SEO - Do You Have Questions About Search Engine Optimization?

[ZekeLL]

Hi, I am Zeke Camusio.

I am here to answer your (SEO) Search Engine Optimization questions.

If you want to take your website to the top of Google but don't know how, I can help you. Ask your questions and I will answer them as quickly as I can.

Thank you!

[fthom]

What are the main ways of SEO'ing' your website other than simple meta tags?
Thanks, ft

[maleko]

Hi Zeke,

How do you get one's site to show up on Google along with 8 links right below it on their search engine results page? For instance right now, if you type in "young entrepreneur" on Google, you will see exactly what I mean.

Thanks,
Maleko

[SmarterGroup]

I have been reading / learning about SEO for a while now and whilst it isn't my line of business, I would be happy to try and help. As for credentials on the subject, I wrote a paper on SEO which has now been published by Coventry University.

SEO is a huge topic however there are two key points to consider:

1. Content is KING

Your website should have concise content, relevant to the subject matter. Writing in good, clear english, is a good way to achieve this naturally. For example, on Smarter Housing, our property pages each have a template with paragraphs referring to the property specification / alternative properties / links to accommodation in other areas and so on. This regimented structure means each property page has a good weighting of keywords without keyword spamming, which is frowned upon by Google and other search engines. By using concise English you naturally avoid keyword spamming as overloading of the word property, for instance, would give a poor sentence structure.

2. You need a large number of incoming links

Ideally, you want links coming in from reputable websites. Link farming, which involves setting up pages plastered in links to your main site, is of no benefit in terms of SEO. A good link, as an example, would be one on the front page of Young Entrepreneur if you are running a similar Entrepreneurship forum or social networking website.

Outgoing links aren't all bad, but you do want to keep them to a minimum. On my sites I keep link sharing to a minimum with websites that contain similar subject matter and are relatively established.


There are many other elements to consider, such as the coding of your website. If you have a database driven site, for instance, you need to make sure output is "natural" and not "dynamic". Slap SEO in Google and you'll be amazed how many guides there are....!

[ZekeLL]

What are the main ways of SEO'ing' your website other than simple meta tags?
Thanks, ft

This is a really good step-by-step tutorial:

For Google and Yahoo, one of the most relevant factors when it comes to deciding what websites will rank at the top is INCOMING LINKS. That is, how many other websites link to yours and which ones.

In this article I will talk about getting high-quality incoming links.

Quality over quantity
Having a bunch of links pointing to your website is good, but not as good as having some GREAT ones. Who links to you is a lot more important than how many websites link to you.

There are two main factors that are taken into consideration by the main search engines to determine how much each link is worth. The first on is the reputation of the website. A link from CNN is worth 100 links from your friends’ blogs (that is, if your friends’ blogs have very little authority).

The second factor is content relevant to your website. For example, if you sell shoes, a link from a website about shoes is more important than a link from a website about cars.

New links rate
This refers to how many new links you get every week. Google assumes that if a lot of people are linking to your website, then your website must have good information. However, Google is really good at finding out what links are legitimate and what links are not. If you were thinking about spamming blogs and forums just to get a lot of new links, forget it. It will actually hurt your rankings.

You need to understand that Google’s job is to provide good search results. Imagine searching for “red shoes” and getting results about blue skirts and black dresses. You will never use that search engine again. That is why Google doesn’t like it when you try to manipulate their results. You are messing with their business.

Do things ethically and you will get the results you are looking for. Don’t take shortcuts.

Anchor text
The anchor text is the link description, such as “Click here to see our collection of red shoes” or “Red shoes here”. If the anchor text has your keywords in it, Google assumes that the page the link is pointing to is relevant to those keywords.

Age of links
The older a link is, the more weight it has and the more is worth to you. Give people who link to you a good reason to keep that link forever.

Text surrounding the link
A lot of low-quality websites have a very common characteristic: they put a lot of links on one page that are not even related to each other. If you have your red shoes link in an article that talks about blue jeans is not nearly as good as having it in an article that talks about red shoes. Google got pretty good at analyzing words and their meanings. They can tell if a link is totally off-topic.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if a page links to 15 websites is not as good as if it links to your website only.

Page Rank
Although many people claim that Page Rank doesn’t matter anymore, it still does. It was a much better indicator a couple of years ago, but it is not worthless now.

The thing with Google Page Rank is that it is a little bit outdated. But it will still give you a good idea as far as how popular a website is.

The bottom line
Do things the right way. And most importantly, do the right things. Don’t buy/sell links. Post incredible content on your website and you will get many great-quality links. Focus on quality, not quantity. And create an amazing website for your visitors, not the search engines. If your website is outstanding and visitors love it, so will the search engines.

For further info:
Search Engine Optimization | Let's Do It!

[ZekeLL]

Hi Zeke,

How do you get one's site to show up on Google along with 8 links right below it on their search engine results page? For instance right now, if you type in "young entrepreneur" on Google, you will see exactly what I mean.

Thanks,
Maleko

I don't really know what you mean. Are you talking about getting all the results on the first page?

[SmarterGroup]

I don't really know what you mean. Are you talking about getting all the results on the first page?

I know what he's talking about. As an example, THIS SEARCH FOR HOTELS brings up Hotels.com as #1 in the SERPS and beneath the main URL are several categories, in this case:

United Kingdom
London Hotels
Hawkwell House Hotel
Saved Hotels
New York
Spain Hotels
Edinburgh
Paris

Some of my sites pop up with these kind of listings, some do not. I don't change anything in terms of SEO techniques from site to site so I suspect this is at Google's discretion (as my search engine optimisation research would also suggest).

[lifefulfilled]

Some of my sites pop up with these kind of listings, some do not. I don't change anything in terms of SEO techniques from site to site so I suspect this is at Google's discretion (as my search engine optimisation research would also suggest).

You are correct. These are automatically generated by Google.

[SmarterGroup]

@life: great link! I wish I'd found that before searching high and low for an answer (some months ago now, so it could be a new article).

[Yiga]

A new idea to make sure website rank more than ever, its a simple idea but worth checking www linkhtml com . i think it can help us since its an easy to understand concept.

[gregdavidson]

SEO is so simple it's beyond belief. Time-consuming but not rocket science like some people think it is.

[monsurvey1]

hi, seo is nothing but a back link that reffer to your site!
i think that, because the web page keyword optimization is nothing if no back links to your site, you are actually get ranking by your website popularty, am I right????

[TheBigIdea]

if anyone wants to know how to generate lots of backlinks, feel free to hit me up and I can show them how.

[ZekeLL]

Greg,

If you were talking about ranking first for a keyword like "black and red metal shovels in santa ana, california" I would agree with you, SEO is really easy.

Now, for competitive keywords like "web design" or "real estate agent" you have to know what you are doing.

Monsurvey1, SEO is not just "backlinks". A lot of factors determine your rankings (read my blog for more details). Some of them are page titles, domain age, frequency of updates, website architecture, and anchor texts. Backlinks are very important, depending on how legit they are and the authority of websites linking to you. A high-quality link is worth more than 100 low-quality ones.

[TheBigIdea]

ZekeLL is right. A backlink of a page that's highly ranked is going to push your stats up!

As an exercise, try getting some legit backlinks from eg: Digg.com, and you're good to go.

Note: getting on Digg.com is a whole different ball game. Highly recommend you researching Digg before actually putting time into getting backlinks from it.