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0. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishi

0. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp. 1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keywords. If you want people to search for "fishing tips" and find you, then several people will need to link you something like this: This site has great <a href=http://www.mysite.com>fishing tips</a>. 2. The more authority these links have, the better you will do. If you get a very high PageRank site to link "fishing tips" to you, you might be immediately first for that query in Google. Or, 2-3 medium links might do it. 3. The words you want people to search for need to be used several times on your site. You should have the words "fishing tips" on several pages and you should link to your best page on "fishing tips" by putting that phrase in your own links to your own pages. 4. Also make sure you put the keywords you want searches for in the title of your page, and enclose them in H1 tags or other bold/header tags. This won't help very much, but it's probably worth doing. 5. Links don't really help you unless they are from a real domain - a link from someblog.blogspot.com will not help your PageRank much at all. Also, the domain needs to exist for a while to help you - something like a year. 6. Good places to get links are from your college and high school newspapers, local newspapers, and anyone else who has a website that would appropriately cover you. 7. Some sites have way more PageRank than you might expect. www.cmu.edu is an anchor site for the link graph, and a link from this site will do wonders for your PageRank. 8. Here are some excellent pages on SEO: http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/ http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-two/ You should also check out Mahalo.com. That site is SEOed within an inch of its existence on Google, so take some tips from them but tread carefully. 9. In the end, it really boils down to having authoritative links with the right anchor text linking to you. The rest matters very little.

PStamatiou 17y ago
Don't forget titles for links and alts for images! Also, if your site may potentially produce duplicate content, due to parameters in URLs etc, look into canonical urls: http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/duplicate-content http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/duplicate-content
gilesbowkett235 17y ago
Like anything SEO, there's some inaccuracy here. For instance, I rocketed a microsite to number one for its keywords with a someblog.blogspot.com link. It was at #1 in like a day and a half. The reason there's so much mystery around SEO is because you've got a black box called Google which may or may not do what you want when you want. You can't run any real scientific method on it because, just like how you can't cross the same river twice, you can't evaluate the same Google twice (since they're constantly running experiments on you, the surfer, in real time), and obviously you're competing with a gigantic graph of web sites, which you also can't evaluate twice, since it changes every time a new page goes online, goes offline, or gets republished with some tiny edit. Most SEO people don't think this way, but because I'm a programmer, I think you should start learning SEO by understanding how Google works. For instance (blatant self-promotion), you could check out this video where I give you Google PageRank in five lines of Ruby: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-pagerank-in-five-lines-of-ruby.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-pagerank-in-... There's also a free SEO book which is supposed to be great. I haven't had time to read it but I hear great things about it. http://www.seofaststart.com/ http://www.seofaststart.com/
jsm386 17y ago
All good advice. I'd add: 1 Speed matters. Google is on record about this. They want your site to load quickly. This factor is part of the 'caffeine' update that Google is in the process of rolling out http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-factor-29793 http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-... 2 Don't stop with H1s. Think about the structure of your page. Subheaders should be H2, and so on. 3 Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. They'll regularly pull it down from your server so as you add pages to your site, Google will know to index them. They'll tell you how many pages you have submitted, and how many are indexed. While you're in Webmaster Tools, check out if your site has crawl errors. Check out the HTML suggestions. Google will point out the pages which are missing title tags, which have duplicate tags, short descriptions, etc. Lots of other information in there, including page load times.
- andrewljohnson 17y ago
  You don't need a site index unless you have a strange site. If you have text/HTML and you are linked from other sites, the site map won't matter.
  - chaosmachine 17y ago
    That's been my experience, as well.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    A site map is an excellent way to make sure that it is your content that makes it in to google rather than someone that 'clones' you. It can give you a few days lead over the cloners and that's sometimes all you need.
    - andrewljohnson 17y ago
      I call bullshit. Have you actually ever had someone clone your site or tried to protect against it this way? I am all ears for your story... I have never heard of anything like that. Setting up a sitemap is usually just a placebo for finicky webmasters, and it's a waste of time to boot. The biggest sin at a start-up is wasting time, and this easily qualifies. The only time you want a sitemap is when you don't have a text front-end, and even then, you are way better off mimicking your JavaScript with a text layer for the search engines that implementing some sitemap. Even submitting a page in a sitemap doesn't ensure it gets crawled, and it certainly won't get crawled if you have a large site and don't set up your sitemap just right.
webwright 17y ago
Great summary. I'd add that SEO is not just a ranking exercise-- it's a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you <title> tag and the first ~150 of your meta-description are what drives people to click through to your site. Also, all other things being equal, the first position on SERPs gets ~42% of clicks... So it's a winner take all game unless you are talking about a content business. OH-- also do some keyword analysis. In Andrew's example-- how many people search for "fishing tips" versus "fishing advice" or "how to fish" or "intro to fishing"? Keyword analysis is about finding out what people are searching for and then digging in to see how competitive those keywords are. If you want to dethrone the #1 result for "fishing tips" you'll want to analyze their SEO. If they are a 10 year old page-rank-9 domain with 87,500 inbound links, you might consider gunning for a less sought-after search term.
- andrewljohnson 17y ago
  This all seems like good advice too. I think the top SERP gets more than 42% of clicks though... more like 70. SEO is in many ways a winner-take-all sport at this point, and it's gotten more so over the years. Google released some eye-tracking data and people just look at the top 1 and then top 3 results, then they re-search.
- Grinnmarr 17y ago
  Excellent point. I was in charge of much of the SEO of a large internet retailer and our organic traffic was stunning. Unfortunately no matter how hard I lobbied to start work on conversion, split testing etc, they insisted I do nothing but drive traffic to our poorly converting sites. When sales started flattening out despite the continuing month over month increase in organic traffic I was let go as a cost saving measure. And while still an Internet Retailer 500 company their position has slipped significantly down the ranks. At the time I left we had top ten positions for hundreds of our most important key words including #1 position for many of our first tier words. When doing SEO remember that traffic is only as good as it converts.

PStamatiou 17y ago

Don't forget titles for links and alts for images! Also, if your site may potentially produce duplicate content, due to parameters in URLs etc, look into canonical urls: http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/duplicate-content http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/duplicate-content

gilesbowkett235 17y ago

Like anything SEO, there's some inaccuracy here. For instance, I rocketed a microsite to number one for its keywords with a someblog.blogspot.com link. It was at #1 in like a day and a half. The reason there's so much mystery around SEO is because you've got a black box called Google which may or may not do what you want when you want. You can't run any real scientific method on it because, just like how you can't cross the same river twice, you can't evaluate the same Google twice (since they're constantly running experiments on you, the surfer, in real time), and obviously you're competing with a gigantic graph of web sites, which you also can't evaluate twice, since it changes every time a new page goes online, goes offline, or gets republished with some tiny edit. Most SEO people don't think this way, but because I'm a programmer, I think you should start learning SEO by understanding how Google works. For instance (blatant self-promotion), you could check out this video where I give you Google PageRank in five lines of Ruby: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-pagerank-in-five-lines-of-ruby.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-pagerank-in-... There's also a free SEO book which is supposed to be great. I haven't had time to read it but I hear great things about it. http://www.seofaststart.com/ http://www.seofaststart.com/

jsm386 17y ago

All good advice. I'd add: 1 Speed matters. Google is on record about this. They want your site to load quickly. This factor is part of the 'caffeine' update that Google is in the process of rolling out http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-factor-29793 http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-... 2 Don't stop with H1s. Think about the structure of your page. Subheaders should be H2, and so on. 3 Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. They'll regularly pull it down from your server so as you add pages to your site, Google will know to index them. They'll tell you how many pages you have submitted, and how many are indexed. While you're in Webmaster Tools, check out if your site has crawl errors. Check out the HTML suggestions. Google will point out the pages which are missing title tags, which have duplicate tags, short descriptions, etc. Lots of other information in there, including page load times.

andrewljohnson 17y ago
You don't need a site index unless you have a strange site. If you have text/HTML and you are linked from other sites, the site map won't matter.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  That's been my experience, as well.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  A site map is an excellent way to make sure that it is your content that makes it in to google rather than someone that 'clones' you. It can give you a few days lead over the cloners and that's sometimes all you need.
  - andrewljohnson 17y ago
    I call bullshit. Have you actually ever had someone clone your site or tried to protect against it this way? I am all ears for your story... I have never heard of anything like that. Setting up a sitemap is usually just a placebo for finicky webmasters, and it's a waste of time to boot. The biggest sin at a start-up is wasting time, and this easily qualifies. The only time you want a sitemap is when you don't have a text front-end, and even then, you are way better off mimicking your JavaScript with a text layer for the search engines that implementing some sitemap. Even submitting a page in a sitemap doesn't ensure it gets crawled, and it certainly won't get crawled if you have a large site and don't set up your sitemap just right.

webwright 17y ago

Great summary. I'd add that SEO is not just a ranking exercise-- it's a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you <title> tag and the first ~150 of your meta-description are what drives people to click through to your site. Also, all other things being equal, the first position on SERPs gets ~42% of clicks... So it's a winner take all game unless you are talking about a content business. OH-- also do some keyword analysis. In Andrew's example-- how many people search for "fishing tips" versus "fishing advice" or "how to fish" or "intro to fishing"? Keyword analysis is about finding out what people are searching for and then digging in to see how competitive those keywords are. If you want to dethrone the #1 result for "fishing tips" you'll want to analyze their SEO. If they are a 10 year old page-rank-9 domain with 87,500 inbound links, you might consider gunning for a less sought-after search term.

andrewljohnson 17y ago
This all seems like good advice too. I think the top SERP gets more than 42% of clicks though... more like 70. SEO is in many ways a winner-take-all sport at this point, and it's gotten more so over the years. Google released some eye-tracking data and people just look at the top 1 and then top 3 results, then they re-search.
Grinnmarr 17y ago
Excellent point. I was in charge of much of the SEO of a large internet retailer and our organic traffic was stunning. Unfortunately no matter how hard I lobbied to start work on conversion, split testing etc, they insisted I do nothing but drive traffic to our poorly converting sites. When sales started flattening out despite the continuing month over month increase in organic traffic I was let go as a cost saving measure. And while still an Internet Retailer 500 company their position has slipped significantly down the ranks. At the time I left we had top ten positions for hundreds of our most important key words including #1 position for many of our first tier words. When doing SEO remember that traffic is only as good as it converts.