I got to write this one its a shortbus trip that you don’t want to take.  First let me start by saying that i am not a paid SEO consultant. I put this blog up as a way of helping me and other learn from my mistakes and sucesses.

I did a Google Blog search for SEO Blogs trying to find some new places to visit and maybe some new info to read. I came across a blog (I won’t tell the Name or justify it with a link) that had an artical on how to identify an SEO Con. He went on about how they will cold call you and how they will tell you that they can rank you high in the Search Engines and on and on. Then he Read the rest of this entry �

I’m going to keep this simple and will get more complicated in later posts. There are a few basic and simple things that you can do to help the Spiders and Bots Crawl your site and get the best information from it.

These are the areas I’m going to talk about in this session:

<title> tag
<Keyword> tag
<Description> tag
<h1> tag
alt text

<TITLE>
The <title> tag should include your keyword or keywords that your are optimizing for. I was lisenting to a pod cast the other day by a very good SEO and he suggest that if your keywords are “Pink Hats” and “Blue Hats” that your title tag look like this:

<title>Pink Hats | Blue Hats</title>

the reason is if the surfer typed in Pink Hats then the title is an exact match. Also the Search Engine see’s a relevant keyword in the title so the page must be about “Pink Hats” and “Blue Hats”
 If you choose not to do it this way then make sure that you don’t include any Stop words in the title like: is, a, no, the, at these word are very common and the search engine filters them out.

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Great articel  over on Pink Hat SEO about buying Comments on blogs. Very good read. 

 My take on this:

First- of all the aritcle calls out a SEO person whos name i will not mention in my post ( no reason to add juice to his name).

Second- Business is about time, money and what your good at. I implied in my comment to the post over on Pink Hat that i have not bought any Blog Comments. But im not so sure that it is not a viable way to generate traffic and links if done right.

Third- We tend to do what we are good at and pay someone else to do those things that we are not good at. So if you have an SEO that is a master at getting rated in the top 10 of Digg with Articles and Comments is it bad to pay that person to through some comments your way.

My  answer is— Read the rest of this entry �

Jim Boykin Just put up a new post on Internal link structure and gave some very good tips as to how it works. To include the use of the nofollow tag to pages that are not as important to your site such as the “Copyright” page or the “About” page. Even though Page Rank is not as important as it use to be this is a must read for those of us that don’t understand Page Ranks use.

Ok for all of you new guys this is a plug for Graywolf he has some of the best post and info on adsense that i have seen theres a lot to learn over there so go take a read, I am.

If you want to know how link bait works Go and check out this post on Jim Boykin’s Blog.
This is a classic way to generate links he just got one from me.

Now this brings up a good point in that when your new to SEO and your reading the blogs they don’t always come right out and say “Step 1. Click here. Step 2 Type this in” You have to look at what is being done as well as what is being said.

So this morning i decided to just go out and try an experiment with an auto email link generator. The one im using is in the Free version of Web CEO. I customized the first contact template so it was a little more natural in its read. I’m having it send out 73 request to barter for links ie. I get a link and in return I promote there site with a blog post or article on a relevant site.  

I’m playing with a site that I have that only gets about 25 avg hits a day and only has about 20 pages on it. It’s highest ranking on Google for a relevant keyword is 21.  

I want to find out at least 2 things: 

1. What is the capture rate from these sites.
2. What if any is the negative effect.

I did pick the sites that it is sending to and I did weed out my competitors as not to have them report me to Google. I also turned of the feature that auto sends a second and third email. I don’t like spam.  But if it’s a valid business request is it SPAM? That sounds like another subject for later. 

Stand by for the results. 

SEO Side Trips Brought to you

ShortBus

I just checked one of my adsense accounts to see how one of my sites was doing and had a nice supprise. I have made about 3 times as much on it today at noon than i do on most days. The reason is that it is Memorial Day and my site is BBQ related. This brings up a good point to consider when looking at a sites potential. Some sites and keywords are going to be seasonal like BBQ. They will also tend to be event driven by things like the Super Bowl. This can be good and bad if its not something that you considered when you started up the site.  Seansonal sites are not bad they just are not as productive all the time.

You need to take advantage of the good time by making sure that the site is up to par durning its peak times and you have maximized your monitizations.

 Just food for though

Here is one of my most memorable Short Bus Trips. Being the impation one and not having taken my meds i was just learning about how links effected your ranking and new i needed to have a bunch of them. Now i talked to my friend who had much more knowlage than i and he said be patient and just get good links. He explained how some links are better than others and talked about text links vs link pages but i was still on the Short Bus. I saw an ad for “1 Million Free Links” and thought (first misstake) 1 million links must be better than a few good links.

Well i jumped on it and registered and put up the reciprecal link and low and behold in the next 4 days i had over 1000 links. I was showing my friend this and he just rolled his eyes and mumbled something about eating books.  Well day 6 came around and i noticed that i was not getting any traffic so i went and started checking things to see what was wrong. Well when i checked backlinks on Google i got a message that it could not find my site.  You guessed it right they pulled my site from the indexs.

This was a very good leason for me and some times i just have to see it for it to sink in.

So ShortBus says: “Stay away from the Link Farms Nothing Good come from it at all”.

Where and when should Search Engine Optimization Start? Well the obvious answer is at the beginning. If you are going to be starting a New website then it should start with the idea. Don’t be rushing out to buy a Domain name and putting up a site till you’ve done your home work. Like I did riding on the Short Bus with my first two sites. So what do I mean?

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