Page 1 for the keyword "SEO for bloggers"

Just a quick update. I am now in page1 for the keyword "SEO for bloggers". I am at the lowest portion of the page. Not really a momentous accomplishment, but I actually did so little link building to get into this page. Just a few on page optimization like keyword density, tags and all that.

I am now a believer that KEYWORD DENSITY matters in SEO.

SEO for bloggers

I have been too preoccupied from optimizing another site that I totally forgot about my blog. SEO practitioners say that blogs drop in rankings when they are not updated. I don't know how true that is, but perhaps other sites that are frequently updated CAN probably get a boost in rankings -- so I guess that could explain it.

Currently these are my rankings.

The picture above came from a print-screen of a software called Rank Tracker. Obviously, what the software does is tell us what your website's rankings are for a specific keyword. (This is a free software, by the way.)

For example, for the keyword "Search Engine Invader", I (NOW) rank top 1 for it in most of the Search Engines. I rank number 1 for it on Google USA, on Bing USA, on yahoo! USA and so on and so forth.

What I want to rank now is for the term "SEO for bloggers".

Since I am not that busy anymore (and have no job for the mean time) I will be optimizing this blog. I will show you the results next week. We will also employ different proven methods to increase rankings and I will show you how to do it.

See you next week search engine invaders!

How am I Ranking?

Since I started this blog 7 days ago, I was completely invisible in the Search Engines particularly in Google.

So how am I ranking now? Was my SEO effective?

Here are the updates.

SERP showing the result for the term "search engine invader". June 3, 2012.

I am number 2! That's one heck of an improvement though. :)

It's kind of funny how Ernesto's blog outranks mine for the search term when he's not even trying to optimize for it. In fact, it is because I asked for this good man's favor to "vote" for my blog (i.e. add a link to my blog to his' blog).

(By the way, I also exchanged links with this great Libertarian Blog for the term "SEO for bloggers". Let's see how much boost I get from the rankings.)

Anyway, I believe he outranks me because of the following factors:

1.) the Age of my blog relative to his

2.) the number of Backlinks he has compared to mine.

He's a good guy, but I'm gonna beat his ass, you hear that? LOL Well, at least I'm gonna beat his ass for that search term.

In any case, this is just a small fish that I'm trying to optimize for. "Search engine invader" actually has no global searches per month. So being number 1 or 2 does not really do anything to me. Nothing. It does not add any visitor at all.  This was just a sort of experiment. :)


This is actually the second blog that I'm trying to Optimize. But the previous blog didn't made it. Google is unmerciful and that silly god penalized my site. It was not without reason though -- I know I was over-optimizing (keyword stuffing, creating tons of one-way backlinks etc.). My tactics gave me away and google found out that I was trying to do something evil: manipulating the Search Engine.

But hey, you might ask, that's what SEO's do : they try to manipulate the search engines. Well, technically, yes... but we have to follow the Google God's Guidelines.

This was just an experiment, proof to myself that I am doing the right things. And perhaps, a slight taste of success. In the long term though, I hope to rank for the search term "SEO for Bloggers". At least there are a good number of searches for that term and I can expect a good number of potential visitors in return.

When we enter the search term "SEO for bloggers", however, the SERPs show us a list of webpages coming from from very popular SEO gurus like SEOmoz and SEObook.

How do you expect to beat these guys? These guys definitely know what they are doing and outranking them will be terribly difficult.

But I'm not giving up.

Cheers!

Link Building Process

Remember the voting system that I talked about on my last post? Link-building is a process of acquiring backlinks... In non-seo terms, it just means "getting your link posted in a website, blog or any webpage". Every single link posted counts as a single vote and every single one of them can more or less contribute to your blogs visibility in the search engines.

But first, you should know that there are factors that affect the weight of those votes.

Factor 1 : Relevancy of the website linking to you

If you're a site about "smelly socks" and another site about "aliens" links to you, most likely Google will interpret the vote of lesser value. Although nobody knows the exact algorithms that Google uses, the above is believed to be the case in many studies and experience of many SEO practitioners.

On the other hand, if a site about "smelly shoes", links to you, then that is actually a weightier vote. It has better link "juice", so to speak.

The Google Search Engine actually knows that 'socks' and 'shoes' are more closely related to the word 'aliens'. It is probably categorized under 'clothing' or something similar. Plus, adding the word "smelly" to it increases the weight of the vote as well.


Factor 2 :  The Age and Authority of the Website.

The Authority of the website can me gauged by the website's Google Page Rank. Although far from the only gauge in measuring the authority of the website, it more or less tells us how Google sees a website: whether spammy or valuable.

You can find a website's page rank by adding a plug-in in your browser.

And, of course, the age of the website can carry weight as well.


Factor 3. do follow and no follow

Try pressing control then S... This is a process of viewing the page source. now before you say that this is quite complicated, let me say that this is a pretty easy process.

After viewing the page source, you can tell whether the site is in "do follow" or "no follow" by pressing control f.

in any case, generally, there are medias that are usually no follow or do follow.

no follow sites are sites such that do not provide link-juice. it can also be usefuly, however, because some people do click on those links and they may be another visitor to your blog.

examples of sites that are generally no follow are 1.) forums comments 2.) blog comments 3.) facebook status' 4. Twitter) and actually many social media sites.

although some fourm and blog comments are do follow, you should check how to know if the website is do follow or no follow.

do follow sites: websites generally.

posting on forums
blogs
participating
giving useful
dont be spammy

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a an art and a science that deals in making a specific website visible in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) of the Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Blekko and others. (see below to learn more about SERPs)


According to some studies 95.91% of all clicks occur on Page #1 of the Search Engine Results Page  (SERPs). This tell us 2 important things.

1.) That being in page 1 is great for traffic
2.) That being in page 2 or more will do little or none to increase your traffic.

Although there are other factors that affect the number of visitors you have on your blog (like posting on social media sites like Facebook, forum posting or having referrals from other blogs), the 2 facts I mentioned above remain consistent.



White Hat or Black Hat Seo? What are these? Which is better?

To keep things simple, White Hat SEO is a natural process of getting higher rankings in the SERPS. This natural process is explained below.

Black Hat SEO is the act of MANIPULATING the Search Engine algorithms to rank well in the SERPS that violate the SEs Guidelines. It is, therefore, unnatural. Google frowns upon this and actually penalize websites that practice black hat SEO (if found out). I have personally experienced being penalizd by Google and it's not fun losing all those rankings.

FACT:  Majority of the searches are done through Google. (This is why we generally talk about the Search Engine : Google)

In order to avoid being in all kinds of trouble with your rankings in the future, and also to avoid information-overload,  I only recommend and talk about doing White Hat SEO.

For the record, I'm not saying that black hat or grey hat SEO do not work - they probably do. But the fact that google is continually updating itself to prevent spam or being manipulated, many black hat techniques that have worked once, no longer work today. In fact, many black hat SEO'd websites that used to rank well suffered terribly from the infamous Google updates. How long will we expect black hat techniques to work?



How do Search Engines Work? What do SEO practitioners do? White Hat

• Keyword Research

When you type in a word (a keyword) in Google.com or Yahoo.com to search for a topic that you want to learn more about (basically called "googling"), a list of websites are displayed in the SERPS. These results basically tell us that the websites listed here are relevant to the keyword that you are looking for.

A SERP. I am searching for anything related to "smelly socks". At the 

moment of writing,I have forgotten why I'm googling for this. 

Click to Enlarge.

Search Engines will judge the relevancy of your website by "reading" the (1) Title Tag,  (2) Description Tag and the number of times the keyword has been mentioned in the content or body -- also called (3)"Keyword Density". The body is your main content, you main block of text (example: this blog post)

In truth, especially on recent Google Updates, I don't really mind about keyword density too much. As long as your topic is truly relevant, the number of times you mention the keyword will naturally be more than any other irrelevant keywords.  So I'm sure you won't rank well for the term 'Aliens' when your blog is about 'smelly socks'. The fact is that there are other factors that weigh far heavier; worrying about Keyword Density is completely unnecessary, in my opinion.

In this pic, I show Title Tag and Description Tag. Observe that the keyword is in bold letters.

The first thing that SEO practitioners mostly do to rank well is to choose a keyword that is not only RELEVANT to your website, but have (1) less competition in the search engines and have (2) a good number of searches per month.

Ranking page 1 for a keyword that nobody searches for does not really add much visitors. And optimizing for a term that has too much competition is terribly difficult to rank for, especially if your blog is not that well established.

So, how do we know if a keyword has less competition and has a good amount of monthly searches? You can use this free keyword research tool: Google Adword Research Tool

In our example, according to the tool, "smelly socks" has low competition (i.e. there are only a few websites optimizing for it, or few websites that are relevant to the term). Surprisingly, however, "smelly socks" has 9,900 global searches per month. That number is actually a good one. This would mean there will be 9,900 potential visitors you can sell or talk about smelly socks with when you get on page 1! (Perhaps you should make a blog about smelly socks!)

("Socks", however, is an example of a term has high competition and will be generally very difficult to rank well for.)

You can play with this Google Adword Research Tool to learn more about it.

• The Voting System 

Let me start of with saying that, for White Hat SEO Bloggers, this is probably the most important and the most significant thing to know about. Yes, guys and gals, so pay attention.

Aside from having good keyword density, Title Tag and Description Tag, the most significant thing that could affect your rankings are inbound links.

Inbound links are links from other sites that point out to yours. This works exactly like a voting system. When many people refer to your site (or when they link out to your site), it is a signal to Google that your website is important or useful. This gives more authority to your website and google rewards this by giving you better rankings!

But how do you get more votes? I talk about that here, but the short answer to the question is: by having a content or blog that people will naturally link to because they found your content useful, entertaining, informative, awesome, fulfilling to read or funny or whatever. Get that and you have = WIN!

Was that all of it? Of course not, those were just the basics. But, in my opinion, this basic knowledge is enough to make blogs rank well especially in the latest Google Update where Google is much more strict, and any activity that may appear unnatural is immediately penalized.

Actually, I tried to optimize my old blog for the search term "Search Engine Invader". The term actually has ZERO monthly searches so I thought I'd get the number one spot like a boss.

I requested a bunch of friends to put a link of my blog in their blogs with the anchor text "Search Engine Invader". I also placed the same anchor text to websites that I was optimizing (so this was actually a vote up for my blog). In the end, I got penalized by Google and couldn't even find my site indexed in Google. In reality, it's almost impossible to have the same anchor text 100% for your keyword in all of your inbound links. Some anchor texts that occur commonly are "click here" or "here".

According to a friend of mine, instead of being a Search Engine Invader, I became a Search Engine Evader!

The trick here then is to APPEAR natural to the eyes of Google. This requires skill, knowledge and it's also risky. But for White Hat Bloggers, you just need to focus on your content and your readers.

- Search Engine Invader