I have now been asked by my friends over at the star wars roleplaying board to look at improving their SEO. The site should rank well, it has lots of content, and is a ten year old domain, but it doesn't rank because basically nobody has ever made any effort to make it rank.
It's a place where like-minded people get together to write collaborative star wars fanfic - so maybe everyone is too focused on their writing to think about it?
The trouble is - for this to be fun, it really needs mroe characters, and more players!
What's the moral of this story? The moral is - you have to do SEO, or get someone else to do SEO for you - because googles ideal reality of naturally relevant listings coming to the top simply doesn't work. If you build a site, fill it with great relevant content - it might never get ranked unless you actually put some effort into making it rank!
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Friday, 5 August 2011
SEO success and failure.
How google actually indexes pages is a little secret, a lot of people know a bit about it, but the actual algorithim is hidden. The old method of looking at keywords is out of the window now.
I find a lot of SEO advice at seo-experiments.net76.net. What I will say having read everything and tried to make sense of it is that there are two factors in google ranking.
Factor 1 = Relevance.
How relevant to the target keyword or keyphrase is the content on the site? The URL, title, headers should all contain the key to improve relevance. Within the body of text on the site, keywords and phrases should be there multiple times, but spaced out, and some instances of the phrase or word should be given prominence by being made bold or starting a paragraph with it.
The other method of improving relevance is to use the target keyword or phrase as anchor text in some links. Using it in all, may make it seem unnatural and google might not like it. But certainly having some inlinks with the key as the anchor is important.
Factor 2 = Authority.
Now domain age is a part of authority, an older domain has more authority of the bat than a new one - up to a point. If you look at page rankings vs domain ages, you tend to find older domains eventually start to slip. I believe at 10 years the authority starts to drop.
Page quality is part of this too, broken links and missing images I believe lower authority. Good code and layout - however that is interpret I think is a factor.
PageRank is a part of authority too, you tend to find if similarly relevant sites are competing, the one with a higher page rank will win. Page Rank is more or less a measure of authority, you get Page Rank from links to your page from external links, reciprocal linking doesn't work so well for getting PR, you really want good 1 way links from sites with authority, which don't have links to many other places from them. Domain page rank is not as important as the actual page with the link on it.
One of the big difficulties in SEO is being able to find places where you can put links on high PR pages which won't be removed and are not 'nofollow'. 'No follow' links are good, but they don't carry the weight of 'do follow' links and the difference is exponential. I would prefer a PR5 'dofollow' than a PR9 'nofollow', however I think I would rather a PR9 'nofollow' than an unranked 'dofollow'.
How much weight PR adds I'm not sure, if I had to guess I would say a PR1 link is worth 25, PR0 links and a PR2 link is worh 25 PR1 links.
Now here is a chart that shows what this means:-
Now I might be wrong it might only be a 5 - 1 ratio of authority. This reduces the usefulness of link farming and the reciprocal linking on link exchange pages. So would you prefer 1000 links from PR1 directory pages or 1 PR4 link? Well, if it's 25 to one the PR4 wins, but if it's 5 to 1 the thousand PR1 is worth more. I think actually it's the 25 to one, but I think the more links there are on a page, the more watered down the PR is.
Articles are a good source of links, but I'll go more into that later.
I find a lot of SEO advice at seo-experiments.net76.net. What I will say having read everything and tried to make sense of it is that there are two factors in google ranking.
Factor 1 = Relevance.
How relevant to the target keyword or keyphrase is the content on the site? The URL, title, headers should all contain the key to improve relevance. Within the body of text on the site, keywords and phrases should be there multiple times, but spaced out, and some instances of the phrase or word should be given prominence by being made bold or starting a paragraph with it.
The other method of improving relevance is to use the target keyword or phrase as anchor text in some links. Using it in all, may make it seem unnatural and google might not like it. But certainly having some inlinks with the key as the anchor is important.
Factor 2 = Authority.
Now domain age is a part of authority, an older domain has more authority of the bat than a new one - up to a point. If you look at page rankings vs domain ages, you tend to find older domains eventually start to slip. I believe at 10 years the authority starts to drop.
Page quality is part of this too, broken links and missing images I believe lower authority. Good code and layout - however that is interpret I think is a factor.
PageRank is a part of authority too, you tend to find if similarly relevant sites are competing, the one with a higher page rank will win. Page Rank is more or less a measure of authority, you get Page Rank from links to your page from external links, reciprocal linking doesn't work so well for getting PR, you really want good 1 way links from sites with authority, which don't have links to many other places from them. Domain page rank is not as important as the actual page with the link on it.
One of the big difficulties in SEO is being able to find places where you can put links on high PR pages which won't be removed and are not 'nofollow'. 'No follow' links are good, but they don't carry the weight of 'do follow' links and the difference is exponential. I would prefer a PR5 'dofollow' than a PR9 'nofollow', however I think I would rather a PR9 'nofollow' than an unranked 'dofollow'.
How much weight PR adds I'm not sure, if I had to guess I would say a PR1 link is worth 25, PR0 links and a PR2 link is worh 25 PR1 links.
Now here is a chart that shows what this means:-
Now I might be wrong it might only be a 5 - 1 ratio of authority. This reduces the usefulness of link farming and the reciprocal linking on link exchange pages. So would you prefer 1000 links from PR1 directory pages or 1 PR4 link? Well, if it's 25 to one the PR4 wins, but if it's 5 to 1 the thousand PR1 is worth more. I think actually it's the 25 to one, but I think the more links there are on a page, the more watered down the PR is.
Articles are a good source of links, but I'll go more into that later.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Portable Air Conditioners
I have been tasked with improving the rankings of a portable air conditioners website.
In this blog I'm going to talk about some of the products they offer and also some of the techniques and methods of getting a better search engine ranking I'm trying. One recent tip I read was about how to get a Page Rank 9 do follow link from you tube using a redirect. Basically it gets pasted something like this.
I have already posted several links on portable air conditioner videos but the problem with these links is they seem to be no follow and as such their value is greatly lessened. Currently I've recently managed to improve portable heating and cooling to a Page Rank 1, if this technique works as intended it could be a quick way to boost this up a rank or two... Only time will tell.
In this blog I'm going to talk about some of the products they offer and also some of the techniques and methods of getting a better search engine ranking I'm trying. One recent tip I read was about how to get a Page Rank 9 do follow link from you tube using a redirect. Basically it gets pasted something like this.
I have already posted several links on portable air conditioner videos but the problem with these links is they seem to be no follow and as such their value is greatly lessened. Currently I've recently managed to improve portable heating and cooling to a Page Rank 1, if this technique works as intended it could be a quick way to boost this up a rank or two... Only time will tell.
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