Learn The Facts, Don’t Believe The Fiction!

I have researched and thoroughly testing a lot of SEO techniques that have received terrible reputations due to myth and popular belief. It’s been going on for years! One person says their bad and everybody just believes it to be true.  That is why I decided to run some tests and I must admit I was surprised to find several well known “facts” to be mere myths!

I own 63 test sites all hosted on different servers located around the United States and Canada. I have been testing the following techniques across several of those sites for over six months and have found the following statements to be 100% truth!

Myth #1 Duplicate Content Penalties

Google does NOT penalize sites due to duplicate content unless they are found to be in violation of copyright laws. Then they will simply remove the duplicated content from their index. In fact social media sites like Digg.com are made up of at least 75% duplicate content and yet the duplicated content often ranks higher than the original post!

But, what if I use the same content on more than one page of my website, then will Google penalize me? Well, if you use WordPress straight out of the box then your site has duplicate content all over it and so do most other WordPress blogs, so again we found that the site is not penalized, in severe cases Google will simply decide not to de-index the duplicated pages.

Myth #2 Submitting Your Site To Directories Is A Bad Idea

Says who? Getting your website listed with web directories will not harm your site in anyway. There are several great directories out there like Dmoz and the Yahoo directory that can increase your search engine rankings considerably! We strongly recommend submitting your website to directories, especially directories that allow deep linking!

Myth #3 Repeating Your Keywords/Phrases Excessively Will Help Your Site Rank Higher

This technique is called “keyword stuffing” and it is a horrible idea. During testing we found that our sites, that were ranked on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for their preferred keywords dropped off the radar when we decided to continually repeat the keywords/phrases that we were trying to rank better for, in fact we tried this on over 30 different websites and had the same results continuously! If your over optimizing your site with repeated keywords and phrases stop! It will only hurt your rankings!

Myth#4 XML Sitemaps Are Not Worth Using

Well, XML Sitemaps are simply to help the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing find all of your important pages. They act as a road map for your website and can even inform the search engines of what pages hold more value to you, the webmaster.

Since it only takes a few minutes to setup and it could potentially help the search engines index your website better, why wouldn’t you want to use a XML sitemap?

Myth #5 PageRank Is Not Of Any Value

I strongly disagree; the PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank.

PageRank has little to do with where your site ranks in search results it merely shows that Google considers the page important, or not so important. Other factors like anchor text, quality inbound links, content, page titles, and such will determine what keywords or key phrases your web page will rank highly for, so having a high PageRank means that Google considers your page important and that is good to know!

Experimenting, learning through seo experiments, and testing techniques is the only way to really know what works and what doesn’t in the world of search engine optimization, so we encourage you to not always believe what you hear and always test things on your own before falling for the hype!

Good quality writing is highly effective and often times essential to your online success. High quality content can work alone to help you produce first page search engine listings in major engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Although, creating good content alone can also have its disadvantages! Your new articles, blog posts, or web pages will have to either attract inbound links naturally, or you will have to build inbound links that point directly to them, in order to maintain your first page listings and to increase its positioning in major search results.

Without inbound links your new content will eventually be marked as unpopular and thus it will be ranked accordingly by the major search engines! So regardless of whether content is deemed “King” or not, it is merely one step in the right direction towards complete search engine success!

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use many ranking factors to determine whether or not your site, page, blog, post or any other content is relevant and worthy of a first page listing in their search results!

Major search engines need to produce accurate top of the line results or their visitors will simply switch to another engine that they feel can accommodate their need to find what they are looking for and to filter out all of the garbage that nobody likes!

So how does Google, Yahoo, and Bing determine what searchers like?

Well, when you get excited and really like a webpage it is only natural that you should want to share it with friends, family and everybody else that you know, so you link to it from your website, blog, article or favorite social media site because it is that good!

Then the major search engines come along and notice your vote “link” for that website and they instantly have more faith in the content because somebody liked it enough to link to it! If enough people stumble upon the content and they like it so much that they also link to it, then the search engines take note and rank the site, page, article, or post higher in their search results because it is relevant and people want it!

What About The Time People Spend The Page?

Yes, there is yet another factor that search engines use to determine if a page is of high quality. Major search engines can often time see how long you were on a particular web page and if you ventured into the site or you simply hated it and clicked the back button to continue searching for a more relevant one.

So there is definitely good reason to have great content on your pages, blogs, articles, and such that way people will want to link to your content naturally and they will stay on your site once they find it!

So let’s sum this entire article up to determine what your site needs to be 100% successful in major search engines!

1.)    You need high quality content!

2.)    You need inbound links pointing to your important pages!

3.)    You need to make people want to stay and revisit your website!

So what are your thoughts on the subject? Is content “alone” still king?

Core Plugins

All-In-One-SEO Pack – This plugin is an important part of SEO. This plugin sets up your blog’s title tags and metatags to include keywords and descriptions. Different title tags place keywords in the title tags and custom meta tags for each blog post, creating more unique content for search engines.

Google Sitemap Generator – This plugin generates a sitemap for search engines to pick up. Search engines give priority to sites with optimized sitemaps.

SE Optimization Plugins

Auto Tagger – This plugin uses Yahoo! to determine keywords related to the content of the article. These keywords are then added as tags to your blog and show up on your posts meta keywords. It’s always best to create your own tags in WP when writing a post, but just in case you forget this plugin will create them for you.

Sociable – This plugin adds links to the bottom of every article allowing your users to share your articles with popular social networks such as Digg, Technorati, and Twitter. This helps people find your site when they are searching popular social networking sites and hopefully brings them back to your blog for more..

Ping Optimizer – Blog pinging notifies blog servers that your blog has recently pulished new content. It shares your content across other networks, increasing your blog’s exposure, but excessively pinging these servers can get your site banned or blocked from future blog pinging. So you have to make sure that you are pinging these servers when necessary. This plugin will handle when and when not to ping these blog servers, optimizing how often you ping.

Security Plugins

Akismet – This plugin is included with every Wordpress installation. This plugin protects your blog from comment spam. Monitor and protect your blog from comment spam.

Database Backup – This plugin will automatically make database backups of your blog and send them to your email. Protect the content on your site from possible server loss by backing up the content on your site on a regular basis.

Simple CAPTCHA – CAPTCHA is a form utility to protect your blog from comment spam by web bots. A CAPTCHA places an images with random text that the user must manually type to submit their blog comment. This utility verifies the commenter is human, cutting down the potential for comment spam.

Link Popularity, Is It Really That Important?

I have been receiving e-mails from my readers asking me why we don’t talk about on-site optimization that much. Why we have been focusing on link popularity, and other off site techniques rather than telling you about Title tags, Page Headers, Keyword Density, and such. So I decided to create this post explaining why on-page optimization is far less important than simply creating one-way inbound links!

Fact: Many websites receive qualified search engine traffic due to link popularity alone. Most Flash-based websites are unable or unwilling to have any on-page criteria, and link development is often their only option.

So the question is, do flash based websites get ranked #1 on Google, Yahoo, Msn, and the other major search engines for highly competitive keywords & phrases?

Well let me show you a website that is currently ranking for one of the most competitive keywords that I know of with absolutely no relevance, no text, and a few internal links!

Search the keyword “SEO” in Google, it”normally” stands for Search Engine Optimization and it receives 5,000,000 global searches on Google alone per month! The competition is unheard of but yet this site “www.seo-usa.org” ranks #7 in Google, #10 in Yahoo, and #6 in Msn for this highly competitive keyword that is worth nothing to them!

The site in question “www.seo-usa.org” has the title “SEO Home” no real text, a couple internal links, and some graphics! Now you tell me, why does it rank so high in the major search engines? There is nothing there! It is obviously outranking sites that are far more relevant! Sites that have been optimized to the tee, or getting destroyed by this irrelevant web page!

So Why?

Wait for it….

Strong One-Way Inbound Links!

That’s right this site is for “Sponsors for Educational Opportunity” or SEO! So when sites linked to them they used the anchor text “SEO” and that is the only reason they are ranking so high for a search term that millions of other webmasters would love to have!

So a site that wasn’t even trying to compete for a very popular search term is dominating search results due to strong one-way links, and you can be too! So get out there and start creating links to your website now!

Link building is the #1 method for top search engine placement. If you create enough relevant one-way links your site will rank #1 for any keyword, competitive or not! The key is to create inbound links to all of your important pages and to have those links arrive from other important & relevant sites!

Think of your website as a ton of pages that can rank for different keywords or key phrases on their own. Then target a different long tail key phrases with each individual page on your site!

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, represents a mathematical system that will enable you to secure a favorably position for your site in search engine results pages (SERPs). And because 80% of your traffic will come from the search engines, search engine optimization techniques take on a vital importance to the success of your internet business!

In that respect there are two varieties of SEO, on page and off page. This post will focus more on off page search optimization which is entirely based on link popularity and link building techniques!

Link popularity is primarily based on the amount of back links your site or web page receives. The more links your site receives on a given page, the better the search engine results will be for that particular page. Google, seems to hate reciprocal linking unless the site your partnering with is relevant to yours so don’t focus too much on reciprocal linking. You will need to acquire unilateral or contextual one-way links to your web pages for success.

The most effective way to achieve this is through having 100% unique, content and building your link popularity simultaneously!

* Article marketing. There are tons of article directories around the Net. You will need to write some articles and submit them to a few article directories. With every article submission, you’ll get a resource box where you can present yourself and add a link to your website. Since, a few of these article directories will have good link popularity their selves your articles will have more weight and will provide great links to your website or web page.

* Forum marketing. You can almost always find internet communities devoted to the same niche that your website is targeting. Look for them, find out if they offer dofollow links and join them. You will have a signature box on most of them, which will appear in every post that you make. Make sure that you add your link(s) is your signature before posting and don’t spam the forums!

* Advertising at craigslist.com. Craigslist is a well known classified ads site with a page rank of 7. Having your links posted on Craigslist is a great way to make sales and boost your sites link popularity at the same time!

Why Should You Build Links?

•    It will help increase your sites traffic.

•    The popularity of your site will go up as you build relevant links.

•    It will help to improve your sites visibility across the web.

•    You will be able to rank amongst the top ten of search results.

•    It aids in saving you tons of money and time.

•    Your site will receive much needed exposure through link building.

But Where Else Can You Get One Way Links To My Site?

Use The Free Link Building Tool Chest To Get Even More FREE Links Now!