A Page Without PageRank Ranking on Google’s First Page
Welcome back! Have you joined my mailing list yet?
I have been running this blog for over two years now (well, probably closer to three although I've only had the .net domain for two years) and one thing still bugs me a bit. No matter how many blogs, ebooks or diatribes I read, I just can't quite wrap my head around the concept of SEO and SERPs. I usually try not to worry that much about proper keyword content or anything.
Another concept I generally don't freak out that much about is page rank. The main page of this site once hit PR3. It has since dwindled back down to a PR1 status. Does this bother me? Not really. I don't really see a huge point in trying to gain page rank, since I generally end up with backlinks from random spam sites and scrapers anyway. When it comes to links, I'll take what I can get.
What does puzzle me, though, is how one of my internal pages can rank high enough in Google to actually pull in a little bit of traffic on a steady basis. I'm scratching my head, because I would like to think that I have more than one well written page on this site. I'm sure that's pretty subjective though.
So which page is it that's pulling in traffic? It's my post on "The Importance of Good Employee Relations". Yep. Nothing that I've written about freelancing, affiliate marketing, or just random ranting has done this.
I was sitting around one day, thinking that I really needed to write something that was business-oriented. While I'm not a manager at my day job, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a common-sense guide on how to be a good boss from an employee's perspective. Somehow, I managed to stumble on something pretty sweet.
While the page itself doesn't have any page rank points with the big G, a quick search for 'importance of employee relations' will turn my link up on the first page. And to top that off, it's the third result...and it's only beat out by a bizmove site and a NASA site. Really, I'm OK with being the third search result out of 1,070,000 results. :D
One thing that I have notices is that it provides me with a VERY tiny trickle of income from the AdBrite ads on the page. I'm trying to come up with a better way to monetize that page right now. I've been also considering expanding my coverage on business topics. I also should focus more on researching my keywords...even though this one I came across by sheer dumb luck.
Are any of you having luck with getting ranked for any of your pages that you just wrote on a whim with no SEO work?
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
SEO Smart Links: The Poor Man’s Ninja Affiliate
I came across a post via Twitter that caught my eye...it was a post about ten WordPress plugins that would help increase your blog's ranking. What I expected to find were the usual suspects (All-in-One SEO, Headspace2, etc.). What I didn't expect was a plugin called SEO Smart Links.
OK, maybe I did expect to find something with 'SEO' in the name, but what I didn't know about this plugin is that it works in a very similar way to an excellent, yet expensive, commercial plugin called Ninja Affiliate by MaxBlogPress.
What SEO Smart Links does is essentially the same thing as Ninja Affiliate. According to the author, it "can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog" and also (and this is the good part) "set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs" just like its big brother.
The main difference? With SEO Smart Links you will save $97. And THAT is a lot of money...at least for me.
While it is true that I do use Ninja Affiliate, I won it in a contest, so I don't plan to change soon. However, if you are a beginning blogger trying to break into affiliate marketing, check out SEO Smart Links and see if it can help you get a foothold on cashflow.
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
14 Common SEO Mistakes and Errors
This post is originally from BlogHighlight.com.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the very effective way to drive natural and targeted traffic from search engines to our websites. Recently SEOMoz has published 12 common SEO mistakes and errors made by newcomers. It is always great to learn from mistakes and experience. I would like to take this opportunity to share with all of you the common seo errors so that we can something and not making same mistake in the future.
Here are the summary list of 12 common SEO mistakes and errors which all of us should not do it.
#1 Repetitive Keyword Targeting
When you are targeting a keyword or key phrase, it is good have it appeared in title tag, H1 tag and content. But it is not necessary to have shown in every page of your website.
#2 Splitting Efforts Across Many Domains
If you have register 500 domains under a single web server and trying to link all of them back to your main domain, please stop doing it. Google prefers links from different IP address you should focus on getting quality links.
#3 Reciprocal Linking
If you are creating a link list page which is used for link trading with other websites, then this kind of reciprocal links should be avoided. But if you are linking to an authority site and somehow that site also links back to your website, then this is the reciprocal linking we can have.
#4 Keyword Stuffing
As I mentioned in one of my previous blog post, keyword stuffing is some king of spamming technique which is outdated and can be easily detected by search engines.
#5 Blocking Bots Access to Duplicate Content
It is certainly not a good idea to block search engine crawlers to access duplicated content. The better way is to use 301 redirect or new canonical tag released by Google.
#6 Avoiding XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps is very helpful to guide search engines what are the content in your website. If you do not have it implemented, you should do it immediately.
#7 Blocking Bots Rather than Using Nofollow
Again, blocking search engine bots is a bad way if you do not want to give link juice to your destination page of the link. Instead you should use nofollow link attribute.
#8 Paranoia About Registering with Google Webmaster Tools
There is nothing to afraid to register your website with Google’s Webmaster Tools. In fact, you can have insights exception report when Google crawler access your web pages.
#9 Ignoring Non-Google Search Engines
Although Google is the biggest player in the search engine industry, you should not ignore other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN Live. The truth is it is easier to rank better in those search engines and it can drive you significant traffic.
#10 Using Google’s Link Command
The result of Google’s link command only represents part of what Google knows. To certain extent, it can be considered as accurate enough to give you a rough idea of how popular is your web page or website. You should not too depend on the result returned.
#11 Submitting Articles for Links
By submitting articles to directories and article repositories, you gain valuable backlinks. But you should avoid submitting same article to multiple website as this is considered duplicated content.
#12 Chasing DoFollow Blogs
Although dollow blogs do give you inbound links when you make comments. You no need to just concentrate on this strategy as they are many other ways to gain backlinks.
In addition, I have 2 SEO mistakes worth to mention.
#13 Internal Linking
While chasing for backlinks or inbound links, many people forget to do internal linking. Internal linking is also an important factor during the search engine ranking evaluation. If you have enough internal links, you can rank higher in search engine results even you have less inbound links compared to your competitors.
I have 2 blog posts discussing about the importance and practical technique of internal linking which you might be interested to read more.
#14 Consistency
To achieve high rankings in search engine is not 1 or 2 days job. You need to be consistent over a long period of time. It takes time for you to build backlinks and watching your search engine rankings climbing from day to day. It is not going to happen overnight. In addition, you should update your SEO knowledge regularly as search engines keep on improving and changing rules.
Conclusion
Nobody is perfect. As long as you are willing to learn from the SEO mistakes and errors, you should be able to get high rankings in search engine result pages. Let’s learn together to achieve our goals.
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Recent Posts
- Multiple Income Streams – Getting Pumped!
- Setting up my savings goal.
- Harry Potter and the Child Support Payment from Hell
- Reinventing myself – setting goals.
- It’s time to do some house cleaning.
Best of [ ! ]
- A Page Without Page Rank Ranking on Google's First Page
- The Importance of Good Employee Relations
- Twitter Followers Versus Blog Subscriptions