Your SEO Questions Answered

[Glassjaw009]

Hey everybody!

I know that nearly everybody on this forum has an interest in SEO. Whether you're pursuing Clickbank, Adsense, ECommerce or any other strategy or business, you're going to want to know about SEO. This is your chance to ask your question to someone who implements SEO strategies and ranks sites for a living.

I come to you with the humblest of attitudes and I realize that there might be questions I might not be able to answer, but I know that there will be a lot of them that I can. If you've got an SEO or ranking question....let's hear it!

Thanks everybody and I look forward to hearing from you!

Best Regards,

Thomas Kearo

[babywarrior]

Just wondering, if say i start another website to SEO for the same niche using the same account for webmaster, would google penalize me?

Also at the same time, the article links for my article points to both of this site. ie 1 article, 2 backlink(1 to each site)

Case study:
website A - keyword = fat lost 4 idiots
website b - keyword = fat lost 4 idiots

boths site using the same webmaster account.

Article link - 1st link and anchor text - i am an idiot - A
2nd link and anchor text - i am an idiot - B

would this affect my SEO effort for either site?

[Glassjaw009]

babywarrior,

Thanks for the question! I can see how this would be a major concern...but at the same time it's a concern based soley in paranoia. Please don't take that the wrong way. Let me explain.

Google itself knows that there are publishers out there with more than one website. Google knows that there are publishers with 5 to 10 webisites. Using webmaster tools or the same articles linking to the same sites will not penalize you in any way. In fact, I do it all the time when writing articles for clickbank sites.

babywarrior, you have nothing to worry about when doing this. However, the fact that you recognize this as a possible flaw and penalty means that you are somewhat ahead of the curve of ordinary internet marketers and it means you can identify potential problems before they happen.

Stick to your current plans and you're going to go far. I guarantee it. Thanks for the question and I hope this helps. If not, feel free to comment again!

Warmest Regards,

Thomas Kearo

[helkay]

Hi,

I paid a lot of money to get my website professionally S.E.O'D, and the whole process took about four months. I was then told that if I needed further ongoing S.E.O it would cost me $400 per month, which I can't afford as I'm not making any money yet!
I have had a few visitors, obviously I am also article writing, submitting to directories,
and anything else which is cheap, am not doing Adwords yet as again, it's too expensive for me right now. My question is: How can I tell if the S.E.O. Guys did a good job?

Thanks
Helen

[Shaun Lee]

Originally Posted by helkay

Hi,

I paid a lot of money to get my website professionally S.E.O'D, and the whole process took about four months. I was then told that if I needed further ongoing S.E.O it would cost me $400 per month, which I can't afford as I'm not making any money yet!
I have had a few visitors, obviously I am also article writing, submitting to directories,
and anything else which is cheap, am not doing Adwords yet as again, it's too expensive for me right now. My question is: How can I tell if the S.E.O. Guys did a good job?

Thanks
Helen

If you're website is now in the Top 10 results for your targeted keyword, then they did a good job.

-Shaun

[hollyvelance]

Originally Posted by helkay

Hi,

I paid a lot of money to get my website professionally S.E.O'D, and the whole process took about four months. I was then told that if I needed further ongoing S.E.O it would cost me $400 per month, which I can't afford as I'm not making any money yet!
I have had a few visitors, obviously I am also article writing, submitting to directories,
and anything else which is cheap, am not doing Adwords yet as again, it's too expensive for me right now. My question is: How can I tell if the S.E.O. Guys did a good job?

Thanks
Helen

The true test of SEO - IMO - is to get a site to the top and keep it there.

I've had many sites drop out of the rankings after a week and it's just been an uphill struggle to get them back up there.

If the SEO did his job properly, you'll maintain any rankings you have made.

[Glassjaw009]

Helkay,

Allow me to address this deeply important and concerning issue. Rankings are something you can never apply a blanket statement to. For instance, if I were to tell you that within 2 months you'd have a top ranked website I would be somewhat remiss as I do not control the search engines.

$400 a month is not an uncommon price, as I charge some of my clients up to $1000, but let me ask you these questions. These are questions that a reputable, caring SEO company will ask their clients if they care at all regarding their clients rankings.

1) Did they ask you about your niche and what progress you've made so far?

2) Did they originally quote you a *general* time frame in which you would see ranking improvements?

3) Did they offer any sort of money back guarantee?

4) Did they ask you about what current visitors to your site convert and which don't in order to find an order of importance of venues that draw traffic?

Helkay, to be honest with you...there are a lot of snake oil salesman out there. They are the ones that say "Oh, I know you paid me for the last 2 months but we really don't have the resources to rank you high right now" or "Google is implementing a new update which prohibits us from ranking you at this second. Pay us for another month and we should be there".

It seems to me that whoever you're working with now has either one of two things:

1) a substandard view of SEO (They've never ranked their own sites but continue to offer services)

2) a silver tongue full of promises that will never happen (only you'll find out about it too late).

I would recommend asking for a monthly (or bi-weekly) report of what they've done for you and how they feel it will help your rankings. If you feel comfortable doing so, email me with this list and I'll tell you whether they're just misguided, just in their actions, or pulling your leg.

Thanks for the reply Helen

[adam westrop]

Oh oracle of SEO, please, please, please help me... I need your advice so much (sarcasm).

[ejullya]

Hi Thomas,

I am reading and implementing your blogging bible (which is awesome, as usual, by the way) and I have a techie question.

I have a google sitemap. In the BB you recommended Kb robots. But in the google sitemap there is an option which says: Add sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt file and then further says: The virtual robots.txt generated by WordPress is used. A real robots.txt file must NOT exist in the blog directory!

So, do I still upload the KB robots pluggin and disable the virtual robots.txt

I am really confused but mainly because I still am techie challenged.

Please help.

Dita

Originally Posted by Glassjaw009

Hey everybody!

I know that nearly everybody on this forum has an interest in SEO. Whether you're pursuing Clickbank, Adsense, ECommerce or any other strategy or business, you're going to want to know about SEO. This is your chance to ask your question to someone who implements SEO strategies and ranks sites for a living.

I come to you with the humblest of attitudes and I realize that there might be questions I might not be able to answer, but I know that there will be a lot of them that I can. If you've got an SEO or ranking question....let's hear it!

Thanks everybody and I look forward to hearing from you!

Best Regards,

Thomas Kearo

[Glassjaw009]

Dita,

I'm extremely glad you like The Blogging Bible and thanks for the question. I agree with you that all this robots.txt and sitemap business can be confusing at times. Basically, when it says that a "real robots.txt file must not exist in the directory" it's referring to manual implementation that people sometimes use.

The manual way of adding a Robots.txt file to your site is to upload it as a physical file to your directory. The plugin generates a virtual file to take the physical one's place.

Essentially, they're just saying not to use both because the physical file takes priority over the plugin. If you had a physical robots.txt in your directory and you attempted to use the plugin, it wouldn't do anything.

Hope this helps Dita. If I didn't clear this up please post again!

Regards,

Thomas

[inter123]

Hi.

I started off doing an X factor type micro-niche website. The keyword is in the domain and it ranks on the fist page.

Started to expand on the niche by adding content on different subjects in the same theme.

These pages are ranking but on no-where near fist page. Typically they are on page 8. Am getting some traffic through the broad searches but minimal.

Some of these keywords have exact searches per month of 10,000+. What can I do to get them on the first page?

The site is about 8 weeks old. I am adding a few back links here and there. Scared to add too much in case it faces the google dance and dissapears. Most of the backlinks I can find at the moment are from high page ranking spam comment blogs, forums and do follow social bookmarks.

Thanks for your help.

Jim.

[Glassjaw009]

Jim,

This problem is not an uncommon one. The X-factor method is great and I have to say that it's a pretty spectacular piece of work. Now for your question:

Your main page is ranking solely because you've got such strong relevance to the search term due to your keyword being in you domain, giving it the appearance of having a lot of strength. So, if you were to take out the keyword from your domain odds are that your main page wouldn't be ranking. You just need more strength.

8 weeks is still a pretty new site, so this is still going to take some time. Start building links to your post pages in order to build their strength and get them to rank. In time, they will - but this isn't the be all end all.

If you want your brand new posts to start ranking immediately upon publishing in the future, you're going to have to build some strength and funnel it in immediately to the post page. Here's how you do that.

Build links to your category pages. If you do this, you'll consolidate strength in them and in turn your category pages will transfer that strength to your posts. Strength always flows downward and this is a great way to get your future posts the strength they need to rank upon publishing. Hope this helps!

Thanks Jim

[Anil Pandey]

Hi

I have a website which I want to get on first page of Google.

Kindly advise.

Thanks

Anil

[roshan1]

Hello there

First of all thank you for such a good thread i like to know how to do SEO for ecommerce website i have done seo friendly urls, good keywords on each pages and descriptions.

I want to know how to make a new site popular with in 3-4 months in SEO ?

[Glassjaw009]

Anil and Roshan,

Whether your site is a Blog, an Ecommerce venture or anything else it's essentially the same process when implementing SEO strategies (though ecommerce can be harder to rank). When first starting, I make sure I nail all of my on-page stuff. As you said, SEO friendly URLS and proper keywording are key. Once I've got that done, I'll slowly ramp in my incoming links for extremely long tail phrases. These are easy to rank for and I can see results almost immediately. Once I rank for these, I slowly make my inbound links less long tail until I've reached my main keyword and ranked for all of these terms. For instance, If I had a site about video games I'd start in this order:

1. Free Video Game Strategy Guides
2. Video Game Strategy Guides
3. Video Game Guides
4. Video Games
5. Gaming
6. Games

Hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Thomas

P.S. - Sorry I wasn't able to make this post longer and more informative, but In order to go into specifics, I would need a specific problem you're having. =(

[ejullya]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for answering my post. That was a bit computerese. So do I understand it correctly: that despite that statement in the WP I still can upload the KB robots plugin and just follow your instructions in Blogging Bible, and I do not have to remove anything or change anything in WP with respect to google sitemap?

Thanks,

Dita

[roshan1]

Thomas

Thank you for guiding me. One more thing i like to know is about article submission.

I want to know submitting articles to many popular directories such as Ezine, Goarticles, Articlesbase, ArticleDashboard I am still not getting good results.

I submit new article in every two days in these directories but still i am not getting much traffic from it. I do proper keywords researching and good optimized title.

Can you please guide me how to get more traffic from article directories ?

Is it worth to submit articles to these directories? I do article posting to my website blog too.

[aprilm]

Hi. Thanks for this thread. I have a question about SEO and my blog. I use wordpress and at the moment I only have posts. But I would like to start using pages and make my site make look more like a static site than a blog. Ok, here are is the SEO question:

• At the moment, I am ranking #15 for my keyword. I have my very first post optimized the most for my keyword, as I read that when your site is new (and mine is) and is being crawled for the first time, the engines use the first post's content the most to determine what your blog is about. At the moment, I have 3 posts on my homepage. I would like to change my homepage from a posts page to a static page, and in the process make it less wordy. (and move all of my posts to a page titled 'blog') If I do this, will the engines still look at my first post's content to determine what my blog is about even though it will no longer be on my homepage, or will they now look at the new content that is on my homepage and possibly drop me in ranking?

Hope that made sense! Thanks!

[Glassjaw009]

Article-Excellence,

When I read this question It made me immediately smile. You've hit the nail on the head in a sense and this is something that I've yet to cover in the thread. Thanks for asking this question as I think it will help others reading as well and you're absolutely correct in your assertion that people don't talk about where to get links.

I want to start by talking about how important a natural link profile is. A link profile is a broad spectrum of all of the incoming links you have to your site and we want to strive to make this as natural looking as possible (as if we've gained all of our links from people just linking to our site by their own free will). The more natural you can make your link profile look, the better you'll rank. I will address the different sources of getting links in order and share with you my experiences with them.

1) Article Marketing - This is somewhat archaic now. While it's true that you can rank extremely focused micro niche sites solely with articles, this isn't the be all end all of SEO. I use articles to get my sites indexed and provide a boost of link juice at the startup of the site. I will very rarely write articles after my site has established itself because the method is somewhat transparent. Google knows that the links provided by these sites are manufactured, thus I see little value to them. I am in no way putting successful article marketers down, but in my experience I can be more efficient in obtaining links. In summary, use articles to get your site indexed and provide a solid foundation for efforts yet to come.

2) Profiles - These are extremely volatile and they can either make or break you during SEO. If we're thinking of SEO like a house, the foundation must be built before we build the overall structure. If we don't it'll fall down. (forgive that analogy, I was a Carpenter for years. ha) Because profiles provide great linkjuice and they're extremely efficient in terms of the time it takes to build the link it makes them a great option the can literally skyrocket your rankings in the SERPS. That being said, they're extremely volatile in that they can be deleted immediately after you post them by the site administrators. If this happens, it can result in a cataclysmic shift in the speed at which you acquire links (Google sees 100 profile links on tuesday, then 60 on wednesday due to 40 being deleted by site admins) which is a bad thing. Profiles are great when used in a fashion that boosts your incoming links when you already have a few hundred incoming, therefore generating a lesser effect on "bouncing" or Google dancing when admins delete some. Overall, once your site hits maturity, they're great!

3) Blog Comments - I recommend these as step 2 after you've written a few articles and provided a solid base for your site. Because they're coming from multiple blogs with multiple PR, strength and relevance, they are nearly untraceable by search engines and they look extremely natural. Also, you don't have to worry about Google finding them only to have them be deleted, as most that are going to be deleted will do so before going live on the site due to Akismet and spam filtering. These are a powerhouse and I've ranked sites using Blog Comments alone. These are my go to tool for rankings. They're also more efficient than articles because they take 15 seconds each instead of writing a 500 word article taking at least 5-10 minutes to write.

I hope this helps Article-Excellence and thank you for the great question. I look forward to hearing from you again and please don't hesitate to post again if I haven't fully answered your question!

Sincerely,

Thomas Kearo

[Glassjaw009]

Dita,

You're absolutely correct! Sorry for the "techiness" of that last post. Sometimes I write and explore my current train of thought, only to neglect other equal trains.

Essentially, if you haven't uploaded a physical robots.txt file to your directory, the plugin will work exceptionally well. The only way it will not work is if you've implemented a custom physical robots.txt file in your directory. If you have not, disregard the plugin's warnings because they don't apply.

Thanks Dita and I look forward to hearing from you again in the future!

Best,

Thomas

[Glassjaw009]

Roshan,

Thanks for the question. I believe that this is something that's pretty common within article marketing. Allow me to share my thoughts!

Though I will admit that there are many successful article marketing gurus out there, personally I have't seen the results I yearn for regarding article marketing in terms of overall SEO benefit. That is not to say that there are no benefits, but I experience diminishing returns with articles (though perhaps I'm setting my standards too high).

Article marketing is a strange beast in that it works great for a short period of time and then ceases the make a dent in ranking that I desire. I believe this is due to the fact that article directories no longer possess the strength or the "intellect" to avoid Google's intelligence. Google knows these links are manufactured. Put yourself in Google's position. You see a site with 500 incoming links and they're all from article directories. These links are manufactured and they can tell. I would suggest using article marketing only as long as they continue to help your rankings. After that, it's time to break outside of the box and start experimenting with new tactics.

In my humble recommendation, the next step for you is blog comments. I would say profiles as well but I'm unsure that you have the incoming link base to support such links without having your site start Google dancing or possible (depending on volume) get sand boxed.

Do some Blog Comments and watch your site jump up in ranking =)

Thank you for your question and may all of your endeavors be successful ones. If you've got any other questions, please do not hesitate to post again!

Warmest Regards,

Thomas Kearo

[Glassjaw009]

April,

Thanks for the great question. I'm glad to see something in this thread dealing with the makeup and SEO settings for Wordpress. Frankly, Wordpress is my absolute favorite blogging platform and I love getting into the nitty gritty details of settings and setting it up for SEO! Love this question.

First of all, I can assure you that you're 100% correct in your move to make your homepage static instead of displaying posts. There is great wisdom in your words. The reason for this being a solid choice is that Google will see your homepage (displaying multiple posts or excerpts of posts) and your Post Pages as having duplicate content. This is never a good thing, but since you've managed to rank #15 I would deem it safe to say that just by chaging this, you're going to see a jump in rankings. I predict you'll jump to #12 or possible #10. We've got that one covered. As far as the setting for changing this, I'd create an entirely new page basically "welcoming" people to the site. Use proper keywording in the page and you'll see an increase in rankings for your posts due to there not being any duplicate content. Also, you'll see increasing ranking for your home page because it's new, keyword rich content.

2) The search engines will determine the relevance of your site depending on what page they first encounter. It's important to realize that each page of your site is judged as a separate entity. If you write about a television on one post (which happens to be the first post encountered by the search engines) your entire site will not be quoted as a television site. In other words, you should be completely fine April.

Thanks for the question. If I haven't answered it to your standards, please post again!

Warmest Regards,

Thomas Kearo

P.S. - I see great things from you in terms of Wordpress SEO configuration.

[roshan1]

Hey Thomas

I am happy with the answer and really worried about what SEO strategies can help me ranking high.

In my opinion higher rankings strategies are very difficult.

Thomas i am doing such things in seo from past and even now.

Can you suggest me what else i need to do to get good results?

I do some good keyword research, Creating Meta Tags for each pages, Placing content by checking uniqueness and informative, then Some Web directory submission, Social Bookmarkings, Article submission, Creating blog and update it with new fresh content, Forum posting and some times Press release submission

I think this things are no more working now... can you tell me what other stratgies can be helpful.... I know video is good way but cant create it right now.

I will be glad to get your nice tips very quickly

Regards
Roshan

[aprilm]

Originally Posted by Glassjaw009

April,

Thanks for the great question. I'm glad to see something in this thread dealing with the makeup and SEO settings for Wordpress. Frankly, Wordpress is my absolute favorite blogging platform and I love getting into the nitty gritty details of settings and setting it up for SEO! Love this question.

First of all, I can assure you that you're 100% correct in your move to make your homepage static instead of displaying posts. There is great wisdom in your words. The reason for this being a solid choice is that Google will see your homepage (displaying multiple posts or excerpts of posts) and your Post Pages as having duplicate content. This is never a good thing, but since you've managed to rank #15 I would deem it safe to say that just by chaging this, you're going to see a jump in rankings. I predict you'll jump to #12 or possible #10. We've got that one covered. As far as the setting for changing this, I'd create an entirely new page basically "welcoming" people to the site. Use proper keywording in the page and you'll see an increase in rankings for your posts due to there not being any duplicate content. Also, you'll see increasing ranking for your home page because it's new, keyword rich content.

2) The search engines will determine the relevance of your site depending on what page they first encounter. It's important to realize that each page of your site is judged as a separate entity. If you write about a television on one post (which happens to be the first post encountered by the search engines) your entire site will not be quoted as a television site. In other words, you should be completely fine April.

Thanks for the question. If I haven't answered it to your standards, please post again!

Warmest Regards,

Thomas Kearo

P.S. - I see great things from you in terms of Wordpress SEO configuration.

Thanks Thomas. I appreciate your input and knowledge. It sounds as if you are extremely well versed in blogging and SEO, especially with the Wordpress platform. Like I said in my last post, I have a blog I would like to transform into a static site that has a blog. (hope that makes sense) So, let me see if I understand you completely...you are saying:

• whatever is on a page (content wise) is what that page will rank for?

So if I have 3 blog posts on my homepage, and the engines crawl my homepage, they will determine what my page is about (not my entire site) by the content in these 3 posts, the first post being what they see first?

• If I change my homepage to a static page, then whatever is on that page will be what I rank for.

Ok, hope I have understood you correctly. That is what my gut told me, just wasn't sure. Question:

• How do websites with a homepage full of pictures like apple.com rank high for their homepage? Some website homepages don't have much content on them, as they are more navigational than anything else.

Here is my other question:

• This question is assuming the title of your blog/wordpress site is very valuable in terms of SEO. The title usually appears in the header. What happens if you have a professional logo made for your site, and you upload that into the header. (now your header is a jpg file) Will the search engines still be able to see the title of your blog? I know that may be a very stupid question, but I am trying to cover all aspects of my blogging ignorance. LOL

Thanks again for all your help and dedication to blogging SEO.
April

[Gary Becks]

Hey Ap,

First off it is not necessary to stop using the post format in favor of pages. Post are actually pages. It is very easy to make a wordpress blog perform as a static site would. It is really only a two step process. In your settings menu hit the reading tab. Where it says "your front page displays" select static page and choose the page you want to display as your home page. Next in the "blog pages show at most" area enter 1 post. This will keep your pages displaying one post per page.

Next go to permalinks in your settings. Select custom structure and enter this--> /%postname%/ Now your titles will be completely optimized. Also be sure to use a good tagging plugin and tag all of your posts properly. Also keep all of your posts categorized properly. This will take care of all of your sites interlinking. I like to add links to other pages in the content but only on my larger sites, this makes a big difference.

To answer your last question you MUST name your images properly. Name your image file after whatever keywords you are trying to rank for. Also use alt tags, use the exact keywords you are optimizing for in your alt tags. The bots dont recognize images but they do read file names and alt tags. Additionally this will bring you traffic from google image search results as you will rank images simply by doping this.

Wordpress is by far the easiest platform to optimize IMO and I have some rather large sites built using it that you would not even know were blogs. Provided your them is properly designed wordpress and good use of plugins will handle the rest for you.

[aprilm]

Originally Posted by Embions

Hey Ap,

First off it is not necessary to stop using the post format in favor of pages. Post are actually pages. It is very easy to make a wordpress blog perform as a static site would. It is really only a two step process. In your settings menu hit the reading tab. Where it says "your front page displays" select static page and choose the page you want to display as your home page. Next in the "blog pages show at most" area enter 1 post. This will keep your pages displaying one post per page.

Next go to permalinks in your settings. Select custom structure and enter this--> /%postname%/ Now your titles will be completely optimized. Also be sure to use a good tagging plugin and tag all of your posts properly. Also keep all of your posts categorized properly. This will take care of all of your sites interlinking. I like to add links to other pages in the content but only on my larger sites, this makes a big difference.

To answer your last question you MUST name your images properly. Name your image file after whatever keywords you are trying to rank for. Also use alt tags, use the exact keywords you are optimizing for in your alt tags. The bots dont recognize images but they do read file names and alt tags. Additionally this will bring you traffic from google image search results as you will rank images simply by doping this.

Wordpress is by far the easiest platform to optimize IMO and I have some rather large sites built using it that you would not even know were blogs. Provided your them is properly designed wordpress and good use of plugins will handle the rest for you.

Thanks Embions! Is there a benefit to sticking to posts rather than just using pages? Does it matter at all?

Also, when uploading a jpeg file to the header, do you delete your blog title in the settings (i believe it is under general..not sure) or do you leave that in there?

And one more thing I have been trying to figure out is, is there a way to turn off the page or post title on the actual page. (other than simply leaving it blank in the title space....because I still want the title to show up in the navigation bar, just not again on the page itself)

Thanks!

[Gary Becks]

There is a benefit in using post over pages in that most settings and also plugins for wordpress are set by default to handle your posts and not your pages. The biggest disadvantage of using pages though is that you cannot categorize pages and categories are a big deal in terms of WP SEO. By using categories properly along with a good tagging structure you can actually build a site within a site (if you get what I am saying). Also a lot of WP themes add your pages titles to your navigation menu (could get a bit messy adding every post to your nav). Pages are made for things like About, Contact, Privacy, and your Site Map.

NEVER delete your blog title in the settings menu. In fact be sure that your blog title is optimized for your keywords in the general settings menu. When you get a chance, view your page source and you will see why I say that this is so important.

As for your last question I am kind of confused but if you are using pages instead of post then this is the exact problem I was speaking of where when using pages instead of posts your page title will automatically be added to your nav menu. Very messy looking.

[aprilm]

Originally Posted by Embions

There is a benefit in using post over pages in that most settings and also plugins for wordpress are set by default to handle your posts and not your pages. The biggest disadvantage of using pages though is that you cannot categorize pages and categories are a big deal in terms of WP SEO. By using categories properly along with a good tagging structure you can actually build a site within a site (if you get what I am saying). Also a lot of WP themes add your pages titles to your navigation menu (could get a bit messy adding every post to your nav). Pages are made for things like About, Contact, Privacy, and your Site Map.

NEVER delete your blog title in the settings menu. In fact be sure that your blog title is optimized for your keywords in the general settings menu. When you get a chance, view your page source and you will see why I say that this is so important.

As for your last question I am kind of confused but if you are using pages instead of post then this is the exact problem I was speaking of where when using pages instead of posts your page title will automatically be added to your nav menu. Very messy looking.

Hey there. I get what you are saying about posts vs pages. You said the major disadvantage to using posts over pages is you cannot categorize pages? Would this plugin take care of that? Misiek Page Category

The only reason I wanted to use pages instead of posts was because I wanted to create a top navigational menu with all my pages, and have one of those nav buttons say 'blog' (this being the page with all my blog posts)

I didn't necessarily want to have all my blog posts in my nav bar, but I wanted to create more pages than just the usual 'contact' 'about' 'privacy' etc. I wanted one nav button to say 'home' the next say 'something else'....I hope this all makes sense. Sorry if I am typing in circles here. :-)

I know that WP only pings your new posts, but other than that, and the above mentioned categories issue (which might be taken care of with the above mentioned plugin) do you see any other SEO issues to having the site set up this way? (Pages in my NAV bar with one of them being 'blog' with all my posts) Basically it would look like a static site with a blog attached. I understand that you can make posts look like a static page, but you can't put your posts in a navigation bar at the top, right? And if you could, I am assuming you can't separate them so that some end up on each nav button while others end up on the blog page....

Ok, now that you are thouroughly confused, haha!

[Gary Becks]

LOL

Well to be honest with you April I have never went the route that you are going for so I can't really say how that would workout. In the rare case that I wanted to have a site constructed how you have described I would design the site and then just add a wordpress blog to the actual site and I have only done this once.

As for the plugin mentioned I guess it could work if the plugin works properly and is updated frequently along with WP. There are ways to add post to your nav bar but it would require a keen understanding of CSS (which I don't have). I say go for it though. Pages automatically have seo friendly permalinks and can be tagged so provided the plugin works accurately it should work out just fine.

[Glassjaw009]

April,

whatever is on a page (content wise) is what that page will rank for?

Not necessarily, but Yes. Google will determine your relevance to search terms based upon what terms are present on your page and their order of importance. For instance, if you've got a page about televisions and you mention a Sharp Aquos HDTV on the site, the spiders will determine that the site has some relevance to this term, thus you will be placed in the SERPS for it. How high you get placed is dependent upon your website's Strength. In small niches, relevance alone can rank you. This is what is taking place when you choose a domain name that's an exact match to a search term.

If I change my homepage to a static page, then whatever is on that page will be what I rank for.

Correct.

How do websites with a homepage full of pictures like apple.com rank high for their homepage? Some website homepages don't have much content on them, as they are more navigational than anything else.

These sites have nearly no on page relevance due to there being a minimal amount of text present on the page, however they make up for it in terms of strength. These sites have incredibly powerful link profiles so they've got a ton of strength and their relevance can be judged from Anchor Text, Headings and Alt Text of the images.

This question is assuming the title of your blog/wordpress site is very valuable in terms of SEO. The title usually appears in the header. What happens if you have a professional logo made for your site, and you upload that into the header. (now your header is a jpg file) Will the search engines still be able to see the title of your blog?LOL

Yes. Search Engines will still be able to view the title of your blog because the title also appears in the browser window and remains coded into the site. Also, if you ever want to use an image but still maintain relevance, alt text should be filled in with your key term to give the serps an idea of what the image is.

Thanks April,

Thomas

[dirtyjazzhands]

I would just like to start off by saying that this is a great post with lots of good tips and suggestions.

I do have one question that's been bugging me for a while, though. I've asked around and looked for answers, but like all things SEO I always get differing replies.

My question is this: Does it really matter whether you have multiple domains for different niches or if you have one domain with sub-domains for those niches?

Basically, what are the pros of cons of each?

An example of multiple domains to clarify my question: bluewidgets.com, reddoohickeys.com, yellowthings.com

An example of sub-domains to clarify my question: bluewidgets.onesite.com, reddoohickeys.onesite.com, yellowthings.onesite.com

Any input would be much appreciated!

--Josh

[mariahm]

I am actually finding this thread a tad egotistical.
I'm sorry.

[inter123]

Hi.

Thanks for taking the time to answer peoples' questions.

I am just wondering with on page SEO what would be a good convention to name URLs, img alt and a href title attributes?

Say the keyword is 'dog grooming'.

For the URL is it best to use: 'doggrooming.html' or 'dog-grooming.html'?

As for the img and a href is it at all a good idea to name it as
'dog grooming'?

Cheers.

Jim.

[Glassjaw009]

Inter123,

Thanks for the great question. This isn't something we've covered in the thread recently so It's nice to get this information out there. I think it adds to the thread greatly!

On page SEO is extremely important, especially when talking in the realm of URL structure. It's a subtlety that many people don't even think about, but that fact that you are speaks greatly about your skill level. Here is my recommendation.

Separate each keyword in the phrase with a dash. Using your example, your best Url structure would be http://www.yourdogtrainingsite.com/dog-grooming

As for image alt text, you want to make sure that you're not going to accidentally adventure into the keyword spam category by using it, though it's essential. If it's a site about dog grooming, the proper alt text would indeed by "dog grooming" unless this pushes your keyword density into the realm of spam (10% and above). As I say in The Blogging Bible, keyword density is somewhat of a mechanism used to NOT rank sites rather than rank them. Overuse it with alt text and the spam filer goes up.

Hope this helps and thanks again for the great question!

Best,

Thomas

[mjbmedia]

am doing some links for a site of a freind, it was ranking top 20, now its slipped down to 32.
and all that in two weeks meanwhile Ive been getting around 10 PR4-6 links for it, with keyword anchor text from highly relevant sources
Now I know 10 backlinks isnt a lot, its a favour not a clontract, but with those PRs and relevancy etc I was hoping it would push the site up Google, not down.
Any generic reasons (the webpage content hasnt been changed) that you may be able to point me to

[aprilm]

Originally Posted by Embions

LOL

Well to be honest with you April I have never went the route that you are going for so I can't really say how that would workout. In the rare case that I wanted to have a site constructed how you have described I would design the site and then just add a wordpress blog to the actual site and I have only done this once.

As for the plugin mentioned I guess it could work if the plugin works properly and is updated frequently along with WP. There are ways to add post to your nav bar but it would require a keen understanding of CSS (which I don't have). I say go for it though. Pages automatically have seo friendly permalinks and can be tagged so provided the plugin works accurately it should work out just fine.

Hey, don't feel bad, I don't get CSS either. In fact, I get hives when I think about learning it. It's probably all in my head though and really not all that hard to understand. Just when you are trying to learn all kinds of other things about IM, thinking about learning another language (code) makes my head spin!

Thanks for the great advice! As always, you are very helpful!

[aprilm]

Originally Posted by Glassjaw009

April,

whatever is on a page (content wise) is what that page will rank for?

Not necessarily, but Yes. Google will determine your relevance to search terms based upon what terms are present on your page and their order of importance. For instance, if you've got a page about televisions and you mention a Sharp Aquos HDTV on the site, the spiders will determine that the site has some relevance to this term, thus you will be placed in the SERPS for it. How high you get placed is dependent upon your website's Strength. In small niches, relevance alone can rank you. This is what is taking place when you choose a domain name that's an exact match to a search term.

If I change my homepage to a static page, then whatever is on that page will be what I rank for.

Correct.

How do websites with a homepage full of pictures like apple.com rank high for their homepage? Some website homepages don't have much content on them, as they are more navigational than anything else.

These sites have nearly no on page relevance due to there being a minimal amount of text present on the page, however they make up for it in terms of strength. These sites have incredibly powerful link profiles so they've got a ton of strength and their relevance can be judged from Anchor Text, Headings and Alt Text of the images.

This question is assuming the title of your blog/wordpress site is very valuable in terms of SEO. The title usually appears in the header. What happens if you have a professional logo made for your site, and you upload that into the header. (now your header is a jpg file) Will the search engines still be able to see the title of your blog?LOL

Yes. Search Engines will still be able to view the title of your blog because the title also appears in the browser window and remains coded into the site. Also, if you ever want to use an image but still maintain relevance, alt text should be filled in with your key term to give the serps an idea of what the image is.

Thanks April,

Thomas

Thanks Thomas! I can't wait to sink my teeth into the Blogging Bible, first few pages seem jam packed with very valuable specialized blogging knowledge already!

[drhoba]

thanks for this post
i have aquestion i build anew wordpress site and have many category and sub category what is better for seo

xxxx.com/Category/sub-Category/post title

or

xxxx.com/post title

[Glassjaw009]

drhoba,

The best URL structure for your posts is the http://www.yourdomain.com/post-title

I think I addressed this an a previous question, but if it needs more clearing up feel free to post again.

Thanks,

Thomas

[Glassjaw009]

mjbmedia,

This is a very interesting question. Without knowing the specifics about the site or the URL, it's impossible to diagnose the exact cause that the site has slipped even when adding strong sites linking to it. Here is one possibility.

Since you're adding powerful links to the site on a daily basis, you're keeping your linking campaign at a consistent rate, so that's a great thing, but there is one other factor. Are all of these sites Blogs? Are they all Forums? A lot of times, when you receive links from only a single type of site it looks extremely unnatural.

Secondly, when linking to the site do you use the same anchor text every time? If you do, it might be cause for an over optimization penalty in the same ballpark of keyword spam.

My suggestion: Get links from different types of sites and vary your anchor text in your links. From the information given, I can't tell which one of these problems you're facing, but it's safe to say that it's probably one of the two.

Early in my SEO career, I wanted to rank for a certain term so I built all my links using that anchor text and I would drop in ranking when I added new links. I was under penalty for anchor text spam. When I started linking using secondary terms I wanted to rank for as anchor text, my site started shooting my immediately. One lesson I learned the hard way. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the great (and mysterious) question.

Thomas

[mjbmedia]

Hi Glassjaw, yes I have been using the same anchor text mostly via blogs, so thats likely the issue Thanks

[Big Squid]

Originally Posted by aprilm

I understand that you can make posts look like a static page, but you can't put your posts in a navigation bar at the top, right? And if you could, I am assuming you can't separate them so that some end up on each nav button while others end up on the blog page....

You can do it manually, but creating a PAGE out of a POST. Or you can put a nav-bar link to a category page.

[mjbmedia]

Originally Posted by Glassjaw009

mjbmedia,

This is a very interesting question. Without knowing the specifics about the site or the URL, it's impossible to diagnose the exact cause that the site has slipped even when adding strong sites linking to it. Here is one possibility.

Since you're adding powerful links to the site on a daily basis, you're keeping your linking campaign at a consistent rate, so that's a great thing, but there is one other factor. Are all of these sites Blogs? Are they all Forums? A lot of times, when you receive links from only a single type of site it looks extremely unnatural.

Secondly, when linking to the site do you use the same anchor text every time? If you do, it might be cause for an over optimization penalty in the same ballpark of keyword spam.

My suggestion: Get links from different types of sites and vary your anchor text in your links. From the information given, I can't tell which one of these problems you're facing, but it's safe to say that it's probably one of the two.

Early in my SEO career, I wanted to rank for a certain term so I built all my links using that anchor text and I would drop in ranking when I added new links. I was under penalty for anchor text spam. When I started linking using secondary terms I wanted to rank for as anchor text, my site started shooting my immediately. One lesson I learned the hard way. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the great (and mysterious) question.

Thomas

is there a way for me to redeem this ie setting up other backlinks with different anchor text to level things up or weill Google right things itself in a day or so? are we doomed or is there a way out

[Glassjaw009]

Mjb,

This is easily corrected, as Google looks at your overall anchor text density, not the order in which they were placed. Just start building links to your site with different anchor text links that you have been doing, to different pages and you'll see increases as your penalty gets taken away!

Thanks,

Thomas

[mjbmedia]

Cheers GJ, do you get penalised for commenting on older blogs?
Like if the article/blog was put up in 2007, the last comment was mid 2009 , if i then commented genuinely would it be worth it SEO wise . thyre PR4 -6 sites Im talking about linking from.

[aprilm]

Hey Thomas! First off, let me say WOW, the information found in your Blogging Bible is awesome! I would recommend anyone who is serious at all about blogging read it. It's a must have.

I have yet another blogging question....well I don't know if it is necessarily just about blogging, but I installed a WP plugin that gives me advanced editing options, and one of the options is adding layers. This allows me to place text and images anywhere on the page and position them excatly where I want them. It seems to be too good to be true, there has to be some kind of drawback. Are layers bad for SEO?

[Glassjaw009]

mjb,

Not at all! The older the site the better when you're talking about SEO! Sorry it took me so long to respond, I've been away for a few days visiting a friend. Generally, older sites are less spammy, are more authoritative and offer significant strength.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Thomas

[redrossero]

Hi,

I see your notes about article directory links to be true in my small seo experience. I have a mixed view about using blog comments links because is almost imporsible to get do follow blogs in some niches. So, my question is how do you do blog commenting. You go for relevant blogs or high page rank blogs in irrelevant blogs. Can these last type of links hurt your rankings?

[Glassjaw009]

red,

Thanks for the question. Blog Comments are a strange beast. To answer your questions, I go for the highest PR and page strength I can. I don't care if it's from a relevant site because you can "inject" relevance with anchor text. In a natural link profile, you wouldn't have only sites about xbox linking to your xbox site. You'd have sites about video gaming, television, playstation sites, etc so getting your relevance as close as possible is not actually helping you. It's page strength that really matters in the end.

It's not that other aspects of linking aren't important, but more than often people focus on subtleties and sacrifice the big picture for them. The big picture is page strength.

Hope this helps red. Thanks for the excellent questions.

Best Regards,

Thomas Kearo

[webbyworld]

Hi Thomas,

I have about 200 new websites I just put up. They are all privately registered, but all on the same shared C Block, and a lot of them have similar words in the domain name, like "Houston Texas" or "Garments for Sale". They all have original content, but because of the close domain names, close niche (different, but close), and they are all using the Thesis WP theme, I am worried about getting the same links to all of them.

I just don't want the websites to have all the same links and leave footprints. Also, I don't want links from bad neighborhoods or properties linking to porn and gambling websites.

My only concerns are having good clean links that won't get me in the sandbox or trip a filter.

How should I get different links for them?

If I submit all the sites to Web directories, Web 2.0 sites, Articles links, Press release links for them will it work ??

Please help me