Archive

Posts Tagged ‘pr’

What SEO Techniques Work?

February 10th, 2009

So you have your site completed and you are ready to invest some time optimising it for Google.  Where do you start and what are the most important elements of optimisation?

Well, SEO can be divided into two sections, i.e. ‘off-page’ and ‘on-page’ optimisation.  First you need to start by getting the on-page factors correct.  I will not go into the details of on-page optimisation as there are many sites which detail this.  Suffice to say that you must get this right from the start and make sure each page has a dedicated and well-defined set of keywords and that each page is optimised for those keywords (links, images, text).  If you ignore this step your SEO efforts will be severely hampered and may result in messy stats for your site.  Equally important in your on-page SEO efforts is following good practice guidelines and avoiding certain coding style/techniques which might be considered black-hat or even grey-hat (e.g. using Javascript to disable the browser’s ‘back’ button).  These might work for a short time, but you risk being penalised by Google and having your site thrown into the sandbox.

Off-page optimisation is quite labour-intensive but a critical part of SEO.  This is where most of your attention will be focused.  You will need to get links to your site from other sites.  These in-bound links should come from a wide variety of sites, of different page rank and with different keywords in the anchor text of the link.  Google wants a site’s popularity to grow naturally, so any SEO practices which follows an unnatural pattern will flag your site to Google and potentially result in a penalty.  Get your in-bounds links in an organic fashion by creating good link-bait and absorbing content.  As you manually harvest links, try to do so in a gentle exponential manner, starting with a few links and gradually acquiring more and more.  Make sure the links come from a statistically viable range of PR’s.  I.e. most of your links should come from pages of PR 0, 1 and 2, with a decreasing number of links from higher PR pages.

The rule of thumb is to make all your SEO efforts look as natural as possible.  Stick to this rule and your site should enjoy an increase in PR and traffic.  Flout it and you run the risk of being sandboxed by Google.

Will datingsite , , , ,

The Benefit of Trackbacks

November 18th, 2008

I was just researching the benefits of trackbacks and trying to determine if I should enable them on this blog or not and I have to admit I am still not convinced of their value.  The problem lies in the way spammers attack every little vulnerability they can find… and trackback links just strike me as very open to abuse.  The problem is that there are so many of them and moderating can become a full-time job.  It would be easy to miss the odd link or two which is actually spam; trust me when I say you do not want to be linking to some of those dodgy sites which spam blogs.  Google can be a little merciless at times and making mistakes such as this can be costly.

Yes, the trackback links can be useful to your readers, but also they can dilute the look and content of the real comments to your article/blog post.  I personally do not like to scroll to the comments on a blog only to spend an extra 10 seconds scrolling past the trackbacks which make up the majority of the ‘comments’.

Additionally, I prefer to pass on my PR to those sites I deem worthy.  I will link to only useful content for my visitors (to provide them with more information), but also to provide the author of the blog a big thumbs up with some added PR value for her/his efforts.

Will website_technology , ,