SEO Strategy - Incoming Links and SEO Strategy

If you truly want your site to succeed in the search engines, a major part of your SEO strategy must focus on the importance of incoming links. The process of submitting your site to the search engines can take from a few weeks to several months. However, even a new site will be indexed rapidly, if it has incoming links.




Google explains that, "The best way to ensure Google finds your site, is for your pages to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly."

 

List of my favorite tools

List of my favorite tools:
Page Rank

Rank Checker (Ranking Tool) - Get a overview of your website's ranking

PageRank Lookup (PageRank Lookup - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - check the PageRank for a website

Google PageRank Prediction (PageRank Prediction - Predict Page Rank Predictor) - check predicted PR of a site

Multi-Rank Checker (Rank Checker) - View your Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking in bulk

PageRank Checker (PageRank Checker - Check Your Google Page Rank) - View your Google PageRank on different Google servers

Links related

Reciprocal Link Check (Reciprocal Link Checker) - check whether your link partners are linking back to your website

Link Popularity Checker (LinkWorth | LinkQuote - Text Link Quote) - a popularity score given to a website based on inbound links

LinkPrice Lookup (LinkWorth | LinkQuote - Text Link Quote) - check the price of your link
Link Price Calculator (Link Price Calculator) - another tool for checking the price of links

Link Checker (http://www.ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/tools/checklink.pl) - check your links to see if it's still valid or not

Link Popularity (Link Popularity - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - checks the total number of web pages which link to a website

Link Price Calculator (Link Price Calculator - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - help to determine the approximate amount you should be paying (or charging) per month for a text link (ad) from each and every page of the specified website

Site Link Analyzer (Site Link Analyzer - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - analyze a given web page and return a table of data containing columns of outbound links and their associated anchor text

URL Rewriting (URL Rewriting - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - convert dynamic URLs into static looking HTML URLs

Link Extractor (Link Extractor) - Extract links from a specific web page

Link Shortener (Link Shortener - Short/Shortcut Link - Hits Counter) - shorten a web address

Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer (http://www.webconfs.comURLnchor-text-analysis.php) - check link text used by your backlinks to Link to your website

Keyword related

Keyword Verification (Search Engine Placement Check - Marketleap Search Engine Verification Tool) - checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword

Keyword Density Analyser (Mark Horrell - Keyword density analyser) - another SEO tools for keywords

Keyword Cloud (Keyword Cloud - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - a visual representation of keywords used on a website

Keyword Density (Keyword Density - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - another SEO tool for checking keyword density

Keyword Difficulty Check (Keyword Difficulty Check - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - see how difficult it would be to rank for specific keywords or phrases

Keyword Optimizer (Keyword Optimizer - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization) - optimizer your keywords with this tool

Keyword Suggestion (Keyword Suggestion Tool) - Find related keywords matching your search


Sitemap

XML-Sitemaps (Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator) - Build your Site Map online (XML, ROR, Text, HTML)

Gsitecrawler (Google Sitemap Generator for Windows :: GSiteCrawler) - Google (and Yahoo!) Sitemap Generator for Windows

Validate XML Sitemap (Google XML Sitemap Validator - XML Sitemaps Generator) - Search Engine Optimizion Tool for validating your xml sitemaps

Search Engines

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) - tells you everything about your visitors

Google Banned Checker (http://www.iwebtool.com/google_banned) - check whether a site is banned by Google or not

Search Engine Bot Simulator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/se-bot-simulator.html) - SEO Tool to simulate search engine parsing of webpages and display discovered links.

Indexed pages (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/indexed-pages/) - check the no. of indexed pages for your blog

Spider Simulator (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/) - simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a web page

Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/redirect-check/) - checks the exact HTTP headers that a web server is sending with an HTTP response.

Search Engine Position (http://www.iwebtool.com/search_engine_position) - Locate your search listings on Google and Yahoo!

Search Listings Preview (http://www.iwebtool.com/search_listings_preview) - Preview your website on Google, MSN and Yahoo! Search

HTML related

HTML Encrypt (http://www.iwebtool.com/html_encrypter) - Hide your HTML source code

HTML Optimizer (http://www.iwebtool.com/html_optimizer) - Optimize and clean your HTML source code

HTTP Headers (http://www.iwebtool.com/http_headers) - Extract the HTTP Headers of a web page

HTTP Headers Viewer (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/http-headers-viewer.html) - check HTTP headers for any specific URL

Meta-tags Extractor (http://www.iwebtool.com/metatags_extractor) - Extract meta-tags information from a web page

Meta-tags Generator (http://www.iwebtool.com/metatags_generator) - Generate and configure your meta-tags

META Analyzer (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/meta-analyzer/) - analyze a website's meta tags

Meta Tag Generator (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/meta-tag-generator/) - help you to generate meta tags

Source Code Viewer (http://www.iwebtool.com/code_viewer) - View the source code of a page

Domain related

Alexa Traffic Rank (http://www.iwebtool.comURLlexa_traffic_rank) - View and compare Alexa Ranking graphs

Domain Age Tool (http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php) - find out the age of your competitor's domains

Domain Stats Tool (http://www.webconfs.com/domain-stats.php) - get all kind of statistics of your competitor's domains

Domain Availability (http://www.iwebtool.com/domain_availability) - Check the availability of domains

Domain Look-up (http://www.iwebtool.com/domain_lookup) - Retrieve a range of information about a domain

Domain Whois (http://www.iwebtool.com/whois) - Retrieve domain whois information

Instant Domain Checker (http://www.iwebtool.com/instant) - Check the availability of domains instantly

Ping Test (http://www.iwebtool.com/ping) - Check the presence of an active connection

Reverse IP/Look-up (http://www.iwebtool.com/reverse_ip) - Resolve a host to an IP address

Server Status (http://www.iwebtool.com/server_status) - Check if your website is online or offline

Website Speed Test (http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test) - Find out how fast your website loads

What Is My IP Address (http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/) - shows your ip address

IP to City (http://www.webconfs.com/ip-to-city.php) - determine the Country, City, Latitude and Longitude of an IP Address

Website to Country (http://www.webconfs.com/website-to-country.php) - determine the Country in which the specified website is Hosted

Web stats

Statcounter (http://www.statcounter.com/) - famous free web tracker

HiStats (http://www.histats.com/) - Free, real time updated web stats service

Addfreestats (http://www.addfreestats.com/) - provide free website statistics

Miscellaneous

FEED Validator (http://www.feedvalidator.org/) - for Atom and RSS

W3C Markup Validation Service (http://validator.w3.org/) - check for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards

Kontera Ads Preview (http://www.webconfs.com/kontera-preview-tool.php) - preview Kontera Ads on your website

Online spell checker (http://www.markhorrell.com/tools/spellcheck.asp) - simple online spell checking tools

Browser Screen Resolution Checker (http://www.markhorrell.com/tools/browser.shtml) - shows what your site looks like with different screen resolutions

Your Browser Details (http://www.iwebtool.com/browser_details) - View your IP address and your browser details

Anonymous Emailer (http://www.iwebtool.comURLnonymous_emailer) - Send e-mails to users anonymously

md5 Encrypt (http://www.iwebtool.com/md5) - Encrypt text to MD5

Online Calculator (http://www.iwebtool.com/online_calculator) - A simple online calculator

Google

1. Reporting Spam to Google - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

2. Use Google to search your website - http://www.google.com/services/free.html

3. Submit your website to Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

4. Monitor Keyword Phrases - http://google.com/webalerts (This is neat to check out however does not help that much)

5. Googles Guidelines for Websmasters –

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html (A must read new people)

6. Facts for Webmasters - http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html

7. Having Trouble? Contact Google Directly - http://www.google.com/ads/offices.html

Website Design & Tools

1. Free Forms for your website TFMail - http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/

2. Validate Your HTML - http://validator.w3.org/

3. HTTP Error Code Meanings - http://www.searchengineworld.com/val...errorcodes.htm (http://www.searchengineworld.com/val...errorcodes.htm)

4. Keyword Tracking - http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

5. Link Checker - http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/...0charset=utf-8
(http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/%7Echeckout...0charset=utf-8)

6. Search Engine Relationship Chart - http://www.bruceclay.com/searchengin...nshipchart.htm (http://www.bruceclay.com/searchengin...nshipchart.htm)
Bruce Clay does an excellent job of keeping this updated.

7. Link Popularity Checker (Uptime Bot) - http://www.uptimebot.com/

8. Character Counting - http://a1portal.com/freetools/charcount.htm (This is great when optimizing your title or meta tags)

9. Character Encoding - http://www.itnews.org.uk/w_qrefs/w_i...p_charsets.cfm (http://www.itnews.org.uk/w_qrefs/w_i...p_charsets.cfm) (Ever wonder what those iso-8859-4 or utf-8 were or how to use them?)

10. Converting Hex to Dec or Vice Versa - http://www.hypersolutions.org/pages/hex.html#DectoHex

11. Ascii-Dec-Hex Conversion Code Chart - http://www.sonofsofaman.com/misc/ascii/default.asp

12. Ascii-HTML View Conversion Chart - http://a1portal.com/freetools/asciicodes.htm (This is an excellent resource when placing ascii code on your website. Remember to use the correct character encoding)

13. Ascii Chart in .GIF Format - http://www.jimprice.com/ascii-0-127.gif

14. Customer Focus Tool - http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm (Tells you whether your website is focused on your customers or not)

15. Dead Link Checker - http://www.dead-links.com/ (Doesn't crawl links within Frames or JavaScript)

16. Adsense Simulator - http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/ (This will give you an idea of what ads will be displayed on your website before you place them)

17. Google Page Rank Calculator - http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank...lator.php3?pgs= (This is an advanced tool for finding out what you need to get your PR to the next level.)

18. Page Rank Finder - http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/google-pr.php (This is a great tool to find quality websites with the PR that you are looking for to exchange websites with. This tool only looks at the home page not the link pages. This tool looks at 10 pages or 100 results)

19. Future Google PR - http://www.searchengineforums.com/ap...e/type:rphans/ (http://www.searchengineforums.com/ap...e/type:rphans/) - This is an article that tells you what datacenter your Google PR is updated on first.

20. Keyword Analysis Tool - http://www.mcdar.net/ - This tool is a must. It's quick and easy to use

21. Keyword Density Analyzer - http://www.webjectives.com/keyword.htm

22. Keyword Difficulty Checker - http://www.searchguild.com/cgi-bin/difficulty.pl (You will need a Google API for this one)

23. Free Google API - http://www.google.com/api

24. Rocket Rank - http://www.rocketrank.com/ - This will only check the top 20 of the following SE's:
(All The Web DMOZ AltaVista Overture Excite Web Crawler HotBot Lycos What U Seek Yahoo)

Keyword Suggestion Tools:

25. WordTracker & Overture Suggestions http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ - This is the best one of the three

26. Adwords Suggestion - https://adwords.google.com/select/m...=KeywordSandbox

27. Overture Suggestion - http://inventory.overture.com/d/sea...ory/suggestion/

28. Link Analyzer - http://www.scribbling.net/analyze-web-page-links Analyze the ratio of internal links vs. external links. This is a good tool when determining page rank leakage.

29. Link Appeal - http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml (Want to know whether or not you actually want your link on that page?)

30. Link City - http://showcase.netins.net/web/phdss/linkcity/ (This place has EVERY tool under the sun for everything you could ever possibly want)

31. Link Reputation - http://198.68.180.60/cgi-bin/link-reputation-tool.cgi (Reveals baclinks pointing to the target URL along with a link survey for each backlink.)

32. Google PR Tools - http://www.thinkbling.com/tools.php (This guy has tons of fantastic tools. He is not as popular as some of the rest yet the tools are great)

33. Protect Your e-mail address - http://www.fingerlakesbmw.org/main/flobfuscate.php (Obfuscates your e-mail so spambots don't pick it up from the Internet)

34. Digital Points Ad Network - http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/?s=2197 - After using all of the tools and more on this page. This has helped out the rankings faster than anything else.

35. Sandbox Detection Tool - http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools/sandbox-tool.php - Is your website being sandboxed?

36. Spider Simulation - http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/ - See what the spider sees on your website

37. SEO-Toys - http://seo-toys.com/ - These are some things that I had in my favorites. Some of them are okay.

38. Multiple SEO Tools - http://www.free-seo-tools.com/ - This website has a variety of misc. tools on it that you can use to better your search engine rankings.

39. Bot Spotter - http://sourceforge.net/projects/botspotter - This is a phenomenal script that will track what bots hit your website at what times. (Runs on PHP enabled websites)

40. Net Mechanic - http://www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/power_user.htm - This will break your website down and tell you any errors that you may be unaware of.

41. Statcounter - http://www.statcounter.com/ - This will track your clients throughout the dynamically created pages of your website. This is a free service.

42. Dr. HTML - http://www.fixingyourwebsite.com/drhtml.html - This will test your website for any errors that you may be unaware of and tell you how to fix them.

43. Page Rank Calculation - http://www.sitepronews.com/pagerank.html

Newsletters & Articles

1. Site Pro News - www.sitepronews.com (http://www.sitepronews.com/)

2. In Stat - http://www.instat.com/ (This has some decent insight)

3. Page Rank Explained - http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank....olbar_pagerank (http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank....olbar_pagerank)

4. Seach Engine Ratings and Reviews - http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/

5. Database of Robots - http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/index.html
(Ever wondered anything about the spiders that are out there?)

ISAPI Rewrites

1. URL Replacer - (Free) - http://www.motobit.com/help/url-repl...od-rewrite.asp (http://www.motobit.com/help/url-repl...od-rewrite.asp)

2. Mod Rewrite2 - ($39.90US) - http://www.iismods.com/url-rewrite/index.htm

3. URL Rewrite - (23.00EUR) - http://www.smalig.com/url_rewrite-en.htm

Link Exchanging

1. Links Manager ($20.00US /mo)- http://linksmanager.com/cgi-bin/cook/control_panel.cgi (This is great for the beginner however you will find out that you need to majorly adjust your pages manually in order to spread page rank throughout them otherwise you end up with 20 pages with no PR and 1 page with PR.)

2. Page Rank Finder - http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/google-pr.php

3. Link Appeal - http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml

Search Engine Submissions

1. Submit Express - http://www.submitexpress.com/newsletters/dec_15_00.html (A lot of people utilize this service. I don't utilize it)

2. Alexa - http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmaste...tml#crawl_site (http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmaste...tml#crawl_site)

3. AOL - http://search.aol.com/aolcom/add.jsp

4. DMOZ Dummies Guide - http://www.dummies-guide-to-dmoz.or..._not_google.htm (http://www.dummies-guide-to-dmoz.or..._not_google.htm/)

5. DMOZ Instructions - http://dmoz.org/add.html

6. DMOZ Resource Forum - http://resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=396 (This is where you go when your website doesn't show up in DMOZ after you have submitted READ THEIR RULES FOR ASKING)

7. ExactSeek - http://www.exactseek.com/freemember.html

8. Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

9. Yahoo http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request (You must have an account)

10. Yahoo Directory Help - http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/appropriate.html

11. Yahoo Express Submit TOS - https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/express/terms

12. Yahoo Submit Help - http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/dir/su...uggest-01.html (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/dir/su...uggest-01.html)

13. MSN - http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?

ALink Reciprocal Link Checker (http://www.info-pack.com/alink/)

AMeta Meta Tag Editor (http://www.info-pack.com/ameta/)

XML Sitemap Maker (http://www.xmlsitemapmaker.com/)
RSS Feed Maker (http://www.rssfeedmaker.biz/)

Webpage Size Checker (http://www.info-pack.com/pagesize/)

Google's new Search-based Keyword Tool to the list, its hotness: http://www.google.com/sktool/#

Basic SEO practices for newbies

I've been recieving a few PMs lately along the lines of this one.

Quote:

Hey safil over the last couple of days you've answered some questions I had about SEO with great ease. I was wondering if you do any kind of SEO consulting with people trying to become familiar with SEO??

The answer is "not really". I'm not even close to being some kind of SEO guru, the questions I've been answering lately are all just pretty basic.

There are a lot of people better at SEO than me, so if you want a consultant you should try checking in the BST services threads. In fact I purchase services from the BST threads myself. If you do your due diligence before choosing a service provider, I've found that the sellers here on bhw are some of the best anywhere.

So, rather than keep answering individual PMs, I'll just make this thread and send them here from now on.

Basic SEO practices for newbies:

The thing to remember is that SEO isn't a magic bullet. It's important, but no one knows the exact algorithms the SEs use, and each one is different so all you can do is optimize the best you can. There happens to be a few things that you should just always do whenever you make a new website. Don't stress over every little thing, just make sure you are doing it, this should just become kind of automatic for you.

Make sure you fill in your meta tags with a good title, description, and the right keywords. I personally don't think the keywords meta-tag is nearly as important as everyone else on here does, but it gives me a way to organize my keywords list for me to reference. When you start having many different websites, it's good to include whatever notes to yourself you can. When you come back to work on an older site you might not remember eveything you were thinking before. The metatags help you remember your site info as much as it helps the SE figure it out. A good rule of thumb is that anything that won't hurt you for SEO and might help, you should use and use correctly. Definately use the title meta-tag, try to include keywords in the title. Definately use the description meta-tag, google will normally use this for the summary it displays in the listing. It isn't used for indexing so write it for humans, this is what gets people to click on your link when they see it in the SERP. Don't use the same metatags for every page on your site. Take the time to make them be specific to each page.

Create good content. Make sure you have some decent content. Content is what the internet was invented for. If you have unique and quality content, then all the seo and backlinking you're doing is just to get the ball rolling. Give them what they want, show them where it is, and they'll start coming. If it's good enough then it'll eventually start building on its own naturally because people like what they found. That's the idea anyway. So whenever possible use the best page design and the best content possible. Avoid duplicate content between different pages on your site, the SE will most likely penalize your site for that.

Remember, your content isn't just something to get google to like your site, it is the whole point of your site. The content and how you structure it is what will make visitors do what you want when they get there. If it's crap they'll just leave, and 99% of them won't leave by clicking on your adsense or affilliate link, they'll just close the window or use the back button. (yes, of course if your doing blackhat stuff you can make the browser go where you want, but that's for a different discussion.)

Include your keywords. Structure your content correctly, make a few title headers in the content that include keywords (use header tags h1, h2, etc.), try to have a keyword density around 2% in your content, and maybe 4% for the whole page including the metatags, alt tags, anchors, etc.

Be sure that your .htaccess is set up correctly. Decide on which way you want your url to be and stick with it. If you decide to use www then always use it like that in your links, don't use both. I usually set up a 301 for all www requests to redirect to non-www urls. If you don't set that up then every single page on your site can appear to google as having at least one duplicate. If that's the only thing wrong on your site it isn't going to kill you, but it's so easy to fix. If you don't know how to set up a redirect in your .htaccess file then just do a search, there are many other threads explaining it. Check google if you can't find it here. Also, .htaccess only apples if your on an Apache server, Windows servers do it a little differently, if that applies to you then just search google to find out how to do it. If your consitent in your linking, then the only time the redirect will come into play is if you get natural backlinks that you have no control over. You should also specify which you prefer, www or not-www in google tools if you use it. (If you don't then you really should, I recommend you set yourself up an account for webmaster tools and analytics.)

Make a robots.txt file and I like to include a favicon because without them the robots will trigger file not found errors on your server. Be sure to configure your robots.txt correctly. Make a custom 404 page. If your site has more than just a couple of pages then also create a sitemap.xml file. It's not a bad idea to just create a sitemap anyway no matter what, it lets you define the structure of your site to the crawlers. Just search google if you don't know how to do any of that, it's very basic and you can find exact instructions within a minute when you do a search.

Other than that there isn't a lot more you can do for on-site SEO. When people ask about SEO they're always thinking of on-site SEO, but thats the easy and quick part. Just do it and get on with it.

Everything else is off-site SEO and involves building backlinks and promotion.
This is where you need to focus your efforts. This is where the magic bullet is, if there really is one.

Social Bookmarks, Directory Submissions, Profile Links, and Blog Comments are really the easiest place to start getting backlinks. It's not a bad idea to purchase these links from a service. They are easy to make, but to do it right they really need to be posted from many different accounts and ip adresses. A good idea when your starting is to do it yourself a little bit to see how it works, then purchase larger quantities from a service. You want to get a lot of links, but you don't want to over do it. Building to fast can look unnatural, just do some searches and read up on it a little more. How many and how fast is a judgement call you have to make. hold off on more complex linkbuilding until you have a little more experience. Linkwheels and other link structures can be very powerful, but can also hurt your site a lot if not done correctly.

Whenever possible include keyword anchors and title or alt tags on your backlinks. Don't always use the same anchors, vary it up a little, use 3 or 4 different keywords and even do a few with some non keyword anchors. You are trying to look as though a lot of different real people have taken a liking to your site, if it were natural then all links wouldn't be exactly the same, so you want to simulate that same type of randomness. Backlinking strategies are all about simulating the natural events that happen as a site grows in popularity. If you can do it successfully then the SE's will give you good position in the listings, and then hopefully what you are simulating can become reality. The point of all of it is to get traffic.

Change up your anchor text. The idea of backlinking is to simulate that masses of people are becoming interested in your site. It should have some amount of randomness to it in order to look natural. I've seen a few made up stats on what's best, but I think a good rule of thumb is maybe about 45% primary keywords, 35% secondary keywords, and about 15% random unrelated like Click Here, and then about 5% just the url. The exact percentage isn't dramatically important, it just needs to seem like the linking is natural.

Create relevant articles containing your keywords, include backlinks using keyword anchors, and submit to article directories. Article directories are mostly authority sites and your article becomes a relevant backlink to your site. Then create profiles and accounts on blogs, social networking sites, forums etc. Include a link to your website whenever you do that and each one of those become backlinks as well.

Thats the end of it. Well kinda.
Go back and watch your stats to see what keywords are getting the most traffic to your site, analyze the data a little bit and if you need to, remove or add keywords to your content and tags, and adjust the anchors your using in your backlinks.

Continue building links. Remember you're trying to artificially create the appearance to the SE that your site is popular. When that happens naturally, people are always adding new links to your site. Since you are trying to look natural you have to do the same thing. Linkbuilding never stops completely.

OK, there you go. That's that basics of SEO. Everything else is about fine tuning, and has to be looked at for each individual situation.

If you have any more questions, before you start PMing anyone just read through the threads in the White Hat SEO section, and do some searching on google. You can find some really good information from some much smarter people than me.

If there are any SEO gurus that want to expand on this or if you see any errors you think should be discussed, please add your input.

Hope this can help some of you.

Top 5 Most Contentious Factors

1. Cloaking by Cookie Detection 16.3% strong contention
2. Cloaking by JavaScript/Rich Media Support Detection 15.4% moderate contention
3. Hiding Text with same/similar colored text/background 15.3% moderate contention
4. Cloaking by IP Address 15.3% moderate contention
5. Cloaking by User Agent 15.2% moderate contention

Note: Consensus and contention percentages are calculated based on the standard deviations of contributor answers.

Participants were asked to apply the ranking factors to Google’s search engine, and although we’ve found that it’s largely applicable to other major US engines (Bing, Yahoo! & Ask), some variance almost certainly exists.

Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors

1. Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative Intent

   68% very high importance
   68%

2. Link Acquisition from Known Link Brokers/Sellers

   56% high importance
   56%

3. Links from the Page to Web Spam Sites/Pages

   51% moderate importance
   51%

4. Cloaking by User Agent

   51% moderate importance
   51%

5. Frequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility

   51% moderate importance

Top 5 Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

   73% very high importance
   73%

2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)

   71% very high importance
   71%

3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)

   67% very high importance
   67%

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

   66% very high importance
   66%

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

   66% very high importance
   66%

Search engine rankings

There are Lots of factors Affecting the search Engine Ranking.

I am here Explain About

Top 5 Ranking Factors

 

Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors

 

Top 5 Most Contentious Factors

 

 

Search Engine Optimization

The SEO fundamentals are: back links, quality site content, good title tags, no javascript for page content, no frames, no hidden text, no duplicate text. Let's briefly look at each of these. Lack of any one will result in poor ranking for popular search phrases.

Back Links
These are links to your site from other sites. See Getting External Links for an analysis of the difficulty level in getting good links - there is no shortcut, and in our organisation every member of the team is committed to a daily routine of link requests, however senior they are. Links from external sites need to be carefully crafted to be valuable as links for search engine positioning.

Quality Site Content
If you build it they will come - but only if it's great - only if it solves some problem or satisfies some want or need. Make the site good, make it fill that need/want and sit back and enjoy the results. Well, almost. You have to obey the other rules too, and you have to get some initial links to the site. But look at sites like xe.com - they don't even have to ask for links - their site is one of those sites everyone uses to see the current exchange rates. They provide some tools that other sites use that results in an automatic link back to them - but if they didn't, people would come anyway because it fills a need. Examine sites like this to see how they do it.

Good Title Tags
Covered in some detail in our section SEO and Title Tags, title tags are one of the three most important facets of search engine optimisation. It should ocmply with the theme of the page and be slightly, not overtly, promotional - since it will appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and will serve to attract potential visitors to click to your site. Make each title different per page.

No Javascript for Content
Notwithstanding the fact that the search engineswill pick up any Javascript that offends any SE rules (like a mass of site links to the same place), any content provided by javascript is not indexed. The simple rule to follow is to look at your public source page - whatever is there is what will be indexed by the SE's. If you can't see any actual content (just function calls and html furniture), then neither can the search gods. Which brings us to the next section...

No Frames
If you are thinking of using frames, think carefully about it, and then decide not to. Unless you're implementing the equivilent of Googles gmail program (in which they use frames) where content is supposed to be hidden and you'd not be too interested in search engine traffic anyway, forget all you learned about frames and start developing sites in a different way, like tables or CSS. The content needs to be seen, and frames are difficult for search engines to grapple with. There comes a point where they (the bots) try so much then give up - and score the site as best they can. Same as the above - look at the public source file - if you can easily see the information then it's OK.

No Hidden Text
Look at it this way - pessimistic though it is. The SE's are looking for a reason to not index you or to penalise you in the rankings. If they come accross hidden text, their cyber noses start sniffing and they think they've found a bad site - they'll look a little further and decide on that basis. Rest assured with one thing - they will never come to you to query the hidden text. So be careful. Don't link elsewhere, whether internal or external with text that is too small to read, or text that is coloured the same or close to the background colour. The SE's have hired the smartest people on earth - don't try to outsmart them. If the hidden text is genuine, it should be evident - but if in doubt don't hide any text at all.

No Duplicate Text
Don't have the same or very similar text on yor site that you know exists elsewhere on the web. Don't even do this internally to the site. Don't make calls to translation sites that result in pages hosted with them that read the same or similar to content you already have. If material you have is copied - do occasional checks (through copyscape.com) to see if it has been copied. It will have been copied - but it's up to you to see if it presents a danger. Generally, the rule of thumb is that if you have a higher PR (or expected to be higher) on the page in question than the one showing the content (include the expected PR by looking at parent pages), you'll be OK. Otherwise you'll have to get out the riot act - people generally oblige. Duplicate content is the current public enemy of the search engines, especially Google. They want to refine the search experience by having distinct material - they don't want different sites appearing in the SERPs with substantially the same content. This is even true of adwords - how much more so with organic results!

For a quick overview of the fundamentals of SEO, consider these factors - Back links, Quality site content, Good title tags, No javascript for page content, No frames, No hidden text, No duplicate text.