SEO

I’ve been an SEO consultant for about 8 years (with 2 years before that running an ecommerce store that I cut my SEO teeth on) and for several of those years I’ve been using SEO Elite (bought it within 6 weeks of it’s release) and as a professional SEO consultant I recommend this SEO software to other SEO consultants who spend a LOT of their time doing SEO analysis.

I would not generally recommend SEO Elite to the average webmaster since a lot of what SEO Elite does can be achieved for free: there’s a LOT of very good free SEO tools and free SEO software these days.

Reading the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines and a post subject: PR confusion? caught my eye.

A poster to the NG has been having problems with an affiliate site http://www.review-a-gadget.com/ and he’s been given some poor quality advice.

I’m confused about PR again.

Not surprised you’ve got some really bad advice lately, been following your newsgroup threads, but I didn’t have the time to post, but it became too much to see another round of ignorance sending you again down the wrong path chasing SERPs I don’t think this site can gain!

Someone in another group told me about the importance of getting deep in links to my inner pages.

New WordPress installations by default now use the rel=”nofollow” attribute on comment links. If you are not familiar with rel=”nofollow” earlier this year the major search engines (Google, Yahoo etc…) issued a new rel attribute (nofollow) which when used on a text or image link will tell the major search engines to not consider this as a link that should pass link benefit (or PageRank in Google’s case).

Link benefit or PageRank is very important to Google and to a lessor degree Yahoo and MSN search engine rankings, so adding rel=”nofollow” to a link will mean the recipient page will not gain an advantage in the major search engines.

This post is based on a thread (Re: My Google Page Rank is 4) in the NG alt.internet.search-engines and a request for help in the comments at SEO Expert page.

Original poster asked about his 3-4 month old site www.cre8ivemind.com, with a PR4 home page, but no pages indexed in Google despite using Google site map.

Confirmed with the Google toolbar the home page was indeed PR4.

Click for large PR4 screenshot

Confirmed with a link:http://www.domain.com/ search in Google that the site had backlinks (5 backlinks) did the same with Yahoo, though Yahoo has changed it’s link: format recently and sometimes it doesn’t work (used to work with any site including deleted ones!)! Yahoo showed 113 backlinks.

There’s a discussion in the NG alt.internet.search-engines “comparing seo techniques [was: To hyphen or not to hyphen]” partially based on this web page How to get IE6 to apply image border styles on hover (mouseover)?.

The owner of the Locus Optimus (Els) is a web designer who focuses on accessibility based web design, a growing niche market due to recent web site accessibility legislation.

Some Free SEO Advice

If she came to me as a client with the primary goal of accessibility since that’s her niche market in web design and compromising accessibility would damage the sites credibility (I have SEO clients with similar needs, and you are a pain in the neck :-)) my optimization advice would be as follows.

Are you looking for an SEO expert to help achieve high search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN?

Here’s how you find that SEO Expert, your own SEO Guru.

What is an SEO Expert?

Before we find an SEO expert, we first need to decide what an SEO expert is. There are many self proclaimed experts out there, some call themselves ethical SEO experts, others whitehat SEO experts, a few even admit to being blackhat SEO experts and the rest just plain old SEO expert or consultant.

Since search engine optimization is a relatively new industry there are no regulations covering the SEO sector like there are for say electricians or plumbers anyone with no training and no clue can setup an SEO company and start offering SEO services overnight.

Was reading a post on alt.internet.search-engines (newsgroup) called “SEO certification” which had gone a little off topic, had gone on to basically how to show you are a good SEO consultant by showing your rankings (SERPs). I started to respond, but thought it would be better on the SEO section of the blog (some new much needed SEO content)-

Someone said to show you are a good SEO consultant make a site that ranks well for some SERPs. Another poster (a self proclaimed ethical SEO expert) agreed rankings is the way to go giving a easy SERP as an example and that got me started-

Phentermine, Xanax and Blackjack is apparently what most of my readers are into according to the comments “Spam Karma 2″ and “Akismet” (two Wordpress comment spam plugins) are catching :-)

Here’s a recent one I find funny-

Name: phentermine online | E-mail: phentermine @ mail.uk | URI: ####### phentermine-online-swicki.eurekster.com/ | IP: 82.146.42.206 | Date: May 29, 2006

I found your work a little stiff, you need to involve your acute artistic sensibilities, that you indeed have, and, your photos reflects, the dicipline of composicion, an important tool that will make you master of your skills. rosa maria

I could see someone missing this as spam, but both Wordpress plugins caught this one which is presumably because of the keyword phentermine in the URI.

MSN’s search market share dropped from 14 percent to 11 percent

Google and Yahoo increased their market share in the online search arena as Microsoft’s MSN slipped, according to Web research firm Nielsen//NetRatings.

Growth in use of Google and Yahoo is outpacing the overall growth in the search engine market during the past year, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

The number of searches at Yahoo.com grew 47 percent, and searches at Google.com grew 41 percent between March 2005 and this March, Nielsen//NetRatings said. Overall, online searches grew 36 percent in the past year.

Google’s searches increased from 2.1 billion in March 2005 to 2.9 billion this March, while Yahoo’s searches increased from 907.8 million to 1.3 billion. The third largest search provider, MSN, grew 9 percent, from 592.2 million to 643.8 million, Nielsen//NetRatings said.

We had a toolbar PR update around Feb 18th and the next one is due around the end of May/beginning of June, so toolbar PR should be stable right now.

Some pages are showing pre toolbar update PR values (so what we saw prior to the Feb 18th update) and others are showing the new toolbar PR value (what we saw after Feb 18th). This is a first for me!

For example

http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/ updated to PR6 during the last PR toolbar update from a PR7. Yet sometimes it still shows a toolbar PR of 7, other times PR6.

right now the above is PR7 (old value).

I’m a paid SEO Consultant with SEO Gold where we don’t generally offer free search engine optimization advice since that wouldn’t be good business.

However, to generate some interest in my new blog for a limited period of time I’m offering free SEO advice here from an SEO consultant.

If you have a question regarding search engine optimization (SEO) post it as a comment below and I’ll try to create a new post to answer your question.

Links from a page are very important to it’s rankings, if you want a SERP like Search Engine Rankings the best web pages you can link to from the page that targets this SERP should be about Search Engine Rankings and the anchor text should include the SERP or similar derivative. A derivative phrase might be “Google Rankings” or “Top 10 Search Engine Rankings” all that matters is some of the anchor text uses some/all of the same words as the main SERPs.

So you’d ideally link to the top resources on the subject matter using relevant keyword rich anchor text. Those resources can be on external sites or on the same site, both help.

Having a discussion at alt.internet.search-engines under the thread Re: Links and PR with Borek, and decided I’d put my answer here instead of on the NG. Won’t waste some half decent content this way :-)

Borek asked-

“Let’s see… Is there optimal size for a page SEO Wise?”

I replied-

For Google below 101KB and preferably more than a few paragraphs of text so your content includes derivative search phrases (based on the main phrase for the page) for maximum overall related SERPs, beyond that it doesn’t matter.
Borek replied (futire response from Borek are indented)-

Well, you are asking others to do some testing before posting their SEO ideas,

A doorway page is basically a web page that doesn’t really offer any real content to a search engine visitor, but is a blackhat SEO technique for creating multiple keyword rich pages that are used as a gateway (doorway) to the real sites content (they also act as pages to add keyword rich links to the target site).

A single doorway page will concentrate on a specific search phrase or theme with links to the appropriate content on the real site. Some doorway pages expect the search engine visitor to click a link to the real content and others use a fast Meta refresh to the real content, so automatically redirects to the real page before the search engine visitor realizes they are on a doorway page.

I used to post a lot to a newsgroup called alt.internet.search-engines which tends to concentrate on search engine optimization, you can view the NG through Googlegroups at alt.internet.search-engines. But recently the majority of regular posters SEO understanding has degraded significantly, posters like Big Bill (BB who is the most prolific poster) in particular brings that groups usefulness to a very low level, so my posts are now far and few between. It’s a shame as it used to be an interesting newsgroup to participate in.