Iam an experienced professional in website development but very new in serach engine field. Iam wondering where to start. I have read books and forums on SEO and pageranking. I SEO'd my site and submitted to search engines.
DO I have to now?
1) get Reciprocal links (for page rank)?
2) write Articles with my website signature
3) Post to forums with my website signature
4) Post Blogs with my website signature
Are these steps effective and legal(according to google)? I sometimes get boggled with the enormity of the tasks. But I know Iam capable of doing it. I just want to know what are the right steps for getting higher rankings. Can anybody guide me with the correct steps with correct order.
If somebody wants, he/she can give me tasks for his/her sites and guide me. I will do it as a learning experience and act of gratitude.
designer posted this at 06:42—10th August 2006.
He has: 31 posts
Joined: Jul 2006
See selfpromotion.com - they give good info
Megan posted this at 13:07—10th August 2006.
She has: 10,032 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
(I'll have to say that I'm just learning about SEO myself but this is what I've learned from other sites)
First of all, you generally don't need to submit to search engines - they'll find you when they crawl anyway. As long as you have some link from somewhere.
Secondly, reciprical links are not the best thing to do anymore. The search engines are starting to lessen the value of those since they know that they aren't real "natural" links. Forum links may or may not recieve much emphasis by the SE's - I've heard conflicting stories about that. But, bot of these strategies are high volume, low quality links.
So what you need is good quality, natural links. Find the audience for your site. If they think it's good, they'll link to you. Search engines are looking for good quality sites for humans - make your site a good quality site for humans and you'll get a lot further than trying to beat the SE's with little tricks that they're going to catch on to sooner or later anyway.
Here's are some good articles at SEOmoz about increasing visibility:
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1105
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1128
Looking at both of your sites, there openeing messages could be improved to provide better keywords. The Marketing site, for example, has a blurb at the top which mainly consists of keywords for SE's, not an explaination for people about what the site has to offer. The other site has no explaination at all, it just starts into the content. That site also has a title format that starts with the title of the site, not the title of the page.
You could also improve the coding of your sites to get a better code to content ratio and make sure there's more content towards the top of the page. Using CSS for layout will allow you to place the content at the top of the page (SE's know that content at the top of the page is more important, and they can't see what it looks like, just what the code is like ... although apparently there have been some attempts to change that). Google also only indexes the first 100K of a page, and if yours is mainly code and navigation it's not going to see much actual content. View source and scroll downuntil the content starts. Notice that you are more than halfway down the page in both cases.
(it's funny - your loans page starts out by saying what a loan is, which most people know, but the presell page doesn't explain what a presell page is)
The other big component of SEO is keyword optimization: choosing the right keywords and optimizing your page so the SE's can find you when someone searches for that term. There are some tools out there to help with that but I'm not sure which are the best ones...
Megan
My web design blog