What Really Works For Search Engine Optimization
By Daniel McGonagle
The evidence is right in front of your eyes when it comes to realizing what works for SEO.
If you are a student of SEO and Online traffic generation like I am, then you learn to look at things in an analytical way.
Some things that I see when analyzing new SEO trends is what types of articles, blog posts, and sites are ranking well.
A great way to determine this is to watch the SERPs during a popular new product launch. At the very beginning of a launch you will see some Diggs, some FeedAge and Feedagg RSS submissions, and even some Mixx-es and “Stumbles”.
But you hardly ever see those social bookmarking urls in the top of the SERPs for a very long time. Sometimes you’ll see a new social bookmarking site doing really well in the SERPs, but it’s difficult to keep track of which ones are currently working.
In my experience, the following types of web real estate do very well in the SERPs over a long period of time.
- Blogs with good domain names (keywords in the title of domain name)
- Articles from EzineArticles.com
- Forum posts from DigitalPoint and the Warrior forum
- Slideshare
- WetPaint blog posts
- WordPress.com sites
- Squidoo Lenses
- HubPages
Recently though, I have seen Google’s version of EzineArticle’s doing really well. Google’s version of EZA is called KNOL, but the KNOLs I’ve seen are pretty heavy-handed and promotional, unlike EZA articles.
When you watch the SERPs during product launches you will see some sites come and go, You will hardly ever see a social bookmarking link maintain its position in the SERPs for a long period of time.
Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, and WordPress.com sites can do pretty well and have some staying power, but the sites that maintain the top rankings are those that are self-hosted sites with keywords in the domain name.
It is possible for lenses, hubs and free blogs to do well if you put some links pointing to them, but it would take more effort to get those to rank well than it would for a regular site to rank well.
The point of this article is to tell you that SEO isn’t complicated if you know what to look for.
Here’s a checklist to teach you how you can learn what really works for SEO
- Type in your search term at Google
- See what kinds of sites are ranking well on first 2 pages of listings
- Check back in a week and see what kinds of sites are still there
- Make a note of what kinds of sites are doing well for your search term.
- Do not try to reinvent the wheel with SEO, just open your eyes to see what is really working right now.
It’s that simple, so keep it simple. If you want to take things another step further, install the SEO for firefox plugin to assess the SEO competition you’re up against. The SEO for firefox plugin will tell you how many links other sites have pointing to them, and conventional wisdom states that if you get more links than your competitors, then you will outrank them.
However, that conventional wisdom is not always true, because the search engines like to rank new content higher sometimes, and not all links are created equal. So getting more links than your competitors may not work for you, or it will work really well.
Earlier I mentioned that lenses and hub pages and EZA articles and do well for rankings and they can achieve this without any backlinks because of the power of the system they’re tied into (Squidoo,com, HubPages.com, WordPress.com). That right there is a testament to the fact that not all sites are created equal.
Things are also subject to change at any time when it comes to how Google and other search engines rank certain pages. Recently I’ve noticed that EZA articles are doing really well in the SERPs, and KNOL is making some appearances as well.
An ezinearticles.com article I wrote about how to start an internet business has been at the top of the search engines for 2 weeks now at the time of this writing, but it wasn’t anywhere to be found prior to that. So things change when it comes to ranking pages in the SERPS.
Some things that will always work for you SEO-wise no matter what:
- Keyword-rich domain names
- Getting relevant one-way, anchor-text style backlinks
- Adding fresh new content to your sites
A lot of people look at PR, or PageRank as an indicator of how much traffic a site gets or how much link juice a site has. Well, I’m here to tell you that PageRank is not as important as the linkjuice your site has and also, how often your site is getting spidered by the search engines crawlers.
The more frequently you post to your sites, the more frequently the search engines spiders will come back. If your site is not properly optimize for on-page SEO, then it may take a few passes of the spiders to have additional pages noticed by the search engines.
A lot of blogs and themes comes with calendars and many people leave these on their sites and it’s a mistake to do that because the calendars send the spiders into an endless loop and they eventually just give up spidering your site after a certain period of time.
The better your site is built, the easier it will be for the spiders to crawl your site and rank and index your pages.
One last thing you should know about SEO….
You can do a lot of the wrong things and still get ranked well if you have other good things happening to your site, like getting linked to by a particularly high-ranking site with good link juice and relevant anchor text-style link back to your site.
And everything I stated here is just for Google.
Yahoo ranks sites differently, as does MSN
Article Source: SEO Tips
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Daniel McGonagle
If you like my Online Marketing and Internet Business Advice, you should get my Free Marketing Tips Newsletter You can also check me out at Easily Answered.com's panel of marketing experts... Have a productive day! :)
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these are good SEO tips, especially about the power of using social networking sites to get backlinks. but it does take a lot of effort. i find it helps a great deal to use a backlinking service to generate links in addition to the ones i place manually. i use Neurolinker myself but there are others, including Linkvana. – Stephen
I am unable to understand this post. But well some points are useful for me.
I feel sorry for goakitalayday who did not understand everything. For me, it was crystal clear, and I’d love that you continue to publish posts of that level.
@Blog marketing tools,
Thanks for the feedback glad someone understood what I was getting at
Dan