Internet Babel

There’s a lot of speculation, worry and curiosity about the supposed upcoming so called ‘PageRank Downgrade’ meaning Google will get rid of PageRank altogether.

Some think it’s happening because of link farms, manipulation, link selling, John Chow. You name it. Here’s what I think… I couldn’t care less!

I know it’s all relevant in the context of link selling. And if you’re a webmaster who does sell links then you may be worried as your PR was one of the defining factors in link sales.

But, think about it. It’s just a number, the only reason it seems important is because Google are so huge. Google are the biggest search engine and one of the biggest sites on the net, they generate a monster income and are just… huge.

If they want to abolish PR, so be it. I could not care less. All I care about it providing quality content, making quality websites and trying to generate income. PR only seems relevant in link selling evaluation because we and Google have made it that way.

Solution = make it irrelevant.

Start selling based on quality and traffic.

PR has never mattered to me much to be honest. I think it just becomes an obsessive figure in people’s minds which they feel they must improve more and more. They worry about obscure little SEO details and make delusional accusations towards Google about lowering their PR due to this and that. It’s become almost a statistical paranoia!

I say, forget about it. Worry about quality, user experience and traffic. The rest will fall into place.

Goodbye Google PageRank!

I think one of the most instantly advantageous things you can do as a… blogger I suppose, is to anticipate what people will search for. Of course people are doing this more and more now so it’s alot harder to be the first there, but if you’re persistent and obsessive enough it can be done.

If you own a blog about TV say, think up all of the most popular worldwide TV shows possible, write them down and anticipate what people will search for in a week or a month. If you can do that before anyone else, you will usually land an instant top spot in the search engines when people do start searching for that because you were already there before it was being searched for.

Now obviously given that this isn’t anything new and alot of people do it these days you need to be quick. And maybe doing it with gigantically popular things isn’t always the best option as sometimes even if you get there first there will be so many people doing it and so much media coverage from large media sites that you may still not get there.

But, still experiment. Also try and find niche things that are still popular enough to be avidly searched for amongst a curve of people but not so popular that saturation is an instant give.

You can even take it to the extreme and start buying domains years before future events that you know will be huge, like the Olympics. Then start blogging on them way before anyone else.

I don’t do this enough myself either and actually the idea for this post actually sparked the intention of me following up with it so I will also start doing this more. I think it’s a great thing to do.

Since this is my first blog as I have always had targeted sites, this is my first experience with really diversing and typing naturally and often. And one primary thing i’ve noticed is how the best way to get ranked, well, is to just type for humans. It’s been said over and over and it’s true, don’t write to optimize for search engines because for a start it wont read completely naturally to the average person. And if it’s Internet pros reading your blog then it’ll be obvious and they’ll just read another blog. It wont become anodyne reading because it’ll be to formal and everyone writes like it, they try and drop in relevant keywords, they plan to. Which is fine, obviously optimize to a degree, SEO is a good thing. But I think focusing more on that than the issue of making your writing original and fresh is wrong.

If you write naturally and let it flow as it comes, it will seem spontaneous and fresh to people reading it therefore making it better to read. Which is the reason I don’t edit much at all once a post is finished. I type and let what comes out come out so it’s as spontaneously written as possible, doing this also helps your brain diverse as much as possible, naturally, whilst staying relevant therefore dropping in keywords naturally without noticing. Also you’d be surprised what people search for and what you can get picked up on maybe not because of PR or backlinks but simply because your content is so unique that Google prefers it to the copied, duped and predictable stuff.

I think alot of people these days try to apply too much complex SEO and do alot of manipulative techniques assuming that it’s really that hard to get high rankings. I’ve ranked #1 for targeted keywords using nothing but basic SEO. Here are a few things to remember with websites, basic SEO that will get you to the top, if the market is not too over saturated.

1. Domain Name – Buy a domain name, which is virally sound n by that I mean. Sounds natural to humans, don’t buy one purely for SEO strategy. Get one with one or two keywords, quite short.

2. Meta Tags – People seem to think these are useless now as if search engines discard them automatically because of all the malicious ways they’ve been used. They don’t, they simply have ways of assuming which meta tags are spam. It’s simple, do your meta tags properly, search engines regard them highly alot of the time still today if they’re not abused. Use a small number of very related keywords. Write a detailed, short, natural description. That’s it.

3. Good File Names – If you are building a purely html / css site. This can do wonders for the average site. Name your html files appropriately – simple and keyword orientated. Also sites usually rank better when keywords are uncluttered and appear in order. You’ll often find if a keyword appears first in a title it ranks higher. It can be that simple.

4. Good Browser Titles – Probably the most effective way to improve rankings. Decent browser titles, spell everything correctly and do not put unneeded keywords there. Simplicity is the key, it’s one of the primitive things that lets people know what the page is about. Write for humans but include keywords appropriately.

5. Quality, Unique Content – Don’t ever be tricked into thinking scraping content endlessly and paying for content creation will get you far. You might make a quick few dollars here and there but it will not last. Search engines are constantly weeding out trash sites with ‘duped’ content and they will continue to get smarter. So as they do, you should do to and the only way to get smarter is to start creating quality, unique content NOW so that in years to come, it’ll still be there. Still earning.

You don’t need to know much more. It’s really not that complicated, people just like to make out it is to sound smart and sell you pointless products. Follow these rules wholeheartedly and take them as rule of thumb. Focus, make free, quality content, monetize traffic and you will soon see results.

Rand Fishkin shows you how you can move people’s rankings down a few by exploiting Google’s love for Wikipedia!

Spotted on Shoemoney.com

Alot of people assume these days that Meta Tags are a waste of time. They aren’t, Google for example, quite often will use the Meta Description as key info for your site and it will sometimes display under your title on a results page.

But Don’t be fooled into thinking you can trick Google, they’re smart. They have to be, with spam, con and duplicate sites being pushed out more n more as the years go on, Google and all top search engines are constantly improving and getting smarter into recognizing and ignoring trash sites. So whatever you do, don’t go cramming your meta tags with absolute insane amounts of the same keyword or irrelevant keywords.

You need to write relevant, informative, keyword friendly (not spammy) type tags.

Description Tag:
<meta name=”description” content=”This should be a short-ish, relevant description about your site” />

Say for example, you owned a site on celebrity gossip, write something relevant and meaningful. Write for humans, because it’s likely humans will see it and they have a brain to!

Good Example:
<meta name=”description” content=”All the latest news on all your favourite celebrities. Pictures, videos, gossip and more, right here!” />

Now that’s fine, a perfectly readable, relevant description which will give searchers and the search engines an idea about your site.
Notice it’s not keyword crammed but keywords are mentioned a few times, casually and naturally.

Now lets look at the opposite;

Bad Example:
<meta name=”description” content=”Celebrity gossip! NEWS AND GOSSIP, celebrity gossip here! free videos, free stuff, celebrity news and gossip!!!!!!!” />

Now lets look at the Keyword Tag…

Keyword Tag:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”these should be, good, relevant, keywords, separated by, commas” />

Good Example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”celebrity gossip, eminem, madonna, celeb news, 50cent, celebrity fansite, news and gossip” />

That’s just a quick example of how keywords could be spread, they’re relevant, short and not over done. Primary keywords shouldn’t be repeated 100 times, it won’t make any difference. But mentioning a relevant keyword once, twice or even three times, naturally in amongst other relevant ones… could! Google will likely disregard the keyword meta of a site which is rammed with ‘of the moment’ keywords, keywords which do not relate to the site content and are just made to spam and cheat search engines.

And a bad example of a keyword tag for this type of site…

Bad Example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”CELEBRITIES, celebs, celebs, celeb gossip, CELEBS, CELEBS, free, free, free, money, free money, the simpsons, harry potter, harry pottttter, freeeeeeee, ceeelleeebss, CELEBRITIES!!!” />

BAD!

….

Description and Keyword tags are the most important, I wouldn’t worry about other possible meta tags like author.

If you use meta tags correctly, like they were first designed to be used like, you’d be surprised on how much they can help your rankings.
Relevancy and format is the key, do not be spammy or try to outsmart Google, it’s been done a million times before you tried it, they know the tricks before you think them up. Work with them, not against them!

Building decent backlinks to your site can be one of the most important strategies in gaining awareness, in relation to sites of your circle, higher rankings and crutiatlly, long term respect from the search engines.

But, the links you build should be on relevant higher ranking sites and not on link farms or useless directories. Relevant directory listings can definitely be a bonus but don’t focus too much on them, but stuff like DMOZ, Yahoo directory listings can be valuable.

So, how do you go about getting backlinks? well you can either pay for them or ask politely for a free link, simple as that. Just get a list of relevant sites to yours and ones which are at least PR3 depending on your own pagerank, but then again, a backlink is a backlink, so just get a decent list of relevant sites to begin.

Once you have a good list, go to each of these sites, find the contact page or find another way to find out who owns the site and email the webmaster asking for a link. Just say that you like their site and ask politely if they wouldn’t mind linking to you as you’re another good resource for that topic.

Now some people don’t just give away links willy nilly so you might end up in 1 of 4 scenarios, either

A: You get a response saying that they will link to you (perfect!).

B: You get a response asking for a reciprocal link.

C: You get a response asking for payment for a placement.

D: You get a straight no.

So if you get a straight up yes, that’s perfect; you’ve just gotten yourself a free backlink.

If you get a reply asking for a return link alot of people would say reciprocal links are pointless and cancel each other out, I’m not sure they entirely do but even if they do, depending on the traffic to the apposing site – it still may create a tiny bit more awareness / traffic to your site, so I would say it’s worth it. It surely can’t do any harm, so why not.

If you get a reply stating that he / she / they do not give out free backlinks and it will cost to have a link placed, ask how much, if they haven’t said so already.

Then evaluate if it’s worth it, go find out what sort of prices links are going for on certain PRs and if it’s even worth buying one on this site. Find out the sites traffic, age, rankings etc.

If you get a straight no then try replying back asking why, if they give no reason -maybe they just didn’t want to give out a free link, in which case either offer a return link or a payment (if it’s worth it).

Also, when asking for backlinks it’s important to get good anchor text. It’s been proven that anchor text links are pretty valuable long term these days on the web so you should get in there now. You should vary the text in which you ask your link to be named each time, but not so much and so broad that it could be mistaken as spam. Too much of exactly the same text could also be wrongly taken as inerlinking or cheating by the search engines so make sure you get good healthy text links, but not overloaded.

Say for example you own a website about sleeping problems, get a few links with the text ‘Can’t Sleep?’ or something like that, maybe some with the text ‘Sleeping Problems’ and then one or two with your actual site title.

A good cycle of healthy anchor text links should help remind Google etc that the backlinks are genuine.

A lot of people underestimate how effective a well written browser title is, in terms of SEO.

Seriously, do not underestimate this simple rule. A good browser title can be a significant boost in search engine rankings (especially Google and Yahoo).

So how to write a good browser title?

Well firstly capitalize the first letter of every word except prepositions (of, and etc).

I’m not sure if this benefits SEO in anyway but it’s correct grammar wise so will make your site more look slightly more professional to grammar geeks. Perception and conjecture based on image, layout, usability is key to the influence of a good site.

Anyway, the most important thing is keywords, obviously. But you don’t want to just ram pack the title with keywords in a spam fashion. Type the title naturally, not too long, not too short, just presentable and readable, write it for humans!

You just have to make sure it describes the page well so that the keywords in the title will match the keywords on the page and if you can, the page header.

An example:

Say your page is about health issues with smoking.

You’d have something like:

“Info and Help with Smoking Health Issues | Lung Caner | Smoking Kills!”

It’s good to sometimes include a question also as a lot of people type querys rather than just random keywords.

But remember, you need to make your title stand out in some way otherwise it will just get lumbered in with the rest, but don’t go to the other extreme as ending up on the spam end of things!