SEO Optimization Quick Tips and Resources
External link (anchor) text is the most important factor…In my experience, external link text matters way more than anything else. That is, the actual words in the links back to your sites and pages.
If you get link text right, link back sites’ pagerank matter way less. Usual SEO advice is to contentrate on link backs from high pagerank sources…However, higher pagerank links are much harder to get than lower pagerank links. And what is often missed is that if you can get even a few lower pageank sites to link back to you using the key phrases you want to rank for, you can rank highly on those search terms even with little or no high pagerank link backs.
Widgets are great strategies…they help you get link-backs from a variety of sites, often on their front pages and often on multiple pages within the sites…it doesn’t matter if they are all low pagerank sites because you can control the link text…If you do a widget, don’t forget you need that static link in it. That is, it can’t all be JavaScript.
Don’t guess search term volume. Use Google’s Keyword & Trends tools.
Select terms that convert… Ideally, don’t guess here either…
Don’t bother if you can’t get in the top 10…A good thing to do is to add one more word to the general term, so if you end up ranking well for the specific term you are helping your rankings for the more general one as well. Then if it turns out the specific one was easy (you quickly become #1), you’ve already gone part way on the general one.
Don’t pay any for any general SEO service…Note I’m not saying don’t pay anyone for SEO, because if you need basic help, a consult from someone in the know might be helpful to, for example, tell you how to re-layout your site and to explain this post to you :).
Beware of nofollow links. Nofollow links are links with a special attribute that tell search engines to ignore them. To check a link, view the source of that page in your Web browser and look for rel=nofollow in it… Don’t waste your time submitting comments and editing Wikipedia articles with your links because it won’t help you.
Don’t waste your time with Google Sitemaps...
Don’t ignore the long-tail…First, make sure you have a static site… Second, look at all the content you can produce or have produced. Can you combine it in interesting ways that people would find useful? For example, at Duck Duck Go we have category pages.
Make as flat a site hierarchy as possible. Pagerank seems to flow logarithmicly from a homepage to its internal pages. So if you have pages you want ranked highly, either you need links back to them directly or have them linked directly from your homepage…
Use directories instead of subdomains. For example, domain/blog instead of blog.domain.
Less is more. Ranking is distributed across your site, so less pages, less links on them, and less text on them will concentrate your ranking potential on what is left.
Don’t do anything black hat. You will get caught, you will not pass go, etc.