Do Edu or Gov backlinks carry more weight?

I have always been a big believer of a link being just a link no matter where it came from. I have added lots of Edu and Gov backlinks to my site(s), and haven’t seen any difference compared to regular com/net/org backlinks.

I’m writing this post because a lot of people ask me how many Edu/Gov backlinks will it take for their site to rank on page 1 of Google. The answer is NONE, and the answer is also A LOT. 

The reason why NONE is an answer is because I rank for a lot of sites that have NO Edu backlinks. Ex. Mortgage Rates (I rank for my state and other national keyterms)

The reason why A LOT is an answer is because Edu and Gov backlinks are worth a lot because they receive a lot of natural links. They MAY carry a lot of weight but not for the reasons we make think they do.

Edu and Gov sites NATURALLY have other sites pointing to them. A site that contains a lot of back links will have a  higher chance of having a higher page rank, trust factor, and authority. I have seen Edu sites with the home page having a PR1 because it was a fairly new EDU site. I did a link analysis on the site, and saw it only had a couple of hundred backlinks. After a few PageRank updates, the site’s PR changed to a PR5. I did another link analysis on the site, and saw that the backlinks were now over 1,000. The Edu site was not even soliciting for backlinks. They now had local municipal sites with aged domains and high PR pointing a link to them.

Gov or Government sites are the same way.

Cars.gov was a fairly new Government site that was created for the Cash for Clunkers program. The site had a few instant backlinks from sites like USA.gov, and was ranking on page 1 on Google for Cars. Everyone in the US was talking about this new program, and writing press releases, articles and blog posts with a link pointing back to Cars.gov.
A lot of people speculated that they were on page 1 almost instantly because it was a .gov site. They overlooked the facts that are played into the SERPs everyday.

1. Google loves exact match domains. Search for Cars on Google or other keywords, and you will normally see an exact match domain on page1

2. Google loves a site that has strong backlinks pointing to it. I’m sure USA.gov (PR10) is not the only strong backlink Cars.gov has.

3. Google will rank the site with most AND quality backlinks, aged domain, aged backlinks, etc. Search for Cars on Google and you will see that Cars.gov is #6, and Cars.com is #1 with sitelinks! Cars.com is beating out a .gov site!

So what’s the lesson here?

Stop chasing Edu and Gov links and/or paying a lot of $$$ when other links maybe a lot cheaper, and worth a lot more in Google’s eyes.

If you need to find any Gov links you can start with Uncle Sam

Here’s Matt Cutts talking about how .Edu/.Gov backlinks carry the same weight as a .Com

Why Digital Asset Optimization matters

DAO or Digital Asset Optimization is huge part of Off Page SEO. DAO is defined as Optimizing marketable assets for search engines & users.

Basically, every digital asset you own should be optimized for the search engines, and for users utilizing the website’s search function.

Here are a few examples of Digital Assets: Articles, Press Releases, Anchor text, Blog Posts, Micro Sites, Images, and even the profiles you create for social media sites or forums. Before anyone can begin with DAO, they must perform a keyword research.

For Images
• Image File Name -  Use Baby.jpg instead of 345.jpg (place keywords in image file name)
• Image Alt Text/Image title – Choose ALT instead of Image Title
• Words around an image including caption is very important.

For Audio Podcast
• Audio File Hyperlink – Ex. “Elvis Presley Hits” not “Elvis Presley Hits –>>click here” (Remove excess words/symbols like arrows or click here)
• Use Description, comments, Title, Details – (Rich content can help with Search engine rankings. Make sure to use every field)
• Meta tags for internal/external search – Users will use the search function in a podcast site. If you use tags, your audio can be found a lot easier.

For Video
• Add Description, Tags – Important part to fill so Users can find you within the Video site or on the Search Engine
• Place in correct category
• Pick an optimized title – Google ‘SEO’, and you will see 2 videos on Page 2 with the words ‘SEO’ in the title.
• Video Sitemap – If you broadcast videos on your website, it’s important to create and submit your video sitemap to Google.

Optimizing Titles
Picking a title that is optimized is extremely important if you plan to rank high in the search engines. There are two different types of optimized titles, and the title will depend on who it’s intended for.

Here are some examples for users (linkbait)
“How DAO can make you millions”
“Making millions using DAO”

Here are some examples for robots (search engines)
“Digital Asset Optimization – DAO”
“Digital Asset Optimization – An Overview”

The difference is that one is catered to users as some type of linkbait, and the other is catered for robots with keywords in the title. The title of this post is a little of both. New blogs will use a lot of keywords in their titles to help it rank in the search engines. Well established blogs will use a shorter title or a link bait title to attract referral visitors. My recommendation is to use a little of both.

Less Cloudy, Targeted, and Optimal titles
• Mortgage rates drop by 1% according to Bankrate.com (cloudy)
• Mortgage rates drop by 1% (less cloudy)
• Mortgage Rates drop (optimal for nationwide)
• Charlotte Mortgage Rates drop (targeted)
• Charlotte Mortgage Rates (optimal, targeted for local)
Using too many words in the title can make the title cloudy, and can hurt your chances of ranking higher. It’s always important to use keywords instead of filling up the title with ’stop words’. If the article is targeted towards your city, then make sure to include your city name in the title.

Blog Posts
• Optimized URLs – Use /fha-mortgage-rates.php not /page1.php
• Use HTML coding (strong/bold on keywords or anchor text) - Using Bold or Strong tags
• Internal Linking – very important if you want Users/Robots to find other posts in your site. Also helps the SEO juice flow through your site.
Not a lot of people use bold/strong tags on their anchor text. This can help make your hyperlinks with rich anchor text standout to the robots. Make sure to use it in your forum signatures, press releases, and articles.

Usernames for Profiles
• Pick an optimized username - Ex. NC_SEO not johndoe or vice versa if you’re looking to create accounts for Online Reputation Management
• Look for places to fill with content (About me, description, interests, around links, etc)
• Look for places to get a back link – a lot of social media profiles allow you to place a free link in the profile section.

Building your Assets
• Social Bookmark your assets – This creates traffic to articles/blog posts/press releases. (another form of backlinks)
• Write Press Releases/Articles – Depending on the type of digital asset, you maybe able to write content that points to the asset.
• Write in Mixx or Digg – These sites are very popular for being large amounts of traffic
• Build Back links directly to asset pages – This works if your digital asset is pointing a backlink to your main website.

Building backlinks to press releases, articles, and blog posts can help boost them in the search engines. If these assets have a backlink to your main website, then the juice of the backlink from the Digital asset to your main website will become a lot stronger. This is a pyramid effect which is one of the best ways to build the overall SEO authority of your main website. Another example of this pyramid effect is using micro sites. Your main website can have dozens or even hundreds of micro sites pointing to it. Each micro site can be strengthen by building backlinks, social bookmarks, Press Releases, and articles that point to them. I would recommend researching what the difference is between a micro site and an actual partner page that is against Google TOS.

Assume the position…you fit the description!

It seems in recent weeks that Google is forcing Whitehat SEOs to go underground.

With recent posts from Michael Gray and Lisa Barone it seems that Google is putting out an APB alert on all SEOs.

So what happens if one of your websites was found to be guilty in the eyes of Google?

In Lisa’s post “Fact: Viral Conversations faced more scrutiny because Michael is an SEO. …Google handles your site is both site-specific and SEO-specific. And they do hold grudges.”

Now if a person’s website once got deindexed or penalized from Google’s index then they can fix the problem, and request a ‘reconsideration request’. The part in the form that bothers me is Google is demanding to know if the person worked with an SEO.

“If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that. Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith that may assist in evaluation of reconsideration requests”

Most clients who hire an SEO do not know anything about SEO, and this is why they hired someone. This reminds me of how a police officer interviews a potential suspect. They tell the suspect to let the officers know everything, and say that the information MAY assist their future sentencing. Everyone knows that if you dont have anything in writing then you have nothing! NADA!

I also believe that Google takes in consideration the Spam Reports or Paid Links report it receives from individuals looking to report their competitors. I believe it’s treated the same way when the police receive a report of a suspicious vehicle in the neighborhood. Some neighbors are nosy, and others just like to look for trouble. Those looking for trouble are normally YOUR competitors who would love for you to drop out of the rankings. Google takes all the reports seriously, and will also look to see if you’re doing something else wrong. I wonder what would happen if 10 different people or 10 different IP addresses report a website for something false. Just like in our regular justice system….even innocent people go to jail because of false witnesses.

 Here are a few tips to avoid the Google radar…..

1. Your domains should have a private registration. I own a few private domains, and have not seen any negative impacts on the SEO part from making them private. Google is a registrar, and can view all the domains that you own. If they find that you’re doing something wrong with 1 website, then they’re more than likely going to look at your other websites.

2. Stop bragging/boasting about how you ‘gamed Google’ or how you ‘quickly shot up the rankings’. Doing this will draw Google’s attention, and even Matt Cutts frequents forums to see what others are doing to spam Google. Google’s best moderators of the web are YOUR COMPETITION. Your competition will love to find a reason to fill out a spam report to see your rankings drop. There are even ‘religious’ white hat SEOs who will report you to Google because they try to exceed Google’s guidelines, envy you, or they’re trying to win some brownie points.

 3. Believe that Matt Cutts is a double agent. You better believe he’s loyal to Google, and he will do what’s in their best interest. Sharing information or asking him the wrong questions THEN handing him your website will only hurt your chances of ranking. His responsibility is the the search engine not to email you to tell you that you have a potential violation of Google guidelines. Google’s goal is to build the quality of the search engine, and not to help you increase your rankings.

4. Be careful with leaving footer tracks. It was a good idea to have a backlink to your site on your client’s footer for referral traffic, and for some link juice. The potential problem doing this is that Google can view your backlinks, and will see who your clients are. Not only will you be monitored with your own SEO company’s site…they will also view all of your client websites. If you were penalized with 1 site for a certain issue, then they’ll look to see if you’re doing the same thing across all of your sites (including clients). There’s nothing worse than someone reporting you in the reconsideration request, and Google taking a hard look at your work. Chances are that they will look and look until they find something wrong. Another reason is that your competition may find your clients, and start soliciting them directly. Also, be careful with displaying a portfolio to the public on your website.

5. You fit the description. The title was taken from profiling of students who were profiled because of their color. The truth of the matter is that a lot of people are profiled because of many different stereotypes. If you proclaim to be an SEO, then you will be looked as a ‘person of interest’ to Google. Your websites, and your client websites will all be scrutinized with a different eyeglass to make sure you’re not trying to manipulate Google’s algorithm.

If you’re really paranoid, then you can try these. Don’t use the same username for bookmarking accounts; Use different hosting providers; Use different logins for your Google accounts WITH different IPs;

Linking to Penalized Pages – Be Careful!

Linking to a penalized website can really hurt your own website. This is why it’s very important to know who you’re linking to when not using the ‘nofollow attribute’ on your external links and internal links. This is known as ‘linking to a bad neighborhood’.

You can control what’s flowing in your website, and what’s pointing out. This is why Google will penalize you for linking to bad neighborhoods. Pointing an external link to a bad site will penalize the page that is pointing the link, and possibly your whole site. Not only does this apply to external links, this also applies to internal links to bad neighborhoods.

Here’s my recent experience:

I have a mortgage site with a  ’mortgage rates’ page that needs to be updated every day with new rates. Since this is not the homepage, and only a few numbers are being changed on the page, I can imagine that Google will penalize this page. They probably believe that I’m trying to manipulate the search engine by constantly changing the info on the page.

Since this is a mortgage rate page it’s very important to my users. The first thing they want to see are the mortgage rates. So I have to include a link all over my website to make sure it’s accessible, and to catch their attention when reading my content. Previously, I was ranking high for a lot of pages on a mortgage site, and noticed that these pages did NOT have a link back to the rate page. I went ahead, and changed the content of the page by just adding a link to the mortgage rate page.

Within 7-10 days all the pages dropped by 10-11 pages on Google. They were all on page 1, and now ended up on page 10 or page 11. I was trying to figure out why this happened since this was the only thing I changed on the website within that time period. I knew that Google had penalized my rate page before, and sometimes would deindex it. So I wondered if my recent change to the rate page had an effect on the rankings.

I went back a few days later, and did 2 things to test things out. I had about 10 pages with the internal link pointing to the rate page. I added nofollow to 5 pages that contained the rate link, and remove the rate link from the other 5. Within a few days all 10 pages were back on page 1 for their respective keyterms.

One of the common misconceptions is that Google will penalize a WHOLE site if one page is not within their guidelines. This makes sense, but we also must see that Google may penalized just that 1 page instead of the whole site. This is why it’s very important to pay attention to ALL the pages on your site. If you’re interlinking to that penalized page then the whole site can suffer as well! 

Just like the common cold it’s not hard to determine if an individual page is being penalized.

Here are the symptoms:

1. Individual page or site drops a few pages in rankings, and stays there. Some penalties may even be as small as 10 spots. If you were #1 then moved to page 2, then you may want to check your site if your position stays on page 2.

2. Green pagerank bar turns grey. If a page on your site has a Pagerank 0-10, then turns grey, you may want to pay attention to why it turned grey.

Pay attention to the use of ‘nofollow link attribute’ for external links AND internal links. Also, pay attention to the symptoms above or your whole site can suffer if you’re interlinking. I would recommend finding out first why the page is penalized, and trying to fix it before doing any major changes.

Read more of Robert Enriquez SEO tips on his SEO Blog

15 ways to lower your Bounce Rate

You probably found this post because you have a nice website that nobody seems to like.

If you have an Ecommerce site, then having a high bounce rate is understandable.

Google views a bounce as a visitor who visited 1 page, and didn’t visit any other page on your website. If they stayed 1hour on the page they landed on, and didn’t visit another page, then that would be considered a bounce.

Everyone seems to ask the wrong question about reducing the bounce rate.

When you look at your website your question should NOT be “How do I lower my bounce rate?’

It should be “How do I make my website ENGAGING?” Engaging – tending to draw favorable attention or interest -Merriam Webster

Does your site draw favorable attention? ….are you sure?

Here’s a few factors to look at (in no specific order)

1. How many pages do I need to scroll DOWN to get to the information I’m looking for? I don’t want to scroll through 4-5 different FULL posts just to get to the post I’m looking for. There are businesses that have a homepage where you can scroll down at least 3 pages. Also, how W I D E is your website? NOBODY likes to scroll sideways to read information that has been cut off.

2. Do you have a side navigation bar or do you have it at the top or both? A lot of old pages have the navigational bar on the left side. There’s nothing wrong with this if you have a short nav bar or it floats when you scroll down. The issue is that most websites have a long navbar on the side, and it’s annoying to have to scroll down just to get to the next tab. Newer websites tend to use both, but try to get the important tabs on the top of the page (going horizontally).

3. What order are you using in the nav bar? Do you put the best selling products or the information most ppl are looking for at the top of the nav bar or all the way to the left (if you’re using the top horizontal navbar)
I would recommend putting the Contact Us or Apply page all the way to the left (if you’re using the top navbar). Most people read left to right…so they’ll always see it when deciding to go to another page.
or
Placing it on the top of the navbar if you’re using the side navbar. Placing it at the bottom shows the importance of it. Placing it at the top will make sure it sticks out like a sore thumb.

4. Do you provide valuable content about your products or are your pages only pitching products? Most people get easily turned off when someone is trying to ’sell them something’. If you sell comic books, then put an informational page of when the ‘comic book idea’ was first created. When was the first comic book sold, who wrote it, where was it sold, etc. Providing information will help build your ‘trust’ with potential buyers.  You can also use interlinking for seo to direct visitors to your product pages from the information pages.

5. Colors – Are you using a light gray font color on a white background? Are you trying to have your visitors buy something or have them go blind? Make sure that the colors are completely different so the words/letters stand out. Also, are you using purple/pink colors on your website that sells male products? Banks use a white background to demonstrate ‘trust/authority’. I wouldn’t put my private information in a website that has a black background. Most sales pages from large companies use a white background. They spent millions on determining which colors will ‘engage’ their visitors. Hacker websites use black or dark colors to engage their visitors. The dark colors will help create the ‘naughtiness’ feeling of hacking websites.

6. Font size/bold tags - Is your title so large that it requires 2 lines? I still see a lot of websites that have titles on 2 lines because they like to use BIG font sizes.  I also see websites using bold tags on  the whole page. Not only is this bad for SEO, it’s also not good if you want to emphasize a phrase or a word.

7. Time it takes for your page to load – Huge pet peeve for a lot of people who are shopping during work hours. They’re usually on their lunch break, and don’t have time for a page to load. There may still be a lot of people who are still on slow internet connection. If any page on your website takes a lot of time to load, you better expect your visitors to leave.

8. Popups – nobody likes to come to a page, and have a few ads popup. If the visitor has a slow connection, then you’re going to slow down the most important pages, and your potential buyer will bounce!

9. Accessiblity - Can users access the rest of your website with one click? Are you utilizing categories, drop down menus, tag pages, or a search box? Everyone loves easy access, and do not like to jump hoops for information.

10. Broken links/broken images – If the landing page is a 404 page, then you better believe most visitors will leave. If the images have a Red X, then your site will also look like it’s not being maintained.

11. Complimentary products – Some visitors may not buy the main product, but if you offer a selection, then you’re more likely to have a sale.  Placing suggested items next to main products will help you get more sales. Also, placing the best selling products on the homepage will also develop more sales.

12. Header – I have seen a few webpages where the header is HALF of the page, and everytime I visit a new page, I need to scroll down half a page to see the content.

13. Mispelled words – Nobody likes to see misSpelled words. A lot of scam websites are done overseas, and the scammers are not fluent in English. Misspelled words also make the site look unprofessional.

14. Music – Imagine this …. you’re at work, and just started your 10 minute break. You decide to search for a local realtor, and as soon as you go to the website there’s music blaring from your speakers. Even if that website may have had the best information a person needed, they’ll probably never know because of the bad first impression.

15. Displaying personal names/pictures – There are a lot of people who discriminate for other things besides the 7 protected classes. Can you imagine visiting the Men’s Hair club website, and when you view the corp page, it shows the President/Vice President/Secretary as all women? Nothing wrong with that but it just doesn’t look right. What if you’re trying to find a conservative church, and you find this website that holds all the same beliefs you do. The day you decide to visit the church, you go on the website to find some directions. You bump into the ‘pastors page’, and you click on it to see what the pastor looks like. There you find a picture of the pastor wearing jeans/white t-shirt with tattoos & piercings on the face. Most conversative folks will never go to that church. Some women would love to deal with other women, and some latin people would love to deal with other latin people. I would remove anything that will give a person a reason to discriminate by their personal nature. My sales increased with a lot of websites because I removed the owner’s picture/name from the website.

My best recommendation is reviewing your website, and send it to your friends/family to give a review. I would also ask coworkers for their opinions. YOUR opinion maybe ’special’ , and sometimes everyone may not think like you.

LSI, Google Branding, Flash Pages, and more SEO Magic Dust

What’s with all this magic dust going around? A lot of this stuff is nothing new, but there’s a lot of people speaking about the ‘latest/greatest’.

I’m sorry to break the bad news, but some of this is getting out of hand. There have been many websites that rank high, and LSI may little to do with the rankings.

Example 1
A lot of these websites don’t think about LSI, and yet they rank high in the SERPs. Hackers are notorious for getting authority domains to create pages that will rank on Google. A great example of this is Yale & MIT hacked. These websites do not contain viagra but they were on the top pages of google for ‘buy viagra’. If these pages weren’t about viagra (maybe mortgages), I’m sure they would stay a lot longer in the SERPs. The point is that Yale is an authority domain, and anything it spits out is considered ‘golden’.

Example 2
Google branding is another example. Can it be that branding will help your rankings or Google will see that
Soft drinks = Pepsi
Soft drinks = Coca Cola
Hey let’s do a google search to see if any brand name companies appear in the top 10 for ’soft drinks’.
Nope….nada…zilch
Let’s try “airline airfares”
You will notice that all of the sites have airline airfares in the title tags.
A lot of these domains have “airline airfares” as the anchor text in their backlinks.
If Pepsi or Coca Cola had ’soft drinks’ in the title tags, I’m sure it would make a great difference in their rankings.
When people come to your house, you don’t ask them if they want a ’soft drink’. You ask them if they want a ‘coke’ or ‘pepsi’.
When you plan to fly somewhere you look for any airline that will give you the best price.
(unless you’re looking for perks like mileage) Keywords/Brand….gotta know when to use them, and 99 times out of 100..you will need to use keywords.

Example 3
SEOMoz posted a case study on a site called Open Cube. This website was on page 1 for the keyword ’seo’, but the website wasn’t offering seo services, didn’t have the seo text on their website, and didnt even have the text SEO in their anchor text! So how did they rank for SEO? They included the keyword SEO in their title tag, and of course had help from having 1 million backlinks. So one question I have is where is the keyword variation in the anchor text since they didnt even use the keyword SEO?

Example 4
Flash pages. It is ‘well known’ that flash pages cannot rank on Google. Is it because of the flash or because too many myths going around? It is more of the 2nd one because flash indeed can rank on Google. Text does not have to appear on the page for it to rank. Flash pages have their text in images so there’s nothing for google to read. Perfect example of this is when George Bush’s profile link at the White House was appearing #1 for the search term ‘miserable failure’. This search term did not appear in the webpage, but because it was included in the anchor text of thousands of links, it came up as #1 in Google. This is also known as Google bombing. Flash websites just needs more work (backlinks), and you can be #1 just like George Bush.

Example 5
My website. Yes I’m writing about this seo blog you’re reading. Not many people know this but this website used to be a wine website. I have heard a lot of ’seo experts’ say that if you buy an old domain to make sure it is ‘relevant’ to what you plan to use it for. Yea I’m sure you heard it yourself. If you plan to use the website for real estate, then make sure it was a real estate website before. Yea good one. I wrote a post about how a 2 yr old boy got this website on page 3 of Google for the keyword SEO within 49 days. My website is on page 4 now because I changed the title tags too many times, and I’m sure google didn’t like that one bit.  I only had a few hundred backlinks that were pointing to my site when I was on page 3. Everyone in the top pages have over 10,000! Hey at least I’m on page 2 for seo blog.

Here’s my take on all these experts. You need to stay away from ‘most of them’.
Most of these ‘experts’ work on well established websites, and when their rankings change, they think they found a gold mine.

Why do only a ‘few’ seo firms hire newbies? Because only a few people in the world know that hiring newbies is the 2nd best thing than working on a new website. A new person brings a fresh perspective, and will tell you what is working, and not what worked 5 years ago.

A newbie can find a nice backlink, and will credit this new link as the recent in SERP change. They notice patterns a lot easier than the old farts that know every aspect of SEO, but forgets what actually works.

Two answers from two different people on a simple question.
What’s the best SEO factor you can apply to any website?
Expert: <sighs> well it depends. depends on this or that, and when you get to that, then it will depend on this and that.

Newbie: backlinks
Me: How do you know?
Newbie: I have been writing content for weeks, and never got noticed. I added backlinks, and now I’m ranking everywhere.

If you dont have the luxury of hiring someone then create ‘new domains’. These domains will help you research/record on what works, and what doesn’t work. SEO experts are data collectors. Always collecting data on what works, and what helps.

Stay away from those who say ‘they know enough to be dangerous’. Those folks will give you bad advice, and you’ll lose your rankings. That is pretty dangerous stuff to be messing around with.

Google Sandbox

Google Sandbox – is it real? Who knows…..who cares.

What I have been noticing in this industry is there’s a lot of people trying to reinvent the wheel, and most of it is a joke.

I own a few domains, and I have never had a site ’sandboxed’. I have ranked for many domains, and they still rank till this day.

The last joke I heard was about Google Branding. I’m not sure if the search engines are hiring people to mislead others or what.

Back to the Sandbox…

The Google Sandbox is considered a ‘probationary period’ given to a new website. Even though your website may have a high Pagerank, lots of backlinks, and quality content it will not rank high in the SERPs. This filter is said to be placed on ‘new websites’.

Here’s how I avoid being in the sandbox

1. Post new content every day, other day, or once per week.

2. Interlink the pages on your website. If Google finds one page then they’ll find the others because you’re interlinking.

3. Place a nofollow link attribute on all irrevelant external AND internal links. This is very important because you can’t control how long the robots will be on your website, but at least you can control where they go. This will make the crawl more effective, and they wont waste time on pages that do not matter.

4. Obtain ‘quality backlinks’ to your website. Here’s another issue that new websites have. Most people would send a backlink to their homepage, but will not get backlinks for other pages on their site. If you do a link:domain.com on Yahoo, you will see a large amount of backlinks to the homepage, but not to the rest of the site. I do about 40-50% backlinks to the homepage, and the rest to individual pages on my website. Make sure to also obtain links that are DOFOLLOW to your site.

5. Stop constantly changing the meta tag title or description! Just like the content…you need to make sure it’s perfect before broadcasting the page. Changing the meta tag title can have a huge impact in the SERPs. I changed my homepage meta tag title, and went from middle of page 3 for the keyword seo, to the bottom of page 4.

6. Buy a domain that contains the keywords or buy an old domain. I have seen this many times where the website ranks in the top #5 for competitive keyterms just because of the age of the domain or because the keywords are included in the domain name.

Webfluence experiences Spam

The search engine allows you to add your own site, with your own title.

I’m not sure why they haven’t created a way for users to login/register or some sort of identification.

I went on the site to search ’seo’ and looks like someone doesnt like Matt Cutts!

This is going to be a big issue if they continue to allow users to post their own sites with their own titles.

2yr old boy on page 3 for keyword SEO in 49days

Ok the gig is up. I just turned 2 in March, and I broadcasted this SEO blog on February 10.

Technically, I have about 16 posts (including this one), and 3 pages (including home page) = 19 pages on my website

I have been trying to rank for the keyword SEO for the past couple of weeks.

My hobbies are watching my favorite video How to Poop (learning Japanese as well), singing songs, and of course SEO.

Whenever I’m working with a new website, I jam to my favorite song – Yes We Can (bobs head while jamming)

I also love jamming to Super Why when I’m doing Keyword Research.

Will I get to page 2 for SEO? I really think so!

Keep your heads up, and read my blog to learn how to rank on the search engines.

If I can learn how to poop, then you can learn how to do SEO!

Microsoft Internet Explorer Blackhat DIV ID

I like checking out the source code for most websites to see if they are using the correct seo coding on their page(s).

I belong to a secret Charlotte SEO society that is located in North Carolina. I was viewing their page in firefox, and at the top of FF went to view>page style, and clicked on No Style. This function helps you view websites the way robots may view a page. Nothing beats the soure code, but this function helps to see if there’s any hidden text.

If you scroll all the way down, you will see the hidden text with a backlink that points to Microsoft’s products.

“Your are currently browsing this site with Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).” (BTW Multi-billion dollar company…it is YOU’RE not YOUR)

I was hoping that this was only viewable to some readers who actually have IE6, but it looks like it was crawled/cached by Google.
(to view the cache go to google.com, and put cache:semclt.com. Go to the top right, and click on Text Only Version)

I can imagine that there are a few million websites that have this text on their websites with the backlink to Microsoft.

I’m betting a lot of blackhatters know about this, and have already exploited this.

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