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Need Any SEO Advice? I'm here to help you

JagerMario

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Hi there,

1st you get the search engines to notice your website. So I recommend bookmarking your site on popular social bookmarking platforms such as

Digg
Mixx
Reddit
Delicious
Mr Wong

That will get it indexed quickly.

When using these bookmarking sites; should you make an account with your site name or is it better (less spamful) if you make it with a personal account?

Thanks for the Help,

Mario
 
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damien275x

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I think he means that if you have some bullshit blog or site that is absoulte crap, stop trying to spam it out to people who don't want to visit it. Man does that piss me off, when I visit a site that blows but ranks so highly. These kind of sites should be banned, especially garbage blogs that offer people 0 value and are run by somebody who doesn't want to help anyone, they just want to string two words together and then watch $$$ come in.

I've never bothered with "SEO" and my page doesn't even rank that high on Google. Almost 100% of my traffic comes from direct input of the URL into the address bar or facebook wall posts. I guess I sell a product though, and I'm not into writing blogs for money. What a boring slow way to make cash, too many people are doing this, why would you want to
 

Dan Da Man

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This thread started out with good advice, but the past few pages are full of bad advice and misinformation.

Tactics such as linkwheels and tier link building are horrible. Anything automated is garbage. There is such a thing as the sandbox and penalties. This has been confirmed by Google and seen by experienced SEO's, including myself.

These lazy attempts at SEO are very popular with the affiliate marketing crowd. This is the same crowd who is crying right now about loosing their rankings to manual penalties for "unnatural links" which were handed out a few months ago or algorithmic penalties from Google's Panda and Penguin updates. Their most popular solution for this issue? Trash the site and start with a new site. Obviously, not an option if your business relies on one main site.

You can play this game of trying to stay one step ahead of Google and pray that you don't loose a main source of revenue when Google does catch up to you. The other option is to generate real popularity to your site and build a real business. Real marketing, interesting content, a real social following, and good manual link building will generate revenue on its own AND get strong, long lasting rankings in Google.

I just don't understand the desire to keep spamming the internet with garbage. Google is trying to stop this. Why use these tactics? They will just keep rolling out updates to combat this stuff.

If you are using these tactics and you are doing well, good for you. But, I recommend that you start to treat your business like a business instead of a hobby. Stop being lazy and learn real marketing.

Oh gawd! Are you serious? You must work for google or have some affliliation for reinterating google's garbage. Automation is not garbage and if I can do something automated 1,000 times faster and cheaper then you can do manual and the output is the same, I would be stupid to do it manual.

It has nothing to do with being lazy and learn real marketing. The fact is that not everyone can be"not lazy" when it comes to SEO. Google has forced us to behave in such ways of using automated tools because simple white hat marketing does not work. And if it did, it is not very cost effective at all! I am sure you charge an arm and a leg for your little white hat google loving SEO tactics.

It also has nothing to do with staying ahead of google as well. If you had a site that was completely unique selling a unique product with a unique service that really caused people to go out of their way and link to you, then sure that is awesome! Most of us are not going to have some extremely unique service that will cause people to "naturally" link out to us. That is why we force google to give us attention by shoving links down it's throat.

This does not mean that we are not providing value or being "lazy" (obviously you don't understand automation) because we are providing tons of value. If I can't rank then who is going to find me to build links for me "naturally". Noone will!

Say I have a site selling stools. I have a great site providing value but I just sell ordinary stools. Now, people who are looking for stools are looking to just buy stools. Nothing else! Are they going to love that I wrote an awesome ebook on stools and made wonderful colorbook drawlings about my stools and the nice cool stool widget i just created? Hell no! They just want to buy.

Your experience seems to be very one sided and to say very popular in the "affiliate crowd" reiterates my point nicely. I did work for big companies such as "Linens & things" and very many others who still build links with automation even with a huge brand. Why? Because it works and it makes sense. Yes you have to be knowledgeable about what you are doing and no it is not completely safe but so is building any links.

Matt Cutts, is that you?
 
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Jeremy

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Really, you sell linkwheels as an SEO tactic to Linens n Things??? Wow, I guess we'll get to read about them getting a 90 day Google ban just like we did JC Penney...
 

JoeV

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I am not against link building. I think Google is crazy to think that only organic linking will work. You NEED to market a site and build backlinks. I am just against automated links that are nothing but garbage on the Internet. The output is not even close. You don't get the same backlinks from automated tools as you do manual.

Google IS getting better at finding these. They don't want them. So, yes, it is or will be a game to stay a step ahead of Google. TONS of sites that use these tactics were crushed in the past 12 months.

There is a place for this automated link building. That place is affiliate marketing. The margins for sites that rely on adsense or affiliate commissions is not high enough to invest into SEO. I don't consider this a real business. I sold my affiliate marketing business in 2008 because it was way to unstable and real companies are pushing affiliates out.

The good thing about building a lot of small affiliate sites is you can throw them away and start over. You can't throw out a domain where you built a legit business and start over with a new domain.

Sure, major sites that have a boat load of authority can't really be hurt by some automated links. But, lets be realistic, most sites don't have the authority to hold up if they have a bunch of automated links and Google brings out more updates to sniff these out. This is why "negative seo" is becoming such big talk. Many sites can be hurt with automated link building. Google has made it easier than ever after the latest updates. As Google continues to roll out more updates to devalue automated links, automated links will become more and more harmful to the average site.

continued.............
 

JoeV

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You can't deny it. You kind of admit it in your post. Google HATES automated links, spun content and fake sites. They are doing everything they can to punish sites that use these... so why use them? You know it will bite you in the a$$ eventually.

There are ways to rank well without automated links. What I find funny is people using automated links to generate thousands of links for keywords, but the competition is ranking for those keywords with only a few thousand links which were built over a year or two, not a week or two.

You DON'T need thousands of links in a couple weeks to rank for good keywords. People need to try to stop spamming the internet with links and garbage content and first do backlink analysis of the top 10 sites for a variety of keywords they want to rank for. See what the competition has and one up them by throwing in a few more high authority links or a better quality site.

People don't need as many links as they think. It is lack of knowledge that is fueling this and you know it. People do not even know how to do basic analysis of the competition and their marketing efforts to see why they rank. Instead they are taken in by the snake-oil salesman who is selling thousands of links and promising top rankings.

Google created this problem in the beginning. It was an arms race to get links. Today it is different. Quality content and links over link quantity. If you want to rank in Google in the long term, this is the direction you must go...
 
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Dan Da Man

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You can't deny it. You kind of admit it in your post. Google HATES automated links, spun content and fake sites. They are doing everything they can to punish sites that use these... so why use them? You know it will bite you in the a$$ eventually.

There are ways to rank well without automated links. What I find funny is people using automated links to generate thousands of links for keywords, but the competition is ranking for those keywords with only a few thousand links which were built over a year or two, not a week or two.

You DON'T need thousands of links in a couple weeks to rank for good keywords. People need to try to stop spamming the internet with links and garbage content and first do backlink analysis of the top 10 sites for a variety of keywords they want to rank for. See what the competition has and one up them by throwing in a few more high authority links or a better quality site.

People don't need as many links as they think. It is lack of knowledge that is fueling this and you know it. People do not even know how to do basic analysis of the competition and their marketing efforts to see why they rank. Instead they are taken in by the snake-oil salesman who is selling thousands of links and promising top rankings.

Google created this problem in the beginning. It was an arms race to get links. Today it is different. Quality content and links over link quantity. If you want to rank in Google in the long term, this is the direction you must go...

Well, I do e-commerce which is not affiliate but I guess you can say it is similar. And yes, it is not wise for me to invest in trying to do "real" SEO for sites that don't really garner much attention in the natural organic link building world. But one thing i can tell you, is yes. Anything that can be done manually can be done automated. Trust me this is where you may not have experience but I know some programmers who can produce blog posts that are highly readable, highly unique with embedded videos and pictures and can create them by the tens of thousands. If Google cannot decipher if it is manual or not (which it cannot because you and I cannot), then how would you be able to compete with me if you were building the same manual links?

Trust me, there is a lazy way to automate your backlinks and there is a smart, future oriented way to build backlinks. I agree that guest posting and all that stuff is cool but even then those tactics are not for sure. Google doesn't like any sites getting organic traffic. You and I both know that Google is only out to make money and if they could eliminate all of the organic listing they would. BUt we know that cannot.

Google has forced businesses to resort to such tactics. I have only had one site hit so far (knock on wood) because I don't get lazy and I make sure that my site provides value which it does. At the end of the day that is all that matters right?
 

Danny G

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Matt Cutts, is that you?

OMG hahahahaha hilarious :D hahaha

I read the whole thread, it took me sometime but I did read it and I had an issue too. Now, it's not like I haven't been in SEO game, actually I work as a link builder (it's a temporary job and as soon as my fastlane goes in the right direction I'm out of working for other people and working for myself only).

So, my website is a bit complicated. It's all based on PHP & MySQL, it's not any kind of a CMS.
It has like 20 pages that are manually done and everything. Now, since It's global website and it generates 1 pages based on the Country, State (if available), City & Service type!

And when a customer in let's say Australia writes in google "XYZ service melbourne" my website should rank with URL something like this

website.com/world/XYZ/Australia/Victoria/Melbourne

So far cool. Where the issue comes ?! - Now since there are over ... I have no idea 2-3 millions of pages (since there are so many countries/states/cities and service types) every single page have as a constant same variables => countries/states/cities and service types and the other text stays absolutely the same.

It's just mathematically impossible to create manually that many unique pages.

What do you think about that. Is there a way out? I don't want google to hit that as a duplicate or low quality content.

The business is super serious and I know it will take a lot of time and everything but I am willing to make as much sacrifices as needed to make it run as smoothly as possible. The service is free for the visitors. I give value and solve problem. (Just trying to give what my competitors don't do and what market needs)

I am open for discussion on this. Thanks in advance.
 

Danny G

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Insert "alt" tag in the images since google don't know what the image is about, it only read the code and if you have an image with red apples your alt tag should be alt="red apples" :)


Whats the best way to optimize SEO on images?
 
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JaySoriano

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What initial linkbuilding do you do for a new website? List of directories, profiles, etc.
 

Ali

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I've been spending endless hours to improve my google ranking but with no visible results. I came across some SEO softwares like iBusiness Promoter, SEO Studio and Web CEO. Some of them claim that they can put your website in the top 10 list with money back guarantee. Do you think it's a good investment? do I have to spend another round of endless hours following the instructions generated by these software or will they do most of the job for me?

Thanks in Advance
 

hackersmovie

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Hey Ali, I wouldn't trust any software that "guarantees" any SEO results. They would seem suspect to me. I offer seo services and have helped several Fastlane members you can visit my site at: Gold Medal SEO Let me know if you have any other questions.
 
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lookingahead

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So I was watching an overview from "The Smart Passive Income Blog" and it was on a 40 day backlinking strategy to get up into the top spots on the SERP's. Well one of the things was using web 2.0 properties to help get backlinks, my question is, what if the niche site is set up on wordpress. Can you still use wordpress/squidoo etc. to help get backlinks or would it put up a red flag?
 

JasonR

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Is there a *reliable* tool that shows you what page you're ranked on Google / Bing / Yahoo for certain keywords? The online ones I've came across don't seem to be very reliable / up to date.

SeoMOZ paid tools will also do this for you. They have a free 30-day trial.
 

theBiz

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target="_blank” .............. does this cause a problem for seo when you have this for links on your site? Even aside from link juice does it have any cons?
 
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RingoLi

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Hi, I owned an online marketing in Hong Kong, recently, we would like to develop our service on reputation management, but no idea on what to do.

Do you have any experience to share?

Ringo
 

ari_ari

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Hi, I owned an online marketing in Hong Kong, recently, we would like to develop our service on reputation management, but no idea on what to do.

Do you have any experience to share?

Ringo
Ringo
Reputation Management is reverse SEO. You're trying to knock down bad results by pushing up neutral or positive results on powerful domains + sites you own.
So say you had a client named John Smith who was a congressman and a rapist. You want to push down all the news stories out of the top 100 if possible, and rank his home page, the nice article about him giving charity, maybe a few other domains he owns, copies of speeches he's given, his wife's practice, etc.
 

RingoLi

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Exactly what we are doing now, we want to promote it but as you know it is a kind of sensitive, so we cannot promote it in low profile.

At the moment, we just relies on telling agent or strategic partner, so that we can work together.
 
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qvantage

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Hi Lighthouse,

Thank you for your questions, I will answer them for you.

Where do you suggest looking for good quality links?

Firstly you need to define what a good quality link is. In an ideal world you would want a link that is

. From a related website
. On a high PR (IE. Over 5) PAGE (not just domain PR)
. On a domain with good Moztrust/Trustrank
. Contextually inserted amongst a group of semantically related phrases
. From a website with high traffic (to refer traffic to you)

The reality is that these types of links are extremely hard to come by. Sometimes you get them but they are very rare. Even if you get a link from a domain that is high PR it is very unlikely that the page has PR. So you need to generate them yourself, some ways of doing this are

. Contacting webmasters and similar niches and offering content on thier websites in exchange for links.
. Utilising a high pr blog network (there are many).
. Getting content on high PR domains ie technorati and leeching off their trust and authority.
. If you have the budget, preparing and then aggressively marketing quality content to attract natural links.

However you should never wait for people to link to you, no matter how interesting and useful your website is, you need to generate the links yourself, the quickest a simple way is high pr blog networks which in my testing have yielded fantastic results.

What is your general SEO strategy?

Make sure that the website can actually be crawled (ie not blocked by robots.txt, robots meta etc), create a highly optimised page, aggressively build links to it with 90% exact match anchor text.

So if you want to rank for "how to become a millionaire" I would create a page on the website, optimise it perfectly for that keywords and then build links from a huge range of website on different block c ip addresses with the anchor text "how to become a millionaire" no matter what anyone says at the moment getting the correct anchor text in the backlink still makes a big difference (although you should mix it up a bit to look more natural). Also you always want to add original content to your site to make it as relevant as possible to the search engines.

When starting a new site, what is your typical plan of attack from getting it indexed to getting it to rank for keywords?

Social bookmarking gets pages indexed very quickly, so i always start with social bookmarking. Then I would do some foundation link building, directory submissions, press releases, articles submissions, blog commenting, forum interaction, guest blog posting, build up a good backlink profile. After this I would turn up the heat on the link building and watch the page reach the top :cool:

How do you feel about recent algorithm changes @ google?

I think Google have been under a lot of pressure to appear like they are cleaning up the search engines. People have been gaming Google for a long time and publications too important for Google to ignore started making a noise so Google responded. I see the recent panda/farmer as a good thing because in theory they are trying to clean up some of the low quality results however unfortunatley there has been a lot of collateral damage so webmasters who have spent years building up really useful sites with lots of original content have been causalities, which I think is sad. But in general i think it is a good thing but more to do with Google being pressured into it . Just my opinion.

Hope that helps.

Definitely, this will help me lot and according to my perception you have more knowledge of SEO. Here i knew that what's the real meaning of high quality links.
 

lovetravelbass

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Hi there, I'm running a blog in Japan. Right now it's only aimed at foreigners and tourists, but when I get enough content and readership, I want to have the ability for someone to choose the "Japanese" version of the site.

In your opinion, what is better for SEO?

To have it as www.mysite.com/ja

or

www.mysitename.jp

With the .jp, my understanding is that I would have to re-create the site and that a .jp is worse for SEO. This is only based on random rumors- any chance you could verify this?
 

MVDH

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Hi there, I'm running a blog in Japan. Right now it's only aimed at foreigners and tourists, but when I get enough content and readership, I want to have the ability for someone to choose the "Japanese" version of the site.

In your opinion, what is better for SEO?

To have it as www.mysite.com/ja

or

www.mysitename.jp

With the .jp, my understanding is that I would have to re-create the site and that a .jp is worse for SEO. This is only based on random rumors- any chance you could verify this?

It depends, generally TLD are created to target people within that specific country.. having said that, my personal choice would be to make a .com where you create location specific content for each of the countries your targeting... let me explain.

You have a website... www.mysite.com (this might be your default site) however, as you explained, you want to have content targeted for different countries, you can do these (despite having to write a lot of content) with properly configuring hreflang tags so you can tell the search engine which version should show up where.

Let's look at the hreflang - <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.mysite.com/" />

The important parts that make up a hreflang are hreflang="x-default" (this is where you specificy "language-country".. e.g. "en-us" is for the english speaking people in the United States "jp-jp" would be for Japanese speaking people in Japan.

The second item of importance is the href="http://www.mysite.com/" (this is where you specify the page that relates to the language and country settings you specified in the "hreflang" tag.)

Here are some examples

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.mysite.com/" /> - this would go on your home page.. if all else fails.. default to this page

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://www.mysite.com/GB/" /> - this page would target the english speaking people in GB (with content relevant to GB)

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="jp-jp" href="http://www.mysite.com/jp/" /> - this page would contain content in Japanese for the Japanese consumer

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="http://www.mysite.com/fr/" /> - this page would contain content in French for the French consumer

It's a lot to take in, but it's quiet simple once you get your head around it.
 
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MVDH

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target="_blank” .............. does this cause a problem for seo when you have this for links on your site? Even aside from link juice does it have any cons?

Generally, target="_blank" is used when linking to external websites, when users are on your site, the last thing you want them to do is open another browser to just visit pages with your website, it creates a bad UX.
 

MVDH

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So I was watching an overview from "The Smart Passive Income Blog" and it was on a 40 day backlinking strategy to get up into the top spots on the SERP's. Well one of the things was using web 2.0 properties to help get backlinks, my question is, what if the niche site is set up on wordpress. Can you still use wordpress/squidoo etc. to help get backlinks or would it put up a red flag?

The whole concept of "using web2.0 properties" is a red flag to me.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to playing nice with the search engines.. web2.0 properties are free for people to sign up an do what they want.. If you were Google.. does it make sense to reward that type of behaviour (getting links from those sites)?

When "link building", ask yourself this, if someone at Google came along and saw this link... would they approve or disapprove?

It is better for you to get out of the "link building" mindset.. try focusing on actually contributing relevant and interesting content about your market.. Imagine writing a blog post about whatever industry you're in for a local newspaper.. having a link from a local newspaper not only goes far beyond what any web2.0 link would get you, but could actually provide you with referral traffic, sales, $$...

Now, again, ask yourself.. should I be focusing on quick link schemes OR should I focus my time on creating relationships with people/blogs/websites that influence the people that ultimately buy my product?
 

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