Ask Any SEO Question And I'll Answer It

[James Fake]

Hey Fastlaners,
Every now and then, I try to give back to the Fastlane forum & MJ who I actually give credit to help sparking my fire to start Fendza. (more about it's progress here in this thread) so I've decided:

ASK ME A QUESTION RELATED TO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION THAT YOU'VE BEEN STUMPED WITH OR DEBATING IF IT WORKS AND I'LL ANSWER YOU.

Now, all my answers aren't some theory crap either. They will all be from personal experience and through my past experiments and trials and failures and successes.

Questions I will not answer:
1. Any general broad question that a simple Google search can teach you. Example: How can I rank my site?
2. Any question that asks me to spend an hour to evaluate your site. I cannot afford the time right now, sorry.

Questions I will answer:
1. What are your top 5 methods for link building?
2. Keyword match domains worth anything?
3. I'm at page 2 and stuck, what do you recommend?
4. On page optimization
5. Link building
6. Opinions on the latest SEO tactics like link wheels, etc.

With that said: FIRE AWAY.

 

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[biophase]

Ok, I'll go first with your suggested questions. I have my own answers in my head, but I am curious as to how your methods may differ from mine.

What are your top 5 methods of link building
and
I'm at page 2 and stuck, what do you recommend?

 

[James Fake]

Hey biophase..

Sure..

In order of most effective link building:
1. Link bait via highly helpful blog aimed target market's indirect needs: time intensive
2. Viral materials (another type of link baiting)
3. Guest blogging on high PR sites
4. Blog commenting and adding value to a relevant site or one whose audience could use my product
5. Submitting articles to directories

All 5 take a good amount of time to do; so after your first level of SEO like directory submissions, etc. than I spend focus on these 5.


2) You're at page 2 because your competition is probably getting good links. Good on-page optimized sites can usually rank page 2-4 on a moderate difficult keyword with '1st level' links within a month or two. Getting to 2 or past 2 usually means you have to start getting higher quality links. Really depends on the competition and what they are doing for SEO.

 

[LightHouse]

2. Keyword match domains worth anything?
4. On page optimization
5. Link building
6. Opinions on the latest SEO tactics like link wheels, etc.

 

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[snowbank]

What is the toughest keyword you have ranked #1 for?

What level SEO would you rank yourself on a scale of 1-10?

 

[Ready2bfamous]

How can you implement SEO into CPA?

 

[James Fake]

Lighthouse

- Keyword matches are still very high in value. Ones with hyphens not so much, probably worth about 60% of ones without hyphens, but still greater than a regular ol domain.

4. & 5. What do you need to know about these? Very big categories.

6. Latest tactics like profile links and link wheels will all eventually be discounted tremendously by Google over the next year or so. Google has hundreds of the best working 40hrs a week on stuff like this; I'm sure they'll figure out what spammers are doing.


@Snowbank

Most difficult? Probably the ones now with Fendza because there's a bunch of old established players in the game; I still made it to page 1 though on most and just getting started with my major attacks.

Most traffic? Probably, twitter background, twitter backgrounds which one gets 33,000 and the other 135,000 'exact' matches per month. and I ranked #1 for awhile on both until I let the site go and moved onto something else. Couple thousand plus in traffic a day just from those two keywords.

As far as skill, maybe an 8

@ready2befamous

CPA as in click per action ads? that's more to do with adwords/ppc than SEO. With PPC, its just testing, testing, and testing.

 

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[JayKim]

I bookmarked this older thread. How do I do the highlighted ?


https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/we...22947-search-engine-optimization-sources.html
@MrPink

I agree. I put 100% focus on the end user on my sites; however, you still have to make your site's robot friendly and solid and each unique meta title and descriptions. I focus on making my sites to start off with SEO friendly, after that, I don't put any work into link building, etc. because if you focus on doing the best at what you offer, the result will come in the long run.

A few MUST do SEO are:
-301 redirect from non www. to www.
-Submit and verify sites with webmaster tools of Google, Yahoo, and Bing
-404 not found redirect page
-Each page has a solid and unique title and description
-Make sure it loads fast without alot of jumble.. use websitegrader.com or websiteoptimization.com's analyze tools to check your speed.
-Make a robots.txt file
-Optimize and give every picture an alt tag
-Try to make it as lean as possible in coding, stay away from javascript and stick to CSS and html if you can.

James F.


links from older threads hope they help anyone.


http://static.googleusercontent.com.../search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf


http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

Online SEO Training Program & Community : SEO Book.com


http://www.websitepublisher.net/seo-guide/


http://www.bluehatseo.com/category/general-articles/


http://www.selfseo.com/

 

[CMCarlin]

Great thread.

I have my own question: How do you rate the difficulty of a keyword? I have my own methodology, but everyone has their own. Example: a lot of people look at the number of pages indexed with or without quotes. I look purely at the top 10 and what they are doing and ignore the number of indexed pages. Those that look at indexed, what is a good reason to? I would like someone to point out to me the logical reasons why.

Also, to comment on an earlier post here. Google has a lot of people working on spam tactics, but things like blog comments have worked for many, many years and probably will continue to do so and that can be automated (spammed). Profile links have been working for awhile too and that is heavily automated (I can push out a couple thousand a day if I wanted to to). Though, I don't think those tactics will get you very far in the high competitive markets, but they work wonders in the smaller niches.

What is your experience of link velocity and google punishment (aka sandbox)? Some state to never build links too fast, while others have claimed to be able to spam the hell out of a brand new site and have it ranking (sure, it will do the dance for awhile but eventually settle down). Myself, personally, have never been consistent in my link building (very start and stop), but I see results. I think it depends on the markets.....

One more: how do your prioritize the different SEO tactics?

example: 80% off page (link building), 20% on page

 

[James Fake]

@JayKim Wow, I read that and had to re-read it.. didn't realize that was me that wrote it. lol

@CM - I hate it when folks judge by how many results show up for a keyword; it's always about the top 10 websites that rank and what they are doing that judges how difficult it will be.

As far as profile links and blog comments. I believe there's a certain ceiling you can reach with those before Google will severely discredit it those links. For instance, if you have 50 profiles links, then they count. Anything after that won't count but the first 50 will. How can a person possibly be interactive on 50 different forums/websites? More than likely a profile linking script. Same with blog comments, there's always spammer patterns. However, there is such things as quality blog commenting to; on sites that are relevant to yours. versus a bunch of 'Wow, this helped me out alot, thanks!' comments, leaving quality comments on other relevant blogs have worked wonders for me.

I don't believe in Google penalties. Any competitor can easily pay someone off Warrior Forum to spam link the hell out your site. I do think there's a pyramid like ceiling (like the previous comment but this time also tied to time frames) of what counts as how much weight before going over that numbers accounts for no increase. I've never had problems from building massive links all at once.

Linkbuilding is never ending, on-page can mostly be completed. So once I optimize my site fully, I leave it completely alone and link build. I may go back and tailor the on page for long tails that I discover, but I generally leave it alone.

Hope that helped.

 

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[maximus20895]

1) How long did it take you to get your Fendza site where it is currently?

 

[throttleforward]

Is it better to have a blog on a seperate domain pointing to your site, or have it be a page within your primary site?

Is it better to have dynamic content on your homepage, or leave your homepage (optomized for your keywords) alone once the site is established/ranked?

 

[James Fake]

@maximus - about 2 months of focusing on SEO, I then stopped and started working on other things like developing the app and working on stuff for the homepage. Between then and now, it's ranked where it's at now cause of previous SEO.

@throttle - depends on what your content is. If it's directly related to your business, then on your own domain.com/blog; it will raise your keywords up to your domain, bring more value/trust rank value to your overall domain, and convert folks from the blog to your site easier. Check out most sites like freshbooks, bigcommerce; they have very good blogs, but keep em on their domain and use the same navigation bar on their site as their blog. To convert readers to further investigate. Cause alot of readers may not know who you are and just read what you got written but will take a look around after done reading.


A bit of both. Majority of it static. But keep your twitter feed or blog feed on the homepage so when you update it, it updates on the homepage. It will add that 'refresh' value folks talk about but keep it static enough so that Google won't bump you up and down thinking its a new site.

 

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[CMCarlin]

Thanks for sharing. I agree with the "ceiling" so to speak. Profile links are very low value and its tough getting them get and stay indexed without some sort of indexing solution in place. I believe, no matter what link building strategy you go for, that diversity is key. Diversity in IP adresses and platform.

@JayKim Wow, I read that and had to re-read it.. didn't realize that was me that wrote it. lol

@CM - I hate it when folks judge by how many results show up for a keyword; it's always about the top 10 websites that rank and what they are doing that judges how difficult it will be.

As far as profile links and blog comments. I believe there's a certain ceiling you can reach with those before Google will severely discredit it those links. For instance, if you have 50 profiles links, then they count. Anything after that won't count but the first 50 will. How can a person possibly be interactive on 50 different forums/websites? More than likely a profile linking script. Same with blog comments, there's always spammer patterns. However, there is such things as quality blog commenting to; on sites that are relevant to yours. versus a bunch of 'Wow, this helped me out alot, thanks!' comments, leaving quality comments on other relevant blogs have worked wonders for me.

I don't believe in Google penalties. Any competitor can easily pay someone off Warrior Forum to spam link the hell out your site. I do think there's a pyramid like ceiling (like the previous comment but this time also tied to time frames) of what counts as how much weight before going over that numbers accounts for no increase. I've never had problems from building massive links all at once.

Linkbuilding is never ending, on-page can mostly be completed. So once I optimize my site fully, I leave it completely alone and link build. I may go back and tailor the on page for long tails that I discover, but I generally leave it alone.

Hope that helped.

Hmm, one more question, in your experience, how useful (or not) is it to mix up your keywords when trying to rank a particular page? One backlinking authority (Terry Kyle) has shown from his own testing that he has more success when he stick to just one keyword. Of course, everyone has a different story and there are a lot of people that saying have a certain mix, like 70/30 or 80/20 main keyword/secondary keyword.

Good stuff here. I love talking SEO, specifically when it has to do with someones experiences and not just stating theories as fact.

 

[CMCarlin]

Heh, got another one that I've been meaning to ask the backlink forums.

Theres a lot of talk about how there hasn't been a traditional PR update in very long time (april I think?).

A lot of people think that google is simply not going to give us this information anymore. And if I helped run google, that is something that I wouldn't do either - it makes it easier to game the system.

However, the last update's data is still available through toolbars and what not.

This is more of a hypothetical question and speculative in nature. We don't really know what's coming down the road and won't know how to navigate the waters until we get there.

A lot of people build lists of high PR backlinking sources to build an asset to re-use over and over again for your portfolio of sites or for clients. If the data is outdated and old, should we even be looking at PR? Though, a high PR site may have a high chance of staying high, and I'll take a PR6 even if it used to be an 8 10 months ago.

I hope I am being clear enough. I am simply speculating here. Who knows, maybe a major PR update will happen tomorrow. Or maybe never.

Also, what do you use to check PR? I've used 4 different sources one time to check against a list of URLs and came up with 4 different answers.

SEO toolbar
SEO Quake
Mass page rank checker (its a website)
and scrapebox PR checker

 

[CMCarlin]

Not to derail this thread but.....

just checked out your site. It so happens that I am the scheduling manager (among other duties) at the call center that I work at. Right now I maintain all my data with excel so I'm interested to see what your stuff can do. A call center is unique in that is based off from call demands, using history and projections to see when calls are coming in every half hour and the patterns and trends are forever changing. I use simple formulas to determine a need. example: On average, agents answer 2.5 calls per half hour and we expect 245 calls between 7 and 730pm.... I tend to also use a lot of line graphs for visual displays to get a feel for day to day trends. How would your app fit with this style? You can answer me in PM if you don't want to clog up this thread with non-SEO stuff....

 

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[snowbank]

Most difficult? Probably the ones now with Fendza because there's a bunch of old established players in the game; I still made it to page 1 though on most and just getting started with my major attacks.

I don't focus on seo much and have pretty limited knowledge in it. Can you explain why the keywords you're targeting for Fendza are difficult. What process do you go through to determine if they are difficult and if they are easy? If someone asked me I wouldn't think those keywords were very difficult at all, so what am I missing?

 

[James Fake]

@CMMarlin

From my own experiences, I focused on one or two keywords at a time. That way I could generally track if my SEO work has been effective or not. Something I've noticed from my Google Webmaster Tools is that Google can tell 'variations' of keywords; like plural forms, other nicknames, etc. But usually I focus on that keyword and that alone, sometimes mixing up the order the words come in, but I don't deviate too far like using other words.

Speaking of PR updates, the Fendza site finally went to 3 then to 2 this past week from staying at 0 or N/A for the past year. So I think a PR update is rolling around as we speak. PR is really a guess; but my smartest guest would be this: say you have half a cup of juice and 1/8 vodka; and you add more juice to fill up the cup but leave the vodka at 1/8th. The strength of the vodka is diluted; that's what I think on PR, except that Google has added like 8 cups of juice (algorithm stuff). It's still a good signal that the website is 'trusted' by Google so probably has some decent domain authority, but other than that; I don't pay much attention to it. I can usually judge if a site is good or not by it's content and if I would personally link to it.

Not sure if it can handle the higher instances of fluctuations by hours/half hours like a call center, more designed for daily fluctuations like restaurants, retails stores, hospitals, etc. But who knows? I made the options pretty broad so you can customize it to any business needs/structure; will def shoot you a link once launched.



@snowbank -
Sure, the first indicator I use is the Keyword Tool by Google, generally you can get a sense of how important that keyword is by seeing it's competition in Adwords. The more competition in Adwords usually mean more folks are actively going to try to rank for it.

Then I'll search it and click on every site from 1-10. I'll take a look at what kind of content they are providing, and if it's helpful to the user or not. I'll use OpenSiteExplorer and Backlinks.net to get an idea of their links back to them. Then compete.com to see how their traffic is. Using those; I'll come up with a guess on how often they continue to just get natural links by being a good site with helpful content on that page.

Then I'll write out a plan to try to beat the #10; spend a few months and execute, and see where I'm at. I'll re-evaluate where I've gotten. Depending on the amount of work I put in, I can then get a better judgment on how hard it will be to eventually rank #1.

But at the end of the day; it's just making something more useful to a person searching for that term.

 

[valuegiver]

Everything is alright except no 5 which is submitting articles to directories. If you are a newbie, focus on creating a link bait post and do guest blogging and buying links from high PR sites (Yahoo directory).

In order of most effective link building:
1. Link bait via highly helpful blog aimed target market's indirect needs: time intensive
2. Viral materials (another type of link baiting)
3. Guest blogging on high PR sites
4. Blog commenting and adding value to a relevant site or one whose audience could use my product
5. Submitting articles to directories

 

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[CMCarlin]

@CMMarlin

From my own experiences, I focused on one or two keywords at a time. That way I could generally track if my SEO work has been effective or not. Something I've noticed from my Google Webmaster Tools is that Google can tell 'variations' of keywords; like plural forms, other nicknames, etc. But usually I focus on that keyword and that alone, sometimes mixing up the order the words come in, but I don't deviate too far like using other words.

Speaking of PR updates, the Fendza site finally went to 3 then to 2 this past week from staying at 0 or N/A for the past year. So I think a PR update is rolling around as we speak. PR is really a guess; but my smartest guest would be this: say you have half a cup of juice and 1/8 vodka; and you add more juice to fill up the cup but leave the vodka at 1/8th. The strength of the vodka is diluted; that's what I think on PR, except that Google has added like 8 cups of juice (algorithm stuff). It's still a good signal that the website is 'trusted' by Google so probably has some decent domain authority, but other than that; I don't pay much attention to it. I can usually judge if a site is good or not by it's content and if I would personally link to it.

Not sure if it can handle the higher instances of fluctuations by hours/half hours like a call center, more designed for daily fluctuations like restaurants, retails stores, hospitals, etc. But who knows? I made the options pretty broad so you can customize it to any business needs/structure; will def shoot you a link once launched.



@snowbank -
Sure, the first indicator I use is the Keyword Tool by Google, generally you can get a sense of how important that keyword is by seeing it's competition in Adwords. The more competition in Adwords usually mean more folks are actively going to try to rank for it.

Then I'll search it and click on every site from 1-10. I'll take a look at what kind of content they are providing, and if it's helpful to the user or not. I'll use OpenSiteExplorer and Backlinks.net to get an idea of their links back to them. Then compete.com to see how their traffic is. Using those; I'll come up with a guess on how often they continue to just get natural links by being a good site with helpful content on that page.

Then I'll write out a plan to try to beat the #10; spend a few months and execute, and see where I'm at. I'll re-evaluate where I've gotten. Depending on the amount of work I put in, I can then get a better judgment on how hard it will be to eventually rank #1.

But at the end of the day; it's just making something more useful to a person searching for that term.

Hmm, backlinks.net doesn't seem to be a backlinks site. I think your analysis of competition is very sound, thanks for sharing.

Have you ever used SEO spyglass? It's a paid program but I use the free version. It can give you an in depth analysis of a sites backlinks like PR, anchor text, dofollow or nofollow, IP address, country, even platform (i.e. blog vs forum) etc etc. This way, when looking at a sites backlink portfolio, you can see the percentage of targeted keywords, how varied the IP addresses are (are they getting backlinks from a few blogrolls or going for true IP diversity). Theres a lot more information it can give you and I highly recommend it.

Great to see that your site fluctuated in PR. Many folks I've talked to have said they haven't seen anything move in months.

Oh, and I signed up to your announcement list on fendza. Looking forward to checking it out. The call center has just doubled in capacity and we are on a hiring spree right now - excel can only scale so much before it becomes incredibly cumbersome.

 

[valuegiver]

SEO Spyglass is not accurate. Use Majestic SEO.

Hmm, backlinks.net doesn't seem to be a backlinks site. I think your analysis of competition is very sound, thanks for sharing.

Have you ever used SEO spyglass? It's a paid program but I use the free version. It can give you an in depth analysis of a sites backlinks like PR, anchor text, dofollow or nofollow, IP address, country, even platform (i.e. blog vs forum) etc etc. This way, when looking at a sites backlink portfolio, you can see the percentage of targeted keywords, how varied the IP addresses are (are they getting backlinks from a few blogrolls or going for true IP diversity). Theres a lot more information it can give you and I highly recommend it.

Great to see that your site fluctuated in PR. Many folks I've talked to have said they haven't seen anything move in months.

Oh, and I signed up to your announcement list on fendza. Looking forward to checking it out. The call center has just doubled in capacity and we are on a hiring spree right now - excel can only scale so much before it becomes incredibly cumbersome.

 

[CMCarlin]

I understand by more accurate you really mean "more links", correct? How does the free version of majestic display it's data? spyglass may not be the best tool but it does offer value for those wanting to dig deeper into a sites backlink portfolio by giving you a range of different metrics to look at. Thanks for the tip, but I'm curious as to why you recommend majestic over spyglass (I'm not partial to either, by the way)

 

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[valuegiver]

SEO Spyglass gets its data from Yahoo which is limited to 1000 links or so.

Majestic SEO crawls the entire internet.

Need I say more?

I understand by more accurate you really mean "more links", correct? How does the free version of majestic display it's data? spyglass may not be the best tool but it does offer value for those wanting to dig deeper into a sites backlink portfolio by giving you a range of different metrics to look at. Thanks for the tip, but I'm curious as to why you recommend majestic over spyglass (I'm not partial to either, by the way)

 

[CMCarlin]

Spyglass gets its data from many more sources other than just Yahoo site explorer. I'll look for a source (I can also look in the program but don't currently have access to it).

 

[littlekingaz]

How does competition for a keyword work??

 

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