Basic SEO practices for newbies:

Great post. Looks like it definitely covers all the basics and processes a newbie should follow.

Sticky?

OK here are my 2c before you even start choose a niche with care research your keywords carefully check competition, traffic, on page and off page competition, actually look at and Analise the top ten sites for each keyword you choose. Keywords are where your money will come from, get this part wrong you are fucked from the beginning. No amount of SEO will help if you get the keyword bit wrong. I always use 6 keywords per site.

Domain names
Lots of different information on the forum about this, so this is my opinion only and I could be wrong, but it works OK for me.

1. When ever possible include your main keyword in your domain name. Do a google search for any term and you will see Google will highlight that term within the domain name. So Google looks for this.
2. Dont use underscore or hyphens bettertohavealongname than better-to-have- a-long-name
3. Always buy a .com and yes I know .info will rank but .com looks and sounds more professional.
4. Always check to see if there are any expiring domains with your keywords in older domains rank better. You might even pick up one with PR.

Make sure your description accurately reflects what your keyword is for any particular page. Do not use a generic description for all pages, the description is what will entice users to click your link above all others, its your chance to get users to click your link. Spend some time on this and get it right.

Dont do this

More info about getting free traffic to your site.

Do something like this

I can show you how to drive thousands of users to your site all of them with fists full of cash, this is so easy to do you wont believe it. Start right now.

By the way GrayWolf this is a great idea.

I enjoyed this post - it does cover all the basics - I never realised googkle doesnt care about the ht access file --- I thought this was massivley important for ages --

I dont see why your host hdoesnt just give you the option to have either http or www when you get the name - its way overrated and over complicated --

there are too many things like this in tech - shit that programmers left in like this that means little or nothing to most of us who just want a site with good seo or a prgram that works --but the better programmers listen to the feedback and make excellent apps --- there rant over ; )

THx a lot for this.
cheers

Thanks a lot for this informational post. Helped me a bit for sure, would like to subscribe to it, too.

This is a great article.

One thing I have found is that building less higher page rank back links makes a way bigger impact than having ton and tons of low page rank back links.

For my main site I hit pr5 within one year just leaving 2-5 comments per day on high page rank blogs.

I always make my name my keyword when leaving comments and always use a subpage as my website in the blog comment forms.

magpie2419 said:

...
Make sure your description accurately reflects what your keyword is for any particular page. Do not use a generic description for all pages, the description is what will entice users to click your link above all others, its your chance to get users to click your link.
...

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@magpie2419 - Everything in your reply is exactly right. Choosing and correctly using keywords is critical to success. Anyone reading this thread should go back to your reply and read it again.

I wanted to also emphasize the point your making about the description. So many people get this wrong. The point of the description meta tag is as magpie says, it gives you control over the description the SE will use for your site summary. Don't stuff this with keywords, don't try to optimize it for the se, write the description as a sales blurb for your site, write it for the humans to read. This is your last chance to get the visitors to pick your listing, with a good description you can get more visitors even if your in position 3 or 4, than the number 1 listing gets.

nice1 said:

I enjoyed this post - it does cover all the basics - I never realised googkle doesnt care about the ht access file --- I thought this was massivley important for ages --

I dont see why your host hdoesnt just give you the option to have either http or www when you get the name - its way overrated and over complicated --

there are too many things like this in tech - shit that programmers left in like this that means little or nothing to most of us who just want a site with good seo or a prgram that works --but the better programmers listen to the feedback and make excellent apps --- there rant over ; )

Click to expand...

@nice1 - It isn't a matter of google not looking at .htaccess. The file is simply a serverside tool that controls what gets returned when the server gets a request. It makes since that google wouldn't penalize for dup content over www since it lets you set a preference in webmaster tools. Remember though google maybe the biggest, but it's not the only SE. Also its just a good idea to set the redirect about www anyway, because it makes the real users end up on your preference. Not everyone notices, but when I visit a site if the address bar changes from what I typed in, I usually notice.

It isn't really all that complicated to set a redirect, but yeah I share your rant - it's silly that www was even created as a default shortcut subdirectory. I've always thought it was unneccessary fluff added just to reinforce the worldwideweb concept. Everything should have been set up without it from the start. But unfortunately we live in a world created by others, so there will always be little annoyances like this that need to be dealt with.

It's also good to learn how to use the .htaccess file anyway. You can control a lot of other things than just redirects, but that would be for a different discussion.

eshelt said:

This is a great article.

One thing I have found is that building less higher page rank back links makes a way bigger impact than having ton and tons of low page rank back links.

For my main site I hit pr5 within one year just leaving 2-5 comments per day on high page rank blogs.

I always make my name my keyword when leaving comments and always use a subpage as my website in the blog comment forms.

Click to expand...

@eshelt - Yes that's the only reason pr still has some importance. Well that and if you want to flip a site or sell advertisements. For those that don't know, Page Rank is the algorithm originally created by and named after Larry Page. It was the foundation used to create the Google SE. But the SE algorithm is constantly being worked on in an effort to make it serve up better results. The PR of your page is no longer used to determine it's position in the SERP at all.
The way your using it is correct, the purpose of PR as it effects the SERP is only about the quality of a page for an outbound link. In other words the PR of your page has nothing to do with your position in the SERP, but the PR of the pages you get your backlinks from is VERY important to the SERP position of your page.

Backlinks from a few high PR pages, will do your site much more good than hundreds of backlinks from low PR pages. One important thing to remember about this idea, is that PR is always out of date. PR is always being updated, but it's only published every 3 or 4 months. So you don't really know the true PR of any page you find. You could get a backlink from a page that shows a high PR, but in reality it is now a low PR link. Or the same in reverse, you could have a link from a low PR site, and it actually is a higher PR site. As you get the backlinks from high PR sites, it does increase the PR of your site, but it's the backlinks that are affecting your SERP.


Well, this thread seems to be getting some good responses. I'm glad I was able to offer something that can help.

:beerchug:

ipopbb has released the results on some experiments he has done on the google scoring system.

Please continue posting good info and tactics in this thread, but everyone should take a minute and go look at his thread too. You should try to incorporate the tips he is offering when designing your pages. Mostly it amounts to just using good html design, but the tips can help you optimize it even more.

Very informative thread by ipopbb: Big changes in Google content scoring.

Be sure to come back to this thread for basic references as well. I hope we're creating in this thread a good consolidated best practices information source that can be used to keep on top of basic seo techniques.

Thanks for a Nice share

A lot of posts. Difficult to read all them.

Good information.

Where can I buy expired domains?

dragondf said:

A lot of posts. Difficult to read all them.

Good information.

Where can I buy expired domains?

Click to expand...

Purchasing expired domains is a completely different topic than what is discussed in this thread. You can use the search tool to find information that can help with that. BHW Search Tool.

One thing to keep in mind with buying an expired domain, in relationship to your SEO plans, is to find something that is in a related niche to what you plan to do with it.

An advantage of finding an expired domain is that there can be many backlinks already in place from the previous owner. All the previous SEO done for the domain will be beneficial for the new domain owner as long as it's in the same niche. If you create a new website that's unrelated to the old niche, then the google crawlers will start seeing that the backlinks are unrelated and then start minimizing their importance to the new site.

This is the case for both maintaining the already earned PR, and for maintaining the already earned SERP position.

i think this thread should be stickied. i will pm a mod.

angelas111 said:

i think this thread should be stickied. i will pm a mod.

Click to expand...

Yeah,
I agree and I am surprised that there was not a sticky already. Cool share OP these outlines are so valuable.

When writing that guide it occured to me that many people (especially those just getting started), are focused on doing SEO and building backlinks simply because they're told it needs to be done. They understand that Google uses these factors to determine how well your site will rank, but many people are blindly just following the advice. All the while they're missing the point of how and why it works.

To understand the underlying principles of SEO, we need to look at what the internet was like and how websites became popular before Google. It's a seperate topic so I created a new thread to discuss these principles.

By keeping in mind how and why everything works this way, I think it can help people make better decisions on when and where to focus their SEO efforts. After reading this thread, you should visit my new thread to learn more about the purpose of all the backlinking and why it all helps.
Hope this additional info can help a few people.
Thanks,
Wolf

angelas111 said:

i think this thread should be stickied. i will pm a mod.

Click to expand...

Thanks angelas, and also thanks to everyone else who's had good things to say about my thread. I wasn't a total newbie when I first joined the BHW forum, but I've still learned a lot since becoming a member.

I was hoping I could give something back someday. It's nice to know that many people think this was a worthwhile contribution.

So, thanks again everyone,
Wolf

This is a great post, Wolf. Outstanding job there buddy.

As for my two cents on the deal, Be sure and focus on your sitemaps too. Everyone says that they are as dead as meta-tags but anyone with any seo experience knows they are still major players, as it is the keywords that connect the user to the target content in the first place.

For sitemaps, it works in two fold. We still need two seperate versions. The bots crawl the XML version but you still need a text version for your human users to be able to see. In some recent testing that I've done, having a human, text link list, with 2-5 sentence reference to each link format, it has not only improved traffic, user click-through, user onsite search, as well as authority page rankings in recent months.

Google is all about content, keyword relevance and authority level information. Their business is 100% ' information ' driven and we create their user content each time a site comes to life. It works under the same context as ebay having their system populated with the latest auction posts and bids.

With that being the case, when using a human based and bot based sitemap set, you are giving the search engines two pages, one of direct access links to crawl in the xml version and a page of content and links to crawl with the human version, as long as you give each link a directory style 2-5 line description. Do this for your links and you will make your links page turn to way more as a content page.

People have the common misconception that authority is all about getting backlinks to your site but that is only a single factor in the overall equation. Test it for yourselves and see how it works for you. There have recently ( over the last 6-9 months ), a lot of site and blog activity showing that more authority ranking of sites comes with being more of a targeted ' one-stop ' shop for your niche content, be it from your own offerings or content from your would-be competitors in the market.

For example, referencing a competitor's blog post or article on your site, giving your thoughts and opinions in agreeing/disagreeing with it, you can link an outbound link to this competitor's site and actually gain more authority credit, due to you being a resource for the search engines to find other related content in your niche market. This also has been proven to show results for at least my tests, that visitors/users come back to my sites over time as their reference resource and will buy from me first more often than not. By doing this, I have a couple of sites that have averaged 30%-50% more sales and pulling in an outstanding 40% average across the board increase in ' residual traffic '.

Supply resources and content to your visitors and it will take the edge off that you are strictly about getting their money and more about getting their attention and loyalty, which is where the trust comes for getting their purchase.

We have all been trained to go for the instant sale and the instant buy but, the truth of the matter is, business, online or off is all about getting the trust of the customer in what products/services we offer to get them to come back as residual clients.

Try it for yourselves and see what works. For me, it is to use keyword meta-tags, two seperate sitemaps and to use more outbound links, as long as the content is solid that is attached to it.

@aftershock2020 - another great post with some more good ideas, thanks for your comments.

I agree that keywords are vitally important to a website. Using keywords throughout your content and in various tags helps the SE know how to index your site. Even though I disagree with the importance of the meta keyword tag, that doesn't mean I disagree with the importance of keywords. It just isn't as simple as throwing a list together that the SE will read. It's necessary to use the keywords throughout your page in the proper context and at a reasonable keyword density. The SE algorithms are pretty good at sorting through content to determine what's most important.

In fact I always suggest that anyone making a website should use the tag. Even if it isn't used for indexing, it certainly isn't going to hurt anything to use it properly. I personally like the meta keyword tag to help myself keep track of the keywords I'm targetting for the page. It's also very important to use if your site is using adsense because adwords does use the tag to help detemine which ads to place in your adsense blocks.

I really like your idea of using a txt version of the sitemap, not only does that give your visitors a way to navigate your site, it gives an opportunity to use keywords in the href for your internal links. This is one more way to feed relevance for your keywords to the SE. That's something that won't happen from just an xml sitemap. From now on, I think I'll be creating both versions of sitemaps for my own projects.

Creating some outbound links to other relevant sites is an interesting idea as well. I'll have to just take your word for it right now regarding the benefits you mention, but it does make sense. I can also see an additional benefit as well; by using links to the other sites, it allows the SE to consider them as keywords too. This is reminescent of the days when people were stuffing names of their competitors in their keywords. If someone does a search for those other sites, your site might possibly come up in the SERP as well.

I pretty much liked everything in your post because it's all related to building a quality site. I agree with this 100%.

If you are going to build a site, do it right. Whether your using whitehat methods or blackhat methods, you will get better longterm results if you build a good high quality relevant site.

There's some great keyword research videos available from the creators of Market Samurai here: http://www.noblesamurai.com/dojo/marketsamurai/

It's mostly focused around their tool (which is worth the money), but the theory applies to research in general. Which tool you use is up to you.

I am a new marketer and just launched my first site a week ago. My plan is to start out with 5 page niche Wordpress URL/ keyword optimized sites selling one affiliate product or service. I'd like a little input on my results so far.

What I've done so far: I wrote 2 Ezine articles, 2 press releases, and bookmarked the site on Mixx and Digg. Thats it.


The site is a week old, the pages look to be indexed but its buried. One of my eZine articles is ranking on page 4. My main URL no where to be found though. I figured it should have at least showed up in the first 5 pages by now---- based on site optimization for the keyword alone but it has'nt. Since Im new at this Im not sure if there are new website guidelines I should be following to avoid Google penalties or the sandbox people talk about. Maybe this is what happened to me I dont know. But I should be ranking ahead of the crappy listings on page 2,3,4 etc..



I have been looking at keywords with a local monthly search volume of 2k-10k using the Google Keyword Tool.


Analyzing the competition in the top 10 results for my own rankability has been my biggest issue for selecting keywords to target. Im using the Firefox SEO plugin to look at the top 10

Here are the criteria I have been using to evaluate the competition: I have been looking at PR (most pages being PR3 or less), y! Page Links (300 or less), amount of root domains present, Alexa rank (500k or more), website age, seeing if any articles are ranking, and 50k or less competing sites (keyword search in quotes) as guidelines.
Each keyword I look at has its strengths and weaknesses in each of those categories and its glazing my eyes over trying to decide which factors or combination of factors are more important than others. Im spending too much time doing that. Its hard to see something definitive unless I really go for a low monthly search volume based on the criteria Ive been using.

If someone could help me with competition guidelines and analysis that would help me save alot of time. Also, new URL/website launch guidlelines. I have to know if I can compete before I put all the work into content creation and domain purchases. At the same time I'd like to go after a little more than 1000 monthly searches.

Thanks to all for your input.

@gladmark - This question and the description of what you're doing are complete enough you probably should have started your own thread asking for suggestions. This thread is more about the basic principles and it looks like so far your on track.

Don't worry about if your site got sandboxed, I don't think that's whats happening here. If you're site is indexed you're doing ok even if your not ranking very high yet. Getting your site indexed fast is extremely easy, getting it to rank well takes a little more time and work. Your site is just new and it's going to take some work to get it to climb in the serps. Those other sites may be crappy but they've been working at it longer than you. Also for what your doing right now, don't worry about what yours or your competitions PR is. The PR of your site isn't what moves you up in the SERP. At this stage the only thing you need to think about PR for is the websites your getting backlinks on. If your doing your backlinking right then you're PR should increase anyway, but don't worry about it. Just concentrated on your efforts to move up in the SERPs.

If I were you I'd keep doing what your doing. Keep working on the article submissions. Try to include a backlink inside your articles on the sites that let you. Be sure to use your keywords for anchors. You can even write a few articles and backlink to some of your other articles to give them more relevancy. Just don't overdo it, you don't want to look like your trying to build a link wheel. Also, keep bookmarking your page on more social bookmarking sites. Mixx and Digg are good but unless your page actually gets popular or if your really lucky hit the front page, just a couple of bookmarks isn't going to help much. You can do it manually yourself, or go to the BST forum and purchase a bookmarking package. There usually pretty cheap and way faster than doing it yourself manually. After that give it a few days and do a directory submission package. I always start with the bottom level backlinks and work my way up to different types. If you look through the bst forum you'll find many members offering a variety of different types of backlinking packages. Just build up the basics to start and develop a strategy that will pretty much have steady flow of backlinks being added over time. Hold off on link structures till you have a good amount of backlinks established. Link structures are more complicated and if you do it wrong you can do more damage than good. Try to make it look like your site is naturally becoming popular. It looks more natural if it's a steady flow being added rather than a dramatic addition of backlinks. You can do that too, but not right away. The longer you work at it, the larger amount of backlinks can be added and still seem natural.

The rest of your questions are really a little off topic for this thread. I know there's a lot of advice warning new people from starting threads, but sometimes it's a good idea. Like I said you're asking detailed enough questions, it wouldn't be a bad idea to open a new thread to ask for more suggestions. You'll probably get a lot more replies that can help you that way.

GreyWolf said:

@gladmark - This question and the description of what you're doing are complete enough you probably should have started your own thread asking for suggestions. This thread is more about the basic principles and it looks like so far your on track.

Don't worry about if your site got sandboxed, I don't think that's whats happening here. If you're site is indexed you're doing ok even if your not ranking very high yet. Getting your site indexed fast is extremely easy, getting it to rank well takes a little more time and work. Your site is just new and it's going to take some work to get it to climb in the serps. Those other sites may be crappy but they've been working at it longer than you. Also for what your doing right now, don't worry about what yours or your competitions PR is. The PR of your site isn't what moves you up in the SERP. At this stage the only thing you need to think about PR for is the websites your getting backlinks on. If your doing your backlinking right then you're PR should increase anyway, but don't worry about it. Just concentrated on your efforts to move up in the SERPs.

If I were you I'd keep doing what your doing. Keep working on the article submissions. Try to include a backlink inside your articles on the sites that let you. Be sure to use your keywords for anchors. You can even write a few articles and backlink to some of your other articles to give them more relevancy. Just don't overdo it, you don't want to look like your trying to build a link wheel. Also, keep bookmarking your page on more social bookmarking sites. Mixx and Digg are good but unless your page actually gets popular or if your really lucky hit the front page, just a couple of bookmarks isn't going to help much. You can do it manually yourself, or go to the BST forum and purchase a bookmarking package. There usually pretty cheap and way faster than doing it yourself manually. After that give it a few days and do a directory submission package. I always start with the bottom level backlinks and work my way up to different types. If you look through the bst forum you'll find many members offering a variety of different types of backlinking packages. Just build up the basics to start and develop a strategy that will pretty much have steady flow of backlinks being added over time. Hold off on link structures till you have a good amount of backlinks established. Link structures are more complicated and if you do it wrong you can do more damage than good. Try to make it look like your site is naturally becoming popular. It looks more natural if it's a steady flow being added rather than a dramatic addition of backlinks. You can do that too, but not right away. The longer you work at it, the larger amount of backlinks can be added and still seem natural.

The rest of your questions are really a little off topic for this thread. I know there's a lot of advice warning new people from starting threads, but sometimes it's a good idea. Like I said you're asking detailed enough questions, it wouldn't be a bad idea to open a new thread to ask for more suggestions. You'll probably get a lot more replies that can help you that way.

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Thanks Grey Wolf....I appreciate the detailed reply and the safeguards you mentioned. Who' wants to do all this work only to get penalized. I'll get it bookmarked some more. I was also looking at the Angela's style backlink packets to get those high PR links you were eluding to. The only thing...if Im Google...is that if the high PR website from these packets is about computers and my website is about Viagra, I might penalize the website. I guess I can pick and choose from the backlink packets to find the most relevant ones to link with. Thanks again for your time....you could be making money instead of answering my questions.