Thanks Cole, great post, Forgive me for chiming in late... I have not read all the posts, just Coles, but hope to provide some additional insight.
Something else that is widely overlooked in SEO, and quite possibly the single most important thing you can do for a website is relevant back links. Despite the common theory of "Content is King," and fretting over title tags, meta keywords, keyword density, and latent semantics... If you focus on your "popularity" (not talking about PR here)... your SEO rankings will start soaring. The important factors: Relevancy, Frequency and No Link Farms/swapping. The high level thought here is, its not what YOU think your site is good for, or want it to be good for, it's what others PERCEIVE your site to be good for. When people start linking to you for specific terms... Google perceives that you are an authority on the subject because someone is referring to you. Links back to your site should be like this: <a href="http://yoursite.com/";>keyword or phrase here</a>. You should focus on pages that are already "popular" and drive more links to those pages. Now don't get me wrong, content is still important, but IMHO, "Content is Queen, and Popularity (or backlinks) is King." I consider content a means for converting your visitor to some ultimate action. The backlinks are to drive the traffic that needs to be converted. Now, for a bad metaphor, the Bishop (who councils the king and queen) is relevance. Both Content and Links need to be relevant for the greatest impact to occur. The other big factor surrounds who is linking to you, other "Authority" sites linking to you have significant more weight in your ranking then say the crumb snatcher websites linking to you. Quality over Quantity will often have substantial impact. Anyway... Cheers all.. ~chad On 5/1/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
hi Everyone, I've done a ton of SEO (not to be confused with SEM, Search Engine Marketing). >> SEO is Search Engine Optimization. Much of it is black magic and/or >> rain dancing. Black Magic. Sounds like the industry term "black hat", which is a major no-no. Ever heard of cloaking? Just don't go there. Rain Dancing. Sounds like "gray hat" to me, which is you are purposely tweaking your code to get better rank, like ridiculous amounts keyword density, without corresponding content. Not illegal, but definitely flirting. >> The bottom line in SEO, as far as I'm concerned, is that if you have >> solid content, well-written (spelled right and grammatically correct) Misspellings are good to put in your keywords meta tag only. To get the most of "organic" seo, follow the published guidelines for the engines you're trying for. I also subscribe to some seo newsletters, which are always full of good advice. You know, have a good title, not "Untitled1.html", which totally makes me crazy when I see it. I'd also say take advantage of the new specs at sitemap.org, as the big three are all using that now. > Sure, some will > promise you page ranks and ask you to do questionable things, but > others will make good suggestions like using dashes in your URLs rather > than underscores, or trying to use keywords in titles. Do nothing questionable, or risk getting your domain banned. I'm not kidding. Even the experts are arguing amoungst themselves over dashes. For fun, check out this recent GREAT article: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors > ethically questionable nor false promises. Whoo-boy, you aint kidding. Read the fine print. The best use of external experts is SEM. If you don't know html well, okay, spring for some seo work. Otherwise, do a little reading, save a lot of money, and avoid ANY black magic or rain dancing. -- Cole _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
-- /--------------------------/ Chad Sollis [EMAIL PROTECTED] 801.792.7651 _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
