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?

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!

“Search Engine Optimization now revolves around link building”.

Inbound Links make your website stand out prominent in the SERPs. In today’s SEO world, more than 95% of the focus is on building quality backlinks!

Contextual Link Building makes up a great new option to traditional link building tactics. A contextual link is produced from creating a keyword rich article that includes an embedded link to your web page. The articles are then added to a site that corresponds the precise theme of your website. Best of all, a complete page is devoted to your article! This assures that there will be no additional links on the page other than your own. As soon as the article is “live”, 10-20 backlinks should be created to the article to guarantee that it acquires plenty of link popularity over a period of time.

In all probability you have figured out, that contextual links are exceedingly effective and well worth the effort! Google, Yahoo, and the all of the other leading search engines count these links as some of the most beneficial incoming links a website can obtain. Contextual links make for lasting, 100% relevant backlinks to your website!

So How Do I Create Contextual Links?

• * Create articles based on your website’s theme including one or two links back to the web site with relevant anchor text.

Any links coming from articles that you write should be thematic! Thematic links are regarded  to be more crucial as they’re on a site that plays off the precise subject of your web site and above all, there are no additional links on that page.

Therefore the entire page is exclusively created for your website’s link and the best part is that contextual links are permanent and amazing for your search engine optimization campaign!

Now lets assume you’ve already created your 100% relevant on topic articles! Where should you submit them? Tons of people will tell you to submit your articles to article directories and that is a good idea for some but I personally like to have complete control over my content! So I create Blogs with some of my new articles! Why? Well, think about it! You will now have a new site that you can use to leverage search engines even further if you choose!

Now once you have created your new Blog your done, right? Wrong! You need to create links to your new blog post! But don’t worry this process is going to be simple for you because we have created the perfect tool! It’s called the dofollow blog finder and it will find relevant blog posts for you to comment on and get high quality links to your new blog posts fast!

Link Building SEO

Effective link building is consistent and steady! That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aggressive! If you attempt to get 2,000 links in one day it isn’t going to kill your search engine rankings like most other “SO CALLED” search engine optimization specialists will tell you!

The key is that you should build links to all of your pages instead of just your main page! If your submitting to directories and your worried about how many submissions you can get by with in one day, Quit! Why? Because they won’t all be approved on the same day anyway! That is just hype created to scare you into hiring someone else to optimize your website.

You need to be aggressive in order to succeed! When faced with needing your business to succeed on the internet for free or cheap you will need to rely more on search engines than anything else! Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn, and Aol mainly focus on link popularity as their #1 ranking factor!

So what does that tell you? Build some links! Some of you may ask the following:

• How many links should I build per day? As Many As Possible!
• Where should I get my links? As Many Relevant Places As Possible!
• What are relevant links? Links From Related Sites!

Time and time again you will hear/read that if you get the wrong link your site will be banned by Google! If a porn site links to your site will you get banned by Google? NOPE!! Otherwise your competitors could submit your site to porn directories and you would be out of business!

Now with that said, if you have nothing but bad links or adult related links your in trouble! You will definitely want more good links than bad! How?

Get Links in the following manner:

• General Directories
• Article Directories
• Niche Directories
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Dofollow Blog Commenting
• Web 2.0 Properties
• Press Release

Extra Tips:

• Create Related Blogs On Free Blog Hosts Then Link Back To Your Website!
• Write Reviews About Your Own Products/Services!
• Create Some Hype!
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