Webmaster-Talk

Note: This isn’t a 10 steps to outranking your competitor article. This isn’t an article to get you to purchase any software or a service from an SEO Consultant. I don’t provide these services I just post about what I have learned over the year from running websites. Here you will find the basic things you can do you your site to properly SEO it and make it easier for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all the other search engines to index your content and properly assign value to your pages.

Links
The most important thing you can do to increase your ranking in search engines is to build back links to your website and your individual pages. This is something that Google especially loves to use when factoring in your ranking in their SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Back links can be accuired through many avenues such as Directories (relevant category and one way non reciprocal linking.), Social networking sites (Digg, Netscape, Reddit MySpace, Facebook) and word of mouth. The word of mouth is the most powerful way which you can really see take effect when you hit the main page of Digg.com. You can acquire thousands of backlinks within days just from people spreading your link to other sites or posting about it on theirs.

Robots.txt
Goal of the robots.txt is to keep search bots out of areas of your site that you don’t want them to be in. You want to use robots.txt to remove duplicate content by not allowing robots to access it in the first place. If you have an archive, printthread pages, or other pages that present the same content I recommend disallowing it via robots.txt. The Robots.txt file always goes in the root of the site, unless you run subdomains, in which case you place it in the root of your subdomain.

One trick is you can go to many sites and add robots.txt to the url and view their file to see how they have theirs setup.

On Page SEO
The big thing to make sure you do here is have plenty of content with your keywords repeated throughout the content as much as possible but only where it would make sense for you to add those keywords. We want to have a good SEO’d site but we don’t want to scare everyone off at the same time. It is possible to find a balance between user friendly pages and SEO friendly pages. I would recommend that you use CSS to design your site in a way that your content appears as high up on the page as possible. You want the search engines to see your content as quickly as possible.

Duplicate URLs
The worst offenders of Duplicate URLs are forums and shopping cart software that use many different parameters in urls to present a page. vBulletin has many issues out of the box with having many urls for the same content. The easiest and most efficenet way at removing these duplicate urls is using mod_rewrite. The goal is to have one url for one page of unique content. This way search engines have no guess work in which url to include in the SERPs and how to apply many of their ranking algorithms to that link to determine the amount of weight it is given.

Conclusion
In the end SEO is going to be something different for each site. It depends on the software you use what you need to concentrate on improving. I deal with forums and wordpress blogs so I know exactly what to do to every vBulletin forum and wordpress installation I run to properly optimize it. No one knows your site better than you do so you can take the things highlighted in this article and apply them to your site to see where you can improve your SEO. Hope you found this useful.

I believe in having a Niche, I have a Niche, my friend has a Niche, I know a lot of rich people who have a Niche. The best reason to be in a niche is because its so much easier to dominate. Whether it is a niche which is just knew and growing or a popular niche where there is no real online leader, seize the opportunity and become that leader.

Finding a Niche is a lot easier when you just look at your personal hobbies, certain industries might be totally dominated by some online giant such as BodyBuilding.com if thats your thing, but there are niche’ that you can work on to bring you some success online. I personally tend to look into the Search Results when im looking to build my niche. Look for Search Terms that are getting high searches but have poor competition and you will see that optimising for long tail keywords in a highly demanded market is an absolute godsend. Trust me.

Ive made $200 this month from a site around 1 Week old, simply because there was demand for it and nobody to fill that gap, I look at my hobbies then I look at the Search Engines. Maybe its time you did aswell?

Glen Allsopp
ViperChill

The Job of an SEO or SEO Company isnt always just about getting high rankings, it includes analysing a website in terms of On-Page SEO looking for possible errors or problems. So, before you go aiming for that next Search Engine Ranking, run your site over this basic SEO Checklist or at least keep it in mind for when you next start a site:

• Make sure all your page titles are unique
• Have a sitemap with links to all your ‘main’ pages on it, all your pages if theres less than 100
• Link to URL’s consitently, www.domain.com/index.php or www.domain.com (preferable), just make sure you stick to one
• Setup a 301 redirect from the non-www version of your site to the www version
• Make sure that you have no broken links, i.e linking to pages that dont exist
• Try not to have any pages that are just advertised as ‘Under-construction’
• Check that all your text is visible to humans and spiders the same goes for possible cloaking or ’sneaky java’ snippets

Learn more about SEO from the following resources:

For Vbulletin: VbulletinSetup For Wordpress: SEOForWordpress Everything Else: Check out the site next to my name if you wish

Of course this isnt a fully detailed guide and just a basic checklist, theres more to SEO than making sure all your pages are only so many levels deep or tweaking your meta-tags till you think you have them perfect. SEO can be an enjoyable experience, finding creative ways to gain backlinks and getting ideas to improve your brand reputation.

Glen Allsopp (ViperChill)

Believe it or not, I honestly dont think there is enough SEO (Search Engine Optimization) information on the web. Why? OK, say I said to you ‘You have no idea what SEO is but you can use any site you know about to learn it’…where would you go?

If you cant think of a few great resources pretty much instantly then you have to join me in thinking more SEO information is required. What are the current great SEO Resources?

• SEOmoz Beginners Guide
• SEO Blogs (Aaron Wall, JimBoykin, Oilman, Matt Cutts)
• General Article Websites
• SEO Book ($89)

Of course there are other places and resources you may have thought about, but in essence,

Hello everyone my name is Sohaib Thiab and this is my 1st blog post here, its my pleasure to be a part of the EF blogging team!

If you’r into web development , you’ve probably heard of AJAX by now and know what benifits it has, so I am not going to go through defining AJAX and the cool featrures it has that we’ve all seen applied in Google Maps for example, if you need to know what AJAX is click here.

As great as AJAX is, it has some seriuos implications on search engine spiders and their abitliy to index your content, as you probably know, search engine spiders follow links on your pages and index content in the destination page, follow any links there and so on, however with AJAX, there are no unique urls which is the biggest problem in optimizing a heavy AJAX based website, without unique urls, you cant optimize each page for its target keywords, modify its title tags and headers tags which are the abc’s of SEO.

Websites such as Netvibes and Pageflakes are almost impossible to SEO, but those websites have no real use of being SEO’d in my opinion, they depend on link popularity and most importantly, viral marketing, thats how netvibes got 15,000 members in the 1st day of its launch.

There are some solutiuons to make an AJAX based website more search engine friendly using mod_rewrite, which is basically by using optimized title and header tags initially, mod_rewrite will solve the issue of unique urls, however optimizing the content and title/header tags in other pages is another issue that cant be fixed. At least to my knowledge.

In conclusion, if your planning to start a new website, my advise is not to use a a fully AJAX based website unless its a unique idea that will go viral, otherwise use some AJAX boxes here and there but never develop the whole frontend with AJAX. Again, don’t do this only if your depending on search engine traffic, if your planning on word of mouth, banners ads or PPC, by all means go ahead and use AJAX everywhere you want. Its also a good idea to get high quality links pointing to your AJAX website with your main keywords in anchor text, of course thats a good idea with non-ajax based websites as well

If you haven’t considered using a site like Pay Per Post, I would certainly look in to it. I have now used this service twice in the past few weeks, spending about $100 each time. The second time I was able to get 16 blog posts written for $105 in all. Each post was positive in nature, included links with the keywords I required, and were on semi-established to well established blogs, many with PR and good content.

The possible downside and negative talk about these services is that search engines aren’t going to value these paid posts like they would other content and people have also been down on the fact these are basically paid advertisements, feeling the bloggers should disclose such. I don’t care to get in to that and it really doesn’t matter to me either way at this point. I just know that getting 16 blogs writing about my product, service, or website for $105 is a pretty good deal.

I also was talking to another Earners Forum member a few weeks ago who said his ranking for the keyword he was targeting with his Pay Per Post reviews moved up several pages in Google. Not very concrete, but we could definitely be on to something here.