Forum Moderators: phranque
My ambition or goal or target for the next couple of years are search engines! I would like to become a good search engine submission guy (sorry not sure what the professional name is...). By browsing through this forum I understand that it's a tough job trying to keep up with the latest SE moves and news but patience is something I have (since I have a lot of time...).
I'm confused however over how a newbie should go about learning anything and everything about search engines (or least narrowing it down to the major areas). I understand that the well-known Google is flying up the competition real quick now and that there is a possibility that they might switch from allowing free submissions to paid submissions or similar ones.
By the end of the 3 or 10 years I would like to become as good as (or least as close as I can get to) how professional highly qualified people are (such as Brett as far as I know in this forum)
Currently I do some basic programming using VB/QB and am able to make just about any type of web pages (by looking at the source code of others and from books) but am not fluent with it. I've been on the internet since 1997 and had surfed around ever since.
Can someone please give me some pointers and guidelines I could use to achieve my goal? And in addition, could someone list down the search engine 'masters' in this forum? (Would be interested to track down all the posts they posted on...)
Thanks everyone, would really appreciate everyone's help!
You are in the right place.
Many of the posters here are experts. Whilst you are still getting the feel of the place, look for the forum moderators (listed at the top of each forum).
There is no shortcut - read previous posts!
The path to knowledge is in reading the debates that occur between the 'experts'.
And remember, everyone is an expert on something:)
Yup reading debates between experts and previous posts is something I'll definitely do!
However, for a total newbie (assume I know nothing about SE submissions at all) what would you and everyone recommend?
Once again thanks for everyone's advise! (And wow response is awesomely fast around here not to mention how useful they are as far as all my replies are concerned :))
I started out about five years ago and did it by creating a website, learning html at the very least and moved on from there. It really does help to have a site that you can use as you learn.
Reading the forums here is the best tool by far. Get to know the site search, learn the rules of the board, keep posting where it’s relevant and become a member of the community.
Since you have time and before you set up your practice site – focus on your plan. The more time you spend on the front end = less hassles on the back end.
Once you determine what your site is going to be about – research. Check out the industry, the competition, the search (related vortal/portal/hub/directories) opportunities, and link possibilities. All of this as part of your planning phase.
Every question you come up with, check out the site search for an answer and even if it’s an old post feel free to bring it up again if you have a relevant question. We’ve probably talked about it at some point but maybe not in awhile. The library is also a great place to get started and stimulate your thinking.
My last tip for now is, spreadsheets. I use them during all my research.
Have fun!
<added - take little bitty baby steps. Start at the beginning and work your way through. A brain can handle just so much information at one time!>
Took a quick look through your website just a minute ago and that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about (What I want to have achieved at least by the end of 5 years :))
Thanks for your advise about creating a website, I will be doing that and probably do a non-profit site for the purpose of educating people regarding web hosting (and including stuff that's found here) or anything else better I can come up with at any later time.
How would you suggest on the practise plan? Could you just jot down a rough plan for me? (Forgive me I'm not sure what kind of plan it is you're talking about... yup that's how far back I am.. sorry...)
How do you use spreadsheets for researches? Is it to do with keywords?
Please forgive me everyone if I'm asking stupid questions... (which I probably am doing) Thanks for any help and advise offered!
Being a newbie myself, here's a bit of advice and a key to learning:
READ...read as much as you can in this board, read stuff from similar boards and just surf, surf, surf. View source files, study code, and then come back and read some more.
Optimization is an interesting field; One that most designers aren't even aware of. I, for one, never thought about optimization on the sites I master, but after a few months have found my rankings moving up and up just in doing a few simple, common sense, fixes.
When you start developing your sites, make sure you write clean code, stay away from too-fancy graphics or scripting, and don't be afraid to revise. No offence to animal lovers (or the PC inclined), but forget dogs - revision is man's best friend.
The people that post here are the best in the biz, but they won't give you specific answers. They'll guide you to a certain extent, but the beauty of this board is that they leave it up to you to decide what works best. The web is ever-changing, so your knowledge and skill set has to change with it.
Sort of a ramble, but I hope it helps. Good luck, and welcome.
Anyways right now this other person introduced me to Western Union (http://www.westernunion.com) which is this service you could use to transfer moeny from one end of the world to another. The only problem being that once you've transfered your money, whether or not the seller is actually going to give what you bought to you. (unlike CC you can't do a chargeback or anything and this isn't actually used for commercial purposes so even if you get cheated, it would be hard/impossible to fight back)
Thanks paynt :) There are really nice people around here :)
hasbeen, I'd be happy to change the title of the thread if you really want me to... just need to figure out how to do that first :( Is it really true everyone who post here are the best in the biz? Meaning those self-appointed professionals (I think) such as Harmony Major [yahoosecrets.com...] (got really attached to her document for a while and still am :)) would be considered the 'average' surfer in WebmasterWorld? That would be really great... :)
Thanks JamesR would be doing that everyday starting yesterday :) And maybe it would be a good idea creating a website on search engine optimization..? Or do it as the 'research' goes alongside.
Thanks everyone for helping! Anyways it's early morning 7:50am right now and have a class in about 10 minutes which will run on for another 75 minutes. Until then :)
I just wanted to say that patience is definetely a virtue in making a site, and the rewards will come if you are enthusiastic and willing to learn ALOT! You have a definite advantage, you are young, and there are plenty of people older and with more experience who are willing to help you out.
Im not much older at 20, but regardless of age or experience, there is always more info around the corner to give your site the cutting edge ;)
In order to get started there are a few basic steps you need to do:
1)read all that you can here
2)use the search function to seek out specific things you have questions about
3)can't find the answer? just ask - no such thing as a dumb question here. We all had to start somewhere and we respect the desire to learn.
4)read some more
5)read yet some more
6)read even more
7)read
8)you get the idea :)
re spreadsheets: yeah - killer way to keep track of stuff. Just build what ever tables you need to keep track of words, rankings, click numbers, etc.
Hope you find your way.
They are a great tool. I organize keywords lists on one, link opportunities on another, places to submit articles… the list goes on and on.
Thanks for your welcome oilman and I certainly would love it if addiction do take place (it's starting that's no doubt :))
Thanks for the tip regarding spreadsheets, will make good use of them. Just wondering, how long are your spread sheets? As in do you find trouble keeping track of which spreadsheet is which and everything? (If it is then will consider writing a small program to help make the task easier for everyone to share if anyone wants to use it ;))
Will be off to do some random reading now to familiarize myself with it
I'm still going to go to university and get a degree (looking at Finance but will have to see what happens when the time comes) and getting myself a day-to-day job or perhaps even start my own business.
Doing this as a personal project for the purpose of wanting to know more and to use free time more efficiently and effectively. This is the area that interest me most compared to all others.
If everything works out fine over here, excellent :) If it does not... there's always the business world to venture into :)
Will have to really stick to JamesR's advice and focus on specific areas... would it be advisable to focus on one particular topic for a couple of days (doing in-depth research) and then move on to another? Or learn the basics of all of them first before moving deeper in any particular areas?
Will be using:
http://www.seo411.com/
http://www.searchengineworld.com
http://www.diy-seo.com/
http://www.apromotionguide.com
http://www.topsitelistings.com
http://www.promotion-strategies.com
http://www.searchenginewatch.com
to give myself a quick intro into each topics and then dig as much information as I can out of WebmasterWorld on that particular topic. And if I encounter any problems will post it in this thread and everywhere else :) How does this sound to everyone?
Are there any other sites similar to those above anyone would suggest to give a quick intro to? Thanks!
You have the right idea about the timescales and study you'll be needing to do to acheive your aims.
As said before and above, this site is a supreme resource for tips, guidance and discussion. However, I do advise doing the 'groundwork' of giving yourself a good foundation too. WebmasterWorld is not as much of a 'beginners' forum as many of the others are (*cough* searchengineforums.com *cough*). :D
Start out by reading all of SearchEngineWatch.com for the basics that everyone in search engine promotion should know. Then read it all again just to be sure. ;)
WebmasterWorld is like any professional forum - we talk shop a lot, and we tend to use a lot of industry-specific terminology without thinking about it. Giving yourself a basic foundation of the principles will enable you to understand more of the terms and issues we discuss.
Most of all, enjoy it. The best SEOs I know are the ones who just love to experiment and discover things. They roll with even the hardest knocks and come back for more out of sheer joy in the game.
Ammon Johns
Regarding what you said about the terms and everything, have searchengineworld.com for its glossary to hopefully help understanding when I get stuck :)
And... well.. I just included your website to the list because it looks useful :)
Going to head on to the other sites as well.
At the mean time, don't quite get these...
What are PR's? Do they stand for Page Rank (forgive me if this question sounds stupid..) How are Page Ranks calculated?
I've read several times Lynx... what is this? Is it a browser?
From another thread it saids the 'traditional method' of submission/optimization still works... which is in my understanding:
1) Good content - most important
2) Target keywords (or in some cases target keywords which tend to be typed in incorrectly... as in 'typo')
3) Target specific keywords
4) Put a keyword everywhere but not too much (Brett suggest 5% to 20%). Least once in the title, meta keyword, meta title, high up on the page after the <body> tag, a couple of times in the middle
5) use a variety of ways of mentioning the keywords that relates directly to the targetted keyword
6) don't use frames/any dynamic web tools (that automically generates web pages because spiders can't read them)/flash. Make them as simple as possible.
7) use text links
8) Spamming/Cheating is the last thing anyone would want to do. Avoid keyword stuffing etc
Did I take things the wrong way? And... any missing parts?
Thanks everyone! :)
I think you have get it that would be a greate start for you i will put another thing that is very important.
9)Linkpop try to get links from high ranked pages to your site in the same industri so even the links have greate content.
Good luck
/Ove
Yep. PR is short for PageRank around here (unless it is in the usual context of Public Relations stuff).
PageRank is a scale of 0-10, although zero PR is thought to be reserved solely as punishment for detected transgressions (spamming or such).
The way that PageRank is calculated is well documented in some ways, and still mysterious in other ways.
These documents will start you understanding PageRank:
http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=1999-66&format=pdf&compression=
(That one is in PDF format).
http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm
http://hci.stanford.edu/~page/papers/pagerank/ppframe.htm
There are very, very few pages with PR10, and not that many with PR9. Yahoo.com has PR10 so if you think of how many links point to Yahoo.com, and consider the quality of sites such links are on (stocks sites, news sites, etc) then you can see what it takes to earn PR10.
Ammon Johns
A.) The first thing you should do when you have decided to begin to use any kind of search engine optimisation you should look at your site and ask yourself: Do I have valuable content on this site, would others benefit from this information?
If not you should stop reading this now.
B.) Once you have decided that you have valuable content you should sit down and write down some expression that you want to target. My advice, don’t start with to many, select maybe 5 keywords/expressions that you would like to have a decent ranking for.
C.) How do I then pick out my keywords? There are different things you could do.
You can start by looking at your competitors, view their <Title> and the <Meta keywords tag> and see which keywords they have selected. Write down the keywords somewhere because it might be good to have selected more than 5 from the start.
D.) Lets say that you’ve found 10 different keywords but you don’t have the time to work on all the different keywords, how do you then choice which ones you should go for?
There are different tools to see how popular different keywords are, how many times they are searched for. Below you have some URL’s that might be helpful:
www.wordtracker.com
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
I also suggest that you use the Google Adwords
https://adwords.google.com/AdWords/main?cmd=Preview
Search click estimate tool.
Now you should be able to pick out the ones that are searched for.
But remember that the numbers they present you with is often misleading but it gives you a hint of which keywords people do searches on.
E.) Ok I hope you’ve picked out some keywords now, but STOP, first of all before you start to optimise your site for the different keywords I suggest that you do searches for the different keywords you have selected and see how many “Results” you are presented to.
A good way to do that is to do a search on Google for the different keywords you have selected, if this is your first search engine optimisation site, you should not pick keywords that gets more than 1 Million results presented when you’ve done a search for it on Google.
There are always exceptions, but I would recommend that you try to find different niche keywords in the beginning, but still words that are searched on.
F.) Now you should start to optimise your site. One of the most easily changed things that will boost your ranking is the <Title> tag, As many search engines places a lot of weight on the <Title> tag and inbound links, you should try to create a Title which represents the content of you site, you should also try to squeeze in the main keyword you have selected.
It’s quite easy to start with the main page of you site since I guess most of the inbound links will go there so it will be one of the most important pages on your site.
I cannot help you with the Title but try to remember to create the title as a short informative description of your site. You should also consider where you should put the keyword in the Title. Because different search engines have a different limit of how much of the title they will show. For example I believe that Google cuts the title when it reaches over 62 characters (not sure about 62 but somewhere around 60) While Fast and Inktomi has a limit which is much longer. But since Google is one of the most popular search engines I suggest that you insert your main keyword within the first 60 characters.
G.) Insert Meta tags to your page. Also an good article about Meta tags is this one:
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html
H.) Go trough the content on your site, and see that you have your main keyword in the text. This is pretty important it will do much for your ranking, but be sure to have it where it fits, otherwise it might look a little strange to both the visitors with no search engine referrer, and it might look strange for people when they do searches and they see “Snippets” which Google uses (When they find the keyword in the text and makes it bold and previews the text around it)
I.) Alt tags, some search engines uses the <Alt> tag for ranking the pages, How much they do for you ranking we don’t know, but remember to only use alt tags which is objective to the picture, don’t put an alt tag with the keyword “Search engines” for description if the picture is an elephant. Also be careful not to repeat the keyword in an alt tag and try not to use a long description in the alt tag. In my opinion the Alt tag is not a must and I have been very careful when I have used it because I think that some spiders/search engines will easily pick up the <alt> descriptions and they might penalize you for it if you have abused the <alt> tag, (Repeating keywords in one <Alt> tag etc.)
J.) I think we are pretty much finished with optimising the first page of your site.
One important thing before we end the optimisation of the first page is that you cross-link you pages. Since most of the inbound links will come to your first page, a link from the first page will be very valuable. Try to link to many sub-pages from the first page, I suggest that you try to link to the other pages that you have optimised. Don’t put the site map on the first page though, but it’s quite good to put a link to the site map page if you have one on the first page, because then there is s a big chance that all the pages on your site will be spidered and included in the search engines.
K.) Now start to optimise the other pages, it’s quite easy when you begin with search engine optimisation that you have 1 page for each keyword and since you have select a few it makes it easy and it doesn’t take that much time to optimise lets say 5 pages.
So follow the same procedure with the other pages.
Now I would recommend that you use a Keyword density tool to see how high density you have for the different keywords in the different pages.
There is quite many tools that you can use I like
http://www.keyworddensity.com/search_engine_optimization/keyword_density.cgi
http://jimworld.nu/keywords.html
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi
They often show a different % of density but I think most people would agree that between 1-12% is a good density for a specific keyword.
L.) You should now be able to submit your site to the different search engines.
Should I use software? In my opinion NO!
The search engines don’t like to receive automated submission via software.
I suggest that you visit every search engine manually and go to there “Add Url” page and submit your site there, you will often learn more than you thought by visiting these pages too.
If you feel like you don’t have time to visit every search engine and submit manually I suggest that get some high quality inbound links to your site, why? Because many spiders/search engine follows links and then discover your site and includes it because the search engines want to grow bigger and bigger and get more pages/sites included in their database.
M.) Inbound links yes, maybe the hottest thing in the search engine optimisation world right now. Do you want to here the secret on how you get a bunch of high quality inbound links?
The answer: If you have good content (a nice looking design wont hurt) you will get inbound links, if you have placed links to other sites before how did you think then?
Often when you find a great site you want to help people to find it and therefore you place a link to it. You can start of by asking different sites in your theme to link to your site or exchange links with them.
N.) Get high quality links via themes.
Themes what is that used for?
Well most of the search engines use themes to rank the value of the inbound link you get.
Different search engines uses different methods, a will try to explain how you get most out of a inbound link which will boost your ranking because it has your theme.
When you get inbound links to your site/page you often want them to come from a page/site that has the same theme as your site when it comes to the content.
The best inbound link you could get could look something like this.
<A href=”tickets.html”>Offers a online store for tickets</A> Tickets Inc. have a great website, which offers tickets to all kind of shows etc.
Which keyword do you think I have optimised the page for?
That’s right “Tickets” the great thing about this link is that you have the keyword in the link text and around the link. It would also be great if the word “Tickets” where in the title of the page than provided you with an inbound link.
O.) Paid inclusion: worth it (Search engine based, not directory)?
This is really a tuff one, the most popular must be Inktomi. It can be tuff to get in to Inktomi without payment. But remember that often Paid Inclusion wont do anything for you ranking, it will only include you in the index. Inktomi is often used for backup results, so if you have a high competitive keyword and a small budget you should think twice before paying.
P.) Pay per click engines.
Many people use them and will continue to use them, me myself have never ever used a Pay per click engine (I have used them, but never paid for a click). If you have demands from upstairs that you must get a number of visitors to the site with a limited amount of time, Pay per click engines might be a start until the search engines have updated their index and you have a nice ranking, but when you have a high position for the keywords on Google etc I think you can drop the Pay per click business.
Kind Regards Martin – Lazerzubb.
I was just reading about PageRank and another question popped up in my head.
Regarding the linking. I understand that the spiders crawls through the websites and 'enters' each link as they see them.
Which means if you have a link on your website that links elsewhere (my apologies I'm not sure which term to use... is this what is known as 'outbound links'?) the spider will 'crawl' into it.
Does that mean if your links are linked to other sites with quality contents the spider will automatically assume that your site provides 'good' contents?
Thanks once again!
