A Beginners Guide to SEO

top 100 time saving websites

i read an article the other day in women’s health magazine and it listed their opinion of the top 100 time saving websites.  they had broken out the sites into different sections, such as money, entertainment, career sites, shopping sites, etc.

some examples i liked:

simpleseating.com

run.com

trails.com

indeed.com

copyblogger.com

but my favorite was a site called post secret.  there are books that are the same, but seeing it online was great too.  people create hand-made postcards with their secret on it and mail it in.  good ones are either put in the books or put on the site.  check it out, everyone has a secret, and they really made you think. 

the google 15

working at the googleplex has its advantages.  their tag-line …. “not serious about anything but search”.  many companies have tried to benchmark the google work environment, believing that people who are happy to be at work, surrounded in a great work environment are more productive in their job.  beginning benefits are standard and on top of those, employees get first class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, dry-cleaning, car washes, 12 weeks of maternity leave, they even have ‘take-out’ benefits for new parents, allowing them to expense $5o0 worth of take out for their first four weeks home with the new baby.  sounds great, right?  and all for the small price of the google 15.  a play on the freshman 15, one of the main benefits for google employees in the mass amount of food available from gourmet chefs at all times … for FREE.  free lunches and dinners for all as well as snack shops around every corner.  this is why first year, or freshman google employees tend to pack on the pounds that first year.  one example of a ’gourmet’ meal cooked up at google, is the bacon krispy kreme burger .  so nasty looking (and sounding) that i just threw up in my mouth.  a greasy bacon cheeseburger equipped with no, not a bun, but in the place of a bun, a grilled krispy kreme doughnut.  thus, in existence … the google 15!

links - what works and what works just as well

having started out my search engine marketing career at a very white hat, play-by-all-the-rules company, that was the way i was taught.  once your mind is set on certain things, such as ‘PR is very very important and every site you want a link from must be PR 4 or higher’, it is difficult to graspe the concept that a link’s PR really doesn’t matter much anymore, at least not as much as if the link will drive traffic or not.  that is just one example.  another is reciprocal linking.  i have experienced great luck with reciprocals and i’ve even heard of sites ranking in the top three for their space with nothing but reciprocal links.  with reciprocal linking, what matters most is the targeted anchor text.  it doesn’t take that many reciprocal links, with targeted anchor text, to increase rankings.  many sites buy links and haven’t experienced any negative effects with that either.  sure good ole fashion, natural links probably are best, but if you are engaged in ‘link building’ at all, are they really ‘natural’?  probably not.  press releases still can be good sometimes and also blogs.  one of the more natural link methods is probably submitting to social sites.  the extreme natural way would be submitting to a social site, just because you actually like the article or the story in the first place and then people who read it and like it and link back to it, but generally, things that are submitted to social sites are indeed looking for links as a reward.  like it or not, people, to some extent, are still using directories and this can still be a source of obtaining a link or two.  everything still sort of works, even to this day, so whatever method you prefer, you should stick to.  and if, in some crazy time, google decides to punish all these methods to prove some point about link building campaigns then first i will eat my words and second, i’m sure people will just figure out more ways to build links.       

seo at 26

i know a lot of people have done it a lot better at this age, but i love it.  i can’t help but absolutely love what i’m doing every single day of my life and be thankful for that alone.  i learn from the leaders that i have been given the opportunity to work with, and the people that i am thankful for every every single day.  from icrossing, to the better company for me, that i am at now …. and some days, you just have to believe that passion will prevail and that you will miraculously land in the right place at the right time …….. 

tip for beginning seo-ers

the number one thing that i recommend for anyone who decides to go into this space (or just sort of falls into it like myself), is to learn how to build a site.  i think everything would have been so much easier for me had i known even the slightest about website building.  actually building a site and knowing how to make that site rank, is ton easier if you know the technical side of how the site was built in the first place.  i’m just now making an effort to learn how to actually build a decent looking site and my dreamweaver skills are at about a one.  one thing i have been told, is to learn how to build a site from scratch, without a program like dreamweaver, but that’s not going to happen!!  anyway, for those of you who are just starting out, i do recommend learning that.  for those of you who are really good at code and site building, search engine marketing would probably come really natural to you. 

google hates link campaigns

i guess this is no surprise to anyone, but i read an interesting quote by jeremy luebke the other day … he said,  

“google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat. it won’t be long before all off topic linkbait, including articles, is considered linkspam.”

google’s intentions have been to keep rankings as pure and natural as possible.  link building is an important part of any seo strategy.  link building though, is very time consuming.  if it didn’t work, no one would do it, so why doesn’t google just make the inbound links less important on the scale of rankings.  instead of just calling it black hat and banning the sites that clearly engage in link building, they could just make the number of links less important. 

old client update

when i left the company i was previously at, a couple months ago, there was one client that i focused most of my time.  i did the linking for them and i did a lot of it.  one month i sent out over 2,400 requests for either new links based on where their competitors were or link modifications, requesting that a site already linking to this client changed the anchor text to include a keyword at the end of the brand.  there were four main keywords that this company was trying to rank for.  this client happened to be in a space with a lot of big brand name competitors with a ton of backlinks.  i had a great deal of success with this client because of the linking campaign.  they quickly went from page 2 to page one in the 6th or 7th spot depending on the day.  i think the highest they ever reached was position 4, with their sister company, also part of my campaign, ranking right behind them at position 5.  after a few months of attempting all these natural links to be added or changed, it was too time consuming for me, so we decided to try buying links.  we called it ‘text link placement ads’ so the client wouldn’t see it so much as purchasing links, which comes with a definite risk.  although, we did explain the risk to the client, we still didn’t call it what it actually was.  with no natural linking campaign and over $4,000 a month going into buying links, their rankings, for all but one of the targeted keywords, the client has dropped in rankings.  hmmmm, maybe they should have stuck with the idea of natural linking ….