Search Engine Optimization/ Pay per Click Guidance

To be a good SEO you need to know a lot of things and to be a professional SEO you need to know them well. I sometimes see people calling themselves “SEO Experts” looking to make a quick buck …

Let’s just list the things I consider that a good SEO must know:

HTML

As an SEO, knowing HTML is a must. You need to see and understand how the search engines are reading the source code of the web pages. If you can produce nice web sites in Notepad and type HTML without looking at the keyboard then it’s good enough

CSS

You don’t need to be a CSS-expert but you need to know all the basics fluently. Tasks can include transforming a JS menu to a CSS menu. Styling heading tags is a daily routine.

Web Design / Web Development

You should be able to produce nice web sites from scratch without help. At least a basic knowledge is needed and you can outsource the design tasks and use CMS‘es for your or your clients sites. To be honest, I myself suck at graphics. That’s the major reason why there are no images on this site. But you don’t really need graphics in your SEO work.

How search engines work

You need to know how search engines rank pages. That’s a simple sentence but you need to observe, study and test until you know and have a good grasp on how it works. It is a plus if you also know the differences between the major search engines in their ranking algorithms.

Keyword Research

You need to know how to find the best keywords by looking at popularity, competitiveness and relevance. This includes working with KEI.

Trust with Google

A basic understanding is required on what the sandbox is (a kind of filter) and is not (penalty for all new sites) and you need to know some basic things on how a site can gain more trust (trusted links etc.).

Knowing and understanding on-page factors

When you review or build a site you should have a checklist to tick off all the on-page factors (perhaps this will help). You should also know which CMSes are the best to use for different purposes.

Ability to write and craft link baits

A good SEO is a also a good writer. If you cannot write you cannot improve a web sites copy, make good guides, articles and other good content which serves as link baits. A good writer can get links much more easily and if you despise writing perhaps you should look for another job.

Basic knowledge of the social networks

With link baits you work with social networks (digg, reddit, furl, del.icio.us, netscape etc.) and you need to know the basics on how they work so that you can use them.

How to redirect pages

There is only one proper way of redirecting a page or site, the 301 redirect. You need to know how to do it in .htaccess, PHP and ASP and when to do it.

Using long-tail

The long-tail of search are all the non-competetive big volume of search queries you will get when using a lot of unique good content properly. You need to understand how this works and properly utilize it.

Handling duplicate content

Part of a SEOs job is removing duplicate content on a site. Any content that shows up same for more than 1 URL should be fixed. This includes the non-www redirect. Example with default WordPress.

Mod_rewrite with .htaccess

This is something you really need to know in order to make those clean nice URLs. A real bonus if you know how to do it on a windows server with IIS (I don’t …).

Link power and how it works (PageRank)

You need to understand such things like how link power flows through a site (so you can make good internal navigations) and how search engines uses links as a voting mechanism and how it works. This includes working with online SEO tools and querying search engines for measurements. You need to know the difference between toolbar PageRank and real PageRank and that PageRank is just one out of 100 factors used in ranking.

Link metrics

For each link there are several factors such as the anchor, link position, link relevance, age, surrounding text, C-class IPs and more. This is also important to understand when you start to build links.

Link Building methods

There are probably over 20 strategies in getting links. I listed some effective ones over here. You need to know them and know how to work with them. As an SEO it should be easy for you to get good links, links are vital for SEO.

Basic knowledge of penalties

To know what factors that can get give penalties or banning in the search engines are very important. If you don’t know these you can make big mistakes, even unintentionally.

Knowledge of and ability to set up backlink generators

As an SEO you need link power in order to power your network of sites, especially if you have many. You should have at least 5 of these running for a big network of 100 sites IMHO.

Understanding the supplemental results and know how to get out

Things like unique title and meta tags, placing big header information at the end of source code with CSS-P, deep links, better internal navigation, removing duplicate content and other factors has to be understood and used to take this action.

Basics of PHP / MySQL

Many sites are written with PHP and using MySQL. You should have a basic knowledge on how it works (in fact I know very little PHP) so that you can adjust existing code for better SEO. PHPMyAdmin can be your best friend when dealing with the database.

Statistics

Your web sites stats are a very important and useful tool, you need to understand how to use it in your SEO.

Competitive Research

You need to know what your competitors are doing, how they get their links and how well optimized their sites are. (this one was added by Lee Beirne in the comment below)

Other things

Google sitemaps, robots.txt and more.

Connections with people

If you are going big and plan to build an empire of own sites and handle a large amount of clients you should have a full list of partners, it will be needed. These includes Web Designers, Content Writers, Link Builders, Programmers, Directory Submitters, Cheap Brokers of PR 6-8 links, buddies that help you in social network sites, SEO Experts that you can ask for advice and more. I currently have 45 partners that I have been using on my list and most of them are experts in a specific field. Many of my partners are located in India or other eastern cheap countries (yes, you can find real good people there). But before you start to use a partner you need to know and understand the thing he is doing and test them on some of your own sites before using them on “real” work. Make sure to inspect and reject work that is not proper. The ideal is that they do the same thing you could have done but you use them to save time.

Did I miss anything?

I didn’t cover marketing or SEM here such as branding, PPC or creating hype - that’s a whole different big field.

Learn more and research on those area you feel you need to learn more on. Did you know all? Good! You are now a Level 5 SEO. Now you need to work on becoming a level 6!

I know all the above subjects, some areas more than others but I have actually stopped providing optimization services as announced here and I am now specialized in link building. If you need help in getting links, feel free to contact me.

2008-12-13T02:20:00.000-08:00

Boosting Rankings through Social Bookmarking

December 13, 2008

If you're not submitting your blog posts, articles and web pages to social bookmarking sites, you're missing out on a lot of link-love that Google looks fondly upon.

You see, my Search Engine Myths Exposed report makes it clear that you don't have to get links from related sites to rank (known in the SEO world as "themed links"). As long as the links come from quality pages, Google will happily count them toward your ranking.

Social Bookmarking sites currently have a lot of value in Google's eyes. Google seems to love sites that rely on democracy to decide what deserves the highest rank (thus their own link-based algorithm). By submitting your pages to these sites, the links will often get crawled and applied to your ranking very quickly — often within a few days.

I've been giving my pages an extra boost by submitting to a few dozen bookmarking sites myself, and I've seen rank increases to the tune of 3 to 5 ranking points on Google's first page of results for my chosen keywords.

I can't share the keywords with you because the sites are in the 3WayLinks.net network, and it's against the terms to share that information. Suffice it to say that the keywords are competitive enough to provide hundreds of visitors per day with my current rankings. That's one of the things I love about 3WayLinks.net — it provides a solid link base on which to build your rankings for tougher keywords.

A couple of great tools to use when submitting to SBMs are SocialMarker.com and OnlyWire.com. SocialMarker.com makes the process of submitting your sites semi-automated, whereas OnlyWire.com fully automates the submission. Both are good tools that are worth looking into (and both are free).

When submitting your pages to social bookmarking sites, set your title tag to the keywords that you want to rank for to get the most value from Google for your links. If you're interested in generating traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, you'll want to modify your titles to be appealing to viewers as well.

For instance, if you want to rank for the phrase "old time radio", just set your title to "old time radio." But if you want to draw visitors, "Old time radio - Thousands of free MP3 shows!" would work much better. Keep in mind, though, that you sacrifice some link value when the link to your site is not your exact keywords.

If your site is brand new, vary your titles so that the links pointing to your site do not all contain the same keywords. If your site is already established with lots of links, a few dozen links with the same link text is not going to be a problem, and it's safe to just use your main keywords as the titles.

If you're hoping to draw visitors from social bookmarking sites to an AdSense revenue site, keep in mind that visitors at bookmarking sites are notorious for never clicking on your ads. If your only form of revenue on the site is AdSense, you might want to word your titles for maximum SEO value and forgo the visitors directly from the sites.

Let me close with another good social bookmarking experience. A friend of mine setup a site that he wanted to rank for a "low hanging fruit" set of keywords (razor targeted for great conversion rates, but without getting hundreds of visitors a day). He asked for my advice, and I offered to submit his site to the social bookmarking sites for him.

He agreed, and I did so. At the time of the submission his site was stuck on page 3 of Google's results. A few days later he freaked out because his site disappeared from the rankings (this is typical when a new site gets a bunch of links quickly–your site will often disappear while Google recalculates your ranking). But about a week after that his site jumped onto page 2 of Google. Not long after that he was on page one. Now he's one happy camper, and it was thanks to social bookmarking links!

So when you're out looking for places to get links from, don't forget about social bookmarking sites. They won't perform miracles with your rankings, but they certainly give a solid boost.

Added: A few comments below made an important point. Don't overdo your submissions or some of the bookmarking sites may ban your account, IP or domain from submitting to them. I personally only submit to each of the sites a couple of times per day, spaced out over the day.

I'd love to know what you think! Please leave your thoughts and questions in a comment below.