I got this in an email from a guy that sells links so take it FWIW. But there are a few good points here.
1. Have Revelant Fresh Content.
This means EACH day you want to put new content on the main page of your website. It doesn't matter if it comes from an article rotation program, your own articles you write yourself or something posted by users. Just make sure it it revelant to the content of the page and the site and that it changes.
A good way to build a better site is to archive off todays articles, and put them into a file archive so your new visitors can read the old ones and your regular visitors can refer back to them.
2. MAKE SURE that if you have multiple websites selling similar products you dont just "Change the Names". Search engines now can look at the style sheets and the main pages and tell that one site has the same or similar enough content to be considered "Duplicate". Change the multiple sites... make them look and feel different. A good way to do this is to make one a very "Quick Sale" oriented site. Where a customer can go to just buy your product and get out with a small amount of detail work. Make another one for the conservatice techie who wants to look at every small detail before they buy. Both sites sell the same thing but use that 2nd domain to target a slightly different audiance then to fool the search engines.
3. Every site needs a POSTING board. Make sure that it is included in your RSS feed. Also make sure that your main page is listed in that XML file also. Also include that Archive section where you post your content to when you update that main page. Once you have that use the link here to
http://www.pingomatic.com to get the word out.
Make sure that when you do your posting or message board and also your main page content and archive content that you either have a program set up that updates the publication dates in your XML file. A decent php programmer can do that for you in a few minutes.
4. USE the robots.txt file to your advantage. I am hearing that a lot of spiders are going away when they do not see this file because of course they get a "File DOES NOT EXIST" error when they try and go to it. Other spiders start requesting 5 or more pages per second from a large site. This can fry a small server, and start passing errors to the spiders, and thats not even talking about how slow the site gets because of all the spider requests. So solve it all simply. Just put in the file and use it to your advantage. Here is the one I use on my servers.
<-----------Begin robots.txt---------->
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /cgibin/
Crawl-delay: 10
User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10
User-agent: Teoma
Crawl-delay: 10
User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 10
<------------End robots.txt------------>
What this is saying is that all search engines should not index the cgibin and cgi-bin directories and also that they should only request one page every 10 seconds. On my file I also put this delay in for the msnbot, teoma and slurp the googlebot. Mainly so that they think they are SPECIAL and not just an *. I doubt this helps anything but it makes me feel better addressing them personaly
A lot of people also disallow any /image and /pics directories. Anything you dont want indexed you can put in here. Not that all the spiders will listen but better to make the effort then not.
5. All Links are Good. REPEAT AFTER ME .... ALL LINKS ARE GOOD!
You need inbound links. Sure its ok to do a bit of outbound linking if you really want to but its really the inbound links you need. So get as many as you can afford. Mix them up. Buy 1000 to 5000 at a cheap price just to build up some numbers. Buy one or 2 that have high PR --- 7 or above. Trade out some medium pr links 3 to 6 with other people. When doing an outbound link trade try and trade with sites that are one notch or more higher then you with PR. This will help you a lot if you are into trades. Also I am hearing good things about BILLBOARD links. You may want to look into these. A Billboard link is a text link but its better. It allows for a LOT more description and a longer anchor text.
Pretty neat huh? I even heard rumors that some people are being pulled out of the sandbox when amassing these type links. Not to make this a blantent advertisement but email me if your interested and I would be happy to quote you a price.
When you get your links make sure that you change your anchor text and description for each vendor you use. You want the actual link to be EXACTLY the same...
www.xyz.com or ...xyz.com but DO be consistant in your actual link url. But for the anchoe make it look like a NATURAL links. What that means is if I was a webmaster just giving you a link because I liked your site how would one person describe it differently then another? As an example. Some may say CLICK HERE TO VISIT JOE'S HOME PAGE others may say THIS GUY IS INSANE CHECK OUT JOE Doing your anchor text like this with different ways of saying the same thing will definetly make your links look like NATURAL links.
The hard part is trying to integrate your key phrases into the anchor text without making every link look the same.
6. Make sure you make the xml file for the google sitemaps program. These are very very important. While you are at it how about this for a unique idea.... Make an html sitemap also when you are making the one for Google. Humans like search engine spiders seem to really like being able to move around your site fast when they want specific information or want to buy something.
Also when you do these sitemaps. Place a link to them on your front page. Make one GOOGLE SITEMAP and another SITEMAP FOR HUMANS. I firmly believe that the other engines are going to jump on the XML sitemap bandwagon and when they do you will have it right there for them.
7. Make sure your site is similar to other sites in the first page of the search results for your phrase. A really GREAT search engine expert, Greg Schipper from
http://www.adventdigital.net/ and a good friend of mine.... GREG congrats on having 50+ page one rankings....., and I were talking today and discussed just this. Greg is probably gonna be mad but im going to pass this little tidbit of information.... Look at the top 10 or so sites coming up in the search results for your phrase... then determine how many pages are on their site... there are programs out there that do this. If they have like 12 pages on average don't make your site 200 or you will fall out of the "NORM" for sites like yours. Also if they have an average page count of 400 pages don't make your site have 12 pages or there is no way it will have enough content to get a high rank and to maintain it. By the same token don't make it 5000 pages long either.
Also look at other site characteristics and make sure you are withing normal parameters of the other sites in the top 10 rankings. ESPECIALLY link popularity.
8. Use those ALT tags on your images. That doesnt mean that you need to STUFF the alt tags but really use it to desctibe the image. instead of [img]./images/logo.gif[/img] Make it look like this:
9. Use absolute URLs when doing your links. As in the above example: not
but
10. And Finially last but not LEAST. Take a look at your page. Especially now that everyone is using dynamic pages. Does it really have content revelant to a topic or is it crap content to attract search engines? Does it look like a human did it, or is it apparent that its a dynamic page? and FINIALLY.... Look at it. And think about this. Google, MSN and YAHOO are competing for advertisors. To get advertisors they need viewers. If your site does nothing other then attract search engine and doesnt do anything for a visitor. The visitors will complain, the advertisors will complain and the search engine will probably have a human look at the page and really evaluate it for the content it contains, how entertaining it is and what a visitor gets out of this. This is especially important of your revenue comes from running adsense ads. Can you pass that test. If you say yes... then in "MY HUMBLE OPINION" you will do ok with the search engines. If not... well then you will eventuall!
y get taken out of the engines, just the same way a tv network will cancel a show the viewers just dont want to see.
I hope that you can use some of this information to your websites benefit. I do want to make this disclaimer... There are my own opinions on SEO, nobody knows the real total answers aside from the search engines them selves so use this info at your own risk.
Have a great and productive holiday weekend!
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