get traffic from SEO...

Read what I told him in my long email:

First of all you need to research keywords that you want to rank for. This free tool tells you number of search per month in Google search engine, and number of competing websites for each keyword.

Keyword Enhancer

The pages of your websites that you want to rank high, each need a different meta title and meta description tag. These are the two tags each page must have different from the rest.

If they are same like other pages, it will be harder to rank cause they seem in the eyes of search engines as similar/identical pages.

If you have a keyword like austin live music performances and you want this page to rank well
Austin Music Bands then on that page talk about something related to the keyword. You should add about 2 paragraphs and use the keyword and the words inside the keyword as well. (not too often)

If you have another different page and you want it to rank for something else do the same. Create two new paragraphs and use that new keyword.

It is good idea since you have many pages, that you optimize each page for just one keyword.

It will be easyier to rank. So if you have Austin Music Bands
do not try to optimize it for 4 keywords, but just one. Keep in mind, that if you have 14,000 pages, you can get ranked in Google for 14,.000 different keywords if you optimize each page just for one keyword.

This is much easier than trying to rank one page for 14,000 keywords.

Now your home page should be optimized for general keywords, your main keyword for example. Again since you have many pages, not a good idea that you try to optimize your home page for all keywords.

Last thing to do for each page is changing the alt tags of images and if possible also add a title tag for the images and links (this also helps) Title tag will cause a small yellow popup to appear when you place the mouse over the image or link. Ex: http://www.deletespyware-adware.com/ place mouse on the image on top: Delete Spyware Adware.

When doing the tags input the keyword you want to rank for that page. If you have multiple images do this... If your keyword is: jazz artists

For first image use: jazz artists image
2nd: jazz artists graphic
3rd: jazz artists online image
4th: jazz artists bands graphic

In other words they will be different but the keyword always remains there.

Note: Place the alt tags on all images and the title tag on all images and links. (on links is optional)

So summary for first part:

Choose the keywords. Optimize one page just for one keyword. Add two paraghraps of text on that page and insert the keyword you want to rank for in the text. Then do the same thing with other pages. You also modify the meta title and meta description of the page. Input the keyword in the title and description tag. Do not repeat the keyword in the tags more than once.

Finaly add the keyword also in all images alt tags and add the title tag both in images and links.

Second part:

You are loosing pagerank because it is moving to pages that do not need it. Ex: Terms, Privacy, Login, Search, Forgot username or password?.Rate It!, Tag This, Edit This, Attend Show and many more.

All those links do not need to be ranked well in search engines, so you should use the nofollow tag on those links.

Modify each page of your website which has those links and include the nofollow tag.

This is the nofollow tag:
rel="nofollow"

So change all links that you do not want to be ranked into nofollow.

I see the links at the bottom like General 1 General 2 General 3 If you want those pages to rank for some keyword, you can change their anchor text from General 1 to the keyword 1.

If you want this page Austin Music Bands to rank well for Austin Music Bands than whenever you link to it from within your website link to it using the anchor text Austin Music Bands. Anytime you link to it, not just one or two times.

On the sitemap of your website remove links that you do not want them to rank or add the nofollow tag to them.

Make sure you do not have error pages, 404 not found. To do this create a Google sitemap and submit it to Google sitemaps at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

You need a free google account and Gsite crawler software that will create your sitemap. It is free software. Download from gsitecrawler.com/en/download/ Login to your Google sitemaps account and you should see details of pages that have errors. Then do the following too:

Click on Preferred domain and choose your preferred domain. If other people link to your website like: http://www.unlockaustin.com/ choose that domain is the preferred domain. If they link to you like: http://unlockaustin.com/ (choose that one)

Here is more info about what preferred domain means according to Google.

When creating your Google Sitemap exclude from sitemap pages you do not want to rank for like Terms of service, Login page, Forget password page and so on.

You only create the sitemap once.

That covers the onpage factors of your website. Most important thing I want you to know is the fact that since you have many pages, you can optimize each one just for one keyword. That makes things more simple and easy.

This free tool at http://infohound.net/tidy/ will tidy and fix any html errors of your pages. It may take long to do all pages, but it is useful. Clean html code is better, spiders will read it faster and see it is not junk.

DAMN

That was long.

Thank You!

Labels: OnPage-Optimization