Old School SEO vs. New School SEO

Has it been nailed down to a science?

[sweet_ali]

Old School SEO vs. New School SEO

If it is generally accepted that old school optimization included: Meta Descript, Title, H1, H2, healthy KW percentage, lots of pages, and inbound anchor text links --

-- Then what are the PRIMARY FACTORS of the New School SEO?

Who's going to write the bible on that one?

Alina

[jimh009]

No need for a bible.

Just read Brett's guide to getting your site well ranked in Google (not sure of the link to it).

That post is still as good today as it was when it was written in my own opinion.

Edit : Here's the link to that Post (the updated versions). Forgot I had it flagged.

[searchengineworld.com...]

Jim

[sweet_ali]

Okay, how important is a stand alone IP?

[trillianjedi]

how important is a stand alone IP?

IMHO, google are clued up enough to know that many excellent websites are on shared hosts.

But many threads on here have bought up some excellent points about having dedicated IP's. A quick search of WW using google should find you plenty of things to think about.

TJ

[peterdaly]

Dedicated IP? Not critical. My sites do fairly well without one. I have about 7 sites on one IP. All sites on the IP are also mine, so that may help, I don't know.

edit:
Clarification.

[edited by: peterdaly at 11:25 am (utc) on April 8, 2004]

[Gory]

New School SEO = Old School SEO + Avoiding all the new filters and penalties

[jackson992]

New School SEO=no SEO and tons of backlinks

[AjiNIMC]

I must say new school SEO, IMHO the Golder rule is

"Think about every move you take, take future into consideration"

- Create a simple customer oriented website, do the little of old SEO tactics, donot over do

- Get links but donot do link exchange, try some other tricks like articles.

Regards
Aji

[ogletree]

It is still not rocket science to get ranked just hard work.

The skilled part of SEO is getting large lists of kw's and make sure you rank for as many as possible. Most people type in 3 or 4 word phrases. It's good to have the 1 and 2 word phrases but they don't convert near as well as the long ones. It is much easer to get 300 visitors that type in 3 or 4 word phrases and get a very high conversion rate than to get 2000 visitors from the short phrases and get a lower rate. You have got to understand that the bottom line is the most important stat there is.

It is also good to have a site that will convert the visitors. Just because you can get them there does not mean they will buy anything.

Short Recap
* Page Title with kw's in it
* H1 tag with kw's in it
* Bold your kw once
* Italisize your kw once
* Repeat the kw as much as you can without loseing readability
* Put kw's in page name kw1-kw2.html
* Don't use Dynamic pages
* Anchor text to internal pages
* Get as many backlinks and anchor text as you can
* Interlink your own internal pages using anchor text in the middle of paragraphs
* Have outgoing links to authority sites that are on topic

You don't have to have all these things and there are many sites that rank well just from backlinks and nothing else and there are alwasy exceptions. This is just a good checklist for somebody that needs one.

[jackson992]

Most of that list is good. The dynamic pages is hogwash tho. I have a ton of them:)

Stress that the most important thing in Google right now is backlinks and anchor text.

And link exchanges are good:)

[Midhurst]

Oglefree,
I would add these to your list:
1.Make you index page VERY quick to load. Keep graphics to a minimum on your index page. Think 'Back to Basics'. Use large HTML header on the index page,etc
2.Segment your site into sub-theme sections. Link pages within a particular section together and link the section to the Index page.
3.In link exchange link page to page on a sub theme basis.
4.Bear in mind Latent Sematic Indexing and create text with plenty of synonyms and words associated with your key words/keyphrases.
5. Link out to 'expert sites',articles by 'experts, and authority sites. (Yes! Oglefree,you mentioned this in your list but just fleshing it out)
6.Put your links within the normal text of your page and NOT in a Links only page.
7.Try for a descriptive URL - yes,I know some people think Google targets these but I've seen too many at the top of the Serps to believe this.
8. Make sure your file names are descriptive of your pages ie big_widgets.html
9. Don't rely on graphic links within your site. Do another HTML menu at the bottom of the page (or elsewhere, if needs be).
There are other points but these are the main ones.
These all work for me - togther with your listed points.
Midhurst

[trebormojo]

I have a question: what is a good keyword ratio? my preferred keyword combination has a ratio of 9.38% some are close to 20%. I read to shoot for somewhere between 2 and 5 percent or googlebot may consider it spam, is this correct thinking?

I don't want to be a spammer, but don't want to cludder my index page with a bunch of text because my site isn't for text.

[ogletree]

It is not hogwash. It is a good rule to follow. An advanced SEO can get past it but if somebody is looking for a list they are not advanced. GoogleGuy has mentioned many many times as something not to do of course he has said many times to leave them alone it is hard to tell with him. You can have dynamic pages it is just harder. I have had actual experience seeing that switching from URL's with "?" and "=" to .html files and seen good results. I have other friends on here that have done the same. Google is very careful with sites that have?'s and ='s. You may not get spidered as much or fresh tags as much. Like I said in my other post there are always exceptions. My list before was just a basic no frills SEO checklist. It will work.

I forgot to ad putting plurals and singulars of your keywords. Even words that the singular and plural is very different like company and companies.

Also remember dynamic pages means? and = signs in the URL. I know literaly it means something else. You can have pages with .asp and .php I just mean pages with arguments. I use the term dynamic because that is how GG mentions it.

Here is a really good link read msg#14 by Brett he explains why you don't want dynamic looking URL's.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[jackson992]

ok then explain to me why I have no trouble getting my dynamic urls spidered:) When I say I have a lot of them I mean most of the site is dynamic not html

[victor]

We'd have to do a site review, which is against TOS, to know what's up with your dynamic pages.

Could there be any clues in this:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[ogletree]

I am not saying there is anything wrong with it. If you don't have a problem then don't worry about it. This is just a good practice for people starting out or if you are having problems. Having "?" and "=" in your URL's is spidered and is freshbotted for some. Some of us have seen improvment when we got rid of them. Brett gave some other very good reasons in that post outside of what the spider is doing. The best point that I saw was that it has been proven that people don't like to give backlinks to sites that have URL's like that. That alone should have you changing your URL's. Read Brett's post you will thank yourself it is one of his top ten posts in my opinion.

Remember dynamic content is ok it is just having the? and the = in your URL. Also session ID's is real bad. I don't think anybody argues that session ID's are a good thing.

[jackson992]

Oh I don't question the session ids. I agree they are bad news. For dynamic urls I also think it is important to keep them fairly simple. For my sites I just pass one value

[Brett_Tabke]

> Okay, how important is a stand alone IP?

very. Every hear of what some people call an oop filter that describe a set of scoring techniques to detect aggressive seo? Some things that might be part of that filter:

- ip address.
- c block.
- dashes in file names.
- density over xx%.
- symantic sentence analysis.

[More Traffic Please]

Ultimately, the most important thing is to get people to click on your site in the list of SERP's. Being close to the top is a very big advantage needless to say. Having your kW's in the title is one of the most important factors in Google's algo IMO. In addition, a well written title that will make people want to click on it is something that is all too often overlooked. Use descriptive words that will have surfers clicking on your #5 listing over the #1. I have a real estate related site and I know when someone types in "any city real estate" they probably want to search for available properties in that city. I make it very clear that they can search for listings on my site in the title even though the word search is not a KW.

[Freedom]

Thanks Brett. I was thinking about doing that, then read your post, now I definetely am going to switch to stand alone IP.

[Watcher of the Skies]

Penalizing dashes in file names would be unfortunate. It's so much easier to read "blue-widget-discounts" than "bluewidgetdiscounts" as a user. Brett, is this a calculated guess with a lot of strength behind it, or a fair guess that you're tossing out? Thanks.

[4serendipity]

Penalizing dashes in file names would be unfortunate.

While hyphens and underscores in file names could hypothetically have a slight negative influence on rank (there are, after all, a bunch of crap doorway pages out there using hyphens and underscores), I doubt that any penalty would be very strong. Anecdotal evidence gathered from a quick browse of the rankings for competitive phrases reveals that there are plenty of highly ranking pages with underscores or hyphens in the files' names.

[gnomedeplum]

Anyone else notice that italicized keyword phrases are perfoming 13.4% better since Saturday's data center refresh?

This may not be important but I thought I'd mention that I have a network of 10 sites that are all on the same IP and they are outperforming the sites with a unique IP by an exponential factor.

[Spica]

Anyone else notice that italicized keyword phrases are perfoming 13.4% better since Saturday's data center refresh?

I don't know how you came up with this figure, gnomedeplum, but it doesn't seem right to me. 12.2%, maybe, but 13.4%, no way!

(lol)

[paybacksa]

I always enjoy running reverse lookups on sites I encounter that I feel are "spammy" but can't quite convict. Sho enuff, 7 times out of 10 they are shared hosted, with N other websites on the same server, at least one of which is dedicated to debt consoidation, one for certain lawyer finding, and an adult affiliate site or two.

I laugh alot, but when you think of how easy it is to learn all that info, you have to wonder if a few bucks a month savings is worth it for virtual hosting.

[Bennie]

One of the primary factors of new school SEO is experience. To rank well on certain search strings you need to be part of a larger 'themed' network. Google have standardized the SEO indusrty (to some degree) by theming links and assigning PR.

Ironically, if we want to ruin a clients rankings (bad payer etc.) we pull the backlinks to US from THEIR site. Cool eh.

Basically Google have shifted the balance of power to experienced webmasters. Clients pay for 'authority' and make up our content. - sounds good to me!

bennie

[Calculus]

"I always enjoy running reverse lookups on sites I encounter that I feel are "spammy" but can't quite convict. Sho enuff, 7 times out of 10 they are shared hosted, with N other websites on the same server, at least one of which is dedicated to debt consoidation, one for certain lawyer finding, and an adult affiliate site or two."

Payback

How do you do this, reverse lookups? Thanks