I was just checking through DNForum for cheap domain names and I noticed that a PR8 domain with 293,000 backlinks was just sold for around $200!!
That has got to be the bargain of the year! I’m kicking myself that I missed it.
On the other hand, don’t believe everything:
There is this sales thread on sitepoint, for a domain listed as PR6 and 1800+ backlinks. On further inspection of the:
PR
and the
backlinks
maybe it isn’t quite such a good deal.
Reciprocal links have gone out of style for most SEOs, but I still get good rankings from recip links - and they are much easier to get than one-way links.
This method also helps you find relevant links. Relevant links help 2 ways
The easiest way to find relevant links, is to choose a competitor and find out who links to them. Chances are, they will also be happy to link to you. This is a major feature of programs like ARELIS (I know, cause I own it) but if you have more time than money, you can do it on the cheap.
Yahoo has the great ‘linkdomain’ command, but the results can be a bit of a pain to sift through. This one is much better:
http://johannesmueller.com/tools/yse/
OK, so now you have a list of potential link partners. Now you have to contact these people - tedious but important.
For every reciprocal link that you want to chase, visit the website & see if they are actually likely to link to you. If they have an area for links, or better yet an information page which your link would fit into then they are worth getting in touch with.
Go to the ‘About’ page of the site and find the name of the person behind it as well as their contact email. You will get much better results if you personalise the ‘link beg’ as much as possible.
Now that you are sure you are going to write to the person, add their link to your site. Don’t wait for them to put their link to you up, why should they make the first move?
Writing the Link Beg email
Address it to the site owner personally and comment on something that stands out on their site (eg a picture) to show that you have visited it. Mention that you think their site is useful to your visitors and you have put a link up already (give them the URL) and say that their visitors might find your site useful as well. Finally, always give the complete HTML for the reciprocal link that you want. This makes it easy for the webmaster to cut-and-paste the code right into their site, and allows you to get the anchor text that you want.
If you are concerned about leaving one-way links on your site to other sites that don’t respond, then keep track of your emails in a spreadsheet. Allow a few weeks for all the responses to come through.
My post on SEO and Images for Long Tail keywords got picked up by SEORoundtable - It’s nice to be noticed!
Content is king, and unique content is a Kingmaker. But generating the content takes work - surely there is an easier way.
If falling foul of duplicate content filters are your main concern, then ‘little-used’ content is just as good as unique content. This is where 3rd party APIs are great. You can get plenty of content, and if you hunt around you can find APIs that almost no one else is using.
A great place to find APIs is ProgrammableWeb, which lists heaps of APIs and mashups that use them.
Some APIs to get you started:
Hot or Not Plenty of text descriptions of people
TryNT Google suggestions, horoscopes, movie reviews, stacks of goodies.
Steer clear of the big ones, (eg - Amazon), they’ve been done to death.
One last point. It is probably not a great idea to base your entire business around a free API. Service can be patchy (Hot or Not goes down about once a month) and grumpy if you do too well (witness the pain Amazon has put StatsAholic through). As an extra way to get free content for your web site though, it is hard to beat!
Following on from yesterday’s post - I had just realised that Google thought all my pages were duplicates - so what was I going to do?
I had to make each page more unique, so this is what I did:
Unique Titles
I have roughly 20 new pages added a day to sudoku.com.au, but it is hard to have unique titles because the pages are added automatically with the new puzzles. So this is what I did:
For each page title, I added the difficulty level of the puzzles, the date (eg 1/Apr/2007) and the page number if comments went over several pages.
Eg: Medium, 1/Apr/2007, Pg-2
I then needed some more text that was related to sudoku.
I set up several word lists:
‘Sudoku puzzles’
’sudoku’
‘Free Sudoku’
and
‘Free puzzles everyday’
‘9 new puzzles a day’
‘Fun for the entire family’
and
‘Easy to Tough’
‘Printable puzzles’
‘Play Online’
I would then randomly combine the word lists to come up with a somewhat unique Title. Eg :
Free Sudoku. Fun for the entire family. Printable puzzles
The lists are actually much larger, so I have around 1000 unique titles. Combine them with the date etc, and the title should always appear unique to Google.
Less Template, More Content
Even though I had 40 unique comments on every page, the standard HTML (navigation, the puzzle, links etc) was making the unique content less than 15% of the page’s total. I had added too much to each page, and the bloat was killing me.
I moved as much javascript out to separate .js files as I could. I also transferred as many inline styles to css files as possible. For some standard links that were on every page, I moved the HTML to another page and loaded them through an IFRAME.
Move the Content closer to the top
It has been said in the past that Google doesn’t completely index large pages. If that is still the case, then perhaps my unique content was being missed due to it being at the bottom of the HTML. Using CSS, I was able to move the location of the comments to an earlier position in the page HTML, while keeping it looking the same for site visitors.
I give code examples on how to do this in my post: How I increased my Adsense Earnings by 50%
Unique Meta Description Tags
I don’t think that Meta tags can help you rank for keywords anymore, but they are definitely useful in letting the search engines know about the page’s contents. Up till now, my meta description tags were pretty generic, so I changed them to be the first 100 characters of the comments for the page. The only disadvantage of doing this, is that the description is sometimes shown on the search engines. I will have to monitor this to see if it hurts more than it helps.
It has now been 3 weeks since I put these changes into place, and the ’site:sudoku.com.au’ command has gone from 4 pages to 1000 (or more, as only 1000 are listed). Sudoku.com.au still ranks at #21 for ’sudoku’, so lets wait for the next Google Update to see what changes!
Mitchell Harper has been talking a bit about using Overture to research topics to blog about. Researching keywords is very important for both PPC campaigns and getting organic search results.
Some search engines provide ’spy’ (also called ‘voyeur’) pages that allow you to see what words are currently being searched on (unfortunately, Google is not on this list).
English
MetaSpy.com
MultiMeta.com
Search.com
Sygol English and Italian
infotiger.com Random results, not that useful
Non English
yandex.ru - Russian
apollo7.de - German
fireball.de - Multiple European languages
vinden.nl - Dutch
Finally, some extra tools
AOL Search 20 million search queries from 658,000 of AOL’s users
Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool Combines Overture and WordTracker
If you post images to your blog/site then this little tip will give your ‘long tail’ Search Engine rankings a boost. Note: Though this tip is about optimising your images, this will boost your rankings in the normal Google Web Search - not just Image Search.
You should already be adding ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags to each of your images. This tells the search engines what the picture is about. However the picture information has to compete with all the other content on the page - so why not give the pic it’s own page?
Say, for example, that you have a picture on your page (cartalk.html):
<img src=’Pics/FERRARI-SCAGLIETTI.jpg’ title=’Black ferrari 612 scaglietti’ alt=’Black ferrari 612 scaglietti’>
Add another page to your site:
<html>
<head>
<title>Black Ferrari 612 Scaglietti</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Black Ferrari 612 Scaglietti</h1>
<img src=’Pics/FERRARI-SCAGLIETTI.jpg’ title=’Black ferrari 612 scaglietti’ alt=’Black ferrari 612 scaglietti’>
<br>
<a href=’cartalk.html’>Back</a>
</body>
</html>
Save the page as ‘Black-ferrari-612-scaglietti.html’.
Go back to the image on cartalk.html and change it to this:
<a href=’Black-ferrari-612-scaglietti.html’><img src=’Pics/FERRARI-SCAGLIETTI.jpg’ title=’Black ferrari 612 scaglietti’ alt=’Black ferrari 612 scaglietti’></a>
So what have you done here?
The new highly optimised page is a bit bare, and you might be tempted to ‘wrap’ it in your site’s template - but I’d hold off on that. If you add the same wrapper to all your image pages then you have a good chance of Google thinking that all the image pages are the same (as the image & description HTML will be small compared to the site template). Then you can get canned by the duplicate content filter.
You might also be thinking:
Well, that’s terrific for the search engines, but my site visitors don’t want to keep clicking the images and get basically the same pics back at them.
2 choices
Change
<a href=’Black-ferrari-612-scaglietti.html’>
to
<a style=”CURSOR: default” onMouseover=”window.status=”; return true” href=’Black-ferrari-612-scaglietti.html’>
That way when your visitor hovers the mouse over the image the cursor won’t turn into a hand and the status bar won’t show the href location. You could even disable the anchor through javascript if you don’t mind the extra work.
When I set up a new site usually one of the most important design considerations is making the site as appealling to search engines as possible. One aspect of this is allowing the SE to reach all parts of the site - which often means having one set of navigation menus for human visitors, and another for the SEs.
A great example of this is http://realestate.com.au. The homepage is designed for humans - but a search engine can’t fill out suburb drop-downs or submit forms, so if this was the only way to view houses, then the SEs would be locked out of all the content. So they have another set of pages which expose all the content in a way that SEs can read:
http://www.realestate.com.au/realestate/homes+for+sale/vic/melbourne+city
This page lists all the homes for sale in Melbourne City, and there are simple HTML links to all the other states/suburbs etc. Now the SEs can see everything.
Something a little more advanced
Some sites are just fancy front-ends for information provided by someone else (eg Mashups). Imagine you have a small site that allows people to find certain photos on Flickr. Wouldn’t it be great to add extra content to your site everytime a visitor used your service? Heres how:
Add a page to your site called ‘PreviousSearches’ and post a link from your homepage to this page.
Capture the visitor’s query, and add an html link on the ‘PreviousSearches’ page that brings up the same results as the original query. Make sure to use descriptive text in the link.
Eg: if the query was - ‘red cars in England’, make sure the anchor text is something like:
/red-cars-in-England.html
And make sure the title of the results page is similarly descriptive.
Code the ‘PreviousSearches’ page so that when it has 50 or so links that it clears the page and adds the old searches to ‘PreviousSearches-1′ and then 2, etc.
Be sure to add some of your own text on the results page so that you aren’t caught in the dupe content filter, and there you go! Heaps of new content for your site.
