Don’t let anyone con you out of your money with a paid directory submission service, although if you still see value in having your websites submitted to 1000 irrelevant directories, perhaps you deserve it!

I think the SEO world needs a new rule – anyone who struggles to create a PR2 website is allowed to give out SEO advice – that would weed out 90% of the posers right there. Heck, I still consider myself a newbie and I know far more than 90% of these wannabee SEOs calling themselves SEO consultants. I’ve always thought of it as follows — if you were really as good as you say you are, why wouldn’t you be building your own websites instead of offering SEO consulting services? Business.com used to give out business advice and now that they’re bankrupt, I can’t help but remember the comment one domainer mad – who would take advice from a company which can’t even stay afloat while owning the domain name  business.com? As they say, hindsight is always 20/20 and I don’t think anyone would be coming for business advice today! Exceptions in the SEO world would obviously apply for the guys charging their customers thousands per day which customers are happy to pay because they deliver results.

Very Bad SEO

Sam’s Club has SEO services starting at just $30 per month.. I don’t know which is scarier – the fact that Sam’s Club is offering SEO services for $1 per day or the fact that people buy into this and actually think they’re getting SEO. Even half decent outsourced SEO isn’t going to work for anywhere near $1 per hour, let alone per day! Submitting your website to 1000 directories is so 1999.. A lot of SEOs talk trash about social bookmarks but I’ve had far better results paying people to bookmark my sites than I’ve ever gotten with mass directory submissions — at least with social bookmarks if you pay enough people (or the right people), you’ll make out okay for yourself. I only do paid social bookmarking myself on sites where the ToS says it’s okay — even playing by the rules, you can get a sizable amount of traffic from Delicious. Social networks are largely short term low quality traffic and you’d likely be better off building something for the long term but if you’re the kind of guy who thinks directory submission services are going to get you good traffic…

Good Architectural SEO

One thing I’ve been working on over the past day is architectural SEO — helping search engines better navigate my blog. Every link a search engine has to go through to get to my content gives less link juice than the previous one — this penalizes content which takes more links to access.  Most SEOs believe there’s a damping factor of around 85% (based on an old paper from Google’s founders which may or may not be accurate today) – this means that even if there’s only one link from one page to the next (which is highly unlikely), you’d only get 85% of the pagerank that the first page has. This would seem to suggest I should perhaps use 2 pages and link 90 posts to each of them or alternatively, set up categories and put links to all relevant posts in those categories. I like the latter option more myself — mainly because my blog posts are on a variety of topics and I doubt an article about SEO is viewed as being relevant to a post of mine such as “How to Incorporate a Business” — maybe if it was how to incorporate an SEO business.. Wordpress without SEO friendly plugins or modifications is bad SEO — the fact some claim Wordpress is almost perfect SEO right out of the box shows how much about SEO people still need to learn. The way Wordpress links posts makes your newest posts appear on your homepage and your oldest posts appear far away from the homepage. Unless all your oldest posts are your worst ones, that’s likely not an ideal SEO configuration. But that’s not the half of it – having a navigational link at the bottom to go from page 1 to page 2, having the same thing displayed on the homepage as on the single post page (unless using excerpts), having the same thing displayed in categories and in the archives. Very bad SEO.

Choosing Keywords

I currently have roughly 180 posts — do I want to have 180 posts with a tiny bit of link juice flowing to each or maybe 20 better posts with much more link juice flowing to each? The right/wrong answer to that question will depend on my blog. If I’m going after keywords/keyphrases with very little keyword competition, I might very well be inclined to categorize my posts and subsequently link to them all almost equally. If on the other hand I’m going after a few more competitive keywords/keyphrases, it only makes sense to try to push as much link juice as possible to those pages. One way to do  Google cracked down on pagerank sculpting recently (Matt Cutts) announcing changes were made to the way the nofollow attribute is handled by Google, making nofollow links act as a link sink. This hardly does anything to impact the other way to sculpt pagerank however – with Google placing increasing importance on link relevance, they’re basically rewarding you for strategic linking and with pagerank today overshadowed by more important factors such as global link popularity and relevance, coming down hard on the nofollow part of pagerank sculpting may very well be a blessing in disguise, encouraging people to better organize their content which will be of benefit to not only search engines but also visitors.

I want to rank my blog for ”domain development” in example — it’s not something super competitive like trying to rank for say, “SEO”, however it’s desirable enough that some companies are willing to pay for sponsored links and at least one person (Mike from WannaDevelop.com) is spending good coin to rank well for it. Obviously any company in the domain development business wouldn’t mind ranking for “domain development” and if you look through the pages on Google, you should see some familar companies such as Whypark and AEIOU.com for example. One great plugin I’ve found for this is the Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP) for Wordpress. If you stick to one topic like say domain development or SEO, it does a very good job at returning other articles on domain development or SEO, however when you make a post like I’ve made here and bounce around talking about domain development one minute and SEO the next, it has a bit of trouble determine which posts are more relevant. Another one I’ve found great has been SEO Smart Links — you’ll notice that whenever I say “domain development” in a post, the first instance of it always links to a particular post on domain development — isn’t that a creative idea to tell Google which page I want to rank well in the SERPs for domain development with? So long as your posts which mention domain development are actually at least to a certain extent about domain development, it’ll help establish relevance. Saying something like “Oh yeah, I forgot to work on domain development” at the end of a post about how great your weekend was isn’t going to help much unfortunately.

Wordpress SEO

What I plan on doing is putting 20 or so links on my homepage to the posts I view as being most valuable. In addition to this, I’m going through all my 180 posts and getting rid of (or merging)  posts which have gotten me zero search engine traffic and are hence just wasting link juice which could be better spent elsewhere. Finally, I’ll set up a sitemap so that at the very least all pages will be indexed, something which likely wouldn’t otherwise happen once I get rid of the link at the bottom of the homepage to view past posts — this will solve any duplicate content issues and I’ll never have to worry about writing post excerpts as there’s only going to be one way to get to any of the posts, having done away with every other method Wordpress provides of accessing posts. Looking underneath my blog post titles on the homepage, you’ll notice I’ve removed some information, such as the “Filed under: Category name” — why the heck would I want to waste pagerank promoting category pages in every blog post? I’m debating whether I should get rid of the comment hyperlink — someone would of course still be able to get to the comments by clicking on the post title, however I have a feeling some people may be more or less inclined to view and/or post comments based on knowing how many there are.

A few more things to mention for the SEO newbie’s newbie:

1 - If you don’t know what PageRank is, do yourself and everyone else a favor and look it up on Wikipedia — they have a nice pretty graph with complicated math formulas that will  keep you thinking for hours.

2 - PageRank isn’t near as important as it used to be. You need relevant links with good anchor text (with relevant text nearby) and descriptions from quality websites. Thinking that a PR4 is always better than a PR3, that a PR4 is equal to a PR4, or that two PR4 websites with the similar relevance, anchor text, descriptions from quality websites will yield similar results are all not necessarily true. Your domain development website being listed in a PR3 page of a directory right beside 100 porn sites is just oozing with relevance — NOT.

3- PageRank is actually calculated out of 100, however Google’s given it a 10 point system so simpletons would have an easier time understanding the concept which doesn’t appear to have happened despite this. That means when the Google toolbar (which nobody even knows if it is how Google actually measures PageRank or if they just created it to keep SEOs busy) reports your website as being PR4, it’s likely not actually PR4, and may be PR4.1, PR4.4, PR4.5 etc.   This is straight from Wikipedia, so it has to be true: “PageRank is a probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page.” So if there’s 10 links on one page and 1000 links on the other, which do you think has a better chance of randomly being clicked on and arriving at your page? That’s not a trick question. Make a quality website and get listed in a few quality directories like DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory. There’s no amount of PR1 directories that will amount to anything — they’re probably giving you negative PR or maybe the engineers at Google think it’s such a pathetic attempt for PageRank that they’ll let your website keep it’s miserable existence as a PR1.

4 - Homepage PageRank is just that — Homepage PageRank. When you do an article or directory submission, how often is your link ever on the homepage? It doesn’t matter if the homepage is a PR 10, what matters is what the pagerank of the page the link to your website is on, in addition to everything already mentioned.

Good Wordpress SEO

One thing I have to get around to doing one of these days is ordering a custom blog design or getting off my lazy behind and doing it myself — nobody likes linking to a free template. All I changed so far was the H1 tag color from blue to green — looks a lot better in my opinion already! Another thing I changed earlier today was the functionality of the sidebars — they now only display on the homepage. Be sure to have plugins in place to handle automatic 301 redirects and redirect 404 error page to your homepage to preserve link juice. This next tip isn’t really SEO but seeing as the whole purpose of SEO is to get more visitors / targeted visitors to your website, I guess it goes without saying that the most important thing to do is to make sure your site stays online. I have a pretty decent VPS however it crashed on a couple occasions and went mighty slow when I had too many plugins enabled — most notably bandwidth heavy ones which are rewriting stuff on the fly and surprisingly, Intense Debates plugin for comments. You might want to keep an eye on your Wordpress database as well — I don’t know much about servers, however something was bloating the hell out of mine. Thankfully the folks at Liquid Web fixed the problem without me even asking. One plugin which further helped with database load was the “Revision Diet” plugin, available at Wordpress.org/Extend. This plugin let’s you specify how many revisions you want stored so your database doesn’t get bloated with unnecessary post revisions. I really need to get my RSS feed link back on my homepage, however I must admit that I’m quite happy with how much scraping has gone down since I took it off. Apparently there are some clever ways to deal with that — one AntiLeech Wordpress plugin goes so far as to give the scrapers not only fake content but also put links on that fake content back to your site! Probably not something you’d want to try on a new site due to Google possibly thinking you’re a spammer but for more established sites, there’s nothing like a little revenge.

Paid Links, SEO, and Monopoly

And contrary to what any SEO will tell you, the best SEO strategy is to produce “good” content (other than buying links if you have the money and accept the risks). Isn’t that a no brainer? Just ask yourself why Google is coming down so hard on some paid link buyers.. It’s because their stupid pagerank formula has one gigantic flaw in that there’s no way in hell it can detect most paid links, so Google resorts to threats and BS about how good their “paid link detecting algorithms” are. Yeah, I’m sure. Because I see paid links on like 1/2 the websites I go to.  So you can buy paid links or you can do what Matt Cutts recommends and create linkbait which in my opinion is most of the time more manipulative than paid links — creating false and/or slanderous content just because some bloggers are dumb enough to link to that kind of stuff — that’s what Google recommends? I’d rather buy paid links than pull a David Letterman but apparently Google would prefer you make  jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter getting knocked up by… I won’t go there — that family has enough issues as it is. The only solution is something Google doesn’t want to address — devalue all links because pagerank was flawed from day 1.

Links are a fundamental part of the Internet and now with Google going so far as to change how nofollow is handled such that all links are penalized, Google is essentially punishing any and every link not bought from them. Hmm… Seeing as the domain world has been ranting and raving about monopolistic behavior the past couple days, I gotta ask you guys — don’t you think not allowing paid links is anti-competitive behavior against all the third party link sellers? I just did a google search on the matter and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. Paid links would get rid of the large majority of spammers, scrapers, and those gaming the SERPs with advanced SEO techniques. How different is it than how their Adwords works right now — he who pays most gets the top result? Does that result in spam? I wouldn’t think much more than organic search results do and it could easily be addressed with new usage guidelines. Oh yeah, but then I forgot.. If I buy my link from someone other than Google, then Google makes no money off of it! So yeah, let’s pretend paid links are really bad but all we actually want to do is preserve our little monopoly and throw a little temper tantrum and blackmail anyone who ponders defying us. Do no evil indeed. Like I said earlier in the post, I don’t buy paid links but I don’t see anything wrong with doing it. Sorry for getting a little off-topic at the end.

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2. Good SEO, Bad SEO
3. Wordpress 2.8.1 Released