There are two kinds of search engine
optimization: on-page and off-page. On-page optimization is the stuff
you do to your actual web page that will help it get ranked. Off-page
optimization means stuff that isn’t on the page that affects your
ranking (namely, in-bound links). Both are important. For Yahoo and
MSN, on-page is more important than it is for Google. Google relies
more heavily on links than the other big two, though Yahoo and MSN
also weight links heavily.
In this case, I wanted to optimize
the home page of the feline photos blog for the phrase “cat
pictures”. This is how I normally do this:
- Make sure the domain name contains the keywords.
- Make the title of the page my exact keywords I am targeting, capitalized appropriately.
- Make the very first text on the page the keywords in an H1 (header) tag.
- Put an introductory paragraph that uses the keywords right after the H1 tag.
- If I have a lot of text on the page, break it up with H2 tags that contain variations of my keywords.
Unfortunately,
catpictures.blogspot.com was not available, so I couldn’t do
#1. Since competition for “cat pictures” was light, I knew that I could get by without worrying about it. But if you are targeting more competitive keywords, make sure that your domain name (or subdomain name) contains the exact phrase you want to rank for. This especially helps for MSN.
#1. Since competition for “cat pictures” was light, I knew that I could get by without worrying about it. But if you are targeting more competitive keywords, make sure that your domain name (or subdomain name) contains the exact phrase you want to rank for. This especially helps for MSN.
Also, I didn’t
do number five for my feline photos blog, because being a picture
gallery there wasn’t that much text on the page. But I’ll give
you more detail on how that works in case your page does have a lot
of text.
Let’s say
that I have an article on pontoon boats that I want to rank for the
phrase “pontoon boats”. This is what I would do for the on-page
optimization: Try and get a domain name with the words “pontoon
boats” in it (www.pontoonboats.com would be perfect). If there
isn’t anything available, then setup a subdomain for it
(pontoonboats.mydomain.com).
Make the page
title “Pontoon Boats”, put the H1 tag at the beginning of the
text as “Pontoon Boats”, then break up the article with H2
subheadings like “Maintaining Pontoon Boats”, “Pontoon Boats
for Fishing”, “Are Pontoon Boats Fast?”, etc. You don’t want
your subheadings to be exactly your keywords like the main H1 heading
and the title, but you want the subheadings to contain your keywords.
That’s really all I do with on-page optimization, and as I said
before, if the competition is light I don’t always do all five of
those things.
There are
other things that search engine marketers focus on and spend a lot of
time with (things like keyword density and image alt tag density,
etc.), but since I don’t try to rank for fiercely competitive
keywords I don’t usually bother with all of that. I leave the
ranking of really tough keywords to the SEO gurus, because to me it’s
just too much dang work.
To me, ranking
for really competitive keywords is like owning a boat: it requires
far too much time, money and effort to maintain to be worth the end
result (going to the lake three times a year–sorry boat owners!).
No thanks.
I’ll rank for moderately competitive keywords and only have to do a
little bit of maintenance every now and again, and by multiplying
that effort I’ll earn 10 times the AdSense.
Step 4 : How
Getting Links Work:
Now I’m ready
to start getting in-bound links. In-bound links serve two purposes:
1. If it’s
a new site, they will get your site crawled by the search engines and
put into the index.
2. They will
help a site rank well if the link text contains the keywords you’re
targeting.
There’s a
couple of methods you can use to get in-bound links, but I only use
one of them.
1. You can
pay other sites to link to you.
2. You can
swap links (called reciprocal linking) with other sites.
When I’m
actively trying to get links, I only do number two. I’m told that
number one works better than number two because one-way links are
more highly valued by the search engines than reciprocal links, but
I’ll tell you why I don’t care.
First, though,
a little explanation of one way links. A one way link is a link that
points from some other site to your site, but your site does not link
back to the other site.
The search
engines value one-way links more highly because they figure it’s
not just “artificial” link trading going on, but that somebody
has given you a real live “vote” for your site without you asking
for it–the greatest compliment.
Yes, one way
links are more valuable. But I don’t care. Why not? First of all,
as I said before, I don’t go after fiercely competitive keywords,
so usually reciprocal links work just fine. Secondly, if you have a
quality site with quality content, after getting some reciprocal
links into your site and getting some visitors, people will start to
link to your site with one way links, and you won’t have to pay for
those!
If you decide
to go my route and do reciprocal linking, here are the steps you need
to take to do it right:
1. Do a search
at the engine you want to rank for using the keywords you want to
rank for.
2. Go to each
page that ranks well and email the webmaster offering to trade links.
3. Once you’ve
emailed all of them, do the link: command on each of those ranking
pages and email all of the webmasters who link to those pages to see
if they will link to you, too.
If it sounds
like an enormous amount of work, that’s because it is. Well, it is
if you do it all manually. But if you know me at all, you know that I
hate to do things manually. I guess that’s the programmer in me
coming out–I want to automate everything.
So how do I
automate the process? How do I drive dozens or hundreds of in-bound
links into my site without writing a manual email to thousands of
webmasters? That brings me to the last
section of this
tutorial.
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