Why this buisiness is depressing

I have always been sort of depressed by the thought of manually optimizing web-pages so im usually very active in places where the blackhatters hang out. On these forums you wont find any nonsense like building links manually though it can be just ebout as effective as spamming blogs and guestbooks. Google bombs come and go all the time, but few of them manage to really push a site anywhere.

The things i concentrate on are first and formost the content of the site, next the structure and markup, headers, etc. But you just cant rule out offpage SEO in the competitive areas of the web.

Im tired of doing all the leg work my self, and while i used to be against spam, i now find my self searching for places where the fence is lowest. Some of the tools would include automatic link submitters, and profile creation tools. The problem is that these tools are often bulky, a pain in the ass to setup, and usually not free or to be found via pirate sites.

So what do someone like me do ? Well so far ive been doing stuff mostly manually, and only tested a few of these lazy-man tools. What i found to be more useful, is free seo addons for firefox, which tells me the pagerank of pages in google, amongst other things. So in short. – I know what to search for to find pages where i can place my links without ever getting noticed. These are long lasting links which are likely to last for at least 1 to 2 years (perhaps even longer)

The problem that we face is that most sites are using nofollow on links placed by users, this means that we are left with either making our own spam sites or buying the links from other webmasters which quite simply cost to much. Per social media will be more important when optimizing pages in the future, at least for us blackhatters. Who knows?

Writers Block and SEOs

Can SEOs really suffer from writers block? Sure we can!

If we spend time doing black-hat stuff, such as submitting links to social sites, then we may suffer fairly easily from writers block. After all, we do have to think about alternative ways to write descriptions for our clients content. Not only that, we may also need to hide our activities, within well established accounts. This is where many of us fail, and resort to short-term techniques, like automated comment spamming.

Its tiresome to work with SEO, but its also fun to watch your pages go up in the SERPs.

Writers block may show it self in many fields, not just writing. Developers can suffer from the same blockade when they feel overwhelmed by the task they face, or when they feel stressed because they have to much work would like to do, and/or because they may be confused as of where to begin. There can be many contributing factors to writers block, but this is where its important to stay calm and try to relax.

How to compete with Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most annoying competitors, because you can’t really do anything about them.

Sites like Wikipedia are quickly steeling the top spots on the SERPS, and its unfair, its annoying, its down right depressing in some cases. And just why you might want to ask? Well apparently due to their domain “authority” being much higher then the typical website.

So what can you do about it?

Well, this is a really hard one to crack. You can’t do anything as a whitehat about it, but you can as a blackhat.

While i won’t give you any direct hints in this blog, i can mention the keywords. Being linkbuilding, and article submission.

I’m told that articles from wikipedia, should be pretty easy to beat using blackhat techniques, mostly since they don’t have that many incoming links, which especially holds true for newer articles.

Idiots who run social websites

I’m not sure how to put this, since I’m somewhat baffled about the cases.

As a fairly aggressive SEO, i use all the tools that i can find. Some tools work, others do not. But not because they are under penalty or anything like that.
No. Because their owners are utterly ignorant morons.

One such sites i believe is bizsugar, where basically most of what is posted is useless spam. I tried submitting an article from one of my own sites, which is dedicated to SEO, but my account got insta banned. What is really funny about this, is that the site in question is listed in dmoz, don’t have ads, or any affiliate links, or other distracting bullshit. (Unlike other sites that are submitted)

To top things off, this site also runs on a decent CMS engine, which was developed by some of the best minds in the industry (not naming any names). I’m sure a lot of you have similar weird cases, that we likely never really solve. I would really like to know why in the above case, (as well as quite a few unrelated cases).

I find it somewhat troubling that anyone can create a social website, and chose to reject and accept whatever they want. Most of these sites are not even run by real companies, but nothing more then wannabe internet Gurus, who don’t have what it takes to create quality content on their own. This holds true in most the cases, since you need quality content to get traffic. An easy way around this, is to open up a social site, preferably a dofollow one, so that you can catch the attention of the SEO world.

They are really trying to milk a dead cow here. Its very few people who make it to the top in this industry, Mack Zuckerberg is one of them. You don’t get anywhere just from running yet another social site, other then the brief attention from SEOs. Consider this you morons, i wouldn’t personally consider submitting anything to your sites, unless it was a decent quality dofollow site like dzone, where people actually do participate.

Most nofollow sites would have to be on the level of Facebook and Twitter before i would consider spending time on them, and thats purely for the attention.

So what is the deal about these sites? What are the intentions of its owners? My impression is that they often spend more time validating links, then they do on innovation and development of their sites, and usually end up with a spam index of no-name “want-to-make-money-online” beginners.

New elements in HTML5 good for SEO?

Today i read about some of the new elements in HTML5, and was thinking if these where good for SEO.

My conclusion so far is a bold no. Search engines already pick up content on websites, and manages to get relevant keywords and keyphrases, i don’t think the ability to easier tell the navigation apart from the content, is going to help them much in deciding the relevancy, this might be the case in the future though.

The navigation can make up a good chunk of a website, and mess with the keywords/relevancy of a site, but only if search engines don’t know that its the navigation column. They have ways to figure this out i believe, but the html nav tag might make it easier.

The other elements that i read about, is not really of much help to SEO. Its always a good idea to aim for semantic markup, and valid pages. But to be honest, this doesn’t really matter as much as some novice SEOS make it sound like. Google stated so them self in one of the videos on youtube.

The article tag is a nice addition to our arsenal, and used together with the section tag, it may even improve semantics of our site. I just don’t think this will have any major impact on your rankings, neither positive or negative. Other tags, like header and footer, seems more to be bloat-tags, after all, why would anyone want a semantic meaning on header and footers?

Don’t get me wrong, HTML5 is very interesting, and has some very useful APIS, but aside from that, its all hype, with less to nothing to back it up.

SEO at its CORE Keywords and Keyphrases

When you have worked with SEO as long as i have, you will obtain a more casual look at things, right and wrong in the industry if you will.

Search engines are not always fair in their rankings. But thinking that getting a bunch of incoming links to a page is the best approach, is misleading at least.

A newer Tutorial on Brugbart hails the content of a website as the most important factor, and i must agree on that. Of cause you can do so much to manipulate the search results, but the effects compared to that of having content that rules is nearly nothing, you got to execute such schemes on a regular basics to keep the traffic rolling in on your sites. What really seem to do the trick though, is by far the content of a page.

The advise about Keywords and Keyphrases is so good, and so legit at the same time, that even Google has recommended that you really think about the content on your site, think about the search phrases that people use to find your site. This put emphasis to the message, that content is king!

The keywords meta tag is rather useless, i find it funny how so many novice SEOS still include it, using the argument that it doesn’t hurt. Well it sure doesn’t do any good either! Monta Out!

Keywords and Keyphrases

The arguments i get into continuously

Some “SEO Experts” like to blindly follow everything google says, and quote them on it everywhere that they get the chance, it makes them look like ”experts” since they have an official statement from somewhere to quote. But truth is they simply lack the ability to think on their own, and that is also why their business potential will suffer!

I’ve gotten lots of pages to rank in the top 10, for their specific keywords, and in my experience for SEO to have beneficial effects, depending on trends amongst searchers in the specific niche. You either need lots of pages in the top 10, or you need to rank in the top 5 results.

Many SEOs claim that they are able to make your site rank in the top 10 results, well that’s not useful for the most part, unless you got a lot of pages, (and we are talking hundreds here). The traffic you get from being number 7-9 in the results is very limited, i got a website with a few hundreds of pages listed, which only gets about 10-20 visitors a month, for some of the specific keywords.

This again depends on the number of people who searches for the specific content, but also on trends among those searchers. Some searchers will look on results further down, and may even go through multiple of pages. But the majority will click either of the first 1-5 results on the first page. Some niches have more people of that latter group of people. But this can change overnight, and we SEOs, need to change with it if we want to stay on top!

That is why i chose to name this blog “tactical agility”. The definition of agility:

Agility is the ability to change the body’s position efficiently, and requires the integration of isolated movement skills using a combination of balance, coordination, speed, reflexes, strength, endurance,and stamina.

And that definition almost describes the work of a successful SEO to perfection, in a such degree that I’d might even dare to call it the truth. But as this is the current case, it might not be tomorrow, search engines are also at an early stage of development. The whole idea of search may have changed in 10 years from now.

We might not even be able to manipulate future search engines as SEOs, but currently its true for the profession. An SEO who lacks Agility, is only able to provide limited services. While an SEO with Agility will be able to get any page to rank well!

Finally, tactical Agility will enable us to create tactics for specific pages, change those tactics when needed, and hence maintain their placement in the  search results.

The arguments i get into on SEO Forums

I often get into arguments on SEO Forums, I’m sometimes somewhat of a black hat, but that is not saying that i don’t have an idea about right and wrong.

I would never try to optimize a page if it wasn’t of some value to users, that is why i first and foremost recommend that you work on your content, make sure that it actually is better then your competitor.

If you do some limited black-hat along white-hat SEO, then you will quickly get to rank on your keywords. But you also risk that google says “hay this looks suspicious, lets have a look at this site”. That’s why its a good idea to make sure that your content actually also is better then that of your competitors, because chances are that google will leave you be, if they consider your site to be of value.

But this is just my “opinion” of my own website, you might think, it doesn’t have to be what other think of my site.

This may very well be true, but this is also where you make the biggest mistake any business owner can make. First and foremost, there are facts, the world dose not consist of “opinions” alone, “opinions” are wrong, but the truth is fact.

It starts to get easier when you begin to think this way, it gets you closer to the truth, rather then the “opinions”. You don’t care about “opinions” as a successful SEO, because then you’d might as well close your business. You can however include them in your considerations, there is a difference!

Remember, the wisest of men follow their own directions, and they trust no one but god alone.

 

In this case, its about paid links. Google is unlikely to punish a site for having paid links, it may still happen in some circumstances. But if your site is of overall good quality, and in good standing, then its unlikely.

Some SEOs don’t care about the quality of the sites that they promote, they spam links everywhere, and most importantly, they buy links, and expect results. You can’t expect results as a SEO, but you can do your part, after which the rest is up to the search engines.

I’m not directly against paid links, because its still perfectly justifiable way to make money on your website. You should just make sure that you wouldn’t accept just any website asking for a link. Be sure that those you sell your links to, are sites that you can agree on, for whatever they are about.

The places where paid links becomes a problem, is where irresponsible SEOs and/or website owners, use them to promote their spammy sites, or carelessly use them to make money. Just because a site has paid links, is no reason not to include it in the search results, and is also very unlikely to harm the site in any way, given that it meets before mentioned guidelines.

So the big question is, is it okay to sell links on your website? Yes, but you should make sure that you actually only accept the sites, of which you would recommend to your users for free, in fact, such links should be dofollow links, regardless of they are paid or not. Links are after all the primerey method search engines use to rank sites, so it would only harm the results to make them nofollow.

The reason google doesn’t mention the exceptions, is that SEOs and website owners, could just use it as an excuse to buy or sell links, and they obviously don’t want that to happen. So whether you buy or sell links, be sure that your site, and the ones you accept, are of value to users.

More about this in my next post.

A Warning About Paid Links

Several SEO related sites are starting to recommend that you avoid paid links, claiming that its better to focus on the content before you consider linkbuilding tactics.

And i agree completely, the content is far more important then the links. You should focus on the On Page Optimizations, alongside your Content. After all you would want your site to actually be useful for visitors. The quality of your content comes first, after that you may consider linkbuilding tactics, to increase your ranking.

On page optimizations would include, considerations regarding usage of the html title element, the structure of your html and so on. These are again topics which i will cover in future posts, have fun optimizing!

Im not saying that you should spam your site. Im saying that you should consider submitting it to relevant directories, ask business partners to link to you, and consider to ask webmasters of relevant sites, to link back to you. One way to do this, would be to sign up on relevant forums, and inform the moderators about your site, they just might find it useful enough to include it in sticky threads.

You can also submit your site to digg, dzone, and stumbleupon. Etc. There are many SEO related forums where you can find links to other social bookmarking sites, so i wont post a list of links for you here. But you should consider checking out sitepoint, which is a site focused at SEO.

Hello Monta Readers

This is my first post on this Blog. So let me start by telling a bit about my self, and what im working with.

As of around 2007, ive been working as a developer of a larger web2.0 styled site, where i post tutorials and articles. The site went live somewhat in 2008, and has continued to grow ever since. Mainly thanks to my own effort at promoting the site, both through directory submissions, and forum posts. Im entirely self-thought, which makes this quite an achievement.

Im only just starting to gain a bit of revenue from advertising on the site, despite its over a year old, and despite having several hundreds pages on the site, all with either affiliate links and or AdSense. I got around 5k visitors / month, and its still growing as we speak.

Now that i rank within the top 10 in google, for most my keywords, i mostly try to optimize existing pages, and improve the quality of the content. Over the past year or so, ive also applied a number of changes to increase the ctr from search engines. Ranking in the top 10 dose provide a few visitors, but still not quite enough, thats why im still looking into ways to increase my ctr.

One way that ive been doing this, is by using the meta description tags, so far its still to early to tell if it works for my website. But i hope that it eventually will help, like it did for many other websites.

Feel free to check out the links that ive included in the right column, those include some of the websites that i use the most.