Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Posted: 14 Nov 2013 06:58 AM PST

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In general SEO (search engine optimization to rank where you organically are not) is like a mystical thing. That is why there is so much money in providing these services. Everyone thinks they know what Google is doing but any theories they have are all bullshit. You really can only go off of your personal experience. The funny thing is in the Google guidelines they specifically state that if you try to make your site rank higher than it naturally should then that is in violation of their guidelines and you could be penalized for it.

Note: I don't consider myself a SEO professional. I have done some basic stuff over the years and dominated search terms. And I have been doing so for 11 years.

There is a fine line between optimizing and spamming the search engines and you need to be careful. I am semi friends (probably more categorized as an acquaintance) with Google's lead spam engineer and have been invited to some interesting back room meetings at Google and had access to some amazing insight.

Google likes to pretend they have this secret formula that auto detects everything… that's simply not true. When Google launched its founders said that if there was spam in their search engine then they needed to build a better search engine.

By 2003, they threw up the white flag and allowed people to submit sites they thought were spammy…

Then in 2006, they started a huge campaign to hire people to actually do nothing to review highly competitive and high dollar terms.

My dates on these are off the top of my head and probably a little off…

So now, Google spam detection and ranking is determined about 75% by humans (in my opinion).

Ok so things you need to do before attempting to do any "on site" SEO:
Register the site with Google Webmaster Central – http://www.google.com/webmasters/ – webmaster tools will give you Google's perspective on your site, alert you of any pages that have errors and pages that are linked but no longer existing. It has a ton of other stuff to to show you regional rankings. Just because YOU see the site rank 1 in Google doesn't mean someone in California does, too.

Register the site with Google analytics - http://www.google.com/analytics/ – this has a lot of features that you may or may not use, but it will show you what keywords are bringing in what traffic. More importantly which ones are leading people to your end goal (if you have one).

Depending on what those results yield and if there are any issues you will want to fix them first. From my experience they have a drastic impact on your ranking.

Make sure you have a privacy policy and terms of use on your website. This is REALLY important. Google wants to see you have made it easy for users to see what you are using their data for. There are tons of examples around the internet. I don't want to go into everything you need cause it would be lengthy but it's easy and you can copy and paste items that are out there.

Once you're prepped then you can being optimizing the pages doing these minimal things:
Each page you want to rank needs to have its own page. The page should be named KEYWORD.html or whatever extension you want to name it.

Each page has to have a unique description meta tag and should read like a description of the content of what the page contains. No stuffing in keywords here.
Use Bold and Italics when appropriate on your keywords.
Every image on each page should contain an alt and title tag containing the keyword in a phrase.
Each page should have a "navigation" at the bottom that interlinks the pages. The link text should contain the keyword.
The Title tag for each tag needs to have the keyword as the first word and a short phrase after. The pages should not all be similar.
You should mention the keyword on the pages as much as often but in context and various phrases.
You should run a keyword density check on the individual pages to make sure your keywords are mentioned frequently on the page and you might need to get rid of some fluff. Here is a great tool for that – http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
Your sites should be VERY focused on value added. Something that someone should want to read and can get value from.
Your sites should all have easy to use social media sharing buttons. From my experience social sharing is an indication to Google that your site is worth reading and there for bumps up its Juice.

Think of your site as a bucket of Google Juice. The more sites that link to your pages the bigger their bucket of juice. If you link to an outside source then you're putting a hole in your bucket and giving them some of your juice.

Now Google provides ways to "link shape" called no follow. Here is Google's official page on how that works and how to do it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en . The basic rundown is when you use this attribute it tells Google that it should not count against your Juice.

The no follow attribute was originally designed for a couple reasons:

To mitigate risk of websites linking to sites with questionable content.
To comply with FTC guidelines of linking to a site that you have been compensated for (if I were to pay you a monthly fee to link to my site to game Google cause your juice is so big).

But you can also use this to tell Google not to give any juice for crap content like terms of service, privacy policy, etc etc pages you might have linked.

Google has publicly stated they penalize sites that abuse this and no follow ALL outbound links… Proof is in the pudding, this is not the case. Wikipedia ranks for EVERYTHING and they no follow 100% of outbound links.

Another thing to think about is what they call reputation circles. For a given keyword lets say your site is about echo. The more sites that rank for "echo" that you link to or link to you the better. It's a high reputation circle or category for a given keyword.

Google has said reciprocal linking cancels each other out…. BUT if your site is better optimized than the other then you win. Also I've found that whole thing to be bullshit. Get links from everyone in the field.

Now that covers the "on site" SEO. There is another big factor that comes into SEO called "off site". These are places that link to your site and gain your authority.

First thing is you should get a game plan on how to get links to your site and build your Google juice.

There are a bunch of free and paid tools that will do competitive research on your site for a keyword… then show you what the top 10 results are doing vs what you are doing. So like if a competitor is getting a bunch of links from various directories then you should submit your site to those directories. You can use these combined to get a great game plan.

This also helps you remain in the circle of trust… if you will. 'Cause other people in your field are doing it.

Overall just be really careful. Look at your site and ask yourself if the site reads like you're just trying to stuff in a keyword or if it's value added content.

That should be plenty to get you started. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?