Commentary on Search Engine Optimization or how to write web pages that rank well in the Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Googler, Matt Cutts publicly outed a spammer using a text box to keyword stuff his webpages full of keywords. Whether or not Google can detect the gimmick of using tiny text boxes as a means of lamely hiding text on a webpage is totally besides the point. Adding hundreds of different words to a webpage, whether visible or invisible, would only decrease the keyword density of each of your keywords close to zero.
It is utterly amazing the number of websites out there that define their home page url, two or three different ways. How can you ever expect to succeed in Google, when your own home page is competing against itself?
Google does a good job of establishing brand names with a special form of a double-listing called an authority site that give searchers added value.
Categories are born to be hierarchies. Using flat category structures is like shooting yourself in the foot.
If you cannot link to your own webpages yourself, then why in the world would you think that anybody else would be interested in them?
Don’t be fooled into thinking that blogging with WordPress is easy. While anybody can put up a WordPress blog overnight, only a few can overcome all of the design and programming challenges necessary to excel with WordPress.
Studying Google’s SERPs reveals a number of different things. Google lists do not always look the same. There is in fact a lot of variability in how search results are displayed. There are at least four different ways that a website can be displayed on a search engine results page.
Most web developers create webpages visually with some type of WYSIWYG HTML Editor. In these types of visual editors, there is always more than one view of the hypertext document. While humans think in terms of the creative process of using pictures, different fonts, color, and size of print to create a pleasing visual effect; Google as a computer sees only the HTML source code view of what you have created. And, just like humans do to each other, Google discriminates against webpages based purely upon certain elements of the HTML view of your pages.
There are far too many SEOs out there spouting their mouths off, blindly repeating the latest gossip, about stuff that they obviously know nothing about. Not only does Leak Juice sound sleazy, it really doesn’t have anything to do with white-hat natural organic search engine optimization.
Amazon.com has 1.8+ million webpages each of which is automatically generated every time a new product is added. The only interesting, or fully developed, webpages to be found on Amazon.com are those for the same popular items being offered by off-line retailers. The long tail marketing tactics of Amazon.com apply only to their obscure hard to get items, most of whose corresponding webpages are quite undeveloped and empty. To try to apply the same long tail webpage development concept to the average site that contains only hand written content is an absurdity that perpetuates a fallacy of unreasonable expectations on the part of naive website operators.
Do you use artificial black-hat SEO gimmicks in order to achieve your search engine optimization objectives? Or, do you use content driven natural organic search engine optimization to achieves long lasting results?
PageRank only counts in the SERPs when all other things are equal. Or in others words, pagerank is almost never a consideration for ranking better in the SERPs.
Google favors keyword density over keyword repetition. So, there is never a need to write really big pages where a keyword is repeated hundreds of different times.
Search engine optimization is about optimizing what one has control over. Webmasters in most cases have no control over who links to them. In fact, obtaining links from other websites is about website promotion rather than SEO. Wasting time on trying to get external links by engaging in superstitious behavior is counter productive to good search engine optimization.
SEOs that make a W3C Validation claim are just trolls trying to scam you into spending your time making worthless busywork changes to your website. Or, worst yet trying to scam you into purchasing their expensive SEO services.
The supreme importance of PageRank simply is not so. Only when all other things are equal does the importance of pagerank ever come into play.
Did you know that ranking for non competitive keywords has more to do with the good SEO use of keywords, section headers, internal url structure and internal linking rather than with pagerank from external backward links?
Always give the readers of your website enough content to wet their appetites the first time around. Just be sure to leave those who read one of your webpages with a thirst to look around on your site for some for more content.