SEO Knowledge 2

The second in a series of SEO knowledge posts, this post is going to discuss reciprocal links.

What are they: You link to a site, and ask them to link back. If they do, these links are called reciprocal links.

Let's say that you are now reciprocal linking, hoping that because the site linking to you has a high PR, you will get a higher PR also. Used to be that way, but not anymore. PR is Google's measure of a pages importance, and hence the ranking of a page in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Thus, beside that fact that the links might bring some visitors from that site, your reciprocal link will not do you much good in terms of higher PR

However MSN and Yahoo! Search still count reciprocal links as 'backlinks,' and thus reciprocal links are still effective in raising your rank in those two SEs.

Remember, the most effective PageRank-and-SERP-rank-raiser is still the one-way link to your site, from a high PR site.

SEO Knowledge 1

This is the first post of what will be a series of Posts on general SEO knowledge.

If you haven't already read the first post on basic SEO, read it now.

Here are a few things every SEO should know:

1. Google does not like duplicate content. Do not copy other's articles, or content, because that will not help your ranking at all. Google actually knows which website had the content first, so they won't rank that one down.
2. The text on links have less effect on what the page ranks well for, after some people created thousands of links to President Bush's website with 'miserable failure' as the link text, and when one searched for the string 'miserable failure,' his website would come up.
3. Write naturally. SE's like naturally styled content, not keyword stuffed trash.
4. Avoid buying links. Google does not like them and might penalize your site.

That's all for now. Check back later for more tips!

Article Writing: Road to PageRank

Many people know of numerous ways to increase their PageRank, but ironically, because there are so many ways to do this, most don't know where to start. Of all the methods I've tried before to increase my PageRank, the most effective and least time-consuming method is - Writing articles. It is by far the most powerful PageRank increaser.

My PageRank jumped from zero to one in a week, and to two in three weeks. Before I had started writing articles, I had mostly said to myself something like, "Yeah, yeah, when I get more knowledge about the topic, I will write articles."

But eventually, still without a lot of knowledge, I tried writing articles. There was a month in which I didn't check the PageRank, because the Google Toolbar wasn't installed on that machine. One day, I used one of the online PR checkers and found out that there was PR2 on my website! I was shocked at the effectiveness of article writing.

For those who aren't familiar with the whole business of article writing, here's a short explanation: first, you write an article, then submit it to an article directory, such as ezinearticles.com (do a quick search on Google for 'article directory'); next, someone who has a website takes the article and puts it on his/her website as content -- but with your resource box. As more and more websites put the article on their sites, you now have hundreds of one-way backlinks to your site!

Writing an article about something you are interested about is the best. Keep the article between 300 and 500 words. And the critical part is to create an interesting 'resource box,' a box with a link back to your website.

Many people don't write articles because they don't realize how much they have underestimated it's power.

Here are a few tips for writing articles:

- Don't put many links to other sites in your articles. This increases the PageRank 'value' of each link on the page, including the resource box link to your own site.
- Make the article interesting. Website owners won't put the article on their site if they think the article is boring.

Try to realize that writing articles is a kind of 'investment' on backlinks to your website, then start writing your articles.

SEO Basics | Finding Keywords for Your Title

The title of a page may be the single most important onpage factor that can boost your search engine rankings. When you make your webpages, make sure to include your keywords in your title. This is a must. If you don't know what you want to be ranked highly for, you won't rank highly at all.

I had seen more than fifty times "research your keywords" but have never payed attention -- until I Googled 'AngleBracket.' AngleBracket is a relatively new site, so I had expected it to be far behind in the results. But no -- this site was ranked number one -- even though it has a Pagerank of zero. The reasons? AngleBracket is in the title, and the term 'AngleBracket' has virtually no competetion.

The trick here is to come up with a bunch of keywords that will attract a small amount of visitors each, but combined, will provide a steady source of visitors.
Here's how to come up with keyword (about your page) specific enough for the SEs to rank you relatively higher. If you were looking for the kind of information that's on your page, what phrases or terms would you look for?

If you have now come up with some keywords, (in this example) "website tips," "website SEO," and "website design," and you put something like

"ABC.com | Website tips, Website SEO, and Website Design"

in your title, this not only looks unprofessional, but also, there are three unnecessary words. In this case, our keywords should be condensed to "website tips, SEO, and design."

"ABC.com | Website Tips, SEO, and Design"

The more unnecessary words there are in a title, the less 'value' each word get, therefore lowering your ranking for the more important keywords, and giving you 'useless' ranking for a way-too-general term 'website.'

This is just a tip on how to optimize your site. Make sure you do not overload your site with keywords. This is considered 'keyword spamming'; the search engines can detect it, and will actually rank your site lower... so here's one good rule of thumb for on-page optimization:

Make pages for visitors, not search engines

That way, you will keep your site natural, search engines like you, and of course, your visitors do too.

Website Magazine | The print magazine for webmasters

This magazine has been running for a few years now; it's called Website Magazine. Topics include SEO, search engine marketing, web development, general Webmastery, and more! It has two versions, print and digital, and both are free if you are in the United States. Check it out now>>

They also have an affiliate program that lets you earn money for letting people know about this great magazine! Visit their site

SEO Tips / High-Pagerank Web Directories

Here's a note on just which sites to get links from.
Google ranks pages by the quality of the sites which link to yours,
by the quality of the sites you link to, and the PageRank of the two types of sites above.

By this, I mean that if you get a link from, say, Yahoo!, your PR will leap up, because Yahoo! has a PR of 9.

So, the conclusion is??

Submit your site to high PageRank directories, and never, never,
link to websites of bad quality. By bad quality, I mean sites with no real content (Just ads), and banned sites.

You can tell which are high PR and which are banned by looking in the Google Toolbar. White means PR 0, while all green means PR 10,
the best. Grey means that the site is banned.

The Google Toolbar can be downloaded with Firefox to the right or on the bottom of this page.

On to something else----
-------------------------------------------------

Here are examples of good directories:

• www.maxlinks.org
• www.urlz.net
• www.botw.org

Getting a link from these directories like these not only sends more
visitors to your site, but also increases your PageRank.

SEO Basics--How to rank highly in search engines

This question is simple enough: how do I get free visitors?
The answer is also simple enough: Search Engines.

Q: How do I get into the SE's?
A: Get a blog, write a post (w/ a link to your site), and submit
it to Yahoo! (see related post Blog and Ping)

Q: How do I get higher in the search results (rank higher)?
A: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

Alright, so here are the "secrets" of how to rank highly (forget
those SEO softwares, "courses," and e-books)--what almost
every White Hat SEO expert will tell you, what nearly every SEO
e-book mentions, what the SEO courses teach: 1) put the right keywords in your site, and 2) get people to link to your site.

Stop here, let me tell you what you're thinking:
Sure, I can do 1), but 2)?? It's easy enough for you to say-

Before you start buying links on high-traffic, super-ranked website, or banging your head in despair, let me tell you the number one source for obtaining 100% free, legal, links to your site.

Do a quick search on Google for "Web Directory."
Web directories plead with you, 'please, please, add your link here.'
Get it? Look for the directories which are listed on the top 20 to 30 in the results. Submit to them for free.

One directory that stands out from the gazillions is DMOZ, the Open Directory. Google, MSN, Netscape, and other search engines include sites from DMOZ into their index, and seem to rank sites that are in DMOZ higher. Go to DMOZ now>>

Thats basically the basics to ranking highly. More SEO tips will follow.

How to use Yahoo Search's Site Explorer

Yahoo! Search has a tool which allows you to authenticate you ownership of a site.
Authenticated sites seem to be indexed faster. Feeds can also be submitted.

It's called Site Explorer (Google has a similar tool which I will talk about in a later post).
Just go to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and log in to you Yahoo! account.
Add you sites manually, then authenticate them. This is done by adding a line of code,
namely a meta tag, or a file with a specific name and text string, to your website.

That's it! You site "will be authenticated within 24 Hours."

Free Automatic Pinging Software

Blog and Ping might really be a great thing, but, of course, you use some help.
Pingomatic.com lets you ping over 20 different site to let them know you've
updated your blog--for free!

Click here--Blog and ping tool

Blog and Ping--get your blog and RSS feed indexed!

Blogging can be a great way of attracting search engines to index your site. This can be done by linking to your website from your blog. However, many blogs aren't even indexed by the search engines, let alone utilizing them to get your sites spidered.

A technique becoming increasingly popular is called blog and ping. Blog means, well, blogging, as normal. Ping means to let the search engines know that you've made a new post and that they should check it out to be updated.

Why do they want to know if there's a new post? Yahoo, for example, needs to know in order to keep the My Yahoo page updated with fresh posts.

1) To get Yahoo to include your RSS feed, first submit it by clicking 'Submit your site' at the bottom of search.yahoo.com. After you get there, click 'submit your media content for free.' Complete the process.

2) Then go to My Yahoo, click 'add content,' and then click 'Add RSS by url' (beside the search box). Enter your feed address and click add.

3) Then, if it's a blog, after you have made a post, or if it's some thing else, after you've refreshed the RSS feed, ping Yahoo. Here's how:

Just enter this address into you browser, changing the last part to your feed's address.
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://anglebracket.blogspot.com

This is the basic process of blogging and pinging.
This procedure can help you get indexed in Yahoo, and in turn, get you indexed in the other big SE's.