SEO Rants and Resources

Increasing Your Page Rank

When a site has useful content, other webmasters will naturally place links to the site, increasing its PageRank and flow of visitors. When visitors discover a useful web site, they tend to refer other visitors by emailing or instant messaging links.

SEO practices that improve web site quality are likely to outlive short term practices that simply seek to manipulate search rankings. Means of improving web site quality include:

1. Clean, fast loading websites that are content rich, and frequently updated.

2. Websites that follow the web's simpler conventions (short and descriptive titles, easy navigation, no disabling of browser buttons, no keyword stuffing or other blatant SEO work).

3. Natural-looking link building: a few links from directories, very minimal reciprocal or three-way linking, no apparent buying or selling of links, no attempted PR manipulation (buying/selling/hogging), no outward links to less reputable sites.

4. No auto-generated nonsense content and no machine translated content, but original, useful material.

5. No technical errors, no duplicate pages, a valid robots.txt, a sitemap, and custom error pages.

SEO Necessity #1 – On-site Optimization:

These are the factors that you can control on your web site, such as keyword density, hyperlink anchor text, keyword proximity, and so on. This is what most people think of when it comes to web site optimization, but in reality this is only a small part of the equation. It DOES count, just not as much as most people think.

 

 SEO Necessity #2 (the biggy) – Off-site Optimization

There are only so many things you can do to your web site itself to help your rankings (I’m talking about the on-site stuff). And you can bet that your competitors are at least doing some on-site optimizing. Off-site optimization simply refers to the things that are out of your control that affect your page’s ranking. Namely, links. Who they are from, and how many you have. If you can perfect the off-site optimization for your site you will be at the top of the search engine results. Easy as that, but unfortunately it’s easier said then done.

Getting Discovered by a Search Engine

For a new site to get discovered by a search engine is not that big of a hassle. The new site does not need to be submitted to search engines to be listed. Now a simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and spider its contents. It usually just takes a few days or less from the acquirement of the link to all the main search engine spiders visiting and indexing the new site. This means that it is good practice to have some means (such as a site map, or plain hypertext links), so that once a spider finds part of a site, it can navigate to the rest of it. Otherwise, individual dead-end pages must be found from outside the site. Any pages that are not linked to the outside of a site would have to have a link within that site to be found.

 

For those search engines, like Yahoo, who have their own paid submission, it may save some time to pay a nominal fee for submission.