Elite Retreat San Fransisco

I am currently attending the Elite Retreat San Fransisco conference where Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, Darren Rowse, Kris Jones and I spoke about online marketing. I know many of you wanted to attend and could not make it, so Kris Jones blogged about the whole event. Make sure you check it out!

SEO Poker Tournament This Saturday!

Readers, SEO BlackHat is putting on a SEO Poker Tournament Saturday, March 24, at 9pm GMT.  Instead of a $100 entry fee you instead get in by antying up quality links!  Real cool concept, more sign up info here.

Preferred Domain – Google Webmaster Central

Search engines view http://url.com and http://www.url.com as two separate sites and you will find that some people link to http://url.com while others link to http://www.url.com. This can hinder the full potential of your sites rankings on search engines which is why search engines recommend redirecting one of them to the other. Most people do this on their server, but you can also do it through the Google Webmaster Central.

If you haven’t yet, signup for Webmaster Central and make sure Google sees your website as 1 URL instead of 2.

Five Linkstars Discuss Link Strategies

When five of the brightest linkstars in the world get together and talk about link strategies it’s wise to listen up. Read up as Sugarrae Hoffman asks Todd Malicoat, Eric Ward, Rand Fishkin, and Roger Montti to go in depth and share a bunch of their knowledge and theories about link development.

Optimizing Before You Purchase Links

There are many ways to increase a sites ranking such as purchasing text links, but it seems that people are forgetting the basics. Before you purchase text links I would make sure you have optimized your website for the search engines. Here are the most common mistakes that I see:

1. Meta Description – Although meta tags don’t seem important you would be surprised at how much a unique meta description tag on each page of a website can do to your rankings. You can try stuffing them with keywords to see if it helps, but I recommend tailoring each description to accurately represent the content on each page.
2. Sitemap – You want to make sure that your web pages are getting indexed by the search engines. If your content does not get indexed how do you expect the search engines to rank it? Using a simple sitemap structure can work well for you if you have a small to medium sized website.
3. Robots.txt – Most people think that the more pages you have indexed, the more traffic you will receive. In many cases this is not true; by removing duplicate content from the search engines you can actually increase your traffic.
4. URL strings – A lot of people use content management systems which make their URLs look all funny with extraneous characters. Clean up your URLs, the difference is like night and day.
5. Code – By using clean and compliant code you can keep your website search engine friendly. You can use basic code elements such as headings or alt tags to help improve your rankings.

There is nothing wrong with purchasing text links, but before you do, I recommend you cover the basics. If you do not do the basics then you will not be getting the most from the text links you purchase.